A Whiff of Fiesta

Four days later they arrived at a village, on a Thursday afternoon, and Axel got the feeling that there their clock had broken.

It wasn’t that it was empty. There were people: there was a bar open, a man watering some pots, two little girls on bikes going round and round the fountain. But it was as though the whole village were half a tone short.

The square was big, square, with arcades along two sides and some enormous plane trees in the middle. It was a good square. The sort you do something in.

And there was nothing.

“What a lovely square,” said Hortensia.

The man with the pots looked up.

“It was,” he said, and went on watering.

They had dinner in the bar: packet soup, omelette and a rough wine that Hortensia said was delicious out of politeness. The man from the bar didn’t talk much, but when Hortensia asked him about the square he leaned on the counter with both hands, the way a man leans when he has spent a long time waiting to be asked.

“There used to be a festival here, you have no idea. Three days. And not one of these festivals they have now, with a band that turns up and gets paid and goes, no. Here they’d build a stage out of planks and up went whoever wanted. My uncle had a list, all right, a list in a notebook, and he’d put you down: you at nine, you at twenty past nine. And the fellow from the garage would go up and play the accordion and a young girl would go up and recite and the sewing women would go up and do a thing they did with aprons that was enough to kill you laughing.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, nothing. It just stopped being done.”

“Something must have happened.”

“It didn’t.” He picked up a glass and began drying it. “The one who organised it died, who was my uncle, and that year it wasn’t held out of respect. And the next year it wasn’t either, because if it hadn’t been held the year before, what was the point. And the year after that somebody said something in the bar and it came to nothing. And now that’s twenty.”

He stood there thinking, glass in hand.

“The thing is it was nobody, all right,” he said. “There was no row, nobody fell out with anybody, nobody said ‘that’s the end of it.’ It simply…” he made a gesture with the cloth, like somebody shooing a fly, “it just stayed left.”

“Well, well.”

“Well, well.”

He finished drying the glass and set it upside down.

“I haven’t got a room. But if you want to stay in the square, fine by me. The fountain gives good water.”

They stayed in the square. They put the tent up under the arcades, in a corner where it was in nobody’s way, and Axel got out the coffee pot and put it on the stove on top of a terrace table that had been cleared and tipped over, because Hortensia had got it into her head that a coffee in a square is a different thing from a coffee on a verge.

“It’s the same coffee pot, Hortensia.”

“It’s the same coffee. The square is a different one.”

They went out to sit on the rim of the fountain, because it was a beautiful evening.

And Eva started singing.

It wasn’t anything special. She started singing the way she always did, without warning, quietly at first, one of hers. Only the square had arcades, and arcades have a thing about them: they give you back your voice.

Axel noticed straight away. Eva’s voice went and came back, hung about up there a moment and came down into the square again a fraction late, as though there were somebody else singing from the far end. She noticed too, because she stopped for a second, laughed and carried on louder.

And she sang for a good while. She sang three or four things one after another, with no names, making up the words as she went as she always did, with Kika asleep at her feet and Fay sitting on the edge of the fountain like a vase.

A light came on in a balcony.

Then another.

In a second-floor window a shutter opened and stayed open.

Nobody came out into the street. Nobody clapped. Nobody said a word. And when Eva stopped, the square went so quiet you could hear the water in the fountain.

“Right,” said Hortensia, getting up and straightening her cardigan. “I’m off to bed, there’s walking tomorrow.”

Axel was woken by a metallic noise. He looked at his watch: twenty to eight. He came out of the tent with his hair flat on one side, and in the middle of the square there was a van with its doors open and three men unloading iron. Long lengths of iron, the paint flaking off, with that coat of thick dust that only settles on things that have spent years stacked in a closed-up place.

The sort you build a stage with.

The man from the bar was in his doorway with his coffee in his hand, watching.

“Morning,” said Axel.

“Morning.”

“And this?”

The man took a sip of his coffee.

“They were in my uncle’s hay barn.”

“The iron?”

“The iron, the bulbs, the planks and two boxes of bunting. And the list, that was there too, in a shoebox, in my uncle’s handwriting and everything.” Another sip. “Twenty years they’ve been in there. I knew. Everybody knew. And this morning my cousin came round at half seven and said to me, ‘we’re getting the iron down.’ And I said all right then.”

“And why this morning?”

There the man turned and looked at him very calmly, the way you look at somebody who asks one of the questions that don’t have answers.

“Well, that’s what I’m asking myself,” he said, and went into the house.

One of the men, a big fat fellow in a hi-vis vest, shouted from the van:

“Boss! Do we put the stage here or next to the plane trees?”

The man from the bar answered from inside, without coming to the door.

“Next to the plane trees! That’s where it always went!”

On top of the pile of iron, sitting on the highest bar with his legs dangling, there was somebody the size of a boot in a red hat. He was watching the three men work with his hands on his hips, like a foreman. When one of them picked up a bar by the wrong end, he shook his head very slowly.

Axel rubbed his eyes. When he opened them the top bar was empty, and one of the men was saying how odd, he’d left it right there.

They packed up the tent with the van unloading iron ten metres away. A woman came out of a doorway with a box of coloured bulbs. A lad came out with a ladder. Somebody had opened the bar early and put the radio on. Nobody explained anything to them, because nobody was explaining anything to anybody: people came out and picked things up, as though the whole thing had been decided months ago.

Hortensia swung the rucksack onto her shoulder.

“Are we staying?” said Axel.

Hortensia looked at Eva. Eva was standing in the middle of the square with the cat in her arms, watching the woman with the bulbs.

“No,” said Hortensia. “Because it’s theirs.”

And she didn’t move.

She stood there with her rucksack on her shoulder watching two men argue about which way a plank went, and five minutes later she put the rucksack down on the ground and told them the plank was the wrong way round, you could see it from there. And she was right.

They stayed the whole day.

Nobody invited them and nobody threw them out. Axel ended up on the lad’s ladder hanging bulbs from a rope, because he was the tallest. Eva did nothing: she sat on the edge of the fountain with Kika and spent the morning watching, which was what she did best, and every now and then she told somebody where the thing they were looking for was. Hortensia went into the bar man’s house at eleven and came out at two with a dish of omelette that wasn’t hers and everybody’s name learnt.

By eight in the evening the stage was up next to the plane trees, with twenty years of dust on it, and thirty-one coloured bulbs hung from the rope, because the others wouldn’t light.

And nothing was prepared. That was the strange part. No band, no poster, no date.

The man from the bar came out of his house with the shoebox. He climbed onto the stage, which creaked, and took out a notebook with covers gone soft from the damp.

“This is my uncle’s list,” he said. He wasn’t speaking loudly and he could be heard all over the square, because the arcades give your voice back. “From the last year it was held.”

He opened it and began to read. Names, and a time next to each name.

“Braulio, from the garage. Nine o’clock.” He looked at the square. “Braulio died eight years ago.”

Nobody said anything.

“The sewing girls, twenty past nine.” He looked again. “There are two of you left, and one is in the armchair.”

A very old lady, sitting in a chair that had been brought out to her doorway, raised a hand and laughed.

“A girl who recited poems. It says Marisol here.” Pause. “Marisol lives in Zaragoza and has three children.”

He read on. Nearly all of them were dead or far away, and at each name somebody said something from the square: that one got married, that one’s in Switzerland, that one still plays the accordion but doesn’t climb steps any more. And it seemed to Axel the saddest thing he had ever seen in his life, and at the same time the square was filling up and nobody was leaving.

The man from the bar closed the notebook.

“So there it is,” he said. “The list is empty. Anyone who wants to can come up.”

And nobody came up.

One of those long silences fell. Thirty-one lit bulbs, an empty stage and eighty people looking at their shoes.

Axel looked at Eva. Eva didn’t move from the edge of the fountain. She had Fay in her lap and the face of someone who has just locked a door from the inside, and he knew, without her saying a word, that that girl was not going to get up on a stage with eighty people looking at her even if the square caved in. Last night she had sung for nobody. Not for people.

And then Hortensia put the dish of omelette down on the ground.

“Oh, I’m going up myself, I can’t stand to watch this.”

She climbed the three steps holding on to the rail, in the cardigan and the tracksuit from that morning, stood in the middle of the stage, looked at the square the way you look at the queue at the doctor’s, and said:

“I’m not from here. I’m a lady who was passing through, and I’ve gatecrashed more weddings than anybody standing here, so I know the part by now.” Silence fell. “I’m going to tell you how I fell into a horse trough on the day of my communion.”

And she told it. She told it with the dress, the gloves, the crown made of butcher’s paper and her brother Julio pushing, and with the frogs, and with the bench where they sat her down to dry like a fish. She told it better than on the road, because she had eighty people in front of her and people agreed with Hortensia. Halfway through they were already laughing. At the end, when she said ‘and I had a better time than they did’, the lady in the armchair banged her stick twice on the ground and the whole square applauded.

Hortensia came down the steps as red as a little girl and with her chin very high.

After her the lad with the ladder went up, who turned out to know a trick with a handkerchief. And after him, two ladies who knew a song in bits. And by eleven the accordion man was playing sitting down, without going up, with the stage beside him, and the square was singing something Axel didn’t know.

Eva stayed on the edge of the fountain all night and didn’t sing. But Axel saw her moving her feet to the music, bare on the stones of the square, and it seemed to him the closest that girl had ever come to going up.

They left with the first light, when the square was empty and full of glasses and somebody had left the bulbs on. Nobody saw them go.

They walked a kilometre and Axel couldn’t hold it in.

“We could have stayed for the real party. It’s three days.”

“No.”

“Nobody has thrown us out.”

“Nobody has thrown you out, no.” Hortensia was walking in front without turning round. “Last night was the rehearsal, and anybody gets into the rehearsal. The three days are theirs. Let them take their own photos.”

Axel shut up.

Hortensia, walking in front setting the pace, was heard to say a little later, to nobody:

“Twenty years in a hay barn.”

And she quickened her step.