Tuesdays

The inspector appeared on Thursday the twenty-ninth, one day before the deadline. They’d been waiting for three weeks. Trini said he came on Thursdays and Sabino said he came when it wasn’t raining, so Wednesday’s downpour had kept them watching the window. Thursday dawned dry, and at eleven they heard a car at the bend.

Out got a man of about fifty, who put on a white hard hat in the middle of the street, where nothing could fall on him but the sky, and took out a grey folder with a torn corner. It wasn’t the other folder.

Úrsula waited in the doorway with her arms folded, Axel behind her and Eva barefoot on the step. On the wall opposite, Sabino had his eyes closed and wasn’t missing a thing.

The surveyor didn’t say hello. He stood under the eaves with his head tipped back and stayed like that for four minutes. Then he took a measuring gadget out of his pocket, pointed it at the front of the house and looked at the screen.

“Eleven forty,” he said, to nobody, and wrote it down.

Sabino didn’t open his eyes.

“Damp’s gone, then.”

The surveyor asked for the ladder. He went up. He tapped the slate with his pen, row by row, first the eaves and then the whole roof. Úrsula had her hands shoved in her overall pockets, which was how she prayed.

In the corner house, on the first floor, a net curtain moved.

He went into the house without taking off his hard hat and stopped with his pen in mid-air when he reached the back room. In front of him, three metres of tree grew from the middle of the room and out through the roof.

“And this?”

“That comes with the house,” said Úrsula.

He looked at the tree and the skylight before turning towards Úrsula. Then he rested the folder on his knee and wrote something, two long lines, that nobody saw.

Eva had stopped moving. So had Axel.

“Who did this?”

Axel put his hand up, like at school.

“We did. With help.”

He signed. He peeled the plastic sleeve off the door, took out the four drawing pins one by one and put them in his pocket, because the drawing pins belonged to the council.

“That’s it, then,” he said.

And he went off down the street.

On the wood there were four little holes left and a paler square, the size of a sheet of paper, where the sun hadn’t reached for months.

“Is that it?” said Eva.

“That’s it,” said Úrsula.

“All those stamps for that.”

The net curtain on the corner stayed still. Then it closed.

The folder guy was never seen on the top street again.

The little plaque he’d brought ready-made in his folder turned up one day in the little tower in the stable, between the bit of tile and the coin, placed by size. Axel left it where it was.

On the third, no machine came up.

The four bricked-up houses kept their little plaques. Axel counted them again as he walked past.

The firewood turned up the following Thursday, stacked by the door. Oak and chestnut, and not a word about who from.

“Trini, that’s worth a bit of money.”

Trini didn’t look up from her accounts.

“Well, don’t bring it down here, love, I haven’t got room.”

The lad with the frying pans came up with a trailer one Saturday. He could stay until twelve. At last they loaded the bed base, the half bathtub and the remaining tins from the slope. Before he drove off they had to get Kika out three times: she was determined to ride on top. On Monday it was their turn to help him with his firewood.

The electricity came in November, with an electrician from the bottom street, who took half his pay in firewood. The firewood that was nobody’s.

Axel earned a day’s wage here and there with Úrsula on other people’s roofs, now that he knew how. He used his first earnings to pay for the ladder. Two hundred and ten euros. Úrsula counted it twice in front of him, licking her finger.

“And don’t mention it to me again,” she said.

Eva sang in the shop on Saturdays and at closing time Trini gave her whatever there was in a tin, without counting it. And Eva took it, which was new as well. With the first tin she crossed out a line in the little notebook. Axel didn’t ask which one.

In November the house was signed over, at two notaries, and Eva signed with an ID card that smelled new. Axel’s dad put in part of the money and hung up before anyone could say thank you.

At half past five one Wednesday afternoon in January, it was nine degrees in the kitchen and the hearth wouldn’t draw properly in the north wind. Axel sat with his hands tucked into his sleeves and thought they’d been absolute bloody idiots. He remembered radiators and flats with heating included in the service charge. Even “service charge” sounded lovely.

The hollow feeling was back in the pit of his stomach. Axel recognised it at once.

He stayed like that for twenty minutes.

Then Eva came in with her face red from the cold and a sack of chestnuts someone had given her.

“Bloody hell, it’s brass monkeys in here.”

She took the speaker, which hadn’t made a sound since the theft, out of the drawer and put some music on. She switched it on herself.

She sat down next to him without taking her coat off.

“You all right?” she said.

“No.”

“Okay.”

Eva kicked her boots off without bothering to undo the laces, pulled her legs onto the bench and slipped her freezing feet under his thigh as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Axel didn’t say anything. They stayed like that, watching the feeble fire. Twenty minutes later the wind changed and the hearth started to draw. After forty the kitchen smelled of chestnuts. And Axel didn’t think about the radiator again all winter.

One afternoon in February, Eva sat Axel on a kitchen chair and draped a towel round his shoulders. She’d borrowed Trini’s scissors. His hair was spilling over his collar again, and for weeks he’d been pushing his fringe aside with the back of his hand.

“Make a mess of this and I’m staying indoors till May.”

“Sit still. It’s a bloody mess already.”

She turned the chair towards the window and held a lock between two fingers.

“About here?”

“There.”

When she’d finished, she handed him the little mirror. Axel checked the front, the side, then the front again.

“Well. Still got both ears.”

“Two out of two, mate. Full marks.”

He did the sweeping. There was enough hair under the chair for another head, and Kika wandered off with a lock stuck to her tail, none the wiser.

The next morning he went down to the hotel to ask for work. He’d spent two weeks walking past it. What embarrassed him was how much he wanted the job. He’d learned how to ask with a boot in his hand at a market. The owner was behind the desk with his glasses on the tip of his nose.

“Morning. Wondered if you needed anyone.”

“For what?”

“For this.” He nodded at the desk. “Four years on reception. And five languages.”

Said out loud, it didn’t seem much. Apparently the owner thought otherwise.

“Can you tell a German that room five faces the courtyard?”

“And that nothing will disturb him there.”

“Monday, then.”

On his first day he found Víctor in the pages of the summer register. Seven weeks in residence and the box for accompanying guests empty. He closed the book.

He was doing the same thing he’d done four years earlier, with the same voice and the same keys. He felt the difference at ten, when he closed up and walked home along a street where he knew everyone he passed.

There was also someone who rang the desk bell the moment the counter was left unattended. Ding. The third time, Axel caught sight of a hat slipping behind the plant pot.

“That’s the draught,” said the owner, without looking. “That door sucks the air through.” And, already on the stairs: “My father used to say the same.”

Someone asked Eva to teach a nine-year-old girl from the street below to sing. They started with half an hour on Tuesdays, in the kitchen, without sheet music. By the third week there were two children, and before spring there were five.

“Don’t look at me,” she’d tell the nine-year-old, who sang looking at her face. “Look at the window. And sing like nobody can hear you, because up here nobody can.”

One afternoon Axel heard the little girl at the fountain, singing the whole chorus from the tripe night on her own. Nobody had recorded it that night.

One Saturday in March Eva took the school rucksack down from its corner, blew the dust off the top and took the kids up the mountain. A sheet of plastic, five metres of rope and a small fire. She taught them that if you leave the matches outside the plastic you’re an idiot and nobody tells you twice.

What she didn’t tell them was who she’d learned it from.

The rucksack didn’t go back to its corner. It stayed in the byre, hanging on a nail next to the blue one.

One night in March, just as he was about to close, a guest of about thirty came down to ask for water. He’d been walking for two days and had to work on Monday. He asked how Axel had ended up there, and Axel found he wanted to tell him.

“Look at that.” He pointed his chin at the vase on top of the cabinet, empty, because it had never occurred to anyone to put anything in it. “They give you one when you’re born. Empty. And you don’t get another one. What you’ve got to do is fill it with things that have really happened to you. The more the better.” He shrugged. “Mine had four years of nothing in it. And a bit of pizza.”

The bloke looked at the vase.

“And what if it fills up?”

“God, I hope so.”

He gave him the key to number five and the bloke went up.

Left alone, he realised that was the first time he’d told a stranger any of it. He’d spent three years with someone without ever saying anything like it, not even half a sentence.

In March they decided to fire up the oven. Sabino remarked that he still remembered Hortensia’s mother’s bread, and three days later four people were arguing in the garden about how to get it ready. Patiently, as it turned out: four days of small fires so the stone wouldn’t crack.

Eva lit the first one. She put her arm right in to the back of the mouth, for paper, and pulled out a brochure folded in four, grey with soot. She didn’t unfold it. She put a match to it.

It burned green and blue, twisting.

“That’s not paper, love,” said Úrsula, with her sleeve over her nose. “That’s varnish.”

On the morning of the fifth day it was the kind of cold that cuts your face. Axel kneaded thirteen loaves, because thirteen was the number. Eight came out well and five came out so-so.

He took them out one by one with the peel, flour up to his elbows, and put them on a board across two trestles. Eva, barefoot on the step, laughed at the wonky ones. Kika got under the board in case anything fell. Fay watched it all from the wall, without coming down.

Little by little the street filled. Trini shut the shop for an hour and came up with her glasses hanging from their cord. Úrsula arrived in overalls and wellies, and the lad with the frying pans turned up without his accordion, ready to lend a hand. Sabino had already claimed his place.

Then the neighbour from the corner appeared with a basket covered by a cloth and stopped two metres from the oven.

“Morning,” said Axel, with the peel in his hand.

She looked at the oven. She looked at the roof. She looked at him.

“Morning.”

And she held the basket out to him to fill.

Nobody paid for anything. And a week later there were a dozen eggs, a rabbit and a sack of chestnuts at the door, and nobody ever said who they were from.

That night Axel rang Hortensia to tell her, and he couldn’t get it all out, because halfway through the first sentence she was already crying and saying how silly, love, it’s only bread.

“Tuesdays,” she said, when she’d got over it. “In my house it was Tuesdays.”

And from that March on it was Tuesdays.

The following Tuesday, without it being anyone’s birthday, Axel went out onto the balcony and rang his dad.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing. I’ve made bread.”

His dad went quiet for a while.

“And did you leave the mouth open at the start, to let it breathe?”

They talked for an hour. About ovens.