Wamba

Axel said good morning to the one in the waistcoat for twenty-one days running. He always found him on the same beam above the elder tree, sitting bolt upright with his hands on his knees, watching the tree as though the building work hadn’t had his permission.

“Morning.”

Nothing.

“We’re taking slate up today.”

Nothing.

One day Axel tried not saying anything, just to see. And the one in the waistcoat turned his head three centimetres, waited, and went back to looking at the tree.

“Oh, so now you’re interested? Well, good morning.”

Nothing.

Down below, Eva heard him talking to himself every morning and asked for no explanation. She just left the broom leaning against the room’s doorway, without specifying who it was for.

Víctor had been there the same three weeks. He slept at the hotel, ate at the house and went down every day for ice and beer. “Put it on my tab, Trini.” Warm beer, he said, was for sad people.

He learned Sabino’s name in a day and Trini’s in two. He called Kika “the dog”, because he never asked. And Axel he called “Concierge”. At first it was funny. Then it stopped being funny, and by then there was no way to tell him his name was Axel without it sounding like a complaint.

Víctor did pitch in, to be fair. He carried the slates up rather badly, but he carried them. What Axel found hardest was the way he finished all his sentences, especially when he got them right. By the second week there were some Axel preferred not to start.

He did something worse to Úrsula, and with the best will in the world. Over lunch she told them how in her third winter in the village her water froze for eleven days.

“Yeah, but that’s because you wanted to, isn’t it?” said Víctor with his mouth full. “You could’ve left. I mean, if you stayed it’s because it was worth it to you.”

Úrsula put her fork down. She looked at him for a moment.

“Of course,” she said.

She carried on eating. And Axel spent the rest of lunch not knowing where to look.

The man with the folder appeared halfway through a Thursday morning in July, in a white four-wheel drive, a big fat thing so clean it looked like it had just been unwrapped. He picked his way up on tiptoe between the stones to keep his trainers clean, his navy gilet zipped to his neck and a leather folder under his arm. He’d had the smile on since the bottom of the hill.

“Morning, guys! I’m not bothering you, am I? You carry on, I’m just taking a few measurements.”

Eva filled the bucket below while Axel hauled the rope from the roof ridge. The newcomer took a little device with a red dot from his gilet and began measuring their front wall, from eaves to corners, whistling as though he were choosing curtains.

Kika left two muddy paw prints on his trainers. Fay, who in four months had climbed on everything that stayed still, a rucksack, a bale of straw, Sabino’s belly, looked at the four-wheel drive from the wall the way he’d looked at the other car: he didn’t even bother.

“Is that a laser?” Víctor was already on his way down off the roof. “That’s sick. How far does it go?”

“As far as you want.”

Ten minutes later the two of them were standing in the middle of the street with their arms folded, looking up at the house the way you look at a car in a showroom.

“The light you get in here at seven, man.”

“Insane.”

“That’s content.”

“That’s content,” said Víctor.

“And that spring up there, how much water does it give in August?” asked the man with the folder, very pleasantly, addressing nobody in particular.

Eva sent Axel up another bucket.

“Eva, mate,” Víctor shouted down. “They’ll buy it off you. With that you could get yourselves a proper house, with heating and everything.”

“This is a proper house.”

“One that doesn’t leak, I mean.” He looked at his can, which had gone warm. “I’m going down for ice.”

He went off down the street whistling.

As soon as Víctor rounded the bend, the laser started playing up.

“That’s odd.” He looked at the little screen. “Now it won’t measure anything.”

He pointed it at the corner again.

“Hang on. There we go.”

Again.

“Gone again.” He laughed to himself. “At this rate I’ll be pacing it out like my grandad.”

Axel saw it from the ridge. In the empty window frame, right where the red dot landed, a hand the size of a walnut was holding a little bit of slate in front of it and taking it away. Holding it there. Taking it away. With enormous patience.

Sabino was on the wall opposite with his face to the sun, his eyes shut and his cap pushed back.

“Sorry, excuse me.” The folder guy showed him the gadget with a little laugh. “Does this happen to other people round here?”

Sabino didn’t open his eyes.

“That’s the damp.”

The sun was hot enough to crack the stones.

The man gave a polite laugh and went to collect his folder from the step where he’d left it. It wasn’t there. He checked along the wall and ended up on all fours under his four-wheel drive in that spotless gilet. Ten minutes later Eva found it without even looking: it was open in a manger in the stable, its papers laid in the bottom from largest to smallest.

The folder guy picked them up one by one, very slowly, with the smile still on. It took some doing.

“Everything’s so authentic here, isn’t it?” he said in the end. “Even the mangers.”

He gave Eva a card, because she was the closest.

“In case you want to talk numbers in September, guys. Because at the end of the day, the numbers are the numbers.”

Eva looked at the front of the card. She looked at the back.

“Thanks.”

The folder guy tiptoed off down the street. On the bend he ran into Víctor coming up with the ice, and the two of them stood there for twenty minutes talking by the four-by-four.

“What’s it say?” said Axel from the ridge.

“‘Head of Rural Experiences.’”

“And what’s that when it’s at home?”

“Head of Bathrobes.”

That night they got the kitchen table to stop wobbling. Eva folded the card from the Head of Bathrobes into quarters and put it under the leg.

A couple of nights around then, in the hammock, Axel got the thing in the pit of his stomach. He put it down to the beer.

On Wednesday at two in the afternoon, Úrsula’s ladder fell. Axel had left it leaning against the back wall and tied to a batten, just as she’d shown him, so it shouldn’t have moved.

Axel was inside. He heard the crash, which in an empty stone house sounds like the end of the world, and ran out.

He found it lying among the brambles in the garden, its crosspiece bent and two rungs torn out. He shrank at the thought that he might have been standing on it. Two creatures he’d never seen before dangled from the aluminium, short and broad, with caps that must once have been the same colour. One clung to each end, and they still had the energy to shove each other.

The three of them stared at each other.

“It was him,” said one.

“It was him,” said the other.

They let go at the same time and vanished into the brambles.

Víctor was coming up the street with the ice. When he saw the ladder lying in the brambles, he put the bag on the wall.

“Were you on it?”

“No. I was inside.”

“Shit. Thank God for that.”

He pushed into the brambles at the other end and between them they dragged the ladder over to the step. Water from the bag of ice started running down the wall as they pulled it free.

Úrsula came up at seven. Axel was waiting at the door, rehearsing since two a sentence that didn’t exist.

“Úrsula, the ladder.”

“What about it?”

“It fell down.”

Úrsula examined the crosspiece, the rungs and the rope, which was still intact, hanging from the batten. She looked at the rope twice.

“It was tied,” said Axel.

“I can see that.”

“Tied like you told me, I swear on my mother’s life.”

“I can see that, Axel.”

And she waited.

Axel had two options, and one of them was to make up a wind that hadn’t blown.

“I don’t know what happened. I was inside, I heard the crash and it was like this.”

Úrsula went back to where the ladder had been standing, crouched down and ran her thumb over the stone. It came away wet.

“Aluminium slips on wet stone. The foot slips, the rope lets it go down and the ladder sits down. I’ve seen it sit down twice.”

“And the crosspiece?”

“It bends if it sits down hard enough.”

She said it wiping her thumb on her overalls, without looking at him.

“Two hundred and ten euros,” she said.

“Bloody hell. I’ll pay you for it.”

“You haven’t got two hundred and ten euros.”

“I’ll pay you in October.”

“You won’t have two hundred and ten euros in October either.” She moved the crosspiece. The aluminium made a nasty noise. “That’s not going to straighten.”

Víctor had come back up and was listening from the garden wall, with a beer already open.

“On Saturday I’m going to Valdemora for supplies,” said Úrsula, getting up. “You come along, you do the loading and we bring it back between us. And you pay me for the new one when you can, and don’t you mention it to me again.” She gave the bent one a gentle kick. “This one’s for the henhouse.”

She went off down the street stamping her heels. Halfway down the hill she stopped without turning round.

“Nine weeks you’ve got left on that order. And today you’ve lost an afternoon.”

Víctor peeled himself off the wall and gave Axel two pats on the shoulder.

“Nice woman.”

That night Axel went up to the back bedroom with his head torch on. The one in the waistcoat was on his beam.

“It was your lot,” said Axel.

And the one in the waistcoat stood up.

It was the first time in three weeks he’d seen him stand. He did up his waistcoat button by button, climbed down by a route Axel couldn’t make out and planted himself beside his boot to say:

“The ones downstairs are idiots.”

“I’d worked that out.”

“One hangs on and the other one shoves. Always the same. Forty years the same.” He put both hands up. “I did not authorise this.”

“I want that on record.”

“It’s very much on record.”

“And the laser business?” said Axel.

“That one can’t measure.”

And that was all.

Axel didn’t ask him what he was, or how, or since when. He asked him what you ask someone you’re going to share a house with.

“And what’s your name?”

He thought for a while before answering.

“Wamba.”

“Wamba?”

“Because of this.” He tugged the lapel of his waistcoat. “It was one of Gran’s rags.”

“Whose gran?”

“Gran.”

Axel sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and the two of them sat for a while looking at the elder tree.

Before going down, Axel noticed the creature’s feet, bare and black with soot up to the ankles. In the kitchen he found Eva washing the pot in a basin, barefoot too. She went on scrubbing without looking up.

“Done?” she said.

“Done.”

“And what’s he called?”

Axel stood in the middle of the kitchen with his head torch still on.

“Wamba.”

“Wamba.” She turned the pan over. “Wamba it is, then. Class.”

She carried on scrubbing, with her back to him.

“The one at the pelota court sat down next to me. That afternoon in the storm. He tucked himself right up against my foot and stayed there about an hour.” She lifted the pan and looked at it against the light. “I thought you hadn’t seen him.”

“Eva.”

“And the one in the café wasn’t a rat either.”

She didn’t turn round. She was perfectly steady.

“Since when?”

“Since I was six.”

She hung the pan on its hook.

“And why didn’t you…?”

“Because I said it once.” She wrung out the cloth. “When I was nine. I told my sister in the car, coming back from a camp. My sister got this look on her face. She told my mum. And my mum took me to see a man with a very nice consulting room who asked me if I was sleeping well.”

Axel leaned against the wall.

“And nothing happened to me, you know. I went three times and that was it. Nobody punished me.” She hung the cloth on its nail. “But I learned. There’s things you say and things you don’t.”

“And the windowsill one. The ‘now or never’ one.”

“That one talked to me.”

“You told me you’d been wondering ever since if you’d made it up.”

“And I do.” She dried her hands on her trousers and finally turned round. “But I’m the one who opened the door.”

Axel didn’t say anything. He took off his head torch, which was still on, and put it on the table, which didn’t wobble any more, pointing at the wall.

“Go on, take the bucket up,” said Eva. “There’s slate tomorrow.”