Barefoot

To the one in the waistcoat Axel said good morning twenty-one days running.

He was always in the same place: on the beam that crossed the back room, the one that passed right over the elder, sitting with his back very straight and his hands on his knees, looking at the tree the way somebody supervises building work he hasn’t authorised.

“Good morning.”

Nothing.

“We’re taking slate up today.”

Nothing.

One day Axel tried saying nothing, to see. And the one in the waistcoat turned his head three centimetres, waited, and went back to looking at the tree.

“Ah, now you do?” said Axel. “Good morning, then.”

Nothing.

Eva, who was downstairs sweeping, heard him talking to himself every morning and never asked. What she did do was leave the broom in the doorway of the back room, propped up, every morning. Like somebody leaving you the keys to a place.

The sugar was still on the shelf. He moved it to the other end, away from the leak, and within two days it was still whole and the ants had stopped coming.

And the one in the waistcoat, that morning, when Axel said good morning, moved his head a centimetre and a half.

It wasn’t a greeting. But it was a centimetre and a half.

Víctor had been there the same three weeks.

He stayed without saying until when, which is how people stay when being somewhere costs them nothing. He slept in the car, ate in the house and went down every day for ice, because he said warm beer is for sad people.

He was brilliant. That has to be said first or none of what came afterwards makes any sense: he was brilliant. With Víctor there, a Tuesday afternoon in a village of twenty-six people with a leak and nothing to do turned into something. He invented plans. He got himself into people’s houses. He learned Sabino’s name in a day and Trini’s in two, and within a week Trini was keeping the paper for him.

And he helped. He carried slate up. He carried it up badly, but he carried it up.

He called Kika “the dog” for three weeks. Not for any reason: he just didn’t ask. He called Kika “the dog”, Trini’s shop “the shop” and the village “the village”, when it had a name and it was written on a rusty sign at the entrance.

And he had called Axel “hotel man” since the first night. Four months. At first it was funny and then it stopped being funny, and by the time it stopped being funny there was no way of telling him that no, that his name was Axel, without it sounding like a complaint.

Fay, who in five months had climbed on top of everything that stayed still — a rucksack, a warm bonnet, Sabino’s belly — never once got on the car.

The first thing Axel noticed on the fourth day, and it was that he had gone four days without finishing a sentence.

It wasn’t that he interrupted. It was finer than that: he let you get halfway, saw where you were going, and told it from there himself. And he told it better. And a lot of the time he was right.

“The thing about the roof isn’t just the water outside, it’s that—”

“The vapour. Yeah. That’s damp from inside, mate.” Víctor raised a hand. “A bloke I know had a whole house rot in Menorca and it wasn’t the roof. It was the kitchen.”

“No, what I was going to say was—”

“Yeah, yeah. Go on.”

And Axel didn’t say it. And it wasn’t the last time, and by the second week he had stopped starting.

The second thing he said to Úrsula, and he said it in absolutely good faith.

Over lunch, Úrsula had told them that for her first three years in the village she had cleaned houses and that one winter the water froze for eleven days.

“Yeah, but that was because you wanted it to be, wasn’t it?”

Úrsula put down her fork.

“Sorry?”

“You could have left.” He said it perfectly calmly, with his mouth full. “I mean, you weren’t trapped. If you stayed it’s because it was worth it to you.”

Úrsula looked at him for a moment. Then she said “of course” and went on eating, and Axel spent the rest of the meal not knowing where to put his eyes.

The third thing took longer, because money things take longer.

Víctor didn’t pay. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to: it was that it didn’t occur to him. He went down to the shop, came back with ice and beer and said “put it on my tab, Trini,” and Trini put it on the tab, and on Saturday Axel paid it because he was standing there. He ate in that house for three weeks and never brought up a single loaf. And one afternoon he leaned over Axel’s shoulder while he was doing sums in Eva’s notebook, saw the figure for the roof and said “bloody hell, that’s cheap,” and went off to look at his phone.

There was a fourth thing, and that one took Axel much longer to see.

In three weeks, with Víctor there, nothing happened.

Not a stone out of place. Not a small laugh. Not a hat. Axel, who had been saying good morning to a creature on a beam since July, realised one day that it had been a while since he had said it to anybody else.

And he put it down to the noise.

The ladder business happened on a Wednesday.

The ladder was Úrsula’s: aluminium, a proper one, four metres with the stays on, and she had lent it to him with a sentence Axel had taken for what it was. You give this back to me when you finish. It was propped against the back wall, tied at the top to a batten with a cord, as Úrsula had taught him, because a properly tied ladder doesn’t fall even in wind.

At two in the afternoon it fell.

Axel was inside. He heard the crash, which in an empty stone house sounds like catastrophe, and ran out through the byre door.

The ladder was on the ground in the garden, in the nettles, with the top rung bent and two rungs pulled out.

On the top rung, one holding each side, there were two of them.

Two Axel had never seen close up: short, broad, with hats that had at some point been the same colour and no longer were. They were hanging off the bent aluminium like two castaways off a plank, and at the exact moment Axel appeared in the byre doorway, one of the two was shoving the other in the chest.

The three of them looked at each other.

“It was him,” said one.

“It was him,” said the other.

And they both let go at the same time and disappeared into the nettles, and Axel was left standing in his own garden, at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, with a two-hundred-euro ladder bent and nothing to say.

Úrsula came down at seven.

Axel was waiting for her at the door, and he had been rehearsing a sentence since two, and the sentence did not exist.

“Úrsula, the ladder.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It fell.”

Úrsula looked at it. She looked at the bent rung, the two rungs, the cord, which was still tied to the batten and hanging in one piece. And then she looked at the cord again, more slowly, because a cord that is still tied and a ladder on the ground are two things that don’t go together.

“It was tied,” said Axel.

“I can see that.”

“It was tied the way you told me.”

“I can see that, Axel.”

Úrsula waited.

And Axel understood, in that waiting, that he had two options, and that one was to lie, and that if he lied he would have to invent a wind that hadn’t blown.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “And I can’t explain it to you. I was inside, I heard the crash and it was like that.”

Úrsula crouched, ran her thumb over the stone at the foot of the ladder and lifted it wet.

“Aluminium slips on wet stone,” she said. “The foot slips, the rope at the top lets it come down and the ladder sits itself down. I’ve seen one sit down twice.”

“And the rung?”

“The rung bends if it sits down hard enough.”

She said it without looking at him, wiping her thumb on the overalls, and it was perfectly clear to Axel that this woman didn’t believe a word of what she had just said and that she was giving it to him anyway, the way you give somebody an umbrella.

“Two hundred and ten euros,” she said.

“Mmh. I’ll pay you.”

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

“I’ll pay you in October.”

“In October you won’t have two hundred and ten euros either.” She bent down, took hold of the rung and moved it, and the aluminium made an ugly noise. “This doesn’t straighten.”

Víctor was leaning on the garden wall with a beer, and he had been there from the start.

“Two hundred and ten?” he said.

“Two hundred and ten.”

“What a rip-off.”

And he drank what was left.

She stood up, brushed off her hands and gave the house a long look.

“On Saturday I’m going to the city for materials,” she said. “You come with me, you do the loading, and we bring it back between the two of us. And the new one you pay for when you can and don’t mention it to me again.”

“Úrsula…”

“And this one you keep for the henhouse.” She gave the bent one a gentle kick. “Because for a henhouse it’ll do.”

She went down the street banging her heels, out of habit. Halfway down the slope she stopped without turning round.

“Eight weeks.”

“What?”

“You’ve got eight weeks of roof left.” She carried on down. “And you’ve had a ladder on the ground for three days.”

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

“She’s all right, her.”

He went off to the car to charge his phone.

Axel stayed in the vegetable patch with the bent ladder at his feet and an ugly thought in his head that he got rid of straight away, because it embarrassed him: that if the one leaning on that wall had been Paco, or Trini, or his father, the ladder would already be paid for.

Another one he didn’t get rid of: that Víctor hadn’t even decided not to pay for it.

That night Axel went up to the back room with the 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 that he had moved off the beam. He stood up, rearranged the waistcoat, which was a folded rag buttoned to the top with the precision of a civil servant, and came down the wall to the floor by a method Axel didn’t quite manage to see.

From the floor, very close to his boot, he said:

“The ones downstairs are idiots.”

Axel crouched down slowly.

“I had rather imagined.”

“One holds on and the other pushes. Always the same. Forty years the same.” He raised both hands, very serious. “I did not authorise this.”

“Let it be clear.”

“It’s perfectly clear.”

The one in the waistcoat nodded once, satisfied, like somebody who has just put it on record.

There Axel, who had spent twenty-six years without a word for any of this, didn’t ask him what he was, or how, or since when. He asked him the only thing you ask somebody you’re going to share a house with.

“And what’s your name?”

The creature thought about it. He really thought about it, as though it had been a long time since he had needed it.

“Wamba,” he said.

“Wamba?”

“Because of this.” He pulled the lapel of the waistcoat straight with both hands, very dignified. “Because it was a rag of Grandmother’s.”

“Which grandmother?”

“Grandmother.”

And with that, as far as he was concerned, everything was explained.

Axel sat down on the floor, with his back to the wall, next to the heap of rubble, and the two of them spent a while looking at the elder.

At some point Axel looked at his feet. They were bare. Black with soot up to the ankle, toes spread, resting on the cold flagstones of a stone house.

Like Gorgorito’s on a dirt track. Like those of the one crying in the pelota court. Like Eva’s on a shiny marble floor, that day, when she said “no” and said it flat.

He went down to the kitchen. Eva was washing the pot in the basin, barefoot on the flagstones, and didn’t look up.

“All done?” she said.

“All done.”

“And what’s his name?”

There Axel stood still in the middle of the kitchen, with the head torch still on, because in five months that woman had never once asked anything in the present tense.

“Wamba.”

“Wamba.” Eva turned the pot over and went on scrubbing. “Well then. Wamba.”

And she stayed like that a while, with her back to him.

“The one at the pelota court sat down next to me,” she said.

Axel didn’t move.

“That afternoon, with the storm. He got right up against my foot and stayed there about an hour, and then he went.” She took the pot out of the water and held it up to the light, looking for bits. “I thought you hadn’t seen him.”

“Eva.”

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

She said it looking at the pot. She didn’t turn round, nothing in her shook and she didn’t make anything of it, and that was exactly the point: she was saying it like that because it was the only way it would come out.

“Since when?”

“Since I was six.”

She hung the pot on the hook.

“And why haven’t you…?”

“Because no.”

She dried her hands on her trousers and finally turned round, and her face was completely ordinary, which was what struck Axel as the most unbelievable thing of the whole night.

“Because I said it once,” she said. “When I was nine. I said it to my sister in the car, coming back from a camp, and my sister’s face went a certain way, and she told my mother, and my mother took me to a man with a very nice consulting room who asked me whether I was sleeping well.”

Axel leaned against the wall.

“And nothing happened to me, eh?” She lifted one shoulder. “I went three times and that was it. Nobody told me I was out of my head. Nobody punished me.”

“But.”

“But I learned.” She picked up the cloth. “That there are things you say and things you don’t.”

And there Axel understood all at once, five months late, why that woman didn’t give her songs names.

“Go on, bring the bucket up,” said Eva. “Because tomorrow there’s slate.”