Flour

They went into the bakery at half past seven in the morning because it smelled.

For no other reason. They were walking down an empty street, with the village still half awake, and out of a doorway came a smell that grabbed you by the neck.

Inside there was a counter, four shelves and a man. The man was with his back to them, putting a tray into the oven with a long peel, and he had on a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his arms white with flour to the elbow.

He turned round. Sixty-something. Broad, ruddy, with very short white hair and hands like shovels.

“Good morning!” he said, in a voice that filled the shop. “It’s all still hot, so you’re going to have to put up with it.”

And he laughed at his own joke, which was not a joke.

Axel felt Hortensia’s elbow in his ribs before she said anything. And then he heard what she said, because Hortensia didn’t say it quietly: she said it at the volume of one woman talking to another woman in a doctor’s waiting room.

“Oh my. What a handsome fellow.”

“Hortensia.”

“I’m having that one.”

“Hortensia.”

The baker, who was a metre and a half away, leaned the peel against the wall and wiped his hands on his apron very slowly, without stopping looking at her. And he went even redder, although that could also have been the oven.

“Well, I don’t know that you will,” said the man.

“Oh, I will.”

“It’s that I’m much in demand.”

“I can see that.” Hortensia looked at the empty shop, and then at him, with a tremendous calm. “The queue is quite something.”

The baker let out a roar of laughter that made the shelves shake.

His name was Paco Sanchidrián and he had been getting up at half past four for forty-three years. He told them that in the first ten minutes, along with the fact that he had been a widower for nine, that he had two daughters away and that the eldest told him every Sunday to close up.

“And why don’t you close?” said Hortensia.

“Because then what do I do?”

“Live.”

“You say that because you haven’t seen me live.” He laughed again. “Without flour I’m worth nothing. Look, I get up at half four and by five I’m already kneading, and at half seven I open, and at two I close, and at three I sleep two hours like a log. And at five in the afternoon the problem starts.” He leaned on the counter. “Because at five in the afternoon I don’t know what to do with my hands. I put the television on and I fall asleep. I go to the bar and by seven I’ve had two and I have to go because tomorrow at half four. And nine years like that.”

He paused a moment and carried on in the same tone, like somebody still talking about the weather:

“Besides, the house is very big.”

Hortensia stopped chewing.

“The house is very big,” he repeated, and he picked up a cloth and wiped the counter, which was clean. “And I still put the coffee on for two, all right. Every morning. I put it on for two, I drink one and the other one I pour down the sink.” He laughed, and this time it was a different laugh, much smaller. “Nine years throwing away a coffee.”

Nobody said anything.

“Anyway.” He hung the cloth up. “Here at half four there’s always something to do. And that’s all there is.”

He took four things off the shelf, put them in a paper bag and gave it to Eva without charging her.

“Here, girl, you’re skin and bone.”

Out of Eva, who had spent her whole life dodging people who gave her things, a whole smile escaped.

They stayed all morning. They didn’t stay on purpose: they sat down on the step by the door to eat the contents of the bag, and Paco came out for a smoke, and one thing led to another. By eleven, Hortensia was inside the bakehouse with an apron on, learning to make a thing Paco called “the plait” and which she was making appallingly.

You could hear them from the street.

“No, woman, the bottom one goes over the top!”

“It’s that if it goes over the top it falls apart on me!”

“Because you’re squeezing it! Don’t squeeze it!”

“I’ll squeeze whatever I like!”

“That’s the problem with your life right there!”

“Look who’s talking, the man who’s spent forty-three years in a four-metre room!”

“Forty-three years doing something, my beauty!”

And then a silence, and then the two of them laughing at once.

Axel and Eva were sitting on the step, in the sun, with Kika lying between them.

“Listen,” said Axel. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Take the bag.” He turned a little. “I’ve spent a month watching you not take anything. Not one tomato. And that bloke gave you a bag of buns and you took it.”

Eva sat with that a while.

“Because he didn’t ask me,” she said.

“What?”

“He didn’t say ‘do you want some?’ He put it in my hand and told me I was skin and bone.” She scratched one of Kika’s ears. “When they ask, you have to say yes. And saying yes is owing somebody something. This isn’t. This is already done.”

Axel filed that away somewhere in his head and spent weeks using it without telling her.

“Here,” said Axel. “Did you throw it away?”

“Throw what away?”

“The napkin.”

Eva put a hand in her trouser pocket, took out a little square of paper folded in four and left it on her knee without unfolding it. She sat like that for a while, with Kika looking at it too.

Then she put it away again.

“It’s a number,” she said.

“Right.”

“A number isn’t anything.”

“Right.”

And they didn’t talk about it again for four months.

“She’s going to stay,” said Eva.

“What?”

“She’s going to stay.”

She said it the way somebody reads out the weather forecast.

“Come on, it’s hardly…”

“Axel.”

Inside there was another shelf-shaking roar of laughter.

“Mmh,” he said.

The four of them ate in the back room, at a Formica table with a checked oilcloth, and Paco brought out an omelette his neighbour had made and a wine that was far better than the co-operative’s.

“And what year are you?” said Hortensia, with her mouth full.

“Sixty-one.”

“Well I never. Same as me.”

“Then we’re two old ones.”

“Speak for yourself.”

It went no further, because Paco started explaining why sliced bread is an insult and that took up the whole of lunch.

At some point, watching Hortensia cut up the omelette, Axel realised she wasn’t the same woman. It wasn’t that she was happier: it was that it was a different face. The woman he had seen in a café two months ago, stiff, with her back straight and not touching the chair, laughing at a barefoot girl, had nothing to do with this one. This one had flour in her eyebrow and was laughing with her mouth full, and she was wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms she had bought in a market for six euros and of which she was tremendously proud.

“What are you looking at?” she said to him.

“Nothing.”

“Go on, eat.”

In the afternoon, Paco closed the shop and took them to see the river in his car. It was an old Renault, white, with a blanket on the back seat covered in the hair of a dog that had died years ago and that he had never taken off.

He drove appallingly. Hortensia sat in front with the window down and her arm out, telling him to go slower, and he went slower for three seconds and then forgot. Eva sat in the back, between Axel and the cat, looking out of the window.

At some point on the road, Paco looked for Axel in the rear-view mirror.

“Here, lad. What is it you do?”

“Me?”

“What do you do. What do you live off.”

“Nothing right now. I walk.”

“Right.” He changed gear with his whole hand. “And after.”

“I don’t know.”

“Right.”

He went a whole kilometre without saying anything, and Axel thought it was over, and it wasn’t over.

“I’ve got two daughters,” said Paco. “One’s in Germany and the other’s in Valencia, and they both left at nineteen, and they both did the right thing. Let that be clear. They both did the right thing.”

“All right.”

“And in this village there were a hundred and thirty of us when I started, and now there are forty-two.” He took a bend with both hands. “And out of the forty-two there are nine who can’t come down for their bread.”

Hortensia sat looking out of the window and didn’t turn round.

“And I take it up to them. Tuesdays and Fridays, and whoever’s poorly, every day.”

Nobody said anything.

“So don’t come to me with nothing happens round here, because what happens round here is that if I shut, there are nine people who don’t eat bread.” He tapped the steering wheel twice. “And I’m not telling you so you can tell me how lovely it is, all right? Because there’s nothing lovely about it. It’s a job. And somebody has to do it, and the one who leaves doesn’t do it.”

There he stopped on his own, a bit uncomfortable, as though he had gone too far.

“Paco,” said Hortensia, without turning round.

“What?”

“You’re doing a hundred and twenty.”

“Ah, bugger.”

He came down to eighty.

Axel, in the back seat of a Renault that smelled of dead dog, started counting them.

Hortensia, who had spent four years sitting at the same table at the same time so that somebody would look at her, with two bathrooms and a garden that was lawn and not one flower. The village with the arcades, with the iron for the festival twenty years in a hay barn and nobody angry with anybody. The man on the pavement, who had a mirror in his house and it wasn’t better, it was just that it was up. Otilia, with six beds made and five years eating off one plate. And the one driving appallingly up front, who put the coffee pot on for two every morning and poured one down the sink.

Five, in two months.

Not one of the five was short of anything. They had a house, they had food, they had money, some more and some less. What they had was a hole set down in the middle of the day.

Not one of the five had fixed it by going away anywhere.

The one in front driving appallingly had just said it to his face, and with numbers.

That last bit got him somewhere and he kept it, and it stayed with him for months.

“Listen,” said Axel, quietly.

“What.”

“Have you noticed what his voice does when he talks to her?”

“Hers is worse.”

And the two of them laughed with their hands over their mouths like two kids at Mass.