Keep It

Hortensia didn’t go into the house the first day.

Nobody noticed until the second.

She was in the garden, or in what they called the garden, which was a patch of earth in front of the oven. She was out in the street. She was in the byre, which is technically the house but you go in from outside. She had her dinner standing in the doorway, leaning on the frame, with her plate in her hand, and when Queta told her to sit down she said she was very well where she was.

On the morning of the second day Axel saw her. She was in the middle of the street, alone, at half past seven, with a cardigan over her pyjamas, looking at the front of the house.

He went down and stood beside her without saying anything. They were like that for a while.

“It’s smaller,” she said.

“The house?”

“Yes.” She folded her arms. “I remembered an enormous house. And it’s an ordinary house.”

“That’s because you were nineteen.”

“Yes.”

She looked at the oven, which Úrsula had cleared of ivy and which was clean, with its black mouth.

“My mother put thirteen loaves in there,” she said. “Thirteen. On Tuesdays. And half the street came for bread, and nobody paid, and in exchange they brought us things all year round. A rabbit. A dozen eggs. A sack of chestnuts.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “And I spent my adolescence thinking that was being poor. And now I tell it in the city and people say to me how lovely.”

And she didn’t go on.

She went up on the third day, in the middle of the afternoon, when there was nobody in the house because they were all down at the shop. She went up alone. Axel saw her from the vegetable patch, going in through the big door, and stayed where he was.

She took forty minutes.

When she came down her eyes were red and her face wasn’t exactly sad.

“It’s very good,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Very good.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “That business with the tree is daft and I love it.”

She sat down on the step.

“I’ve been in my room,” she said.

“Which one was it?”

“The one with the small window, the one you two use as a corridor.” She laughed. “That’s where I slept with my sister until she got married.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“She died in eighty-four.” She said it calmly. “That’s longer ago than anything.”

And she looked at the street.

“The thing is I’ve gone into that room and there are two sleeping bags on the floor, and a fruit crate with folded clothes in it, and a candle in the window.”

“Yes, it’s just that there still isn’t…”

“No, no, man.” She put her hand on his arm. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

Then she got up off the step with both hands on her knees and the groan of the hip.

“Oh, and tell Trini she was right. That you have to put something sweet out for them.”

Axel stood there.

“For who?”

“For the ones upstairs, love.” She brushed down her trousers. “There was one sitting on my bed.”

“And it didn’t…?”

“Love, I grew up here.”

She went down the three steps holding on to the wall, and she never mentioned it again, not that day or any other, because as far as she was concerned there was nothing more to say.

At dinner that night the birthday came up, and it came up over something silly. Queta was handing round the cake she had brought up from the south, and she asked one of those things you ask while handing round cake.

“And you two, when are you from?”

“Sixty-one,” said Paco.

“Me too,” said Hortensia.

“Both of you from sixty-one?”

“Both of us from sixty-one.”

“March,” said Paco.

And Hortensia put down her fork.

“March?”

“The fourteenth.”

A silence fell over the table that belonged to nobody, because nobody yet knew what was happening.

“Me too,” said Hortensia.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, woman.”

“Fourteenth of the third of sixty-one.” Hortensia was going red, and that never happened to her. “And at seven in the morning, because my mother has told me four hundred times.”

Paco leaned back in his chair.

“Me at half past seven.”

“Then I’m the elder!”

“Half an hour!”

“Half an hour is half an hour!”

There the whole table laughed, and Ximo got up for the bottle without anybody asking him to, and Paco sat looking at Hortensia with the face of a man who has just been given some enormously important news about his own life.

“Sixty-five years,” he said.

“Sixty-five.”

“It’s taken us sixty-five years to meet, love.”

“Well, fancy that.”

“Right.” Paco raised his glass, very serious. “Then till death do us part.”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh!” said Hortensia, covering her face with her napkin. “There are people present!”

Then, from under the napkin, and so that the whole world would hear:

“All right, then.”

It was after that, with the table still laughing and her mouth full, that she said it. She said it the way she said things.

“Right. I’m giving it to you.”

A silence fell over the table.

“What?”

“The house.” She took some bread. “You’re keeping it.”

Axel put down his fork.

“Hortensia.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes, love.”

“No.” Axel was going red. “This isn’t… I mean, we’re here because you let us come and look at whether it was still standing. This is yours. It’s your family’s. It’s where you grew up.”

“Well then.”

“Well then,” she repeated.

And she carried on eating.

She explained it to him afterwards, outside, when they had cleared up and the two of them were in the street in the cold.

“I’ve been forty minutes in there today,” she said. “And what I thought was going to happen to me didn’t happen.”

“What did you think?”

“I hadn’t come for forty-one years because I was afraid of going in and starting to cry and not being able to get out.” She turned up the collar of her cardigan. “That’s what I thought. That that house had me by the neck, and that if I went in again I’d stay inside and it wouldn’t be me deciding any more.”

She looked at the front of the house.

“And I went in and I saw a new roof, a tree in the back room and a barefoot girl hanging washing on my balcony.” She lifted one shoulder. “And nothing got me by the neck. And I’m going to tell you something that might sound bad: it made me a bit angry. Forty-one years being frightened of a thing that was nothing.”

She was quiet a moment.

“It’s a very pretty house and I’m very glad to have seen it,” she said. “And I’m going back on Tuesday.”

“And you’re not staying?” said Eva, at the door, on the Tuesday morning.

Hortensia was fighting with the Renault’s seatbelt.

“Here?”

“Here.”

“Oh, love, no.” She managed to click it in. “I’d die of boredom here in two weeks.”

“And down there you wouldn’t?”

“Down there I’ve got a bakery.” She wound the window right down. “And a man who sings the radio.”

Paco, from the other side of the car, put both thumbs up.

And Axel realised at that moment something, which was that Hortensia hadn’t brought a rucksack. She had brought a cloth bag for three days. Which meant she hadn’t thought about staying for a single second, right from the start.

What she had brought was a flat parcel, wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with string, which she took out of the boot as though it weighed a great deal more than it did.

“This is for the house,” she said. “And don’t open it in front of me, it embarrasses me.”

They opened it in front of her, of course.

It was the painting of the boat. The one from the junk shop. A sailing boat on a sea that nobody had ever painted that green before, with the gilt frame chipped at one corner.

Axel stood there with it in his hands.

“I thought this painting…”

“I bought it that afternoon,” said Hortensia, and she was going red again. “Because I left without paying for the blanket and had to go back, and while I was there.”

“And why?”

“Because she stood looking at it for a very long while and didn’t take it, you daft thing.” She shrugged. “And people who don’t take things have to be given them.”

Eva didn’t say anything. She took the painting, carried it inside and spent twenty minutes deciding where it went, and where she put it was in the back room, above the small window.

Above the corner.

They did the paperwork by post two months later, with Hortensia signing from down there and them from up here, and it came out cheaper than Axel feared and dearer than they had, so his father put in a part of it and wouldn’t let them pay him back.

But that was afterwards. That morning all there was was a white Renault going down the cobbled street in first gear, with a woman’s arm out of the window, and Paco sounding the horn at the bend.

And then the silence of the village again.

And Eva, on the balcony, with the washing half hung out.

Axel went up for the bucket and stopped in the doorway of the room.

In the corner, next to the small window, was the school rucksack. Standing up. Closed, with the shoelace pulled tight, and inside it the plastic sheet, the rope, the toilet bag, a change of clothes and the notebook.

It had been like that for a month. Since the Tuesday of the loaf of bread.

The blue one had spent a month downstairs, in the byre, hanging on a nail by the door with the clothes pegs in it, and that one she had put there herself. Upstairs, in a house that was going to be theirs, with a painting newly hung above, there was a packed rucksack leaning against the wall.

Axel stood a moment looking at it.

He went down for the water and didn’t mention it, not that day or any other.