The Bend

He went to the doctor.

He went to a health centre in a village of three thousand people, with Eva sitting in the waiting room, and he was seen by a doctor of about forty who asked him nine things and took his blood pressure.

“How far do you walk a day?”

“Well… twenty-five kilometres. Sometimes thirty.”

“In the heat?”

“In the heat.”

“And what do you eat?”

Axel thought about it.

“Depends on the day.”

“Of course.”

She took blood. She told him to drink two litres minimum, to eat salt, not to walk between two and five and that if the half-hour thing happened again he was to go to A and E without discussing it with anybody.

“And it couldn’t be… something else?” said Axel.

“Something else like what?”

And there he got stuck. Because you can’t say it.

“In the head,” he said in the end.

The doctor put down her pen.

“Look,” she said. “A dehydrated bloke who hasn’t eaten does odd things and doesn’t remember. I see that four times a month in summer, and I don’t see it in old people, all right, I see it in lads your age who think they can take it. The head runs on sugar and water, like everything else, and if you take both away from it and then set it walking six hours in the sun, it does what it can.” She picked the pen up again. “Start with drinking and eating, which is the cheap part. And if you’re eating and drinking and it still happens, you come back and we talk about the other thing. No problem, and with nobody laughing at you. All right?”

“All right.”

“Really all right?”

“Really all right.”

He came out with two prescriptions and a very odd feeling of relief and swindle at the same time.

The blood tests came back fine. They told him on the phone four days later.

And it didn’t happen again. And he never entirely knew whether that meant it was nothing, or that it was something that had gone to sleep.

The last four days were uphill. Properly uphill: the road went into a narrow valley and started climbing in bends, with the rock wall on one side and the drop on the other, and the villages got smaller and further apart.

The air changed. The green changed, went darker and thicker. Ferns up to your waist started appearing in the verges and enormous chestnut trees, terribly old, with hollow trunks. And it started raining every afternoon at the same hour, half an hour, and clearing.

“This is a different place,” said Eva.

Kika was beside herself: she got into the ferns, disappeared, came out somewhere else, disappeared again.

On the last day four cars passed all morning. The road was already single-track with passing places and there was grass growing down the middle in some stretches.

At eleven they found one of those metal signs, rusted along the bottom, with the village name and an arrow.

Axel stopped to look at it a while, with the piece of flour bag in his hand, comparing the letters like an idiot, because it was the first time he had seen that name written on anything but that scrap of paper.

“This is it,” he said.

“I know.”

“It exists.”

“Well of course it exists.”

Axel put the paper away.

“It’s that I’ve spent four months walking towards a place that was written on a flour bag. And until today it could have not existed.” He tapped the rusty metal twice with a knuckle, and it sounded like metal. “Look how daft. A sign.”

“Welcome to the world,” said Eva.

They arrived at half past two in the afternoon.

And there was nothing.

That was what surprised Axel most afterwards, when he thought about it. There was no view from up high. There was no moment when the valley opened out and the village appeared below, with the sun on it. None of that.

There was a bend, and behind the bend some houses.

Axel realised he had spent four months imagining that moment and that he had always imagined it with music. There was no music. There was a bird and a tractor very far away.

Houses of dark stone, with slate roofs and walls with patches of damp and moss. A handful. Twenty or thirty. A fountain. A wash-house with the roof fallen in. A rubbish container. A granary on stone legs eaten away.

And silence.

Kika stopped in the middle of the road and sniffed the air.

And then, on the left, a man. He was leaning on a low wall, in the sun, with a cap and a stick that he did not appear to be using for anything. He must have been well over eighty. He watched them arrive without moving.

“Afternoon,” said Axel.

“Afternoon.”

“Is this Taramundi?”

“This is it.”

Axel took out the paper and unfolded it.

“We’re looking for a house. The last one on the upper street, the one with the oven built onto the wall.”

The man didn’t look at the paper. He looked at Axel, and then at Eva, and then for a good long while at Eva.

“Hortensia’s,” he said.

“Do you know her?”

“Man.” He resettled himself on the wall. “I sold her father a donkey.”

He laughed to himself, with a noise that was half a cough.

“I’m Sabino.”

“Axel. This is Eva.”

“Right.”

The three of them stood there a moment.

“It’s in a terrible state, mind,” said Sabino. “The house. It’s been forty years without being opened. There’s nothing in there now but creatures and roots.”

“We had imagined.”

“And the others.”

Axel blinked.

“What others?”

Sabino made a gesture with his hand upwards, towards the street, a gesture like shooing flies.

“The ones there are.” He moved his hand again. “They get into houses that are left alone. It’s always been that way.”

He fell quiet, because for him the conversation had ended there.

Axel stood looking at him. He had talked about that exactly the same way he had talked about the donkey a moment earlier.

“Excuse me,” he said. “The ones that get in are…?”

Sabino raised an eyebrow and looked at him the way you look at a city lad who asks whether milk comes out of the cow.

“Son,” he said. “It’s the upper street. It’s that one there. You can’t miss it.”

He went back to looking straight ahead, at the sun, leaning on his wall.

They went up the upper street, which was forty metres of slope with the stones loose.

And there the journey ended, and something happened to Axel that he hadn’t foreseen in four months: that he didn’t know what you do.

He had spent four months with a very clear task, which was to walk north, and that task had finished at half past two in the afternoon on a Wednesday in front of a swollen wooden door with a lock full of rust.

He stood still with his hand on the rucksack.

“And now what?” he said.

“Now you open it.”

“Mmh. And then.”

Eva leaned on the wall beside it and looked the façade up and down: the patches of damp, the roof sunk at one corner, the window covered with plastic.

“And then, if I tell you the truth,” she said, “I think it’s going to last you years.”

And then a car was heard.

Not a tractor. A car, coming up the lower street in first gear, scraping its underside on every stone, with that way of sounding that cars have when they shouldn’t be where they are.

It stopped twenty metres off. Low, matt grey, with one wheel up on the wall because otherwise it didn’t fit.

The door opened and he got out stretching, sunglasses up in his hair, looking the whole street up and down like somebody arriving at a place he has been told a great deal about.

“I told the bloke at the bar down there to keep an eye on the car,” he said, shutting the door with his hip, “and he told me there’s no bar here. All right, hotel man?”

Axel stayed there with his hand on the rucksack strap.

Behind him, Eva hadn’t moved from the wall.

They had been watching him do this for two months. An hour of driving, then two, then three, then four. Every time they got further away he put more road under the car and turned up in front of them again, leaning on the bonnet, waiting.

And Axel, who had spent four months walking towards that door, noticed a very strange thing.

That the car had taken six hours.