The House

The upper street was six houses and four of them were empty.

You could tell straight away which: the live ones had firewood stacked, or a hosepipe, or a doormat, and the others had their windows blocked up with breeze blocks and brambles climbing the wall.

The last one wasn’t blocked up. The last one still had its door.

It was a two-storey house, of dark stone, bigger than Axel had expected. Below, a wide wooden byre door burst apart along the bottom. Above, a wooden balcony running the width with half the boards fallen and a fern growing in one corner.

Built onto the wall on the right, half eaten by ivy, a rounded lump of stone with a black mouth.

The oven. It was exactly as on the paper.

Axel phoned Hortensia from the street, leaning on the wall opposite. She picked up on the second ring.

“Are you there?”

“We’re standing in front of it.”

Hortensia could be heard breathing at the other end.

“And?”

Axel looked at the façade.

“No dressing it up, then?”

“No dressing it up.”

“Well, it’s standing, but only just.” He went through it. “The balcony has fallen on one side. There’s a window with no glass. The roof has a big hole at the back, and something has grown in there, because there are branches sticking out of the hole.”

“Oh dear God.”

“The walls are fine.” He went over and knocked with his knuckles. “The walls are perfect, Hortensia. This is a metre of stone.”

“And the oven?”

“The oven is there.”

She took a while to answer.

“Is it whole?”

“It’s whole. It’s got ivy over it, but it’s whole.”

He heard Hortensia breathe in an odd way at the other end of the phone.

“Right,” she said, with her normal voice again. “Well, now I know. Thank you, son.”

“Do you want me to send you a photo?”

“No.”

And she hung up.

The lad had come up behind without anybody telling him to and was planted in the middle of the street with his hands on his hips, looking the front of the house up and down.

“Bloody hell. Is this yours?”

“No.”

“Even better.”

He said it delighted, like somebody finding out that the entrance is free.

Eva had stayed on the step opposite, with her rucksack still on.

“And what are you doing here?”

“Passing through.”

“Nobody passes through here.”

“Well.” He smiled with his whole face. “Then I was passing through badly.”

They had had the key since Paco’s village. Hortensia had given it to him in an envelope, with an elastic band, and it was one of the old keys, long, iron, with a square blade.

It didn’t go in.

Axel spent ten minutes fighting the lock before he realised it was full of earth and that inside there was something that wasn’t a lock: a nest, old, dry, made of grass and a piece of blue plastic. He got it out with a twig, very carefully, and left it on top of the wall.

He told it himself while Axel wrestled with the lock, without anybody asking him and without giving it the slightest importance: that he had set off at five in the morning, that the last hour was nothing but bends, and that the name of the village was something Axel had been telling him on the phone for two months, every time he asked whereabouts they were.

Eva lifted her head for a second and lowered it again.

Axel kept working the key and said nothing.

Axel kept working the key and said nothing.

The key went in on the fourth attempt and turned with a noise like bone.

Inside it smelled of wet earth and of something sweet he couldn’t identify. The byre was a big open space, with a flagstone floor and stone mangers along one wall. There was a rusted wheelbarrow. There was a mountain of dried ferns in one corner.

And there was light. Light coming in from the roof.

They went up by a stone staircase set against the wall, with no handrail, counting the steps because two were broken.

Upstairs was the house. A kitchen with an enormous open hearth, black with smoke, with the chimney recess the size of a wardrobe. A wooden table still standing. Two chairs, one of them upside down on the floor. A corridor. Two rooms.

At the far end, where the hole in the roof was, a heap of rubble and fallen slate, and coming out of the middle of the heap, growing up towards the hole, an elder. A whole tree. Three metres of it.

Growing inside the house.

Eva stood still looking at it.

“Bloody hell,” she said.

A column of light came in through the hole and fell on the leaves, and the leaves moved, because forty years of a hole in a roof are forty years of air coming in. A tree inside a house, growing towards the place where the house had broken. Axel stayed there longer than he needed to and didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that this was the loveliest thing he had seen on the whole journey.

The second thing he thought, with less poetry now, was that the water came in through that hole too, and that in three months it would be October.

They spent two hours going round and they found things. A biscuit tin with buttons inside. A 1983 calendar pinned to the wall, swollen with damp. A photograph stuck to the bottom of a drawer, of a wedding, with the faces washed away. A child’s shoe, just one. Pine marten droppings on the stairs and owl feathers in the back room.

And they found, on the kitchen floor, beside the hearth, a little heap.

A tidy little heap. Four things placed one on top of another, the size of a fist: a big button, a clothes peg, a piece of slate and one of the old coins, the fat ones. Stacked, carefully, largest to smallest.

Axel crouched down.

“Eva.”

“Yes.”

“Do you see this?”

Eva crouched beside him and looked at it for a good while.

“A marten,” she said. “They hoard things.”

“Biggest to smallest?”

“Martens do whatever they feel like.”

She got up and went off to look at something else, and Axel stayed crouched in front of four bits of junk stacked with a patience that doesn’t suit any animal.

He saw him at dusk, when they were already packing up to go down and set up the sleeping bag in the byre. He was sitting on the edge of the chimney recess, with his legs inside and his back very straight. He was smaller than Gorgorito and wore a thing that looked like a waistcoat made out of a rag, buttoned right up. He was combed. And he was very serious.

“Afternoon,” said Axel.

The little creature didn’t move. He looked him up and down, very slowly, the way you look at a bill.

“Are you two staying?” he said.

And what came out of Axel was the truth, which was that he didn’t know.

“I don’t know.”

The creature nodded once, with the face of somebody who was already expecting that answer and has it written down somewhere.

“You’ll tell me.”

“Listen. And how do you…?”

But he had already gone into the chimney recess, and from inside, with a stone echo, came one last sentence:

“And that slate from the door you’ve left where it shouldn’t be.”

Before going down to the byre, Axel went out into the street again with the phone torch and stood in front of that lump of stone built onto the wall on the right. He pushed the ivy aside with his arm. It was a vault the size of a bread oven, with a black mouth half a metre across and a slab in front of it, eaten with moss, the joints still whole.

He took the paper out of his pocket and read it by the torch, although he knew it by heart.

The last one on the upper street, the one with the oven built onto the wall.

He stood there, in the middle of the street, at eleven at night, with a piece of a flour bag in one hand and a bread oven in the other, and it seemed to him such an enormous joke that he laughed on his own.

“Eva.”

“What?”

“It’s an oven.”

“What’s an oven?”

“What it said on the paper from the bakery was a real oven.” He knocked the stone twice with a knuckle. “It’s here.”

Eva came out onto the step, looked, and didn’t say what he expected.

“Well, now we know what we’re doing in March,” she said, and went back in.

They slept downstairs, in the byre, on top of the dried ferns, which turned out to be a fairly decent mattress. You could hear the house: you could hear it creak above, and something running across the ceiling, and the elder moving with the air coming in through the hole.

He slept in the car. He said there was no room for anybody else in the house and it was true, and he said it in a way that sounded like a favour.

In the morning Axel went out for a pee in the vegetable garden, which was a jungle of nettles a metre and a half high, and looked at the house from outside for a good while, with the eight o’clock light on the stone. And then he went over, picked up the piece of slate that had fallen in the doorway and propped it against the wall, to one side, on its edge. So it wouldn’t be in the way.

He stood a while looking at the propped-up slate.

And then he picked up another piece and put it beside the first.