There Were Eight

They slept in the hay loft of an empty house, in a village of twenty inhabitants, with the permission of a woman who said yes to them from a window without coming down to open the door.

“The door’s open. Don’t smoke.”

“We don’t smoke.”

“Well, that’s that then.”

And she closed the window.

The loft had a small square window that gave onto the back street, at first-floor height, and from there you could see the washing lines. It was one of those villages where washing really is hung out: at every window and on every balcony there were lines with clothes out to dry, because it was a splendid day and it was Monday.

Axel fell asleep looking at that and thought it was lovely and gave it no more thought.

He woke at four in the morning with a noise. A tiny noise. Like a clothes peg falling.

He sat up in the hay, with his neck wrecked, and went over to the little window.

What he saw took him a while to understand.

There were eight. Eight, counted.

They were spread out over the washing lines of the street, hanging from the cords as though they were one more piece of washing, moving from one window to another by a system of ropes they had rigged up themselves and which went from balcony to balcony right across the street.

And they were moving the washing around.

They took a shirt off one line, hooked it onto the middle rope, sent it through the air to the balcony opposite and there another one caught it and hung it on the line of that house. With the pegs and everything. Washing was going back and forth over the street at four in the morning.

Axel was glued to the little window.

He recognised Gorgorito straight away, because he was the one doing least work and shouting most: he was on a balcony directing the operation with his hands on his hips. And he recognised Manazas, because Manazas dropped a pair of trousers into the street and spent a whole minute looking down with both hands on his head. And Lito was there, understanding nothing and hanging things wherever he liked.

“PUT THAT ONE ON THE BLUE!” shouted Gorgorito, in that way of shouting only Axel heard.

“PUT IT WHERE?”

“ON THE BLUE!”

“OF COURSE THERE’S LENTILS!”

Gorgorito put both hands to his face with a weariness of centuries.

Axel stayed there twenty minutes, with his nose at the little window and an idiotic smile, and at some point he turned over, lay down in the hay and fell asleep with the feeling of having been to the theatre.

At half past nine in the morning the street was a riot.

They went down for water at the fountain and found seven people in the back street, all looking upwards, all talking at once.

“That one’s mine!”

“Away with you, woman! That’s my Manolo’s!”

“I know it, I sewed the cuff myself!”

A woman in a flowery housecoat was on a balcony, with two pegs in her mouth, taking down a shirt that wasn’t hers and waving it out over the street.

“Milagros! MILAGROS! I’ve got your socks here!”

And from a window three doorways down, another woman stuck her head out with her curlers in.

“They’ll be your own!”

“They’re yours, they’ve got the elastic gone!”

Axel and Eva stayed on the corner, with the bottles in their hands.

A man in his vest with an unlit cigarette in his mouth was in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, looking upwards with the face of a general who has lost a battle.

“It was the kids,” he said, to nobody in particular.

“What kids, Ramón? There aren’t any kids here.”

“Puri’s ones, who come at weekends.”

“It’s Monday!”

“The twins, then.”

“The twins are four years old!”

“They’re the devil!”

“Ramón, they couldn’t reach the line with a ladder!”

“They’re the devil!” he repeated, happily.

The twins, who did in fact exist, were on the corner swearing on their mother that it wasn’t them, and nobody in the village was believing them for a second.

The one who solved the case was a woman in an apron, finally remembering somebody over a metre tall.

“Puri’s nephew,” she said. “He came up on Sunday for firewood and he’s got a ladder.”

Ramón took the dead cigarette out of his mouth and looked at her the way you look at evidence.

“Puri’s nephew is forty-two.”

“Well, exactly.”

That was accepted in under a minute, and not because anybody believed it. It was accepted because they were already laughing, and to carry on laughing you need a culprit, and one with a ladder did perfectly well.

At ten in the morning, in that street, there were fourteen people laughing. Fourteen people who had probably not all coincided outside their houses at the same time in weeks.

And Axel, leaning against a wall with the rucksack at his feet, realised something that left him dumbstruck.

That the night before, from the little window, he had seen eight washing lines and not one person. That the village had twenty inhabitants and that he, in the fifteen hours he had been there, had not seen two of them talking to each other: he had seen windows, and he had seen a woman who said yes to him without coming down to open the door. And that at ten in the morning on a Monday there were fourteen people in the street arguing about a pair of socks.

He looked at the balconies and saw nobody on any of them.

Eva turned to him.

“It wasn’t Puri’s nephew,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

She stood looking at the empty balconies a bit longer than she needed to, and Axel waited, because it seemed to him that something was coming behind it.

It didn’t come.

For the second time in two days a whole sentence presented itself to him. This one: “There were eight. I counted them. And two of them you already know by name.”

“Mmh. Well.” He slung on the rucksack. “When I was twelve I did worse things.”

He set off, and walked a kilometre thinking that he had been keeping things to himself for a while and that the two were of completely different kinds, and that one he would tell any day laughing and the other he would not.

And he still didn’t tell either.

And behind him, Eva walked that same kilometre without opening her mouth, which was what she had been doing since a café.

Behind him, the woman with the socks was apologising to the twins’ mother and the other one wasn’t accepting it, and both were laughing.

On the balcony of the hay loft, leaning on the railing in a checked housecoat, was the woman who had said yes to them without coming down to open the door, looking at the street. She saw them go.

“Hey!” she shouted.

Axel turned round.

“Did you two sleep well?”

“Very well. Thank you.”

“Well, when you come back let me know and I’ll put sheets on for you.” She leaned better on the railing. “And tell the one on the second floor that I’ve got her socks, I took them off the line before anybody trod on them.”

And she closed the window before they could answer, exactly as she had the day before, but it wasn’t the same.

They walked all afternoon. And on a rise, with the sun already low on one side, Eva stopped.

“Here.”

“What.”

“Can I borrow your phone?”

Axel handed it over without thinking, because it was a phone, and carried on walking. Twenty metres later he realised she wasn’t behind him.

He turned round. Eva had stayed on the verge, with her back to him, the phone at her ear and her other hand covering the other one.

She was four minutes.

When she came back she gave him the phone, shouldered her rucksack, set off ahead of him and didn’t say who she had called.

And Axel didn’t ask.

It took him three kilometres to work out why he hadn’t asked, and when he worked it out he didn’t like it at all: because asking gave her the right to ask.