Tools

They arrived on a Friday at half past seven in the evening, after eleven hours in the van and an eleven-hour argument about whether the GPS was taking them the right way.

They heard them before they saw them. A car could be heard coming up the street in first gear and a man’s voice saying “but it doesn’t fit up here!”, and a woman’s voice saying “then don’t bring the van up!”, and the van carried on coming up anyway.

It was an old white van with the name of a workshop on the door, half rubbed off. And it stopped in front of the house.

His father got out, shut the door, looked the façade up and down and said:

“Bloody hell.”

“Hello, Dad.”

“Bloody hell, Axel.”

He gave him one of those hugs with two hard slaps on the back and let go straight away, and looked at the house again.

“Are you doing this yourself?”

“With help.”

“How’s the beam?”

“Whole.”

“Thank goodness, man.” He went over to the wall and ran his hand over the stone. “Thank goodness.”

His mother got out on the other side, stretched with a groan, went over to Axel and took his face in both hands.

“You’re very thin.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re very thin.”

“Mum.”

“And very brown.” She turned his face. “That, yes, you look handsome.”

His father was called Ximo and made furniture. His mother was called Queta and had a shoe shop in the street behind the market, and had spent thirty years looking at people’s feet before their faces. She couldn’t help it. It was a professional deformation she laughed at herself.

She went straight to Eva, kissed her on both cheeks and put a hand on her arm.

“You’re Eva.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Queta.”

Her eyes went down for a moment. A very short moment. Eva was barefoot, on the stone step, with her feet black with earth up to the ankles.

Queta looked up again.

“What size do you take?”

Eva blinked.

“Thirty-seven.”

“Well I never. Same as me.” She patted her hand twice and didn’t let go. “I’ll bring you some boots, then, because the ones in my shop are all men’s.”

She went into the house without waiting for anybody to tell her to come in.

Axel stayed in the street, looking at Eva.

“She started with the feet,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“It’s her thing.”

“No, I liked her.”

And in there his father could be heard.

“Axel! What’s this?”

He was in the back room, hands on his hips, looking at the two hammocks hanging from the beams, which was where they had ended up because in that house there was still no bed.

“Hammocks.”

“I can see they’re hammocks.” He went over, pulled a cord with two fingers, let it go. “I mean what’s this business of sleeping here.”

“You sleep well, Dad.”

“Your back.”

“You sleep well.”

His father looked at him the way you look at a son talking nonsense. And then he took off his jacket, left it on the floor, sat down on the edge of the hammock with enormous care, lifted his feet and lay looking at the beams.

He stayed like that a good long while.

“Blimey,” he said.

“Eh?”

“It isn’t bad.”

“I told you.”

“No, it isn’t bad.” He swayed a little, hands on his belly. “I’d take this to the workshop.”

From the hammock, without lifting his head, he started looking at the beam he was hanging from, and Axel had time to see his face change.

“Listen. That beam.”

“It’s whole.”

“That beam is not whole, son.”

Axel lifted his head to argue about it, and what he saw was Fay lying along the beam next door, the other one, with all four paws tucked in and the face of a cat who hasn’t been up on that one for three weeks.

They brought half a van. They brought a circular saw, a big drill, two trestles, a sander, four clamps, a small chainsaw, a bucket of assorted screws, a stepladder and a toolbox Axel had known since he was five, with the same rubber handle worn through in the same place.

And they brought wood. Four three-metre chestnut beams, tied on the roof rack, which his father had been drying in the workshop for two years without knowing what for.

“And this?”

“For the roof, of course.”

“And how did you know…?”

“I didn’t know anything.” His father was untying the ropes. “Your mother told me there was a hole and I brought wood. If it isn’t needed, it goes back.”

They started on Saturday at half past seven in the morning.

They didn’t talk. That is, they talked. They talked the whole time. But about this:

“Pass me the tape.”

“Here.”

“That one’s rotten at the knot.”

“This one?”

“No, the other one.”

“Do I cut it here?”

“A finger further along.”

Víctor was there the whole of Saturday. He carried slate up, cut a finger on a batten, laughed a lot and lasted until seven.

In the middle of the afternoon, watching Ximo cut a chestnut beam that had been drying for two years in a workshop eight hundred kilometres away, he asked him the question.

“Why don’t you just buy it ready made?”

His father thought about it, because he was a man to whom all questions seemed legitimate.

“Because then I wouldn’t have made it.”

“Yeah, but you’d save two days.”

“Yes.”

And he went on cutting.

Víctor waited a bit, in case the rest was coming, and the rest didn’t come. And he went off for ice.

They spent two and a half days like that, up on a roof, taking out broken slate, removing what was rotten, putting in the new beams and nailing battens. Queta and Eva below, passing material up with a rope and a bucket, and cooking for four on a camping stove and a hearth that drew badly.

Axel, up on a roof with a hammer, holding a beam his father had cut, started feeling something he couldn’t name until the third afternoon.

He was happy.

Happy in a very silly and very complete way, with his hands wrecked and his back destroyed and a beam properly in place.

Those three nights, in the hammock, nothing came.

He noticed on the Sunday, and he noticed it the other way round: not by feeling that it wasn’t there, but by suddenly realising he had gone three days without remembering it existed. He spent a while looking for it, out of curiosity, the way you prod a tooth that has stopped hurting.

And he fell asleep before he found it.

At some point in that dinner his father sat looking at him.

“What?” said Axel.

“Nothing.”

He went back to his plate. And on the next mouthful:

“That you eat slower.”

“Me?”

“You.”

And he said nothing else, and Axel spent the rest of the dinner trying to eat normally and failing to remember how that went.

On Sunday evening, over dinner, his mother said it.

“Right.” She put down her fork. “And what is this?”

“What is this what?”

“This.” She made a circle with her finger, taking in the kitchen, the house, the village. “Because I’ve come, all right. And I’ve carried buckets. And I haven’t asked you anything in three days.”

“Queta,” said his father.

“I’m not asking him anything bad. I’m asking him what it is.”

Axel sat with the glass in his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Right.”

“Honestly, I don’t know, Mum. I left home to go and see the sea and I’m on a roof in the mountains.”

His mother nodded slowly.

“And are you all right?”

“I’m very well.”

“Then that’s that.” She picked up the fork again. “Because I don’t care what it is. What I want to know is whether you’re all right and whether you eat.”

And his father, from the other side of the table, without looking up from his plate, said:

“And whether the beam is whole.”

That night, with the house in darkness, Axel lay awake doing a stupid sum. His father. His mother. Hortensia. Paco. And up there Úrsula, and Trini, and Sabino, and half the village. Everybody knew where he was.

There was one more person, who had never walked up that street and who knew the name of the village, and about the hole, and about the beam. And that one was on nobody’s list but his.

They left on Monday at six in the morning, because his father had a commission on Tuesday. They loaded the van in the dark, with the head torch on, and they left him half the tools.

“I’ll collect this at Christmas,” said his father.

“Are you coming back at Christmas?”

“I should think so.”

And his mother put a bag in his hands.

“In here are some size thirty-seven boots that were in the shop from three seasons ago and nobody is going to buy them.” She looked towards the balcony, where Eva was hanging out a cloth, and lowered her voice. “And don’t tell her they’re for her. You leave them there and that’s that.”

Axel looked at her.

“How do you know that?”

“Son, I’ve been selling shoes for thirty years.” She patted his cheek twice. “There are people who won’t try anything on if you’re watching them.”

“Here. The one with the car.”

“Víctor.”

“Him.” She hung the bag on her shoulder. “He’s wearing four-hundred-euro trainers without a mark on them.”

“And?”

“And nothing, love.” She climbed into the van. “That he hasn’t walked in them.”

When the van went down the street, Axel went up to the back room and stood looking at the new roof from inside.

You could see the four chestnut beams, pale, not yet darkened, and above them the battens and the old slate re-laid. No light came in anywhere.

And on the usual beam, the one above the elder, was Wamba.

Looking up too.

“Well?” said Axel.

Wamba didn’t answer. He spent a good long while with his head raised, studying the new wood, and at last he said:

“It’s whole.”