Twenty-Four

It came out because of a parcel.

It was in the shop, on a Tuesday, with Trini behind the counter and her glasses on. An envelope had arrived from the health service for Eva, one of the ones you have to sign for, and Trini got out the receipt book and the pen.

“Name and surname.”

Eva stayed a second with her hand on the envelope. A second. Nothing. Axel saw it because he was beside her and because he had spent two and a half months watching her not say it.

“Eva Moreno.”

She said it whole, in a normal voice, in the shop of a village of twenty-six inhabitants, and Trini wrote it down without lifting her head because for Trini it was a Tuesday.

“And date of birth, because they ask for it here.”

“Eleventh of the eighth.”

“The eighth of this month?”

“The eighth of this month.”

Trini stopped the pen.

“Then it’s Thursday.”

“Ah,” said Eva. “So it is.”

She took the envelope and went out into the street, and Axel stayed inside three seconds longer, with the hoe in his left hand, looking at the receipt book where, for the first time in a year and a half, that woman’s full name had just been written down.

That night, in the kitchen, he tried.

“Listen. It’s your birthday on Thursday.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How many?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Right.” He sat down opposite. “Then something will have to be done.”

“No.”

“Eva.”

“No.” She was peeling a potato and didn’t look up. “I don’t do birthdays.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

There Axel shut up, picked up another potato and started peeling it.

After a while Eva said, without anybody asking:

“Birthdays in my house were a lunch with twenty people I didn’t know at all, in a dress my mother chose.” She threw the peel in the bucket. “And a cake from a good bakery, one of the ones with a chocolate plaque on top with your name written on it. And everybody saying how big you’ve got. And at six everybody left and I stayed there in the dress in a tidied-up sitting room.”

“Of course.”

“And I have spent six years not telling anybody what day it is.”

Axel nodded.

“All right.”

And he carried on peeling.

He organised it in two days and he organised it terribly, in the sense that he didn’t organise it. What he did was go back to the shop the next day and tell Trini. That was all: he went down for milk and said, in passing, while paying:

“Trini, the Thursday thing.”

“Thursday what.”

“She’s twenty-four.”

Trini looked up over her glasses.

“Ah,” she said.

And she left it at that.

Axel went up to the house extremely worried, thinking that maybe he had gone too far, that maybe Eva would be angry, that maybe nobody would come and that would be worse. He spent two days with that.

On Thursday morning nothing happened. They had breakfast. They worked. Axel put out the plate of sugar. Eva went up on the roof to pass him slates.

At half past ten a delivery man came puffing up the cobbled street with a box and asked for a Eva Moreno.

It was a microphone. A real one, a studio one, in a black case with the foam cut to size and a folding metal stand, and the delivery note had the name of a shop in a city six hundred kilometres away.

Víctor opened it, because Eva wasn’t opening it.

“Happy birthday!”

Eva looked at the open case on the table.

“And what’s this for?”

“What do you mean, what’s it for?” Víctor laughed. “For recording you.”

“Right. But what for.”

And he laughed again, because he thought it was a joke, and started putting the stand together.

Axel was in the doorway with a bucket in his hand and said nothing, and he spent the rest of the morning not knowing why a present that was a good present had left him feeling like that.

At eleven, Úrsula turned up with the excuse of collecting the slater’s hammer, which she hadn’t needed for five weeks.

At twelve, the frying-pan lad called round to ask something silly about the water.

At one, Sabino arrived at the door with his stick that he didn’t use and sat down on the wall opposite, and didn’t move from there again.

Eva started getting suspicious at half past one.

“What’s going on today?”

“What would be going on?”

“Axel.”

“Nothing.”

At seven in the evening Trini came up. She came up with a shopping trolley along a cobbled street, which is a feat, and behind her came half the lower street.

They brought a table. They brought two benches. They brought a pot of tripe stew that weighed twenty kilos and had been made by a woman Eva had never seen in her life. They brought an omelette, and another omelette, and a dish of empanada, and a case of cider, and a home-made sponge cake with twenty-four of those birthday candles that come in packets of twelve, so it was two packets and four of the candles were children’s ones with pictures on.

Fourteen people came.

In a village of twenty-six inhabitants, fourteen people came to Hortensia’s house, which had been shut for forty years, to celebrate the birthday of a girl who had been there five weeks.

Eva stood in the middle of the kitchen with a cloth in her hand, not knowing what to do.

It took her a good hour. Axel saw her in the corner, with a glass she wasn’t drinking, answering when spoken to and no more. He saw her put on that face she put on when somebody gave her something.

And he didn’t go to rescue her, because he had learned, and because besides it wouldn’t have done any good.

The one who rescued her was Sabino. Sabino, who had spent two hours sitting on a bench without talking to anybody, called her over with his hand.

“Come here, girl.”

Eva went over.

“Sit down.”

She sat down.

The old man, without looking at her, told her a terribly long and entirely unfunny story about a donkey he sold to Hortensia’s father in nineteen sixty-one, and that it was a bad donkey, and that he knew it, and that he sold it to him anyway.

“Because the donkey wasn’t bad-tempered, all right,” he said. “The donkey was bad in one leg. And a leg you can see. The thing is that day it was raining and the donkey was in the mud up to its hocks, and in mud you can’t see a leg. And I knew that. And I spent the whole morning showing him the donkey from the other side.”

It took him twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes Eva was laughing.

From there on it was all downhill, in the good sense. They ate tripe stew standing up. Somebody brought out a bottle of something home-made that scratched. Somebody put a plate on the floor for Kika and Kika pushed it with her nose right across the kitchen and under the bench. Úrsula told the ninety-five van story and it came out far funnier than the first time. The frying-pan lad turned out to have an accordion.

At eleven at night, in a kitchen with a smoke-blackened hearth and a bulb hanging from a wire, there were eleven people singing an Asturian thing Eva didn’t know, and Eva in the middle of them, listening.

And then she sang.

Nobody asked her to. That is: everybody had been asking her all afternoon, with that village insistence, and she had said no four times.

At twenty past eleven she got up on a bench and sang.

She sang three. And by the third they knew the chorus, because she had made it up four minutes earlier and it was very easy, and in that kitchen an eighty-year-old woman started singing Eva’s chorus, keeping time with her hand.

At some point in the third one, up on the bench, Eva realised something: that there were eleven people looking at her and not one of them was looking at her hands.

When she got down off the bench, Víctor got up on it.

“One second! One second!” He clapped twice. “You need to know this.”

The silence came all at once, because in a kitchen with eleven people the silence comes quickly.

“This one is coming with me in September.” He pointed at Eva with his glass. “There’s a studio waiting for her and in a year you’ll be hearing her in the car.”

And the place went up. It really went up: Úrsula whistled, the lad with the frying pans put three chords into the accordion, Sabino raised the walking stick he didn’t use, and the woman who had made the callos took Eva’s face in both hands and said something in her ear.

And Eva said nothing.

She laughed, which is a different thing. She went red and laughed and dropped her head, and when somebody asked her which city, she said they’d see.

Axel, leaning on the hearth with a glass he wasn’t drinking, saw the two things one after the other and didn’t know what to do with them.

Because four minutes earlier that woman had got up on a bench and sung something she had just made up in front of eleven people.

Four minutes later, when a bloke said in front of those eleven people something she had never said, she kept quiet.

And so did he.

They left at one. They all left at once, the way people leave in villages, with a great deal of noise in the street and goodbyes that lasted twenty minutes. Trini took her trolley. Somebody left a dish behind.

And the two of them were left alone, in the kitchen, with the table in a state.

Eva sat down on a bench, with her eyes on the table.

“Are you all right?” said Axel.

She nodded.

Then she started crying. She started crying in a very odd way, without covering her face and without making a sound, sitting very straight, with her hands on her knees and the tears just running down her face.

Axel sat down beside her and didn’t touch her.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s that I don’t…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. They stayed like that a while.

“Do you know the worst of it?” said Eva, when it had passed. “That nobody came who knows me.”

“Sorry?”

“Those people don’t know me at all.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. “They’ve spent five weeks watching me go up with a bucket. And they came. And the tripe woman doesn’t even know my name, Axel. She asked Trini at the door.”

She looked down at the table again.

“That’s what I wasn’t expecting.”

And Axel, next to her on the bench, with the table a complete mess and the kitchen smelling of tripe, did not say the one thing that had come into his head all night.

That there was somebody who did know her. Somebody who had spent weeks on the phone asking him whether she was eating, whether she was sleeping and whether she was laughing. And who would have given an arm to be sitting in that kitchen.

They cleared up at two in the morning. And when Axel was going down with the rubbish bucket, on the stone staircase, on the second step, there was a button. A big mother-of-pearl button, placed in the middle of the step, nicely centred.

He picked it up, looked at it a moment and put it in his pocket.

“What are you standing there for?” said Eva from above.

“Nothing. There was a button.”

“Then take the bucket down, man.”