Úrsula

Everything could be done slowly except one thing.

Cleaning, propping, clearing brambles, covering the window with plastic: that could wait. But water came in through the hole at the back of the roof, and as long as water came in, everything they did would be eaten by the damp.

And the water had a date.

Trini said so, without anybody asking, while she was ringing up a broom: that in that village it rained in earnest from October and that in October nobody goes up on a roof.

It was mid-July.

The roof cost money, which was the other half of the problem and the half that watching videos doesn’t fix. Axel did sums on the back cover of Eva’s notebook, which she lent him without saying anything. Old slate that could be reused, half of it. Battens, roofing felt, nails, four beams. He got a figure and crossed it out. He got it again and crossed it out again.

The third one he didn’t cross out. One thousand four hundred and sixty euros, counting the slate that could be salvaged and not counting labour, because the labour was them.

There was one thousand eight hundred and something left in the account. That was everything there was: what he had saved up the day he got off the floor of his kitchen, minus four months of two people walking. There was nothing behind it. No wage coming in, no flat to sell, nobody to ask.

“Let me see,” said Eva.

“There’s no need.”

“Let me see, man.”

He gave it to her. She looked at the figure, looked at the roof, and gave the notebook back.

“Mine’s missing,” she said.

“Your what?”

“I sleep here too.”

“Eva, you don’t have…”

“I know what I have.” She took the notebook again, wrote something underneath and closed it. “There, it’s written down. And when I have it, I put it in.”

And Axel didn’t argue.

He spent three days watching videos with the phone propped on a stone and one bar of signal. And on the fourth day a woman appeared at the door: greying blonde, with her hair cut roughly, of about fifty-something, in blue overalls and wellingtons.

“Morning. I’m the one from the green house.”

She spoke perfect Spanish, but with an accent that caught on her r’s and with a village vocabulary that didn’t go with her face at all.

“Trini tells me you’re on the roof.”

“We are.”

“And do you know how?”

Axel thought about it.

“No.”

“Good.” She nodded, satisfied. “That’s good. The one who says he knows how is the one who does it badly for you.”

Her name was Úrsula and she had been in the village thirty years. She told them that while going up the stone stairs ahead of them, banging her heel on the steps to see which held.

“I came on holiday. In ninety-five. Twenty-four years old and a van.”

“From where?”

“From Utrecht.” She struck a step. It sounded bad. “Not this one.”

They went up the other side.

“Three of us were going to the coast. And the van broke down here below, on the bend, and the mechanic was in the city and the part took five days.”

“And you stayed five days?”

“They stayed five days.” She laughed down her nose. “I’ve been thirty years.”

She got to the top and went straight to the hole in the roof.

“Right. This isn’t so bad.”

“Have we got time? They tell me in October…”

“Not in October.” Úrsula leaned out of the hole. “In October this is a river. You’ve got July, August and September, and September only half.”

“Eleven weeks.”

“Eleven weeks if you start tomorrow.”

“And if not?”

“If not, you wait until next year and next year this won’t have a top any more.” She struck a beam with her heel. “Houses don’t fall down slowly, all right. That’s a story people tell a lot. Houses hold, and hold, and hold, and one Tuesday they fall. I have seen two fall here, and both of them were holding perfectly well on the Monday.”

Axel was left with that.

Úrsula, who had spent thirty years dealing with people she had just said something like that to, did what she always did: she turned round, leaned into the hole again and repeated, in the same tone as before:

“Right. This isn’t so bad.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.” She pointed with her chin. “The big beam is whole. Look. What’s broken are the ones above, the small ones, and that’s four bits of wood. If the big beam were rotten, then yes. Then you’d be off to Germany.”

“Why Germany?”

“It’s a manner of speaking.”

She stayed all morning. She taught them to tell good slate from slate that’s no use, which is by the sound. She taught them to stack it so it could be reused. She told them which four things they had to buy and in what order, and at which place on the main road, and to say they came on her behalf because otherwise they’d be overcharged.

She left them a proper aluminium ladder and a slater’s hammer.

“You give this back to me when you finish.”

“And if it takes me a year?”

“Then in a year.”

And she went down the steps banging her heels again, out of habit.

She ate with them, at the table outside, a stew Axel made with what there was. And there Eva asked her what she had been wanting to ask all morning.

“And don’t you miss home?”

Úrsula chewed.

“Utrecht?”

“Yes.”

“Oof.” She thought about it properly. “The bread. The good bread there. And the cheese.”

“That’s it?”

“And a canal. There’s a canal in the centre I liked a lot.”

Eva waited.

Úrsula fell quiet. She took another piece of bread and carried on eating, and that was the end of the answer.

“And weren’t you frightened?” Eva pressed. “Staying.”

“No.” She wiped her mouth. “I was frightened afterwards.”

“After what?”

“After four years.” She resettled herself on the chair. “At four years I got a horrible fright, because that’s when I realised I had stayed. The first four years I was staying a little longer, the whole time. One more month. One more winter. Until I fix the window. Until the fiesta.” She laughed. “It is easier to stay a bit longer for thirty years running than to decide to stay once.”

She got up to take her plate to the basin, and gave no importance whatsoever to what she had just said.

Axel phoned Irene that night. He went down to the fountain, which was where there was signal, with the excuse of filling the bottles.

He told her everything: the village, the house, the roof, Úrsula’s ladder.

And he noticed that he liked telling her.

That was the ugly part, and he saw it and didn’t stop: that he had spent five weeks telling that woman things that were happening to him, and that he liked it, because she was the only person in the world who asked him how his own business was going.

“So you’re staying,” said Irene.

“For now.”

“And is she…?”

“She’s all right. She’s very well.” Axel leaned on the fountain. “You look at her and she’s calm. She sleeps. She eats.”

A chair could be heard at the other end.

“I could come,” said Irene.

“No.”

“Not to see her. To a hotel. To the town next door, and that’s all, and if she doesn’t want to she doesn’t see me. I won’t get out of the car, Axel. I’ll stay in the car and you tell me you’ve seen her through the window and I’ll go back.”

“Irene.”

“It’s been a year and seven months.”

Axel closed his eyes.

And he said the sentence.

“I’ll let you know.”

“Will you?”

“I’ll let you know,” he repeated. “When it’s the moment. Trust me.”

At the other end the woman said “all right” in a voice that broke in the middle, and thanked him three times, and hung up.

Axel stood by the fountain with the empty bottles on the ground. Up in the house, a light could be seen moving along the balcony: Eva with the head torch on, sweeping towards the side Trini had said.

He picked up the bottles, filled them and went up the street with one in each hand.

And halfway up the slope he stopped, because the car was still there.

It had been there three weeks, with one wheel up on the wall, and in three weeks he hadn’t moved it once.

The three of them ate outside, on the step, a tin of beans heated on the camping stove and yesterday’s bread, and they spent two hours laughing. He told them about a cancelled flight in Bangkok and about a friend of his who had bought a horse. And when they were already clearing up, something occurred to Axel and he was almost embarrassed to ask it.

“Here. What’s your name, actually?”

The lad laughed with his mouth full.

“Víctor.”

“Víctor.”

“Víctor.”

And Axel stayed there with the plate in his hand, doing a sum that wouldn’t come out. That this bloke had been coming in and out of his life for four months. That they had written to each other fifteen or twenty times. That he had eaten with them in three different provinces and had taken Eva off for a whole day in the car.

And that in his phone he had him saved as nine digits with no name.