Vacancies

The landslide had come down at five in the morning.

They found out when they got to the village: half a hillside had come away with the rains and the road was blocked two kilometres further up, with machines working and a sign saying nothing doing until tomorrow. And as the village sat in a funnel, the people going up and coming down had ended up stuck there.

Not many. Five people. An elderly couple in a car with plates from another province, a farm-machinery parts rep who was very angry on the phone, a girl doing the route by bike who was taking it a good deal better, and a lad in his twenties with a car that didn’t belong on that road.

The car was parked with two wheels up on the verge, because there was no other way of fitting it, and it had its underside scraped from going where you don’t go. He came walking down from the cut, sunglasses pushed up into his hair and his hands in his pockets, and he was the only one of the five who didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

“I offered the digger bloke two hundred,” he said, when he got there.

“What for?”

“To open me up a gap.”

“And?”

“He can’t.” He laughed, delighted. “There’s half a mountain on it. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s that he can’t.” He stood looking at the slope with his hands on his hips. “I thought that was great.”

Kika sniffed his trainers and put her head on his knee within ten seconds, which is what Kika does with everybody. Fay looked at him from the top of the wall and didn’t come down.

“Are you lot walking?” he said, when they got there.

“Walking.”

“That’s brilliant.”

He meant it, without a drop of sarcasm, and Axel liked him in three seconds.

All five were at the door of the only place that looked like a hotel.

And the place was closed.

The sign said HOSTAL LA PARADA and the letters had gone pink from all the sun. It was a three-storey building with the wooden shutters closed, a dead vine over the door and an unlit neon sign with half its tubes broken.

Hortensia rang the bell. It rang inside, very far away.

Nothing.

She rang again. And again. And on the fourth try a woman of about seventy opened up in a checked dressing gown and a face that had never expected anybody in its life.

“We’re closed.”

“I can see that, love.”

“My husband closed in nineteen and died in twenty, so you tell me.”

She stood with her hand on the door, waiting for them to go.

“The thing is there are five people out there who can’t get through,” said Hortensia. “And it’s going to rain again.”

“I don’t have a hotel.”

“You have beds.”

“I have unmade beds.”

“Well, they get made.”

The woman looked at her. She looked at Axel. She looked at Eva, barefoot, with a cat in her arms and a dog at her side.

“I can’t manage this,” she said. “I’m seventy-three years old and I have a titanium hip.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” said Axel.

There she turned to look at him for the first time.

Her name was Otilia and it took her twenty minutes to say yes, and all twenty minutes were excuses.

“The sheets will be yellow, all right. They’ve been folded since nineteen and wardrobe paper doesn’t work miracles. And the hot water you have to run for a good three minutes, because it comes out brown, and it isn’t that it’s bad, it’s the pipe. And in the kitchen I have nothing, and when I say nothing I mean nothing, I don’t mean ‘not much’. And another thing: I am not charging anybody.” She raised a finger. “Not one euro. Because I’m not registered and I have no insurance and I have no register of anything, and if somebody falls down the stairs here they take the house off me. So if anybody puts a note in my hand, I haven’t seen it.”

“Then don’t charge,” said Hortensia. “Let them pay what they like and you put it in an envelope.”

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because the spare-parts salesman chose exactly that moment to stick his head in and ask whether this was a hotel or what, and whether it came with an invoice, and Otilia went back inside and was four minutes coming out.

Axel stayed in the doorway with his foot in it so it wouldn’t shut all the way.

“Madam,” he said, into the gloom of the corridor. “Not the invoice. But the sheets, yes?”

And from inside came a voice, very low and very dry:

“The upstairs ones are in the hall cupboard.”

Axel went behind the reception desk and his body did it on its own. It was the strangest thing: he put his hands on the wood, looked at the board with the keys hanging on the wall behind, with their numbers, and out came a voice he hadn’t used in two months.

“Good afternoon. Are you together or separately?”

The salesman, who had spent two hours shouting at his phone, was disarmed.

“Er… on my own. One.”

“Perfect. Number five, which faces the yard, so the machine on the road won’t bother you.”

He said it without knowing whether number five faced the yard. He turned round, took the key for number five, put it on the desk and turned round a notebook he had found in a drawer.

“If you could put your name here.”

The one with the car came to the desk last, hands in his pockets, and stood looking at the board of keys.

“Give me the worst one.”

“Sorry?”

“The worst one you’ve got.” He shrugged. “I’m off tomorrow anyway.”

Axel gave him number three, which looked out on the road and the machinery, and the lad said perfect without looking at the key.

Otilia was watching him from the kitchen door with her arms folded.

“You know about this?”

“Four years.”

“It shows.”

Eva and Hortensia made six beds in an hour and a quarter. You could hear them from downstairs: you could hear Hortensia giving instructions on how a fitted sheet goes on, and you could hear Eva telling her that way was fine too, and you could hear the two of them laughing every couple of minutes.

And Axel went into the kitchen.

The kitchen was enormous and it was empty in the way that kitchens go empty in places that close: with the pans there, hanging and clean, and not one single thing you could eat.

“There’s nothing here,” said Otilia.

“There’ll be something.”

“There’s nothing, son, I’ve been eating off one plate for five years.”

There was rice. There were two jars of tomato. There was a string of garlic and half a box of onions that were going but could be saved. In the freezer, under a layer of ice the size of a brick, there was a bag of cuttlefish. And in the yard, in some pots, there was an enormous rosemary and some parsley.

“You can make a rice with this,” said Axel.

“For nine?”

“For nine.”

Otilia leaned on the worktop.

“Do you know how long it is since that stove was lit?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. That’s the problem.”

And she sat down on a stool to watch.

They all had dinner together in the dining room, at the long table, because there was no sense in laying five tables. The elderly couple turned out to be on their way to a funeral and running late, and instead of being sad they were in a splendid mood because the dead man, they said, had been a scoundrel. The girl with the bike had been pedalling nine days from her house and her name was Alba. The spare-parts salesman was called Fermín Losilla, which Hortensia thought was the funniest name she had heard in years, and within half an hour he was telling them that when he was young he played the drums.

The one with the car turned out to be the best thing at that table. He told them about an airport in Istanbul, about a bloke who fell asleep on him on a plane, and about a motorbike he had bought and sold in the same week. Three things one after the other, all three funny and all three well told, with the timing in the right places. Within half an hour the nine of them were crying with laughter at a story of his about a dog and a swimming pool.

Hortensia was wiping her eyes with the napkin.

“Oh, this lad.”

In the whole of that dinner he didn’t ask anybody anything. Not one thing. Not where they had come from, not where they were going, not what they were called. And nobody asked him either, because when somebody talks that well there’s no need.

The rice came out well. Not perfect: the crust caught a bit on one side, and it annoyed him and nobody else noticed.

At some point during the dessert, which was bread and chocolate because there was nothing else, Eva started singing. And Fermín Losilla started keeping time on the table with his hands, surprisingly well. And the couple from the funeral started dancing in the gap between the table and the wall, holding each other, very slowly and very badly.

And the one with the car went quiet.

It was the first time in two hours. He stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth and didn’t open it again until she had finished.

“Sorry,” he said then. “Did you just make that up?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, yes?”

Axel, standing in the kitchen doorway with a piece of bread and chocolate in his hand, felt something very daft inside him, about the size of a stone in a shoe, and paid it no attention at all.

“That I made it up just now.”

He sat back in the chair and ran a hand over his mouth.

“Right,” he said. “Right, right, right.”

After that he didn’t shut up all night, but about something else. He told her that was worth money. He told her he knew people. He said the name of a place and the name of a person, and Eva went on shaking her head, four times running, with half a smile, the way you say no to a compliment.

“No, really, I don’t record.”

“Yet.”

He wrote a number in the margin of a napkin, folded it in four and put it under her plate.

Before going up to his room he asked Axel for his phone, dialled and hung up on the first ring.

“Now you’ve got mine,” he said. “In case you end up nearby.”

Axel stood looking at the number on the screen, with no name on it, and pressed save without giving it one.

Of the nine people in that hotel, eight had come with somebody. The old married couple going to the funeral, the two sisters, the girl with the bike and her bike. He had turned up on his own, had spent dinner talking and hadn’t said where he was going, and it occurred to Axel, already on the stairs, that maybe he wasn’t going anywhere.

Axel ate his piece of bread and chocolate standing up, leaning on the kitchen doorframe, watching all that. And he chewed slowly, a great deal more slowly than a piece of bread needs, because for a few weeks now he had always chewed like that and he still hadn’t noticed.

Otilia stayed standing in the kitchen doorway, with a cloth in her hand, not sitting down all evening.

In the morning the road was open. They all left before ten and the envelope they left on the desk was fairly fat.

Fat with five. Axel saw them all go past the desk: the couple, the rep, and the girl on the bike, who left what she could and apologised for what she couldn’t.

He saw the one with the car stop in front of the envelope, put two fingers on it for a second, the way you greet a thing, and go out into the street to look at his phone.

He thought nothing of it. He remembered it two months later.

He was the last to leave, because he spent twenty minutes at the door showing Eva something on the screen. When he started the engine he wound down the window.

“Write to me!”

Off he went down the newly opened road, scraping his underside on the bump at the exit.

None of the three of them realised, until much later, that they hadn’t asked him what his name was.

Otilia saw them to the door in her checked dressing gown and stood a moment under the dead vine.

“Listen,” she said to Axel.

“Yes?”

She opened her mouth. She closed it.

“Nothing,” she said. “Safe journey.”

And she shut the door. But she didn’t shut the shutters.

Axel saw it a hundred metres on, when he turned round: the ones on the top floor were still open, all of them.