Yayo

Wamba showed him.

It was an August morning, with Axel halfway up the stone stairs and an armful of firewood, and Wamba appeared at the top, in the doorway, and stood there waiting for him to arrive.

“Come up.”

“I am coming up.”

“To the hearth, I mean.”

Axel put the firewood on the kitchen floor and went over to the chimney recess, which was the size of a wardrobe and black as the inside of a boot.

“I can’t see anything.”

“Then put the light on.”

He went for the head torch, climbed onto the stool and put his head inside the flue.

On the stone ledge that runs round inside the chimney, a metre and a half up, against the back wall, there was something.

At first he thought it was a rag. A dark lump, smaller than a fist, pressed against the stone, covered in a layer of soot so ancient it looked like part of the house.

And then the lump breathed.

It was a minuscule movement, nothing at all. The way something breathes when it breathes every four or five seconds.

Axel went very still on the stool.

“Is he asleep?” he said, very quietly.

“He’s asleep.”

“Since when?”

Wamba thought about it.

“In all the time I’ve been here I haven’t seen him awake.”

“And how long have you been here?”

“I’ve been here.”

And with that, as far as he was concerned, it was answered.

Axel got down off the stool and stayed a while in the kitchen with the head torch in his hand.

“Listen. And that in there, is he all right? Isn’t he cold?”

Wamba didn’t answer. He went off to the back room, to his beam, and didn’t answer anything else all day.

And that was how three odd weeks began.

Axel climbed onto the stool every morning. He didn’t decide to: he would go through the kitchen, see the recess, remember, and two minutes later he was there with the head torch on and his head inside a chimney flue seeing whether a lump the size of a fist was still moving every four seconds.

It was. Every morning it was.

Every morning, when Axel got down off the stool, Fay was sitting at the foot of it waiting for him to get down, and then he went off. Like somebody who walks you to a room and then goes.

One night he put in, feeling completely idiotic, a folded piece of the checked blanket, in case he was cold. In the morning the cloth was underneath the lump. Not on top and not beside. Underneath. As though somebody had moved it with enormous effort.

And Eva saw it.

That was the odd thing about those three weeks. Because Axel wasn’t doing it in secret: the stool creaked, the kitchen was the kitchen, and Eva was almost always there, washing up or chopping something or seeing to the fire.

She saw him take the stool. She saw him put on the head torch. She saw him put his head into a black hole and stay a minute without moving.

And she never asked him.

What she did was this: she kept the head torch charged. Every night, when she went down for water, she plugged the head torch into the battery of Úrsula’s car, which was the only socket in the village you could reach without asking permission, and in the morning it was on the table.

One morning, while he was up there, she said from below:

“Listen.”

“What.”

“Does he eat?”

Axel pulled his head out of the flue.

“I don’t know.”

“Ah.”

And she carried on with what she was doing.

Axel stayed up there, on the stool, with the head torch on, realising that that woman had just asked him a question of the kind you only ask about something that exists.

One night, up on the stool, with his head inside a chimney and a torch pointed at a sleeping creature the size of a fist, Axel realised something.

That he had no photograph of any of this.

Not one. He had no photograph of the bell tower coming out of the water, or of Nardo’s boat, or of Hortensia with flour in her eyebrow, or of the square with the arcades, or of Eva up on a bench in a stone kitchen with eleven people singing something she didn’t know.

Five months and not one photograph.

He got down off the stool and stayed a while with that, waiting for it to hurt the way it had hurt on that pavement, sitting on a bench outside a police station, with a piece of a flour bag in his hand.

And it didn’t hurt.

It struck him as the strangest thing and he didn’t know whether he was better or worse.

He asked Trini.

He went down to the shop with the excuse of cheese and waited until there was nobody there.

“Trini, another thing. In the chimneys round here, does anything sleep?”

Trini finished cutting, wrapped the piece in paper and weighed it.

“Well, of course.”

“What sleeps?”

“Bats.” She shut the drawer. “In the ones that aren’t used. They get in from the top and hang on the ledge in the flue, and they stay there four months without moving. They look dead and they aren’t.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t touch them, all right?”

“No.”

“And don’t light a fire until they go, which is in April.”

Axel said all right and asked how much it was, and went out into the street, and walked to the corner thinking that that explained absolutely everything and that he had seen it open an eye.

He went back up the street with the bag. And for the first time since he had been in that village, something crossed his mind that never had before: that if anybody had told him, in that café five months ago, that he was going to be worried about a creature asleep in a chimney, he would have laughed.

And he didn’t laugh.

He went up, left the bag on the table, took the stool and looked again.

He was still there. With the blanket underneath.

He stayed up there a long minute, with his head inside the flue, listening to how that thing breathed every four or five seconds, and counting it. Counting it the way you count somebody’s breathing in a hospital room: without meaning to, and without being able to stop.

He knew exactly how long four seconds are with no air getting in.

He hadn’t told Eva that. He had told her about the slice of pizza, and the worktop, and the three messages, and he had even enjoyed telling her. What he had never told her was that he counted them.

Getting down off the stool, for the first time in that whole year, the question came to him the other way round.

Not “do they exist?”.

But “and what if something happens to him?”.

Because he had spent three weeks climbing onto a stool to see whether it was breathing, and in three weeks it had not once occurred to him to wonder whether that was real, and it had occurred to him four times to wonder whether it was cold.

Something else occurred to him, and that one wasn’t about the chimney. That in five months it had not once occurred to him to say to Eva a thing that was hers.

There was something important there, and he didn’t know what it was, and he went off to have dinner.

On the Thursday of the second week, Víctor came down to breakfast with the keys already in his hand.

“You’re not going up on the roof today.”

“What?”

“You’re coming with me. A mate of mine has a place in the city with a proper booth and I want you to see it.” He poured himself coffee. “We leave in twenty minutes.”

“We’re off.”

“Where?”

He didn’t ask. He said it. And it wasn’t bad faith: it was that things occurred to him already decided.

He didn’t ask. He said it. And it wasn’t bad faith: it was that things occurred to him already decided.

Eva stopped with the cup halfway.

And she said yes.

She said yes with a face Axel had never seen on her, not singing, not on her birthday. The face of a girl who has just had a door opened for her after a year and a half sleeping in the street. That face was the worst part of the whole thing, because there was absolutely nothing to hold against her.

Úrsula turned up at nine with the slate hammer, because on the Tuesday she had said she would put in the Thursday and the Friday.

“Where’s the girl?”

“She’s gone for the day.”

Úrsula looked at the roof. She looked at the pile of slate that had to go up by hand, bucket by bucket, on the rope. She wiped her thumb on her overalls.

“Ah.”

And she went up.

It was a whole day of hauling on that rope on his own, with the line biting his hand in the same place, and going down for water three times instead of once. At seven Úrsula sat on the ridge, drank half a bottle in one go and said the arithmetic without anybody asking her for it.

“We’re a day behind.”

“I know.”

“With October right there.”

“I know.”

Axel said nothing else, and it wasn’t because he had nothing to say. He had. What was going on was that since July he had been talking to Eva’s sister behind her back, and if he took her to task for going off without a word, she was left holding the right to take him to task for exactly the same thing.

They got back at eleven at night. Eva got out of the car with a plastic folder under her arm and walked fast up the street.

She told it the next morning, washing up, with her back turned and very fast, like somebody getting a thing off their hands: that the place was the real thing, that there was a room with carpet up the walls and headphones that weighed, and that Víctor’s mate had listened to the river one twice over and then said a date.

“Thursday the twenty-sixth,” she said. “A session. Three hours of studio, paid for.”

“And are you going to go?”

Eva put the scourer into the pot and spent a long while on the same spot.

“I don’t know.”

And that night, over dinner, Víctor got out the notebook.

Not Eva’s. One of his own, hardback, bought in the city, and he put it on the table between the plates.

“Right. We need to get on with this.”

“With what?”

“The titles.”

Eva put down her fork.

“We’ve got nine recorded,” said Víctor, counting them off with the pen on the paper and not looking at her. “Nine. And they’re all very good, all right? They’re very good. But you can’t send that anywhere like this. If I send this, the first thing they ask me is what it is. And I can’t say ‘well, it’s a girl who sings whatever comes out’.”

“It is a girl who sings whatever comes out.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “Well, you can’t say that.”

That started a conversation that lasted an hour and that Axel heard from start to finish from the kitchen doorway, standing up, with a cloth in his hand, not getting involved.

That they needed names. That they had to be fixed, because a song that changes every time isn’t a song, it’s a moment. That they had to pick five of the nine. That the river one was out, not that one. That the third one had to be recorded again because at minute two she went off somewhere else.

“That’s because I went off.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go off.”

At one point, looking for a page, with the pen in his mouth and not an ounce of malice, Víctor said this:

“And the bench one you do exactly like Thursday.” He tapped the paper twice. “Here, like that, and done.”

Eva sat looking at the notebook.

Here, like that.

She said nothing. She got up to get water and spent four minutes outside, on the step, with the empty jug in her hand.

And two days later there was the thing with the glass.

Axel said nothing else, and it wasn’t because he had nothing to say. He had. What was going on was that since July he had been talking to Eva’s sister behind her back, and if he took her to task for going off without a word, she was left holding the right to take him to task for exactly the same thing.

He crossed the whole of it, end to end, in front of the dish of potatoes, walking the way he walked, hands behind his back and in no hurry at all, and when he got to the edge he stopped to look at Víctor’s glass.

Axel stopped chewing.

Víctor, who was forty centimetres away and looking at exactly that spot, went on talking about a festival.

He didn’t dodge him. He didn’t look away. He didn’t do that thing people do when they notice something and decide not to look at it. He was looking at the exact place where there was a creature the size of a hand with its hands behind its back, and what he was seeing was a glass.

Then he picked up the glass, with Wamba in front of it, and drank.

Axel looked up.

Eva wasn’t looking at Wamba. She was looking at Víctor. At his face. With an attention Axel hadn’t seen her give to anything in five months.

She didn’t open her mouth for the rest of the meal.

He was leaving on Thursday. He said so on Monday, the way he said everything: already decided.

“We’re off on Thursday.”

“We?”

“Come on.”

On Wednesday night Axel was washing up and could hear the two of them outside on the step. Nothing sounded wrong. He could hear Víctor talking and Eva saying “yeah” now and then.

And suddenly he heard Eva.

“No.”

And then again, louder:

“Víctor, I said no.”

Axel went out with the cloth in his hand.

They were both standing in the middle of the street, with the car behind them, the passenger door open and a bag inside.

“What do you mean, no?” Víctor was saying.

“That I’m not going.”

“But it’s all—”

“I know.”

“And what are you going to do? Stay here?”

“Yes.”

Víctor ran a hand over his face and laughed, and it was the first laugh of his in a month and a half with nothing inside it.

“Right. Right, right, right.” He leaned on the car. “So you’re staying.”

“I’m staying.”

“With roof boy.”

And there Eva went quiet.

“That’s got nothing to do with—”

“It has, love. It has.” He put both hands up. “I’ve been here a month and a half. I’ve been sleeping in a car. A month and a half. In a car.”

“Nobody asked you to—”

“Yeah. I know. Nobody asked me for anything.”

He was quiet a moment, and what he said next he said calmly, and that was the worst of it.

“Do you know what I’m offering you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t. Because if you knew you wouldn’t be standing there with a broom.”

“Víctor.”

“I’m getting you off the street, Eva.” His face went red all at once. “You’ve spent two years singing for nobody. For nobody. And a bloke turns up and says listen, this is worth something, I’ll pay for it, I’ll set it up for you, and you tell me no because you like a village.”

“It’s not the village.”

“Well, whatever it is!” And now he was shouting. “Your music is rubbish if nobody hears it! Do you get that or not? That thing doesn’t exist! That you’re never going to be anybody like this!”

Kika could be heard getting up inside.

“And in ten years you’ll still be here,” he said, quieter and worse, “with the same four little songs nobody has heard, singing them to the old woman with the tripe.”

Eva didn’t move.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe?”

“That maybe you’re right.”

Then she said the other one, looking him in the face, and nothing about her shook.

“But it’s mine.”

Víctor looked at her for three long seconds.

“Fine.”

He stayed a second with his hand on the open door.

“The session still stands,” he said. “Thursday the twenty-sixth. It’s paid for and it’s going to be paid for whether you go or you don’t, so don’t do me the favour of not going.”

He said it without a drop of anger, and that was what made it worse.

He shut the passenger door with the bag inside. He went round the car. And before getting in he stopped, with his hand on the roof, and looked at Axel, who had been through all of that standing on the step with a cloth in his hand.

“And you didn’t say anything either, did you,” he said.

And he got into the car.

He went down the cobbled street too fast, and on the bend at the bottom you could hear the underside of the car scrape against the stone.

And that was that.

Eva stayed in the middle of the street a long while. Then she went in, picked up the broom and carried on sweeping towards the other side, which was how Trini had said.

Axel didn’t ask her anything.

At eleven, when they were already in the hammocks and had gone twenty minutes without speaking, she said, in the dark:

“He’s left the mic.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Well, take it down to Trini tomorrow and get her to post it.”

“All right.”

And after a while:

“Axel.”

“What.”

“Thank God you were there.”

Axel lay looking at the ceiling of a house he had mended, hanging from a beam his father had cut, with that woman a metre and a half away having just said that to him.

And he said nothing to her.

Out of five months, that was the night he came closest and the one it would have cost him least, and he didn’t do it.

In the morning the plate of sugar was empty.

It had been full for three weeks.

“Yayo,” he said to him, the next night, with his head inside the flue.

For no reason. It just came out.

It seemed to him that, after three weeks going up to look at him, the least he could do was call him something.