Zoquete

The firewood appeared on a Thursday.

It was at the door when they came down, stacked against the wall, laid properly, with the logs crossed at the ends so it wouldn’t fall. A metre and a half long by a metre high. Oak and chestnut, dry, the good stuff.

Axel went down to the shop to ask.

“Trini, do you know who’s left firewood at our door?”

Trini was doing sums in a notebook with her glasses on.

“No.”

“It’s just that it’s worth a bit of money.”

Trini looked up.

“Well, don’t bring it down to the shop, love, it won’t fit in here.”

And she went back to her sums.

He asked Sabino, who said he didn’t cut firewood any more. Úrsula, who said she bought hers. The lad with the frying pans, who looked at the street and said no idea.

All three with the same face: the face of somebody who isn’t lying but isn’t going to help you either.

That was the first winter. And the first winter was hard, and then it was good, and in that order and not the other one.

Hard was this.

In November it rained nineteen days out of twenty-six and the water didn’t come from above: it came sideways. The new window held. The plastic in the back room didn’t, and there was one night when they got up at one to put buckets out and at three to empty them. And water came in through a spot in the roof that Úrsula had warned would let it in and that Axel had left for the spring, and Úrsula didn’t say “I told you”, which was much worse.

In December the hose froze and they spent six days carrying water up from the fountain in water containers, two per trip, four trips a day. Axel worked out once how many kilos he had carried up that week and decided never to work it out again.

And at some point in that December, coming up with two containers, he stopped in the doorway of the back room.

The school rucksack was still in its corner, upright, the shoelace pulled tight.

It had dust on it. A finger of dust on the top flap, the kind that lifts when a door slams. The dust of a house being worked on, which settles on everything that doesn’t move.

Which meant she hadn’t touched it for months.

Axel didn’t clean it. He shut the door with his foot, very slowly, and carried the containers down to the kitchen.

There was one January afternoon, a Wednesday, at half past five, with the house at nine degrees and the hearth drawing badly because the wind was coming from the north, when Axel sat on the bench with his hands pushed up his sleeves and thought, with all the clarity in the world, that the whole thing had been idiotic.

He thought it in detail. He thought about a radiator. He thought about a small flat with the heating included in the service charge, and the phrase “service charge” struck him as beautiful.

He was like that for twenty minutes.

Then Eva came in with her face red from the cold and a sack of chestnuts somebody had given her, and said “bloody hell, it’s freezing in here”, and sat down next to him without taking her coat off, and the two of them sat quiet, looking at the bad fire.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“All right.”

And she didn’t ask him anything else.

Twenty minutes later the wind changed and the hearth started to draw, and forty minutes later the kitchen smelled of chestnuts, and Axel didn’t remember the radiator again until the following year.

Good was this. That the house filled up.

It filled up in a way neither of them had planned or asked for. Úrsula came to dinner on Thursdays. Sabino came up the street once a week, very slowly, and sat in the kitchen saying almost nothing. The lad with the frying pans started coming with his accordion and leaving without it, and by the third time he didn’t take it away at all. Eva sang in the shop on Saturdays, because Trini thought of it and because people came down from two villages further up.

Axel cooked for whoever turned up, which was what always ended up happening.

And nobody ever said anything. Nobody said “we’re going to look after you”. Sabino didn’t give him a single piece of advice all winter, not one.

What they did was this:

Somebody left firewood at the door and didn’t say who.

Somebody, on a day when Axel went down with a fever for bread, swapped his loaf for a bag with two sachets of stock in it, didn’t charge him for the sachets and didn’t say a word.

Somebody changed the bulb in the street lamp on their street, which had been out for three years.

And Axel spent the winter trying to work out who did each thing, and at some point in February he stopped trying.

He missed Yayo on a Tuesday.

He took the stool up, put his head into the chimney with the head torch on and looked at the ledge.

It was empty. There was the little piece of checked blanket, folded in four, in one corner. And nothing else.

Axel got down off the stool with a thing in his chest, and he didn’t tell Eva because he didn’t know how you say it.

In the afternoon he went up to the back room. Wamba was on his beam, above the elder tree, which in January looked like a bundle of wire.

“The one in the chimney isn’t there any more.”

And Wamba, without turning round, said:

“He’s downstairs.”

“Downstairs where?”

“In the byre. Next to the door, where the sun comes in in the morning.”

Axel stood there a second.

“And is that good?”

And that time he did turn round.

“Honestly,” said Wamba, with infinite irritation, as though he had been asked the stupidest question in the world. “The chimney ones are the ones for shut-up houses.”

And he went back to looking at the tree.

Axel went down to the byre. He looked for half an hour and saw nothing.

But next to the door, in the spot where the sun comes in in the morning, there was a rush-seated chair he hadn’t put there.

He asked at the end of March, in the vegetable patch, planting garlic, and he had been thinking about it for weeks. He asked the right one, who had spent three days turning up mid-morning to do absolutely nothing: sit on the edge of the bed with his legs dangling and give his opinion.

“Gorgorito.”

“What.”

“How do you make them come to a house?”

“Make who come?”

“You lot.”

The little brownie thought about it for less than a second.

“Well, don’t make it boring,” he said.

And he carried on watching him work.

Axel stayed on his knees in the bed, with the garlic in his hand.

What came to him was not the house. It was a dirt track, at night, with the rain stopping and a speaker playing inside a rucksack, and a little voice saying I go where things happen.

A whole year to answer that.

“Right,” he said.

And then, because by now it didn’t embarrass him:

“Do you want chocolate?”

“Honestly.”

He saw the last one in April, almost exactly a year after leaving his flat with a rucksack and a list with the grammes on it.

He was sitting on the kitchen window ledge, on the outside, looking in: very small, very round and with a woollen thing on his head that wasn’t a hat, it was a sleeve.

Axel opened the window.

“Evening. Are you new?”

Nothing.

“What’s your name?”

The creature looked at him for a very long while, with enormous attention, and didn’t open his mouth.

He didn’t open it all the following year, or the one after, or ever.

“Zoquete,” said Axel.

The creature nodded once, very slowly, as though he thought that was fine.

That night the house was full. Úrsula was there and Trini and Sabino in his chair, and the lad with the frying pans with the accordion that lived there now, and the woman from the third floor, who had come up with a dish and stayed, and Kika under the table, who was fat by now.

Eleven.

Axel made the stew crouched at the hearth, stirring with a stick, for eleven people.

At some point, between the smoke and the noise, he remembered a night at his own kitchen table, with his phone propped on a pizza box, with a piece of pre-frozen pizza stuck in his throat and the absolute certainty that he was going to die right there.

It seemed to him like centuries ago.

He didn’t tell anybody, because he was serving.

Before singing, Eva climbed onto a bench, and while people were going quiet she pointed at Axel’s feet with her chin.

“They smell,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth, so only he would hear.

“I’m barefoot, Eva. Like you.”

“Right. But mine don’t smell.”

And she started to sing.

They all left at gone one and the two of them cleared up, as always, without dividing it. And when Eva had already gone off to the room, Axel stayed last in the kitchen, turning things off.

He opened the drawer, took out the bar of chocolate he had bought at the shop on Thursday and broke off a piece. A good piece, not a corner.

He went out onto the balcony.

On the window ledge, in the spot where the one who didn’t talk had been sitting, there was already a piece.

A big one. Broken off any old how, the way she breaks things.

Axel stood a moment with his own in his hand. And then he put it next to the other one, and went back in, and said nothing. Not that night and not any other.

Then he stood there, with his hand on the window, and the usual question came to him.

The one from when he was eight. The one from the wood. The one from the café. The one from ten past four one morning. The one from a half hour that wasn’t anywhere.

This time he realised something: that he hadn’t asked it for months.

Something else: that the answer was never going to come, not from a test, not from a whole village talking about them the way you talk about the weather. That he could stand there all night with his face pressed to the glass, waiting to see whether something happened to a piece of chocolate.

He shut the window. He turned off the light. And he went to bed without looking.

That was the only thing he did differently, and it cost him, and he did it.

And in bed, in the dark, the day went past him, which was the thing from every night.

He had brought wood up twice. He had made a dough and it had come out badly. He had spent forty minutes arguing with Úrsula about a gutter. He had put a piece of chocolate on a windowsill next to another piece of chocolate.

He was asleep before he finished looking at it.

In the morning it wasn’t there. There were four crumbs on the ledge and a damp line where it had melted a little with the dew.

Fay was sitting right underneath, on the balcony, licking his lips.

Axel stood a moment at the window. And he laughed to himself, with his hand on the latch, because of the two things that could have happened out there that night, both of them seemed fine to him.

Eva went past behind him with the bucket, on her way to the stairs.

“Are you coming down or what?” she said. “Úrsula’s coming today about the gutter and the ladder has to go up first.”

“It’s just that I don’t know if the new one will take the weight of…”

“Give it a good kick, Axel.”

And she carried on down.

Halfway down the stone stairs, without turning round, with the bucket knocking against her knee:

“Somebody said that to me once.”

“I know.”

“Well then.”

And Axel stood for two seconds in the middle of the kitchen with a look on his face that nobody saw.

Then he picked up the other bucket and went down after her.