Flat 5B, on the top floor, hears them before it sees them: the lift, the voices, the wheels. It remembers every guest by what they left on it, and it is quite sure it understands people. It is proudest of the living-room floor, an old mosaic that guests step across without looking down.
Four nights, one suitcase. The suitcase is the first thing 5B will get wrong.
Wednesday, 16:40
At 16:52 Lucía unlocks the door, lets the guest in first and shows her the one thing that matters: from the inside, this door only closes if you shove it with your hip. She shows her twice — where exactly to push, and how hard — so she'll remember. The woman (Hanna, according to the phone in Lucía's hand) tries it herself. The lock clicks first time. Lucía raises an eyebrow, which for Lucía is applause.
Wheels on my floor again. Don Paco will have heard them before the lift let her go.
Lucía is explaining the shutters and the air conditioner (“it works, if the remote has batteries”) when her phone buzzes. She reads it with her thumb half over her mouth. “Terraza?” she reads aloud, to nobody. “At twelve minutes past four in the morning. For this.” She walks out onto the terrace, photographs the two chairs and the rosemary, comes back and types a reply.
One word. She used to write me whole paragraphs about curtains.
Lucía leaves at 17:20, the phone still lit in her hand.
Hanna opens the suitcase on the living-room floor. Two sweaters. A folded tree, sixty centimetres tall, wrapped in a pillowcase. Then fourteen glass ornaments, each in its own rolled-up sock. She counts them aloud in a language 5B doesn't know and lines them up along the skirting board.
She looks down at the mosaic for a long time. 5B, which has waited years for someone to stop over its floor like this, goes quiet all through: not a creak, not a sound in the pipes. Then Hanna fetches a bath towel, folds it in four, lays it in the middle of the room and stands the tree on it.
A towel. On my mosaic. I can't decide whether I've been insulted or protected.
Thursday, 13:10
At 7:10 the bin lorry goes by under the balcony, as it has every morning since 5B can remember. The bedroom shutters stay down. They are down at nine, at ten, at eleven.
Hanna surfaces at half past twelve and goes out with a cloth bag. She comes back with mandarins and a slab of turrón, and peels a mandarin in one long spiral, plainly something she has done all her life; the spiral goes on the windowsill. At ten past one she opens the wrong door: the balcony, the orange tree, and the kitchen across the street, where a man in an apron waves a spatula at her. She waves back with the mandarin. Then she finds the right door, the one behind the curtain.
The terrace is bright and cold, the way December is here: sun on the face, shade on the knees. Hanna stands in the doorway until the door swings back against her hip. Then she goes in and comes out with two cups of coffee. One she puts in front of her chair. The other in front of the other chair.
Two chairs, two cups. I read people from what they leave on me, and this one is easy. Someone is late.
She drinks hers. The second cup steams for a while, then stops. Hanna doesn't look at it. But she doesn't move the chair or take the cup away either. At two she carries the tree out in her arms, towel and all, and sets it on the table. She hangs the fourteen ornaments on it. She doesn't plug in the lights; the plug hangs from a branch like a tail.
By six the sun has gone behind the bell towers. Along the port the cranes switch on, one after another, red and white.
By seven the kitchen across the street is filling up. The man in the apron carries two more chairs to the table, then another. Children run from room to room, someone shouts “Iaia!”, and the smell of fried fish and garlic carries all the way to the terrace. A cork pops. The man in the apron spots Hanna and raises his glass across the street. She raises her cup.
At eight, through the wall, Don Paco starts a carol on his trumpet. He plays every Thursday — in the August heat, during Fallas — and tonight, Christmas Eve, is no exception. 5B is sure he would play through the end of the world, if it fell on a Thursday. On the fifth note he goes flat, as he does every year.
Hanna laughs once, short, the way you laugh when you've forgotten you're allowed. She looks at the second chair, then at the wall. She knocks on it twice with a knuckle.
The trumpet stops. There is a pause just long enough for an old man to decide something. Then the carol starts again from the beginning and goes flat in the same place.
He does it on purpose. All these years through one wall, and I would swear to it.
At midnight every bell tower rings at once, and the kitchen across the street spills out onto its balcony. Hanna is still on the terrace, wearing both sweaters.
Friday, 9:30
On Christmas morning someone knocks at the door. Twice, with a knuckle.
I've known that knock for years. Only until now it came from the other side of the wall.
Hanna opens. There is nobody on the landing; behind the door of 5A someone is washing up with great dedication, and on the mat stands a plate with a blue rim, covered with a napkin. Under the napkin are six little half-moon pastries filled with sweet potato, still warm, dusted with sugar.
She eats two of them standing in the hall. At noon she knocks at 5A with the same plate, now holding three mandarins and one long spiral of peel.
Don Paco takes his time opening. First he looks at her feet — slippers, no wheels — then at the mandarins.
“Bon Nadal,” he says.
“Bon Nadal,” she repeats, with the stress in the wrong place.
He points at the wall, then pretends to blow a trumpet. She shows him how she knocked. They laugh on the landing for longer than the joke deserves.
In the evening Hanna finally plugs in the lights. The plug-tail reaches the socket by the terrace door, and the tree on the table glows over the rooftops, small and yellow. Through the wall, silence: it is Friday.
Fairy lights. The tiles under the tree are warm, like an August evening. Now I have lights too, like the cranes, only closer.
Sunday, 10:40
On the last morning she carries the cups out at nine, both, as on the other mornings. She finishes hers standing up. The second she picks up, weighs in her hand, and pours slowly into the rosemary pot. The soil takes it without comment.
Coffee. With milk. On my rosemary.
She washes both cups and sets them upside down in the rack, side by side. She folds the tree into its pillowcase and the ornaments into their socks; she counts them as they go in and gets thirteen. She counts again, doesn't start a third time, and zips the suitcase. She hangs the towel on the rail, folded in three, edges matching.
Thirteen. On Thursday I counted fourteen on the tree. I was looking at the cranes.
At 10:52 she shoves the door shut with her hip, no practice needed. The lift, for the first time this week, goes straight down.
No stopping between floors. As if I had asked it to. I didn't. I may have thought about it.
Tuesday, 11:30
Rosa takes the last flight on foot, because the lift is hanging between the fourth floor and the fifth and she has stopped waiting for it. One hand on the rail, the other on her knee. Her glasses swing on their cord at every step.
She does the flat the way she always does: windows, beds, bathroom, stepping over the tile that rings without looking down. Then the terrace. She stops.
On the rosemary, from a loop of red thread, hangs a glass bird with a chipped beak.
Rosa takes her glasses off and lets them fall on their cord. She turns the bird over once, twice. Through the open door she can see the two cups upside down in the rack, side by side. She smells the rosemary, and her eyebrows go up a little, the way they do whenever she thinks about guests.
Then she hangs the bird back where it was, on the same twig, says “Bueno” to the plant, and goes to strip the beds.
The box. There is a box for this: top shelf, second bedroom. That is what the box is for.
By one o'clock the flat is clean and Rosa has gone, pulling the door shut with a hip that no longer likes it. The terrace is empty, the table bare, the chairs where the wind left them.
The rosemary still smells of coffee. Nobody asked me. I have to admit, it's better this way.
