Marta's aunt's oranges

The box arrived yesterday afternoon, just as I was coming back from the music school with my case on my back and my hands still cold from explaining to a nine-year-old why you don't hold a bow like a knife. In the doorway, leaning against the mailboxes, was a cardboard box with a tinned-tomato logo on it, tied up with esparto cord and a note stuck on with tape: Marta Ferrer, 3rd floor. They're the good ones. It was her aunt Pepa's handwriting.

Pepa lives in Carlet and has something like eighty fanegas of orange trees, or so she says, because Marta swears it's six small fields and one that no longer produces anything. Every October, when the first ones ripen, she sends a box. Not by post and not by courier. She sends it with her cousin Vicent, who drives his van to Valencia on Wednesdays to take things to the market and leaves it wherever he can. Once he left it at the bakery downstairs. Another time, at the bar on the corner, with the waiter only half warned.

The rules

Carrying the box up three flights without a lift is my job, because Marta says her back has been bad ever since she said so once and it worked. It weighs about twelve kilos. I went up with it against my chest, stopping at every landing, and on the second one an orange fell and rolled all the way down to the ground-floor neighbour's doormat. I went down to fetch it. It smelled of green leaf, of that sharp, clean thing an orange has when it still has its little stalk.

There are rules in this flat that nobody has written down. The first is that Pepa's oranges are never paid for and never thanked by message: you thank her in person at Christmas, by eating everything she puts on the table, which is a lot. The second is that you don't buy oranges at the supermarket while the box lasts. Marta would look at them the way you look at an ex at a wedding. The third is that the peel doesn't go in the bin but on the balcony railing, to dry. Marta says it keeps the flies away. I think it's an excuse to have a balcony that smells of something.

Peeling without talking

Last night we opened them. Marta sat on the kitchen floor, the only place where the two of us fit, and I sat on the stool with the violin still in its case at my feet, because I didn't even have the strength to put it back in its corner. She split one in half with her thumbs, no knife, and gave me the bigger half, which is her way of saying she's had a good day.

It was so sweet it made me a little angry. There's something unfair about the fact that something so good has so little in common with what you normally buy under the same name. We ate four each without speaking. Halfway through the fifth, Marta told me her aunt had left her a six-minute voice message that she hadn't listened to, and that she didn't know whether it was about the co-op's prices or about her uncle being worse. She stared at a segment.

I didn't know what to say, so I handed her half of mine. We stayed like that for a while, on the floor, with sticky fingers and the kitchen bulb humming. Then she got up, found her phone, took it out to the hallway and listened to the whole message, with the bike sleeping next to her and the door ajar.

It was about the co-op's prices. And also, at the end, a minute about some beans. Marta came back into the kitchen laughing with wet eyes, and said she'd go and see her on Sunday.

This morning there was a pile of peel on the balcony railing, drying in the October sun, and the air all down Calle de Cádiz smelled of an orchard that isn't anywhere near here.