The man in row seven

On Tuesdays I go to the cinema alone. I've done it since I moved to Russafa four years ago. At first it was about money, because tickets are cheaper on Tuesdays, and then it turned into something else. Marta never comes. She says reading subtitles is work, and that she corrects quite enough things during the week without correcting the actors as well. So I go on my own, by bike, to the Babel, and I always sit in the same place: row six, seat four, left of the aisle.

I didn't choose that seat for any reason. It's the first one I was given and that was that. I'm like this with cinema seats, café tables and my side of the bed. Habits cost me almost nothing to pick up and a fortune to change.

The regulars

If you go to the cinema every Tuesday for four years, you end up knowing people you don't know. There's a couple in their fifties who argue in whispers through the trailers and hold hands the moment the lights go down, as if both things were part of the same ritual. There's a boy with a little notebook who writes things down in the dark, I don't know how, and who never laughs, even at comedies. And there's a man. The man in row seven.

The man in row seven sits right behind me, slightly to the right. He must be over seventy. He always wears a corduroy cap, which he takes off when he sits down, and a grey cardigan buttoned to the top whatever the weather. And as soon as the film starts, he peels a piece of fruit. In summer it was a peach, which makes no noise but does make a smell. From October to March, a mandarin. I know because for four winters I've smelled the first mandarin of the season in screen two of the Babel, in the dark, right when the film starts getting serious.

We'd never spoken. We nodded at each other when the lights came up, like neighbours on a landing who don't know each other's names.

Out of focus

This Tuesday I went after stopping by my grandmother's house, and with the back brake finally working, which meant I arrived with five minutes to spare instead of with my heart in my mouth. They were showing a Korean film of almost three hours about a family who run a noodle restaurant and don't talk to each other. There were eleven people in the room. I counted.

Ten minutes in, I smelled the mandarin. First of the season. I smiled in the dark like an idiot.

Twenty minutes in, the man got up. I thought he was going to the toilet, or that he didn't like the film, which also happens. He went out through the door at the back with his cap in his hand and was gone a while. And then something happened on the screen that I can't really explain: the picture got sharper. Not much. Like when you clean your glasses without knowing they were dirty. Suddenly you could see the threads of the mother's apron, the steam off the pot, the tiny print on a calendar hanging on the restaurant wall.

I hadn't noticed it was out of focus. Nobody had. The couple were still holding hands; the boy was still writing.

Thirty-one years

When it ended and the lights came up, the man was putting his cap back on, and I, feeling brave that night for no reason I can name, asked him if he'd gone to say something to the projection booth. He looked a little surprised, as if he hadn't known I could talk.

He told me he'd been a projectionist for thirty-one years at a cinema on the Gran Vía that's now a gym. That back then you adjusted the focus by hand, peering through a little window, and that he still can't watch a slightly soft picture without his hands itching. That the boy in the booth is nice, but everything's digital now and people think digital doesn't go out of focus. "It does," he said. "It's just that nobody says so."

I told him I hadn't noticed until he fixed it. He shrugged. "Of course. That's how it is with most things."

His name is Vicente. I know because at the door the woman in the ticket booth said, "See you Tuesday, Vicente," and he replied, "God willing, and the focus too," which must be what he says every week, because she didn't even laugh.

I was already unlocking my bike when he came back towards me, digging in his cardigan pocket, and gave me a mandarin. A small one, with a leaf still stuck to the stem. "For the road," he said. And he walked off down the street with his cap on and his hands behind his back.

I didn't eat it on the way. I carried it in the basket, rolling from side to side over every bump, and when I got home I put it on my music stand, next to the Haydn I'm working on. Yesterday morning I ate it on the balcony, in my pyjamas, with my first coffee. It was sour, the way they are at the start of the season.

The peel is still on the music stand. This morning, when I opened the case to practise, the whole room smelled of screen two.