The village band rehearsal

This Saturday was the first without a wedding since April. I woke up at eight out of habit, with my hands ready for somebody else's tie, and lay there looking at the ceiling with no idea what to do with a whole day. My cousin Paula texted at nine: "We're rehearsing for Santa Cecilia this afternoon. Come watch me suffer, there's horchata." I took my bike onto the ten past eleven train, with the violin case at home for the first time in months, and my back felt strange for being so light.

I hadn't been to the village since August. My mother says a person who lives fifty kilometres away and only turns up at Christmas and for the fiestas is a tourist with a surname.

The band room

The room is above the village social club, up a staircase of green tiles that smells of damp and floor wax. There's a poster from 1987, a cupboard full of dented euphoniums and a piano that is out of tune in such a loyal way that it's become part of the tuning. When I arrived, at four, they were setting out chairs. Thirty-eight, Paula counted; thirty-eight because a fifteen-year-old girl has just joined with a tuba bigger than she is.

I sat at the back by the window, next to a woman who folds the sheet music and hands it out. She's called Amparo, she's been there since before I was born, and she asked whether I was Rosa the pharmacist's daughter. I said niece. "Well, you look like her," she said, and dropped a folder of pasodobles in my lap so I'd do something useful.

The conductor is a small man with a white beard trimmed with a ruler, who gives the downbeat with his left hand and scratches his ear with his right. He said "Good afternoon" and thirty-eight people breathed in at once. I've spent years teaching kids and playing in quartets and at weddings, and I don't think I'd ever heard a breath like that, so collective, like a big animal stretching.

Out of tune together

They played a pasodoble, repeated it, went back to bar twenty-three three times. The brass came in a little late. A trombone was on the wrong page and carried on with admirable confidence. Paula, who's had her clarinet since she was thirteen, noticed me watching, twisted her mouth and rolled her eyes without ever stopping blowing. I burst out laughing and Amparo elbowed me.

And then, during a pause, the conductor said: "Again, and this time listen to each other." They played the same bar and it sounded different. Not better, exactly. It sounded as if somebody had finally moved in. I sat with the folder open and didn't turn the page.

At six I wanted an instrument that was only mine because Paula had hers and the older people in the village called her "the clarinettist" with pride. I wanted that name. Now, at twenty-seven, sitting at the back of a room with a leaky roof, I realised the name was the least of it: what she had, and I missed, was thirty-seven other people breathing beside her.

The horchata

Afterwards we went to the bar at the club. Paula's face was red and her lip swollen, which is what happens when she plays two hours straight. We ordered horchata with fartons, even though it was October, and talked about small things: her boyfriend, who doesn't understand why he can't see her on Saturdays; my mother, who still doesn't believe I earn money playing; Iaia, who told Paula on the phone that this year the niche took her less effort than last year, which was a lie, of course.

I told her I'd enjoyed the rehearsal more than any concert in the past few months. She looked at me with the glass halfway to her mouth. "Then come on the 22nd," she said. "I'll lend you Amparo's chair." "I can't play the euphonium." "Nobody's going to ask you to. Just come."

I took the eight o'clock train back, the bike held between my knees and the pasodobles still in my head, bar twenty-three going round and round. A girl with headphones watched me hum and smiled. In the window, between two dark orange groves, the whole carriage was reflected, my face in it, with no case on my back.