Two Euros of Warm Hands

Half the school was missing today. Remei announced it at four in the staff room, register in hand: on the Friday before All Saints' the kids go off to their villages with their grandparents, and the teachers stay behind with the ones who don't have a village. I was left with two out of six. Lucía, who told me the ugly bat is still at home inside her witch's hat, and a new seven-year-old who spent the whole lesson asking me whether the school's loan violin had a name. By ten past six I was out on the street, and it was dark. Ever since the clocks went back I leave class feeling as if someone has switched the city off without telling anyone.

And my hands were cold. Not the usual cold, the stage-fright kind, but properly cold: the first of the season. It was sixteen degrees, which in Valencia is practically an emergency, and I was still wearing my September denim jacket because I haven't yet taken my grandmother's coat out of the wardrobe.

The smoke

I smelled it before I saw it. Coming down Calle de Sueca, level with the market, the air changed: sweet smoke, a bit of firewood, a bit of burnt sugar. On my corner, outside the low house opposite my balcony, a chestnut cart had appeared. A black metal drum with a crooked chimney, a pan full of holes on top and, behind it, sitting on a rush-seated chair, a woman in a woolly hat and flowery oven gloves.

It wasn't there yesterday. I know because yesterday I went past in the dark with a cardboard bat stuck to my case, and the corner smelled of nothing. Today, all of a sudden, it was autumn.

I leaned the bike against the lamppost and joined the queue, which was one man and a dog. The man asked for a dozen "big ones" and the dog sat down to watch the pan the way you'd watch television. The woman stirred the chestnuts with a wooden paddle charred at the tip and every so often covered them with a wet sack that gave off a cloud of white steam when it touched the iron.

Six chestnuts and a sweet potato

I asked for half a dozen chestnuts and a moniato, which is what we call a sweet potato here and what my grandfather called it. Two euros. She gave it all to me in a newspaper cone, chestnuts on top and the sweet potato underneath, split open and steaming, and as soon as I held it in both hands I felt my fingers come back one by one, like walking into a house while someone goes ahead of you switching on the lights.

I stayed there instead of leaving, the cone pressed against my chest. The woman looked at me from under her hat and said, "You're the one with the violin. Third floor." I asked how she knew. She pointed the paddle upwards, at my balcony, which looks tiny from the street, its railing lined with orange peel drying out. "In the mornings, at nine," she said. "You play a slow thing that goes round and round."

It was the Haydn. The slow movement, the one with the long notes. I blushed in the dark, which shows just the same.

The orange tree

Her name is Encarna. She lives in the low house, the one with the orange tree in a pot that I discovered the Sunday the clocks changed, counting rooftops. I told her I'd wondered who would pick those oranges, that it made me a bit sad to think of them left on the tree. She laughed, a hoarse laugh, the kind left behind by cigarettes long given up.

"They're bitter, xiqueta. Nobody eats those. I pick them in January and make marmalade, it's all they're good for." She told me she's been setting up her cart on that corner for twenty-eight winters, from the Friday before All Saints' until the street smells of orange blossom, and that she knows the neighbourhood by what it orders. Young people, chestnuts. Old people, sweet potato. Sad people, both.

I asked her which I was. She looked at my cone. "You were cold," she said.

She offered me the rush chair for a minute and I don't know why I took it. I sat by the drum for ten minutes, peeling chestnuts with my nails and burning myself, while she served a couple, a delivery rider with his helmet still on and a little boy who paid in ten-cent coins counted out on his palm. The heat from the drum crept into my knees. From down there, my balcony looked like somebody else's.

The cone

I went upstairs with two chestnuts and the sweet potato. Marta was on the sofa, wrapped in the blanket, marking papers with her red pen. I handed her the sweet potato without a word and she ate it with her fingers, blowing on it, smearing a corner of the papers. She said the first sweet potato of the year brings good luck, which she had just made up.

When I went to throw the cone away I saw it was a crossword page. Half done, in pencil, in big slanting handwriting. Three answers were missing. One of them, across, said: "River of Valencia, five letters." It annoyed me that she'd missed it, with it so close by. Then I thought maybe she knew it perfectly well and had left it for whoever took the paper home.

I filled it in with the pencil from my case, the same one I used to write Nil's sentence inside the lid. I've smoothed the page out on the music stand, with a sweet-potato stain in one corner, next to the Haydn. Tomorrow at nine, when I play the slow movement, I'm going to try to take it a little slower. Down below, at that hour, there won't be any smoke yet.