“You get fatter by the day, woman!”
And Silvestre laughed, and Mariana laughed with him. They were like two children. They sat down at the table and drank the hot coffee, making playful, slurping noises, each trying to outslurp the other.
“So, what’s it to be, then?”
Silvestre was no longer laughing. Mariana had grown serious too. Even their faces seemed paler.
“I don’t know. You decide.”
“Like I said yesterday, the leather for soling is getting more and more expensive. My customers keep complaining about the price, but that’s how it is. I can’t perform miracles. Where are they going to find anyone to do the work more cheaply, that’s what I’d like to know, but that doesn’t stop them complaining.”
Mariana interrupted him, saying that moaning would get them nowhere. What they had to do was decide whether or not to take in a lodger.
“It would certainly be useful. It would help us pay the rent, and if he’s a man on his own and you don’t mind doing his laundry for him, we could just about break even.”
Mariana drained the last sugary drop of coffee from her bowl and said:
“That’s fine by me. Every little bit helps.”
“I know, but it does mean taking in lodgers again, when we’ve only just managed to rid ourselves of that so-called gentleman . . .”
“Oh well, maybe the next one will be a decent sort. I can get on with anyone, as long as they get on with me.”
“Let’s give it another go, then. A man on his own, who just needs a bed for the night, that’s what we need. I’ll put an ad in this afternoon.” Still chewing his last piece of bread, Silvestre stood up and declared: “Right, I’m off to work.”
He went back into the bedroom and walked over to the window. He drew aside the curtain that acted as a screen separating the window area from the rest of the room. Behind it was a high platform on which stood his workbench. Awls, lasts, lengths of thread, tins full of tacks, bits of sole and scraps of leather and, in one corner, a pouch containing French tobacco and matches.
Silvestre opened the window and looked out. Nothing new to be seen. A few people walking along the street. Not far off, a woman was crying her wares, selling a kind of bean soup that people used to eat for their breakfast. Silvestre could never understand how she could possibly make a living. No one he knew ate bean soup for breakfast anymore; he himself hadn’t eaten it for more than twenty years. Different times, different customs, different food. Having thus neatly summed the matter up, he sat down. He opened his tobacco pouch, rummaged around for his cigarette papers among the hotchpotch of objects cluttering the bench and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled the smoke and set to work. He had some uppers to put on, a job requiring all his knowledge and skill.
Now and then he would glance out at the street. The morning was gradually brightening, although the sky was still cloudy and a slight mist blurred the edges of things and people alike.
From among the multitude of noises already filling the building, Silvestre could make out the sound of an immediately identifiable pair of heels clicking down the stairs. As soon as he heard the street door open, he leaned forward.
“Good morning, Adriana!”
“Good morning, Senhor Silvestre.”
The girl stopped beneath the window. She was rather short and dumpy and wore thick glasses that made her eyes look like two small, restless beads. She was nearly thirty-four years old and her modest hairstyle was already streaked with the odd gray hair.
“Off to work, eh?”
“That’s right. See you later, Senhor Silvestre.”
It was the same every morning. By the time Adriana left the house, the cobbler was already seated at the ground-floor window. It was impossible to escape without seeing that unruly tuft of hair and without hearing and responding to those inevitable words of greeting. Silvestre followed her with his eyes. From a distance, she resembled, in Silvestre’s colorful phrase, “a sack of potatoes tied up in the middle.” When she reached the corner of the street, Adriana turned and waved to someone on the second floor. Then she disappeared.
Silvestre put down the shoe he was working on and craned his neck out of the window. He wasn’t a busybody, he just happened to like his neighbors on the second floor; they were good customers and good people. In a voice constrained by his somewhat awkward position, he called out:
“Hello there, Isaura! What do you make of the weather today, eh?”
From the second floor came the answer, attenuated by distance:
“Not bad, not bad at all. The mist . . .”
But we never found out whether she thought the mist spoiled or embellished the beauty of the morning. Isaura let the conversation drop and slowly closed the window. It wasn’t that she disliked the cobbler, with his simultaneously thoughtful and cheery air, she simply wasn’t in a mood to chat. She had a pile of shirts to be finished by the weekend, by Saturday at the very latest. Given the choice, she would have carried on with the novel she was reading. She only had another fifty pages to go and had reached a particularly interesting part. She found them very gripping, these clandestine love affairs, buffeted by endless trials and tribulations. Besides, the novel was really well written. Isaura was an experienced enough reader to be a judge of this. She hesitated for a moment, but realized at once that she did not even have time to do that. The shirts were waiting. She could hear the murmur of voices inside: her mother and aunt talking. They talked a lot. Whatever did they find to talk about all day that they hadn’t already said a hundred times before?
She crossed
