One
The street was white. That was what Lucía would remember afterwards. She remembered the white of it, and the lime on every wall throwing the August sun back at her until her eyes ached.
Then she pushed open the door of Bodega Arrieta, and the dark took her.
It was a while before the room came back. First the window, high under the roof, and the single blade of light falling through it. Then the dust, turning in the light as slowly as something underwater. Then the casks. Row after row of them, stacked three high, their black faces turned towards her like a congregation waiting for someone to speak.
The smell came last. Oak and old wine, and something older underneath. Her grandfather had carried that smell on his hands every day of her childhood. She had not breathed it in eleven years.
‘So you came,’ said a voice in the dark.
Rafael. The foreman had seemed old when she was a girl, and he had not grown any younger. He did not offer his hand. He looked at her suitcase the way he might look at a dog that had wandered in from the street.
‘I came to sell it,’ she said.
He nodded, as if it were the answer he had expected, and also the one he had dreaded. Then he lifted his lantern and led her down the narrow stair to her grandfather’s room beneath the bodega. His coat still hung on its hook. His lamp still stood on the desk, as if he had only gone upstairs for a moment. The light moved along the casks against the wall, past the one she had drawn on as a child, and found the one beside it, with a chalk mark on its face.
There he stopped.