Bocadillo
This morning was all about sweeping up — every five minutes — the trail of mud and debris left behind a million tiles as the less tanned Mbappé’s cousin hauled them away from a terrace.
Alongside the all about, the Chinese woman’s bar continued its festival of smells. It hasn’t smelled yellow for days.1 This time, no one was there when I walked in. I had to wait until the woman appeared, but it was worth the wait because she came through the kitchen door carrying a simple, succulent bocadillo wrapped in foil and cut in half like a durum. She placed the two halves on the counter and solemnly said:
‘Bocadillo.’
It came with chicken, tomato and lettuce, and smelled of freshly cut tomato and lettuce, chicken breast freshly pan-seared with black pepper, and a very subtle hint of mayonnaise. It’d invite you to live, in such a way that Don Johnson’s Spanish voice sounded again over a pool.
It really began to smell like chlorine, suntan lotion and grass until, a few minutes later, the lift’s sliding door started malfunctioning.
Neighbours thought it was owing to the thousand times in a row the workers had carried the million tiles, but the explanation was the typical one that should be obvious to anyone, even those who know nothing about elevators, but which in practice only occurs to you when you have some experience and have already encountered the same problem before: the door was getting stuck just because mud and debris had clogged the rails, and the solution was just to remove that mud and debris with a flathead screwdriver.
I asked Mbappé’s cousin’s boss and companion to clean the tiles off a bit before taking them out of the flat and continuing to fill the entire building with mud and rubble, but there were only seven left. They took the seven tiles down and proceeded to carry the new ones up to the terrace.