Természetesen

The cave above Playa de Diego Hernández, on the Adeje coast. Spring, 2041, late afternoon.

The corner had been weeping since November. Tibor had let it weep through the rainy season because a wall that wanted to weep should be allowed to, and because trying to seal a wall in the rain was a way of teaching yourself patience whether you needed the lesson or not. Now, in spring, with three dry weeks behind him and three more probably ahead, the corner was finally ready to be heard.

He stood on the small wooden stool with the bucket of lime mix at his feet and the trowel in his right hand, and he worked. The lime had been mixed an hour ago and would set in another hour, so he had perhaps fifty minutes of usable time, which suited him. He liked work that had to be done at a particular pace.

The cave above Diego Hernández was a thing he had been making since 2017. He had arrived on the Adeje coast of Tenerife with a pickaxe, a sleeping bag, and a small grant from a Hungarian cultural foundation that he had stopped accepting after the third year because he had stopped being able to explain to them what he was doing. What he was doing, exactly, was hand-digging a cave in a volcanic outcrop. He had done this for eleven months before the cave was habitable and for six years more before it was beautiful. Then the world had gone quiet. Then the cave had become something else.

He looked at the corner. He drew the trowel through the lime once. He pressed the mix against the rock and smoothed it, and the rock accepted the seal the way old rock accepts most things, which is to say slowly and on its own terms.

Behind him, somewhere in the back of the cave, Kutya snored.

Kutya was Tibor's dog. Kutya was the Hungarian word for dog, and Tibor had named the dog Kutya because he had not been able to commit to a real name when the animal had appeared at the cave one summer evening in 2034 and refused to leave, and by the time he had been able to commit to a real name the dog had already learned Kutya as his identity. Kutya did not know he had a generic name. Kutya was happy.

Tibor finished one section of the corner and stepped down from the stool and refilled the bucket with fresh lime from the larger bucket and remixed it and stepped back up. He had a system. He had had the system for a long time.

The cave around him: at this hour the fluorescent paints on the walls were not visible as colors, only as topology, a low relief of layered shapes. Under blacklights at night the ultramarines and reds and yellows would come up and the cave would look like the inside of a coral reef that had read poetry. By day it looked like a cave with feelings. Tibor had painted it in seven layers since the silence; each layer applied over the last when the wall called for it. He could read the cave the way certain old men could read their own families.

The stage at the front. The bar on the left, run on a strict no-profit principle, the way the bar had always been run, the way the bar would always be run. A small kitchen tucked behind a curtain at the back. A bedroom even further back, dug deeper into the rock, where Tibor slept and where Kutya, at this moment, was producing the small irregular snore of a dog dreaming about a thing he was not going to share.

Tibor thought about the cave. He thought about his hands. He thought about whether the corner would hold this season or whether he would be back on the stool again in October.

He did not, in this hour, think about the night in 2027 when a song had been sung in this cave that nobody had known was being recorded.

He did not think about it because he had decided, somewhere around 2030, that he had thought about it enough for one lifetime. He was wrong about this. He thought about it a small amount, every day, the way you think about a thing that has shaped a room you are still standing in. But he did not let it become the day's main subject if he could help it.

He worked.

Outside the cave, on the volcanic apron that ran from the cave mouth down to the dry barranco below, a footstep crossed the gravel. Then another. Tibor did not turn around. Kutya, from the bedroom, made a single small whuff of acknowledgment and went back to sleep, which meant the footstep was Yara.

"Persze," Tibor said, to nobody in particular. Of course.

Yara came through the curtain at the cave mouth and stood for a minute letting her eyes adjust. She was tall, even taller than he remembered from yesterday, the way she got taller in the shadow of the cave because the cave's ceiling made you measure her against it. She was wearing the green linen shirt she always wore on days when she had walked from town. She had a small mesh-paper note in her left hand.

"Tibor."

"Yara."

"Are you mid-corner?"

"I am mid-corner. Forty more minutes."

"I will wait."

She did not wait. She came over to the bucket and looked into it the way someone who knew lime looked at lime, and she nodded, and she crouched and picked up the small wooden float that was sitting on the rim and stood up and waited at the edge of the corner with the float ready, which was the way she always helped without asking. He did not stop her. He worked the trowel for another minute and handed her the mix where the corner turned and she ran the float across the seam and the seal was better than it would have been if he had done it alone, because Yara had a hand for surfaces in the way she had a hand for fire.

They did this without speaking for ten minutes.

Then Yara said, "Anna found a recording."

Tibor did not stop. He drew the trowel again. He waited for her to continue, because he knew which recording.

"Stef brought it up two months ago. Maddy did the work. It is the aya-yait, Tibor."

"From the show."

"From the show."

He worked the trowel. He had known the answer before she had finished asking. He had known the question the moment Yara had said Anna in the particular tone she used when news was real.

"How is the recording," he said.

"Maddy says poor. But the song is in it. The whole song."

"Has Aaju heard it."

"Anna sent it. She's waiting for him to be on the mesh tonight."

"Pipaluk?"

"Same. Tonight."

Tibor finished the section and stepped down from the stool and set the trowel on the rim of the bucket and did not pick up another tool. He looked at the corner. The lime was wet. The lime would dry by morning.

Yara was still holding the float.

"Yara."

"Tibor."

"Sit."

She sat on the stool. He sat on the floor near the bucket, because the stool was hers and because the floor had been swept that morning, which was the way the cave was kept. He put his back against the wall, against a section of an older paint layer that had been ultramarine in 2031 and was now a layer below several layers, and he closed his eyes.

He thought, briefly, about the night. He did not go far in. Not the light, not the crowd, not the four seconds in the middle of it that he had never described to anyone. He thought about how Yara had looked then. He thought about how she looked now.

He opened his eyes.

"Have you heard it," he said.

"Anna sent it to me an hour ago."

"And."

"It is the song."

"Igen."

"It is the song, Tibor."

"Igen. I know."

She looked at him and he looked at her, and the small mesh-paper note in her left hand, which she had not used because she had wanted to say it in voice, fluttered slightly as she put it down on the floor between them.

"Will you listen to it," she said.

"I will listen."

"Tonight?"

He thought about this. The way to listen, he believed, was on the night that Aaju and Pipaluk were also listening. The three of them in three different rooms hearing the same song they had been inside of. That seemed correct.

"Tonight," he said. "When they are."

"I will tell Anna."

"Köszönöm."

She stood up. She handed him the float without ceremony. She crossed back to the cave mouth and looked at him from the curtain.

"The corner is good," she said.

"The corner will hold."

"Természetesen."

He smiled. It was the small Tibor smile that arrived before the joke and stayed for a moment after.

She went out.

He listened to her footsteps cross the gravel. He listened to them go down the apron toward the dry barranco. He listened until the gravel was quiet and only the wind off the south coast was left, and the small irregular snore of Kutya from the bedroom.

He stood up. He picked up the trowel. He returned to the corner, because there were thirty more minutes of usable lime and no reason to waste any of it. He worked without thinking of Aaju or Pipaluk or Yara or the night in 2027 or the song that had been recorded without anyone in the cave knowing. He worked because the work was the work, and the cave was the cave, and the spring afternoon was, on most days, accurate.

Above him, on the wall, the layers of paint sat one over the other.

In a few weeks, when the lime dried fully, he would paint the corner the same color he had painted it in the previous round. Ultramarine. The darker one, not the lighter. Yara would tell him he was wrong about the choice. He would do it anyway.

That was the rhythm. The cave continued.

Természetesen.