MargenI moved into the third floor left in March. An old flat, high ceilings, radiators that talk at night. Since the first week, every Thursday, a handwritten letter appears in my letterbox addressed to «Miss Aurora Valdés, 3rd floor left». No return address. A postage stamp, postmarked in the city.
I asked the doorman: Miss Valdés lived here forty years ago and left without a forwarding address. I returned the first letters with the standard formula —«addressee unknown»— but they kept coming back. Someone was re-sending them with a stubbornness from another era.
This week I made a mistake: I opened one.
«Aurora: yesterday I walked past the conservatory and the chestnut tree at the entrance has flowered early again, like the year of the competition. I thought I'd write it to you before it slips my mind, because these days I forget things in alphabetical order and your name begins with the first letter. Don't worry, you I don't forget: I file you. Your S.»
I opened them all. I know I shouldn't have; and let me tell you, I don't regret it either. They were short letters, weekly, from an elderly man who signed S. and asked for nothing: he told things. The price of coffee, a film, the flowering of a chestnut tree, the arthritis in his right hand «which was yours when we danced». Forty years of Thursdays, or so one of them said: «I've been writing to you since 1985, which is when I should have said this out loud».
I played neighbourhood detective. The postmark was local, the handwriting trembled with age, and there were only two old-style stationery shops within a few streets. The shopkeeper at the second didn't even let me finish the question: «Señor Salvador. He's bought one envelope every Monday since before I was born. He lives in the care home on the square».
I went one Sunday, with the last letter unopened and my heart in my throat. Señor Salvador turned out to be small, neat, and perfectly clear-headed about certain things. He wasn't surprised to see me.
—You're the one from the third floor left —he said—. You've been getting my letters for months.
—Aurora hasn't lived there for forty years —I told him, as gently as I knew how—. You do know that, don't you?
—I've known it for forty years. —He smoothed a crease in his trousers—. She died in '86. I went to her funeral. It rained.
I was left without a script. He looked at me with an ancient patience, the patience of a teacher repeating the lesson for the slow pupil, and explained:
—I don't write so that she'll read, miss. I write so as not to stop telling her things. They are different habits. The second one doesn't need an addressee: it needs an address. And the only address Aurora ever had in my life is yours.
I should have told him the letters had to stop coming, that it was all irregular, that the letterbox is mine. What I said was something else. That the conservatory's chestnut tree has flowered again this year. That the staircase smells the way it must have smelled back then, of wax and soup. That the third floor left now has books up to the ceiling, and that the living-room window is still the best in the building for reading in the afternoon.
Señor Salvador died in October. The stationery shop told me one Monday, when his envelope went unbought.
The following Thursday, for the first time in months, the letterbox was empty. You have no idea how much an empty letterbox can weigh.
So I bought an envelope at his stationery shop, and a stamp, and wrote in my best hand: «Señor Salvador: I'm the one from the third floor left. The chestnut tree is still in flower. I'm writing so as not to stop telling you things; I know you understand me. The living-room window is still the best in the building».
I posted it with no return address. Let whoever re-sent his letters re-send mine.