Adél looked at the photo on her phone repeatedly, comparing it to the two walls beside the entrance. No matter how she counted, one wall had seven key boxes, and the other had six. But the picture showed only four: three black boxes marked with yellow, red, and blue circular stickers. Next to them, a silver one was partially visible. The instructions said to open the white box using the combination 1-1-0-5. Since there was no white box, Adél assumed the silver one would be it. One of them, anyway. The other wall also had three identical silver boxes. She set the combination on each, but none of them opened. She didn’t want to call the apartment manager. The point of self-check-in was not having to interact with the owner or manager. But eventually, she had no choice.
The man clearly wasn’t prepared for a long conversation. He didn’t even hold the phone in his hand; it lay on what was presumably a small, low coffee table in front of a sofa. The manager watched TV with one eye, unconcerned that Adél could see him more from below than straight on. From this angle, she could clearly see he was missing three teeth from his upper jaw. After a lengthy, confused back-and-forth, running between the walls, she finally found the black key box with a worn white circular sticker. Adél didn’t even bother asking why she had received an outdated photo of the entrance. They also spent a long time, impatiently, looking for the apartment together, as the man hadn’t mentioned in his message that she had to enter through a different gate than where the key box was located. From there, “up the right stairs, and it’s the second apartment” didn’t mean the same thing to both of them.
Once she finally got inside, she kicked off her shoes and hurried to the terrace. The door, hidden behind worn, shabby curtains with peeling paint, was reluctant to open. This wasn’t how Adél had envisioned it on that fateful night when she trudged home, freezing, her eyes red from crying, both physically and emotionally shattered. Back then, she had decided that as soon as she arrived, she would stretch out on the terrace and cry her heart out. After that, she would open a bottle of wine and drink at least half of it. She hadn’t counted on there not being a store nearby. Yet the description of the accommodation said the shop was only a few minutes away. What it didn’t mention was that this was only possible by car. Adél hadn’t rented a car.
After some tugging, she finally made it to the terrace, only to be greeted not by an ocean view but by the crumbling wall of the building opposite. True, if she leaned out over the railing and looked sideways, she could see the water. She cautiously sat down on the worn, cracked rattan chair, not entirely trusting it. She had just settled when she heard shouting. It was the blue-haired woman with a blotchy, wine face of indeterminate age, whom she had already encountered at the gate. Adél stepped to the railing and looked down into the courtyard. The blue-haired woman was shouting at her in broken English. She waved enthusiastically when she saw Adél. Beside her, a stocky dog and a pot-bellied Vietnamese pig sniffed around intently. The blue-haired woman waved a bottle of wine in her hand.
“Come on! I told you, I have wine. Don’t be shy! You can have the whole thing.”
Adél didn’t know whether to feel happy or embarrassed.
“I’m coming,” she waved back with a smile.
She hurried back into the apartment but forgot about the step between the terrace and the room, nearly tripping. She muttered angrily, then opened the cabinet that looked antique and beautiful in the photos but was greasy and rickety in reality. Inside, she found a broken-handled mug and a few low, wide-mouthed glasses. There were no wine glasses or anything similar on the other shelves. She washed the broken mug and went downstairs to join the snuffling pig and the floppy-eared dog, whose owner was grinning widely.
“I won’t drink all your wine, but if I could have a mug’s worth, I’d really appreciate it.”
The woman laughed heartily, then yelled into one of the ground-floor windows.
“Jesus María, are you home? Bring a corkscrew and a glass for yourself!”
To Adél’s surprise, an elderly, dark-skinned man stepped out onto the terrace, not a woman.
She couldn’t sleep in the cigarette-smelling bed. The surreal experience of drinking wine with a man named María and the blue-haired woman who owned a pig would have been enough to keep her awake. But the smelly pillow was the worst. She folded up her towel and used it as a pillow instead.
By the time she finished the crackers she’d been giving Antonio, the pot-bellied pig, as a morning treat, she was already on the plane. She hadn’t had a single minute to indulge in a good, long cry. During the day, she swam in the ocean at the sand dunes or read on the beach, which she reached after an hour’s walk since there was no closer option. After walking back home, she threw together a simple meal and waited for the blue-haired woman and José María to call up to her.
“How are you, darling? Have you managed to move past what happened? Or at least come to terms with it?” her friend asked in a concerned tone.
Adél shrugged.
“The whole thing feels so distant. Like it didn’t even happen.”
“Don’t be silly, Adél! That jerk cheated on you, and everyone knew! He humiliated you horribly. Don’t act like you’re over it in just a few days!”
Adél’s mind drifted to Antonio, who snorted and snuffled as he gobbled the crackers from her hand. She was much more interested in whether the blue-haired woman and the man named María would still drink wine together without her than in anything that had happened to her before this strange trip.