The house was mine and the men who slept in it, and the men changed, and in twelve years so many had passed through that I had stopped counting them, and what stayed the same were the six rooms upstairs and the kitchen downstairs, and the front staircase, and the iron staircase at the back that opened onto the alley. The men worked. They left early and came back tired, and sometimes I wouldn't see their faces for days, but I saw their shoes, they left their shoes on the landing, and I knew the men more by their shoes than by their faces, and in the evenings I knew who had come home by looking at the landing. Tomás had been with me for nine years. He was the one who had stayed the longest, and he fixed the faucet and the hinge and the shutter when it wouldn't come down right, and his work jacket hung on the coatrack in the entrance hall, low down, where he left it when he came in, and where I saw it every time I went up or down the stairs.

That morning was a morning like any other, and that is the thing I cannot get out of myself, that it was a morning like any other. I had turned on the kitchen radio, low, the way I always do, because I don't like the house when it's empty and silent, and upstairs the men were having breakfast before their shift, and you could hear the water in the pipes and a chair scraped back and footsteps, and on the landing there were the shoes of the ones who hadn't left yet, and I was counting them with my eyes without even realizing it, because I had been doing it for twelve years. Then they knocked.

They don't knock the way someone knocks who is looking for a room. They knock in a different way, and you recognize that way the first time you hear it, even if you've never heard it before. I went to the door, and in the hallway I passed the coatrack with Tomás's jacket hanging low, the way it did every morning, and I opened the door just enough, and on the threshold there were two men, and one of them was holding a sheet of paper, and the paper was a list of names, and he held it toward me so I could read it, and he asked me which rooms were occupied and by whom. I have spent my life minding my own business. It is the thing I do best. For twelve years I had rented rooms to men I asked nothing about, and not knowing was my trade, and it was convenient, and it was also a way of respecting them.

And so I did the only thing I know how to do when I don't know what to do, which is talk. I started talking. I said that the house was old, that I had taken it in two thousand and thirteen, that there were six rooms but one had damp and I didn't rent it out, and that the man I had rented that room to before had left two months' debt behind, and I told them about the debt, the figures, everything, and I asked whether they happened to know how you go about recovering a debt like that, and all the while I was holding the door with my hand, neither open nor closed, and Tomás's jacket was right there within reach, low down on the right, and I was talking, and I was starting my sentences over the way I do when I'm embarrassed, and the embarrassment that morning I did not have to invent. I was talking for the two of them, on the threshold. But I was also talking for the ones upstairs. Because upstairs, I knew, there was the iron staircase at the back, and a voice in an old house carries through walls, and if I talked loudly enough and long enough, upstairs they would understand one thing only: that there was someone at the door, and that it was not the moment for shoes on the landing. I did not lie. I did not give a false name. I only stretched things out, and stretching things out is not lying, and I kept telling myself that while I was stretching them out.

By the time I let them in, upstairs it was already something else. They went up, they opened the rooms one by one, and the rooms were almost all empty, with the beds still warm, and a window at the back left open, and the iron staircase that when you touched it was still trembling a little. On the landing there were no shoes. The men had carried them in their hands as they came down, so as not to make noise, and this thing, the men coming down an iron staircase holding their shoes in their hands so as not to make noise in my house, is a thing I cannot get out of my head. Tomás had come down with the others. I just had time to see him from the kitchen window, at the far end of the alley, walking fast and not running, because running, he had told me once, is the thing that gets you noticed.

His work jacket had stayed on the coatrack in the entrance hall. Low down. Where he left it. It is still there now, and I have not moved it, and every morning I come down the stairs and I see it, low down on the right, and every morning for a second it is as if Tomás had come back in and was about to fix my shutter, and then no, and the shutter keeps not coming down right, and I do not move the jacket.