One Page

My cousin arrived at four minutes past six on Thursday morning, read one page, made it better and was gone by a quarter past. He is the best guest I have ever had, and he will never visit again.

It started with the streetlight. The one outside our building has been blinking since August: on, off, on, a long off, as if it were trying to tell us something and kept losing its place. Eter has rung the meria about it four times. Each time a young man promised to “pass it on”. On Wednesday evening she knocked on my door with a sheet of lined paper and a pen.

“Write it properly,” she said. “You write all day. Write it so they’re ashamed.”

So I wrote it. It came out like this: “With reference to the persistent intermittent malfunction of the municipal lighting unit located adjacent to…” It went on for a page. Every word in it was correct. It sounded like one lamp post writing to another.

I knew it was wrong. I could not see where. So in the morning I called my cousin.

He is very like me, only stricter. He doesn’t take his coat off, because he doesn’t have one. He sat at my kitchen table, read the letter once and drew a line through the first paragraph.

“Who talks like this?”

“Officials.”

“Officials don’t read it either.” He crossed out “intermittent”. He crossed out “unit”. “What does she want?”

“She wants the light fixed.”

“Then say that. And say she’s seventy-nine and goes down the stairs in the dark to feed the dog.”

“Is that relevant?”

“It’s the only relevant thing.”

He went down the page like that, line by line. Nine words became one. “Malfunction” became “blinks”. At the bottom he made me add: “I have called four times. Please don’t pass it on again. Fix it.”

When he had finished, he laid the pen down square with the edge of the table, the way I do.

“Will you come on Sunday?” I asked. “Eter’s making lobio.”

“I won’t be here on Sunday.” He said it the way people say they’re busy. “I won’t be anywhere. I came for one letter.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

He thought about it for a while, which for him was a very long time.

“Some people get a whole life and never write one sentence right. I got eleven.”

Then he was gone. No footsteps on the stairs. Muria, asleep on my mat, didn’t even lift his head.

Eter read the new letter on the landing at seven.

“This is good,” she said. “Who wrote it?”

“My cousin.”

“Bring him on Sunday.”

“He doesn’t travel.”

She signed it and folded it in three. Outside, the streetlight blinked once more and then stayed on, as if it had been listening.

In my family, everybody visits exactly once.