By Francesc Borrull · November 17, 2025

Introduction
Today I’m sharing a story from my upcoming book, Not the End — a literary collection of nine interconnected stories about memory, loss, and resilience. Each piece moves quietly through moments of silence, music, and human connection, tracing the small but powerful ways ordinary lives are shaped by grief and endurance. The tone is reflective and intimate, more poetic than dramatic, exploring how people carry light through darkness.

This is a collection for readers who appreciate quiet emotional depth — stories that linger, unfold gently, and illuminate the beauty in ordinary moments. If you’re drawn to introspective, character-driven fiction that stays with you after you close the page, this book was written with you in mind.

The story below, “The Cobbler,” is one of the most intimate pieces in the book. It explores craftsmanship, devotion, and the unexpected ways someone’s presence can linger long after they’re gone. I won’t say more — the tale speaks for itself.

The Cobbler

He arrived each morning before the bells of the parish rang seven times, unlocking the shutters of his workshop with fingers that moved like memory. There, on Carrer del Portalet—a narrow artery of the old quarter, always half in shade and half in dust—he lived in communion with leather, thread, nails, and time. The shop bore no sign, just a sun-bleached awning and the scent of polish that clung to the air like incense in a sacristy.

He had been the cobbler for as long as anyone could recall, and though his birth certificate said Mateo, no one used it. The townsfolk referred to him simply as el sabater, the shoemaker. And to watch him work was to see a craftsman in the throes of devotion.

The shop was a humble space, cluttered but clean, organized in the only way artisans truly understand: by need. Rows of lasts—wooden foot molds—lined the upper shelves, many cracked from age but preserved, each a ghost of a customer long gone. On a wall peg hung the skiving knife beside the curved awl; a bristle-tipped hammer; spools of thread in bone, bark, coal; a pair of pincer pliers dulled to a satin shine where his forefinger rode. A hand-cranked finisher waited, its wheel a dark moon.

Above the workbench hung an old photograph of two boys painting the shop’s shutters—the younger holding the brush too tight, the elder laughing behind him. He hadn’t seen his brother Joan in years.

He fixed soles worn thin from generations of steps. Replaced heel caps cracked by the unrelenting tap of ambition. Re-stitched quarter panels frayed by toil and weather. Every piece of leather that passed through his hands bore a history—weddings, funerals, baptisms, betrayals.

“Ah, these are no shoes,” he’d say, examining a pair of derbies with a hole clean through the sole. “These are a diary. You just don’t know how to read it.”

Customers came not only to fix shoes, but to be listened to. There was Mrs. Claramunt, who brought in her husband’s boots every November. He’d been dead eight years, but she still wanted them shined. There was Teo, the schoolboy with the scuffed saddle shoes who always asked to watch. And Don Rafael, a retired tailor with shaking hands, who once said the cobbler’s hands reminded him of his youth.

A bell tinkled every time the door opened, and with each ring came a new story: a wife anxious about her husband’s return from the army, a priest with cracked sandals muttering about Rome, a young man with dance shoes worn from heartbreak. He took no apprentices. Not out of arrogance, but reverence. “The trade is a quiet one,” he would say. “It doesn’t like to be explained. Only understood.”

By noon each day, a baguette would sit next to his polish rag, half-eaten, its crust flecked with crumbs and dust. He would hum—not melodies, but small phrases of rhythm—as he stitched, his hands moving with the grace of long practice.

It was in this sanctuary of tools and talk that she walked in.

She came in on a Thursday. Rain was folding over the rooftops like heavy linen. She wore a mustard-yellow coat and held in her hand a pair of high-heeled shoes with broken straps.

“They were my mother’s,” she said, setting them on the counter. “They deserve a second life.”

He looked at the shoes, then at her. Then back at the shoes.

“I can manage that,” he replied.

He had never believed in fate. But there was something in the way she lingered in the doorway, her fingers resting on the frame, that unsettled him. She returned three days later to pick up the shoes, then again with a different pair. Within a month, her visits became regular, even when no repair was needed.

Her name was Clara. She worked as a nurse in the pediatric ward of the city hospital. Her hands smelled faintly of lavender soap, and she often wore her hair in a braid that looked too carefully undone to be accidental. He fell in love with her not in a thunderclap, but the way you grow used to sunlight in a room. One day, he looked up, and she was in every corner of his world.

Their courtship was quiet. Long walks after Mass. Letters left in each other’s mailboxes. Shared meals over stew and stories.

“You should rest,” she told him once, finding him still bent over a boot at dusk.

“And leave the shoes unfinished?” he smiled. “They’d gossip about me.”

She had an easy laugh, the kind that forgave the world. He, who had spent decades attending only to leather and nails, suddenly began caring for linen and tea, for poetry and prayer.

They married on a humid July afternoon. The wedding was small. She wore a pale green dress and a flower in her hair. He wore the only suit he owned, altered at the shoulders by Don Rafael, who wept through most of the Mass.

She moved in above the shop. They prayed nightly for a child. Every month was marked by a hope that slowly grew heavy. He pretended not to mind, but the weight pressed on him like a shoe half a size too small.

He began to feel odd: dizzy spells, a strange fatigue. At first, he dismissed it. Too many hours bent over shoes, too little sleep. He told Clara it was the leather dust, the summer heat—anything but the body’s betrayal. Still, the days began to smear together. He could no longer finish a single repair without pausing. Once, he dropped a heel cap and had to sit on the stool to steady his breath. Another afternoon, he collapsed while changing a tap. Clara took him to the doctor.

“It’s your kidneys,” the doctor said. “They’re failing.”

Clara clutched his hand. “We’ll pray harder,” she whispered.

But his eyes looked elsewhere, into a silence even she couldn’t reach. That night, he washed his hands and watched the water run from his knuckles as though from a cracked seam. He noticed, in the morning, that his skin had thinned like leather stretched too far. Some things, he thought, cannot be mended.

At night, while he slept, Clara would sit by the window overlooking the narrow street. She could see the flicker of the church’s candlelight in the stained glass across the square. She prayed softly—not for a child, not anymore—but for time, for one more season of his laughter echoing from the shop below. On the worst evenings, she imagined the children on her ward sleeping, their small chests lifting like tide, and she asked for that same steady sea to carry him.

He began recording his days in a small ledger he kept tucked beneath his pillow. “Tuesday,” he wrote, “she hummed something sweet while chopping onions.” The entry was longer than the last, describing the steam rising and the light on her face.

One late afternoon, perhaps sensing the end of a season, Mateo asked Clara to send a letter to his brother Joan. “Tell him I remember the night we painted the shutters,” he said. “Tell him I miss our mother’s kitchen.”

When Joan came to visit the following week, the brothers sat for hours in the dusty back room. They shared figs and cheese, and silence where words would have rattled. Mateo placed a pair of worn leather boots on the bench between them.

“Start with the heel,” he said. “Everything begins at the heel.”

Joan, who made tables for the parish school, ran his thumb over the awl’s handle as though it were a tool he already understood. For a moment, they laughed like boys.

Time passed, measured now in dialysis sessions and dark mornings. He rode the bus to the hospital on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. He tried walking at first but could no longer manage the distance. Clara always came with him. They sat in silence on the ride, her gloved hand over his.

The shop grew quiet. A layer of dust gathered on the awl. He left repairs unfinished, then unstarted. He began muttering about selling the workshop. Clara didn’t object, though it hollowed her.

One evening, he sat by the window staring at a single boot left on the counter. “No one will want it,” he whispered. “It’s half a pair.”

Clara said nothing, but later that night, she placed the pair gently in a wooden box, wrapped in linen, and set them in the closet. She whispered a quiet prayer.

He spoke more of his brother, the way boys do when they are far from shore. Their afternoon together had left him calmer. Sometimes he smiled and said, “Joan would’ve made a better cobbler. He’s patient in a way I never was.”

“You’ll be late,” Clara said softly one morning when the taxi idled beneath the window.

“Then the world will wait,” he answered, and put on his coat.

After a stormy night, Clara called a taxi to take them to the hospital. The driver was polite, an older man with gospel music playing low. They arrived, paid the fare, and stepped onto the curb.

Mateo paused. “I feel heavy,” he said.

Clara took his arm.

And then he collapsed. He fell backward, as though a string had been cut. The driver ran to help. Clara screamed his name. There was no response. He had died before he hit the ground.

The funeral was quiet, modest. The church smelled of beeswax and carnations. Among the mourners, a man stood with his son, his hands shaking, face cracked in disbelief. His name was Joan. His younger brother now lay in a wooden box lined with satin.

Afterward, Joan sat on the porch outside his home, a bottle of brandy at his side. He sipped it like communion, whispering the names of their childhood pets, their first jobs, their late mother. His son watched from the window. He had never seen his father cry before. Not like this. Something had broken, and it would never be mended. Not with thread. Not with polish. Not with time.

Clara stayed in the apartment above the shop for several more months, working part-time at the clinic. Each evening she lit a candle at the foot of the stairs and wrote Mateo’s name in her prayer book. When she finally decided to leave, she packed only what she needed. She locked the workshop and mailed the key to Joan with a note: He believed in your hands.

Joan returned to the cobbler’s shop days later. The bell above the door still chimed. Dust lay softly on the bench, on the pincer pliers, on the finisher’s dark wheel. He walked through the small room slowly, pausing at the wall of lasts, the photograph of two boys painting the shutters, the faded wedding picture of Mateo and Clara beneath paper flowers. He set his palm on the bench as he might test the smoothness of a tabletop he’d planed.

He sat and picked up a half-repaired oxford, studying the stitches, the way the welt curved back toward itself, the rhythm of holes waiting their thread. His son stood in the doorway.

“Will you keep it?” the boy asked.

Joan didn’t answer. He turned the awl in his hand, feeling its weight, the way the handle found the hollow of his palm. Outside, the bells of the parish rang seven times.

Inside, he lowered the awl and began the stitch.

* * * * *

If you enjoyed The Cobbler, stay tuned — the full collection Not the End will be released very soon. Thank you for reading.

© 2025 Francesc Borrull. All rights reserved.
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