Remigio presses his thumb six times and the machine says no

14 April. Window 4.

"Again, Don Remigio. Right thumb, flat, don't press."

Remigio Cuéllar, plasterer, sixty-four years old, puts his finger on the glass of the reader for the sixth time and the terminal brings up the same message again: QUALITY INSUFFICIENT. 2 VALID FINGERS OF 4. I looked at his hand carefully. No scars, no wounds: the pads of his fingertips are smooth, without a single ridge. Forty-one years of lime and plaster have filed them down the way sandpaper files a plank. He laughs and says that in the trade they call it a silk hand, and that he always took it as a compliment.

I tried the glycerine trick on him, the warm water one and the breathing-on-the-finger one. Two out of four again. The terminal wants four to issue the ID card.

And Remigio needs the renewed card to file for his pension. He has seventy-seven days left.

28 April.

I went up to talk to Teo Barahona, head of the office. He pointed at the sheet that has been taped to the side of my monitor for years, a photocopy of a photocopy whose letters have thickened from being repeated so often: FINGERPRINT EXEMPTION. AMPUTATION OR BANDAGE ONLY. Underneath, in blue ballpoint, somebody added long ago: worn skin doesn't count.

"If it isn't on the sheet, it isn't, Yolanda," Teo said. "And if I sign an exemption that turns out not to apply, the auditors send it back with an objection, and it comes back with my name inside it."

I asked him who made that sheet. He told me it was already taped there when he arrived, and he arrived in 2014.

Remigio waited one hour and forty minutes, on his feet, to be told to come back another day with a medical report.

11 May.

He came back with the report. His family doctor, Aurora Benítez, wrote it in four lines: chronic contact dermatitis from lime, with permanent loss of dermatoglyphs — the ridge patterns of the fingerprint — on all ten fingers. Stamped and signed.

The terminal has nowhere to put that. The observations field takes forty characters and accepts no attachments. I rang the support line and they told me the exemption is handled by the office, not by them, and that they know nothing about medical reports.

Remigio left the paper on the counter and pushed it two centimetres towards me, very slowly. Then he picked it up and put it back in his breast pocket.

"I'll come back whenever you say," he said. "But tell me what to bring, because I've brought two things already."

25 May.

The terminal does accept two prints: there is a box, DIFFICULT CAPTURE, which closes the file with whatever prints there are. To tick it you need a supervisor code I don't have, and the only person in this office who has it is Teo, who won't give it without the signed exemption, which he won't sign because of the sheet on the monitor.

I drew it in this notebook with three arrows, in case I was the one getting it wrong. All three come back to the same place.

I wrote to the application's incident mailbox explaining the case in nine lines. Automatic reply eleven seconds later: ticket number, category "functional query" and the words "shortly". No date. Remigio's deadline does have a date: thirty-six calendar days.

5 June.

Social Security rang. If Remigio does not produce a valid document by 30 June, the application lapses and has to start from scratch: three more months with no money coming in. I told him over the phone. He didn't complain. He asked whether he could drop by on Monday first thing, just in case there was news, and I had to tell him there wasn't going to be any.

Before hanging up he told me, without my asking, that he still works half-days on a site in Carabanchel because what's left of his pay isn't enough, and that his knees start warning him at eleven in the morning.

Tonight I brought home the full name of the sheet. If somebody photocopied it, they photocopied it from something.

19 June.

The sheet on the monitor was written by Esperanza Gil, a section head who retired in 2009 and lives in Getafe. It says so at the foot, in three-millimetre type, and it took me two months to look there. I rang her this morning.

"I made that for myself," she said. "A summary, so I would not have to pull up the whole annex every time. It was never meant to go up on a wall."

I read her what has been taped to my monitor for years and she went quiet for a few seconds.

"Put the annex up," she said. "Paragraph four. It has always been there."

The annex exists, it is on the intranet, and it is nine pages on the taking of fingerprints. I read them all, with a coffee and my phone in airplane mode.

Page six, paragraph four: the exemption applies in cases of amputation, bandaging or immobilisation, and in cases of permanent alteration of the dermatoglyphs certified by a medical report, including those of occupational origin.

The three things Remigio has been carrying around in his breast pocket for two months, written in paragraph four since before I started in this office.

The annex wasn't hidden either: regulations folder, third document on the list, dated 2011. Nobody opens the regulations folder with fourteen people in the queue and a terminal that already says yes or no.

I printed page six. I went up with the annex and with Aurora Benítez's report and laid them both on Teo's desk, side by side, without saying a word until he had finished reading. He took four minutes. He read the line about "occupational origin" twice, following it with the cap of his pen. Then he signed the exemption and gave me the supervisor code for the first time in four years.

"And this has been there all along?" he asked, and he wasn't expecting me to answer.

At 11:20 I ticked DIFFICULT CAPTURE with the two prints Remigio's hand can give, and the file closed green. He picks up the card on the 27th. He makes the deadline with three days to spare.

As he was leaving he stopped at the door and came back.

"And can I tell the lads on the site?" he asked. "There are two more on the scaffolding with hands like these."

I photocopied page six for him, highlighted the line about "occupational origin" in yellow, and he put it in the same breast pocket, with Aurora's report.

"If they come, let them come with that," I told him.

Then I peeled the sheet off the monitor, crumpled it and threw it in the bin. In its place I taped up the whole of page six, with fresh tape and paragraph four marked.