It was her father who carved those initials

Previously: Elsa inherits 96 hives and eleven of them hold boxes with seeds from orchards her uncle Ovidio ordered burnt in 1994 and then hid there.

In the county's farming archive there is a folder with a green cloth spine and the number 22 written by hand. It is the one Rosalía Nevado, chair of the village council, has been keeping for Elsa since she heard about the boxes. Inside there is room for twenty-two unrevised hives and a small notebook stitched with thread.

«From your uncle's office,» says Rosalía, laying a finger on it as if she were weighing fruit. «Nobody has opened it. Not even me.»

Elsa opens it. The folder holds the sanitary complaints filed in the summer of 1994, when the bacterial fire forced Sorbeda to level its orchards. Each complaint bears the round stamp of the county officer —Ovidio Trigo, in blue ink— and the signature of the owner of the denounced tree. Elsa leafs through it. Complaint number forty-one carries a name that hurts her before she reads it whole: Julián Trigo, fruit grower.

She asks Rosalía without looking away.

«Did my father denounce his own orchard?»

«Your father denounced his own,» Rosalía breathes through her nose and lowers her voice. «And he did it before anyone else. On the 12th of July, when the rest still would not believe it.»

In the stitched notebook Elsa recognises Ovidio's handwriting: small, with straight «t»s and open «g»s. It is a two-column list. Left: the burnt orchards, with the holder's name and the town. Right: the hive and the number where the seed was kept. There they are —the winter pear of the Vidal house (hive 3), the plum tree of the Ceas (hive 6), the walnut of the Brañas (hive 8). On line 41, in the same blue pen, there is a different note:

Julián T. — wild cherry of La Vega — hive 7 — carve E.T. and year

«E.T. is Elsa Trigo,» she says out loud, without looking at Rosalía, because she needs to hear it before she can believe it. «Me.»

Rosalía nods, her mouth shut. It shows that she has spent years waiting to be able to nod to that.

«I showed the notebook to Amaro Cid twelve years ago,» she says next. Amaro is the county vet, the one who still climbs up to the mountain pass every spring with the herds. «He asked me not to say a word, that your uncle was already carrying enough. I didn't say. Now it's no longer time to keep quiet.»

Elsa goes back to complaint forty-one. It is dated on a Tuesday in July, twelve months after the Holy Week when she was born. In the left margin, in the same blue ink as Ovidio's signature, there is a second note in her father's careful hand: «The whole tree and all the fruit. Keep seed in box 7. Carve initials E.T., year 1994.»

There is no J. Not a single letter pointing to the legal owner of the orchard. The initials Julián asked Ovidio to burn into the wood are his daughter's, the one who that year was learning to walk among the pots and the one who —he had already thought it through— would one day inherit the hives through her mother's side, when grandmother Sofía let them go.

Elsa holds the paper in both hands. She never heard her father say the word «orchard». He never showed her a photograph of the cherry tree. Julián Trigo died in January, at sixty-two, leaving two sentences written on the back of a medical prescription: «Let Elsa look after the hives. Let the honey be sold in the village.» Neither of them made sense until today.

«The cherry tree was in La Vega,» Rosalía goes on. «Next to the path down to the river. Three trees. Your father asked for the three to be burnt the same day. He did not wait for the inspection: he preferred to sign first.»

«Why?» says Elsa, and her «why» trembles a little.

Rosalía explains without ornaments.

«Because if he signed, he could choose who cut and in what order. And so, while one cut, another scraped the bark to take the good seed out. The other owners found out when it was already done. Some also saved. Most did not.»

Elsa points at the notebook note with her finger.

«And he chose the initials.»

«He chose them,» Rosalía says. «Ovidio asked him if he wanted to carve his own, ‘J.T. 1994', in case one day it had to be claimed. And your father said no. That if that cherry tree survived the burning, it was not for him. It was for the girl who had just learned to walk among the pots at home.»

Outside, in the archive courtyard, someone is sweeping with a heather broom. You can hear the dry «tas-tas» of the stiff bristles against the stone. Elsa closes the folder and does not close her eyes. She thinks of the cherry tree of La Vega, of Holy Week of '94, and of a father of thirty-eight who learns a new signature to carve into hive wood for his daughter before the fire takes the tree.

Julián Trigo carved E.T. on box 7 the day he denounced his own orchard.