Margen
Previously: Casilda Trigo, the stationmaster, showed Olalla a disciplinary file dated the 31st. The 1998 list has one name crossed out.
Six nights left. The 803 pulled out of Ribadeña at 23:40 on the 25th with Olalla Berruezo, the conductor, counting empty seats out of habit and carrying the green 1998 folder under her arm — a folder that was not hers and that she had not given back in two days.
At 00:11 Fermín Aizpún, the driver who retires on the 31st, braked at Vallonga. The halt has been closed since 2011: no light, no shelter, and not one reason for a train to stop there eleven years running. Amelia Sanchís, a retired schoolteacher from Ribadeña, climbed aboard in a blue coat with a cloth bag, and nobody got on behind her.
“You've come alone tonight,” said Olalla.
“Tonight was Ermua del Río's turn, and the Ermua man works nights,” said Amelia. “I'll bring him up on Thursday.”
“Tonight we're bringing nobody up. Sit in row four.”
Row four of the 803 has the little table that doesn't wobble. Olalla laid the folder on it, opened it at the last page — the signatures — and turned it towards Amelia the way you turn a menu.
“Eighty-seven signatures,” said Olalla. “And a blue line under the last one.”
“Eighty-eight ruled lines,” said Amelia. “You counted right the other day.”
“Casilda says you made that crossing-out the same night as the minutes, because the ink is from your pen and because nobody else touched the folder until 2011.”
“Casilda Trigo has been stationmaster for twenty years and she doesn't get paperwork wrong.”
“Then give me the name.”
“I'll give it to you now. First you answer one: why do you think this train stops at Vallonga?”
“Because I bring you up,” said Olalla. “And that's a serious offence that costs me sixty days without pay, so I'd be grateful if you didn't use it to change the subject.”
“The train has been stopping at Vallonga since long before me.”
“Since when?”
“Since they closed it. I live in the house above and from my window you can see the whole platform. Fermín Aizpún has stopped there every night since November 2011. He opens door one, leaves it open for forty seconds, shuts it and goes. Eleven years. I've been getting on for six nights; he's been stopping for nobody for four thousand and something.”
Olalla looked towards the cab, which you can't see from row four.
“And you've never asked him why?”
“I asked him in 2012. He told me he didn't sign the sheet either.”
The 803 was doing sixty along the Villaseca straight. Amelia took a plastic sleeve out of her bag with a ticket inside, one of the old ones, orange card with a serrated edge. She did not put it on the table: she left it in her open palm, face up, and waited for the train to cross the Sotoclaro level crossing, which makes a noise under the floor that stops you hearing anything for nine seconds.
“On 14 November 1998, in the council chamber, there were eighty-six adults and one child,” said Amelia when the sound of the rails came back. “The girl came with her mother and spent the whole meeting under the long table, drawing trains on the back of the notices. When I passed round the sheet for signatures she took it, climbed on a chair and wrote her name on the line that was left. It took up two lines, but I counted it as one.”
“Amelia.”
“The promise was to come back the day they announced the closure and ride the last train. That's twenty-eight years of debt for somebody who couldn't do division yet. You can ask an adult to remember; ask a nine-year-old to remember and you've ruined her whole childhood. So I drew the line that same night and I slept well.”
“But you bought the ticket anyway.”
“I bought eighty-eight. Eighty-seven are in a shoebox in Vallonga.”
Amelia put the sleeve in her hand and turned it over. On the back of the orange card, in the same blue pen as the line, a name was written in a teacher's handwriting, and under it a figure: Olalla Berruezo, 9 years old.