Eighty-eight tickets and a single ticket punch

Previously: Casilda found the clause: the 1998 tickets were never used, never refunded and never cancelled, so they are still valid.

One night left. At a quarter past eleven on the 31st, the platform at Ribadeña held more people than in the eleven years Olalla Berruezo had been the 803’s ticket inspector.

Casilda Trigo, the stationmaster, had dragged two benches out to the track and was counting aloud. Sixty-six. Sixty-one had confirmed; the other five heard about it from a brother-in-law, from a hairdresser’s and from the bar in Corrales, and turned up unannounced.

Amelia Sanchís, a retired schoolteacher from Ribadeña, arrived with the shoebox under her arm and set it down on a bench.

“Eighty-eight,” she said. “The ones for the sixty-six who are here, and the other twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two of them aren’t going to travel,” said Olalla.

“Twenty-two of them aren’t going to come. That’s a different thing.”

Olalla had spent twelve nights letting passengers on one at a time and still had not asked the only thing that mattered to her. She asked it with the platform full, which turned out to be the worst place and the only possible one.

“You could have called all eighty-seven on the first day.”

“I could,” said Amelia. “And you would have had to decide it all at once, in front of eighty-seven people, with Mardones on the phone and the disciplinary file already written. You would have said no. Anyone with a wage would have said no.”

“And why full? One passenger was enough to prove whatever you wanted to prove.”

“Because on 14 November 1998 this line was saved by eighty-seven signatures and a journey that never happened. They bought a train and they were given a coach. I told them, on this platform, that the journey would be made one day.” Amelia sat down. “I have spent twenty-eight years as the only one who believed it.”

Puri Berruezo, a retired seamstress and signature number four, took the envelope with the blue line across it out of the box and laid it on top of the pile.

“Number eighty-eight didn’t belong to anyone on the list.”

“It belonged to a nine-year-old girl who could not sign a petition,” said Amelia. “I crossed her name out myself, with this same pen, so the water authority would not throw out all eighty-seven signatures over one minor. And then I bought her the ticket, because crossing someone off a list and leaving them out of the journey are two different things.”

Fermín Aizpún, the 803’s driver, retiring from the following day, leaned his head out of the cab window.

“I leave at 00:12. I open the doors at Vallonga at 00:41. I have been saying so for three thousand eight hundred and forty-two nights.”

Serafín Mardones, the operator’s head of service, turned up at half past eleven with a folder and no tie, which was his way of coming in peace. Casilda put the 1997 supplement in front of him, open at article seventeen, and the till register for 14 November with its three zeros.

“If they board with a valid ticket, I am not carrying irregular passengers,” said Olalla. “I am carrying passengers.”

Mardones read the clause twice, looked at the platform and went back to the folder.

“The file is dated the 31st,” he said. “Today is the 31st until midnight. Leave at 00:12 and it will already be the 1st.”

“That isn’t in any manual.”

“Neither is the bit where a head of service has to enjoy his job.”

He stayed on the platform, which was the only thing he could do without signing anything.

The problem was not legal: it was made of iron. A cardboard ticket is not valid until it is punched, and the whole line had one punch left, Olalla’s, which bites one notch at a time and takes both hands to squeeze. Eighty-eight notches between Ribadeña and Puente Alcor. Sixty-four minutes.

She started in the first carriage with the clock in view. Each passenger handed her their orange card, she turned it date-side up, squeezed, and handed it back. Nobody put the ticket away: all sixty-six travelled with the card in their hand, the way people hold a ticket at a theatre door.

At Sotoclaro two daughters of a 1998 signatory who had died in January got on, carrying their father’s ticket in an envelope. At Vallonga, where the halt has been closed since 2011 and Fermín stops anyway, nobody boarded: that stop was no longer needed.

Somewhere near Ermua del Río, Puri went down the aisle laying the twenty-two tickets of those who had not come on the empty seats, one per seat, and sat back down. Casilda wrote the number of validated tickets on the running sheet, in the handwriting Fermín had found illegible since 2006.

At 01:33, six minutes short of Puente Alcor, Olalla had fourteen left.

Amelia did not hand hers over until the end. She took it from her coat pocket, not from the box, and left it in Olalla’s palm face down, where a teacher’s handwriting had written a name and an age twenty-eight years earlier.

Olalla punched them one by one, and the last, the one Amelia had kept for twenty-eight years for a nine-year-old girl, she punched for herself.