Margen
Previously: Olalla, the 803’s ticket inspector, confirmed that 61 signatories will travel on the 31st, but the line can no longer issue tickets.
Two nights remain. At 6:07 p.m., Casilda Trigo, Ribadeña’s station manager, had covered the packing table with the 1998 folder, three fare manuals and the report on the train that never departed.
Olalla Berruezo, the 803’s ticket inspector, placed on top the email about the disciplinary proceedings that Serafín Mardones, head of service, had already dated for the 31st.
“Last night you said they were collectors’ items.”
“Last night I’d been here for fourteen hours and you asked me after ticket sales had closed,” Casilda said. “Today I’ll answer you with an article, a stamp or an apology. In that order.”
Puri Berruezo, a retired seamstress and signatory number four, walked in without knocking, carrying the notebook in which she had counted the sixty-one yeses. She set it beside the manuals, saw the dust and picked it up again.
“If a ticket expires, it has to say so somewhere.”
“That’s railway law according to a seamstress,” Casilda said.
“And yours was railway law according to a tired woman.”
Casilda pulled out a chair for her. Puri wiped the seat with her sleeve before sitting down.
At 6:20, Amelia Sanchís, a retired Ribadeña schoolteacher, arrived with the shoebox from Vallonga. Inside were the tickets she still kept; the others remained in wallets, envelopes and a frame on top of a sideboard. They were all orange card tickets: Ribadeña to Puente Alcor, one way, 14 November 1998.
Fermín Aizpún, driver of the 803, appeared with his flask and stayed in the doorway, as though entering an office might delay his retirement.
Casilda opened the report from that night. A breakdown at Corrales had prevented the 803 from departing, and the operator had sent a coach. The resolution field did not say “service withdrawn” but “service replaced by road transport”. Beneath it was a typewritten code: CGT-17.
“I was told to get off, and the passengers were sent to the coach,” Fermín said.
“There were no passengers,” Amelia corrected him. “There were eighty-seven people waiting to make, together, the journey they had just saved. When they saw the coach, they decided that it wasn’t the 803 and went home.”
“That explains why they didn’t board,” Olalla said. “It doesn’t explain what became of the tickets.”
They laid them on the table in rows of ten. Puri counted; Amelia checked the names of those who still had their own; Casilda examined the front and back of each one under the lamp. Olalla turned them so they all lay with the date facing upwards.
Not one bore the bite of the ticket punch. Not one had a coach validation mark, a refund stamp or the diagonal line used to cancel card tickets. The passengers who had boarded on previous nights had put them away intact again because Olalla had refused to validate them.
“It seemed like useful cowardice at the time,” Olalla said.
“So far, we can only certify the first half,” Casilda said.
She then found the cash ledger for 14 November. It recorded eighty-seven tickets issued. There was a zero in the margin reserved for refunds. The cancellations sheet was blank and signed at closing time. The page for the 15th began with the standard fare, with no note carrying those numbers forward.
Puri ran her finger over the three entries.
“Zero used, zero refunded and zero cancelled.”
“Zero punched,” Casilda corrected her. “We still don’t know whether ‘not punched’ means ‘not used’ under condition seventeen.”
“In sewing, if the needle hasn’t gone through, it isn’t sewn.”
“And at a station, we don’t decide things through metaphors.”
Fermín finally entered the office, read the three zeroes and stepped outside again so as not to break the habit.
Olalla pointed to the dark ticket-office screen.
“Ticket sales for the line closed on the 15th of this month. We can’t issue a single new one.”
“That much is clear,” Casilda said. “The question is whether these need to be new.”
She opened the thickest manual at the index. The code CGT-17 was not there. In the second, she found “General Conditions of Carriage” and a cross-reference to a 1997 supplement. The supplements shelf held numbers 14, 16 and 18.
“A badly filed paper is a lost paper,” Casilda said.
“You’ve been saying that since 2006,” Fermín said from the doorway.
“Because since 2006 you’ve all kept losing them.”
They took turns searching. Olalla emptied the drawer of old circulars. Amelia worked through the folders from the back, as though she were marking exams. Puri read every spine aloud and twice set aside the same file because she did not trust Casilda’s handwriting. Fermín held the door and insisted that counted as helping.
By 7:15, they had found a 1997 fine for smoking, a complaint about the volume of Sotoclaro’s public-address system and the plans for a ticket office that had never been built. There was no sign of the supplement.
Casilda returned to the breakdown report. The code CGT-17 had been written in different ink from the rest. Beneath it, almost hidden by the stamp, was a second reference: “Copy attached to complaints.”
She went to the file Puri had set aside twice. Between the fine and the complaint from Sotoclaro were twelve stapled pages, their corners damp. Casilda carried them to the table, checked the heading and found article 17.
She read it once in silence. Then she placed the supplement beside the tickets, rested her index finger beneath the exact line and read it aloud to everyone:
“‘Tickets issued for a cancelled service replaced by road transport shall remain valid until used, refunded or expressly cancelled.’ Not one was used, not one was refunded and not one was cancelled. The sixty-one tickets from 1998 are still valid.”