The gauge at kilometre 4 reads eight hours too many

Previously: Felisa Arcediano, ditch keeper of Valdeporrina, has 36 hours of water for 14 plots that have asked for 52. The canal closes on the 11th.

Wednesday, twenty to seven in the morning. Begoña Larrauri arrived at kilometre four in a white car with the river authority’s logo on the door and got out with a tripod and an aluminium case. She is the engineer in charge of this stretch of canal, forty years old, and she is the person who signs off the day the season closes.

—It took me a while to find it —she said—. On the plan this is the kilometre four gauge, and on the plan it is on the other bank.

—They moved it some time in the eighties.

—Who moved it?

—My uncle. It is written down.

Felisa had slept four hours. She spent Tuesday night with the oilcloth ledger open on the kitchen table, turning pages backwards, looking for the day the iron got bent. She found it: 14 May 2019. Her uncle wrote it in the small handwriting he used for things he did not like. «Flood. The gauge at 4 is now leaning west. Report it.» Underneath, nothing. There is no second line saying that he did.

Begoña set the tripod on the parapet, took a current meter out of the case, which is a small propeller on a graduated rod, and put it in the water.

—This counts turns. The turns give me the speed, and the speed times the cross-section gives me the flow. What the iron on the wall says is no concern of mine.

She measured at five points, bank to bank, writing by hand in a squared notebook. It took her forty minutes, and in those forty minutes she spoke only to call out numbers.

Felisa wrote down what Begoña called out and, between one point and the next, looked at the iron on the wall. Close up, the kilometre four gauge is not bent. It is pushed in on the western side, the plate folded inwards, and on the scale the numbers painted in white still read as clearly as they did on the first day. That is what does the damage. The iron does not look broken; it looks sound. Donato Rebolledo turned up at twenty past seven, with his motorbike and his helmet hanging off his elbow. Donato is the canal warden, the man the river authority pays to make sure nobody touches what is theirs.

—Morning, Larrauri.

—Morning. How long has the gauge been like that?

—It has been bent since the flood.

—She has already told me that. I am asking how long you have known.

Donato took his time answering and in the end he answered something that was true and no use at all.

—I open and I close. The gauge is read by whoever irrigates.

Begoña wrote that sentence in the notebook, with the time beside it, and asked him to sign. Donato signed without reading it. That was the first thing of the day that struck Felisa as odd: a man who has been paid for thirty years to watch this water does not sign a paper without reading it, unless he already knows what it says.

At ten past eight Begoña gave the figure.

—Ninety-four litres per second. The iron on the wall says one hundred and twenty.

—And how many hours is that?

—That is not hours. The hours come from the sill.

She explained it as they walked down the track to the gate of plot 1. An irrigation gate does not draw water out of a canal by magic: it draws water because the canal level is above the sill, which is the concrete lip the gate lifts off. If the level drops below that lip, the gate can be wide open and nothing goes through. On lateral 7 the sill is thirty centimetres off the bed.

—The shutdown programme drops your level bit by bit from the 9th —Begoña said—. At a hundred and twenty litres you stay above the sill for all 36 hours. At ninety-four, you do not.

—How many do I not?

—The last eight. On the 11th, in the small hours, you will have a canal with water in it and dry gates.

Felisa said nothing for a long while. Then she asked the only question that mattered.

—Can I write that in the ledger?

—You are going to write it in the ledger and I am going to put it in an official record. One is no good without the other.

They came back along the lower track, the one that runs past the edge of the Cerrada, because Begoña wanted to see the tail of the lateral before she left. And at the tail the second odd thing of the day showed up.

—Ninety-four coming in here. —Begoña put the current meter in the water at the end of the lateral, behind the last gate—. And here, at the tail, seventy-one coming out.

—That is twenty-three litres.

—Twenty-three litres a second going somewhere between kilometre four and here. In an old canal that can be seepage. In an old canal with an old offtake, it can be something else.

The old offtake is plot 14’s. It sits halfway down the lateral, covered with a steel plate and a twist of wire for as long as Felisa can remember, and it is the only mouth there is between the gauge and the tail. Begoña crouched down, looked at the plate, did not touch it and wrote down the time: Wednesday, 9.05.

—Who owns 14?

—Nobody.

—Nobody is not an answer, Felisa. In my register 14 has a holder.

—In mine too. —Felisa opened the ledger at the page of plots and put it in front of her—. Look at the name.

On the page, the line for 14 had a name struck out with two pen strokes and a date in the margin: 1998. The handwriting of the date was her uncle’s. Above the crossing out, very carefully, you could still read the surname: Rebanal.

—And who pays 14’s levy?

—Nobody, not since I have kept the ledger.

—And before that?

Felisa turned the pages back to where the paper changes colour, back to 1998, and looked for the payments column. The column was there. The box for 14 was blank, year after year, running down the page like a clean gap nobody had bothered to fill. Begoña saw it from the other side of the ledger and, for the first time all morning, stopped writing.

On that same page, two lines further down, in the remarks column for plot 14, her uncle’s handwriting turned up again. Two words: «Do not claim». No date and no signature.

—That plot is green in August —she said—. I saw it on the way in.

—It is. It always is.

—Then somebody is paying for its water.

At 10.20 Begoña wrote the record leaning on the bonnet of the white car, with the wind lifting the page, and Felisa held one corner down for her. Donato watched them from his motorbike, a hundred metres off, without getting down and without leaving, for as long as it took the two of them to write and read two sheets of paper. When Begoña started the engine, he started his too, but towards the other side, towards kilometre six, which is not where his hut is.

At half past eleven Begoña left with the record half written and a promise to send it signed before two. Between half past eleven and twelve Felisa walked the whole lateral on her own, from gate 1 to gate 14, measuring with a bricklayer’s tape how far the water was from the lip of each sill. At gate 1 there were eleven centimetres to spare. At 9, Olimpio’s, four. At 12, Nazario Elorrio’s, who has irrigated since before she was born, two and a half. She wrote it all down, gate by gate, with the time of each measurement beside it.

At a quarter to twelve Olimpio Sanz rang, the tractor driver who irrigates plot 9.

—Is the 3rd still mine?

—I will tell you at midday.

—Felisa, I have the tractor hired for the 3rd and I pay for it whether I irrigate or not.

—I know. At midday.

At ten past twelve she got to the irrigators’ hall, the ground floor of the old dance hall, with its twelve plastic chairs and its cold stove, and found Pura Mazuelas waiting on her feet with her coat on. Pura has chaired the irrigators’ community since 2011 and she does not sit down until there is a number on the table.

—It is ten past twelve.

—It is ten past twelve —Felisa said.

She put the ledger on the papers table, opened it at the allocation page and wrote in the right-hand column, under the 52, the number they had measured between the current meter and the sill: 28. 28 usable hours on lateral 7, and not the 36 on the notice. Next to it she wrote the date and the time, the way her uncle did, because in this trade what is not written down has not happened.

Pura read the number upside down and did not ask about the iron. She picked the carpenter’s pencil off the table and wrote, in her own hand, underneath the 28, the number the subtraction gave: 24.

—You are telling the fourteen of them this yourself, on Friday, in this room —she said—. And I will be sitting in the front row.