Margen
Previously: Águeda, the pharmacist of Valdecierzo, received prescriptions from Doctor Sagasti, dead for two years. The tracing says the signature is genuine. Thirteen days remain.
On Wednesday, with thirteen days ahead of her and the shutter still half raised, Águeda Mendioroz emptied the blue folder onto the walnut counter and counted what she had spent two years not wanting to count. Thirty prescriptions. She laid them out by date, the oldest at the top left, Tuesday's at the bottom right, and the whole counter was covered in official paper, like a game of solitaire with too many cards.
She noted the count in the margin of the calendar, under the 26 circled in red, and crossed off yesterday. It is a new habit: since the letter came from Petra Aldunate, the area's pharmacy inspector, Águeda pencils the date in the corner of every prescription in soft lead and crosses off the days that remain, one each night, so that fear will at least keep its books.
The first thing she did with the thirty was what she had done on Tuesday with four: hold them up to the light against the back-room glass, in pairs, one signature over another. She spent the morning at it, between customers, with the drop-counting loupe hanging from her neck. And there was the first answer, so simple it was maddening not to have looked for it sooner. All thirty signatures were Doctor Sagasti's — the long launch of the S, the dot of the i planted far off, the ending that climbs in a single stroke — but not one fell exactly on any other. This S a hair wider, that ending a millimetre shorter, January's hook deeper than June's. Thirty sisters, not one twin.
Águeda took off the loupe and stood looking at the counter. A traced signature falls dead centre on its model: that is why, on Tuesday, when she laid the new prescription over the 2019 one from her father's files, her heart gave her a warning. But a tracing repeated thirty times would have given thirty identical copies, and what she had before her was the opposite: living variation, that of a hand that is not copying a drawing but writing a name that comes out on its own. Whoever signs those prescriptions does not work with onionskin paper at a window. They sign in one run, with the doctor's signature settled into the wrist, the way anyone's own settles in after writing it a thousand times. That asked for years at Sagasti's side. That, or being Sagasti, and half the village buried Sagasti.
The second answer came from her own prescription book, the bound register where the pharmacy records every dispensation with its date. She checked the thirty dosages, name by name, against what she herself had been supplying. Not one was wrong. And in two cases, not being wrong was, strictly speaking, impossible. For Balbina Ochandiano, a retired stockwoman from the upper end of the village, Sagasti had left the digoxin well adjusted while he was alive, and that dose was unchanged: fine. But Celedonio Baraibar, who sheared sheep for half the county in his day and goes about now with the blood pill, had his anticoagulant lowered by the area doctor in February, after blood work at the district hospital, from a whole tablet to three quarters. Sagasti had by then been dead for almost two years. The prescription “of his” that arrived in March said three quarters.
Before tying them up again with the rubber band she looked at the dates she herself had been pencilling in the corners. There was an order there too. One prescription every three or four weeks, almost always on a Monday; two very close together in the Octobers, when the chronic patients' check-ups pile up; and not a single one in the August of two years ago, the month Águeda closed for a fortnight for her father's hip operation and left the sign written in marker pen. Whoever drops off those envelopes does not prescribe at random: they keep count of the boxes running out, and they know when the pharmacy is open to receive them.
Águeda closed the prescription book with her finger inside, marking the page, and noticed the question changing on her. It was no longer how can a dead man sign: that lay answered on the counter. A living hand signs, one that learned the signature until it made it its own, and that hand does not prescribe by ear: it knows what was decided at a consultation twenty-two kilometres away, with the medical record open, in February of this year. The dead man supplied the name. Someone living supplied the care.
At midday she called the area management and asked for Marcial Beloki, the clerk who handles prescription billing for the district. They know each other from the quarterly summaries and from arguing over ten-cent discrepancies with the patience of two watchmakers. Águeda told him nothing about the dead man: in her paperwork voice, she dictated the red numberings from the corners, the consecutive serials of the pads the thirty prescriptions belonged to. One complete series and the start of a second.
—And what's this about? —asked Marcial, the keyboard clattering behind him.
—Inventory. I have an inspection on the 26th and I don't want surprises.
—Well, a surprise is what you'll get anyway —he said, and the keyboard stopped—. Those series belong to the Valdecierzo surgery. Doctor Sagasti's material. I have here the removal of registered practitioner 31.0448 from the roll in March 2024 and, look, the return report for the official material: pads, a receipt from management, and certified destruction in April 2024. Signed and filed. Those pads don't exist, Águeda. They were shredded two and a half years ago.
Águeda thanked him, agreed to send him the list in writing and hung up slowly, her eyes on the counter full of prescriptions written on paper shredded two and a half years ago.
She made the list that same afternoon, in the back room, in her voucher-filling hand: thirty numberings in a column and, beside each, in brackets, the pad it had come from. The pattern was clear. From the first pad there was everything: the numbers in sequence, top to bottom, not one skipped, like someone using up a notebook in order without tearing out pages. From the second, only the beginning. And that way of spending told her something too: nobody who steals official paper to get out of a tight spot uses the numbers in a row for two years. That row is the work of someone tidy, someone who keeps the pad in a fixed place and opens it where they left off, with the little lamp on and the house locked up. The report said destroyed. The red corners said here we are. Someone had signed that receipt, or someone had emptied the boxes before they reached the shredder, and in either case there was, somewhere in the village, a drawer of a dead man's official pads, still only half spent. She wrote the question on the back of the list, in soft pencil: where do they come from.
In the afternoon, at the hour when the sun leaves the counter and climbs up the shelves, Balbina came in. She came slowly, with the new cane she does not like and her knee protesting on every step, and she carried her purse in one hand and an envelope in the other.
—I've brought you two things —she said, and set down the purse—. The first, my heart pills, which run out on Friday.
Águeda had the box of digoxin on the counter before the sentence was finished. While Balbina counted coins into the little dish, with the calm of a woman who has sold milk by the jug all her life, Águeda asked after her knee.
—The knee, well. —Balbina gave her leg two little taps—. On Thursdays Simón brings up my bread and my papers, and I'm spared the hill. But today I had to come down myself, because what comes from you is not a thing you send anyone else for.
Then she pushed the envelope across the counter, with those fingers grown broad from forty years of milking.
—And the second is this, which isn't mine. The postman left it at my place last Thursday, between the feed and the rural bank's magazine, and what with the knee I hadn't been down until today. It's for you. Open it, let's see if it's something to pay, because then it goes straight back to my letterbox.
The envelope said “Farmacia. Valdecierzo” in typescript, with no other address. No sender, like all of them. Águeda felt it as she picked it up: the same weight of paper that had been appearing for two years in the letterbox in her shutter, dropped in by hand, unstamped, in the small hours. Only this one had not gone to her letterbox. This one had got the wrong house, and letters only get the wrong house when they travel by post.
She opened it right there, with the parcel knife and with Balbina in front of her, because hiding it would have been giving it more importance than an envelope should have on a counter. Inside was the usual: official paper, violet ink, the dead man's cramped hand. Three quarters of a tablet, thirty days, Celedonio Baraibar. And in the corner, in red, the next number of the second series. Águeda added it without meaning to, the way she adds everything since the letter came: thirty-one.
She turned the envelope over. Postage stuck on with care, in the exact corner. And over the postage, round, its ink a little tired of itself, the postmark: VALDECIERZO, sub-office, dated the Thursday before. The village post office, the one that opens for two hours in the mornings on the ground floor of the town hall, two hundred metres from the counter where Balbina was waiting for her change.
—Bad news? —asked Balbina, putting the heart box away in her bag.
—Post from the village —said Águeda, and it was true, and for that very reason it was not a whole answer.
The other envelopes a hand dropped in the small hours into the letterbox in the shutter, unstamped, and they could have come on foot from anywhere. This one had passed through the counter window the way everyone does, its postage paid and no name for the sender. Águeda put Celedonio's prescription into the blue folder — thirty-one signatures now, not one twin — and the envelope on top, and crossed another day off the calendar. The postmark lay facing the ceiling of the drawer: Valdecierzo, sub-office, Thursday. Whoever posted it, posted it in the village.