Rosalía warns her: on the 30th the lorry takes it all

Previously: Elsa Trigo, a beekeeper, inherited 96 hives. Eleven hold boxes of seed, and the 1994 burning order was signed by her uncle Ovidio.

Sixty hives are still to be checked and it is half past eleven when Elsa walks into the bar on the square with the archive folder under her arm. Rosalía Nevado, chair of the village council, has taken over the back table with four piles of paper and an ink pad.

«Not there, it's still wet,» says Rosalía without looking up, stamping the corner of a form. «Is this about the mountain?»

«It's to ask you whether I can keep eleven hives back.»

Rosalía puts down the stamp.

«Eleven.»

«Eleven.»

«Explain it to me slowly, because on the 30th I've got a lorry.»

The mountain pasture is rented whole and by season, she says, from August to October, for the nineteen beekeepers in the district. One lorry, one only, belonging to Nemesio Braña, the haulier for the river villages, who comes up at seven in the morning on the 30th and makes one trip. It was agreed in March. The council pays for the grazing in advance, whatever ends up on the lorry.

«And if the lorry doesn't go up on the 30th,» she adds, «the whole village loses the grazing, because the stockman up there has given his word to some people from León for the first. I'm not your enemy. I'm the one who signs.»

«I'm not arguing about the trip,» says Elsa. «I'm arguing about eleven boxes.»

«Right.»

Rosalía pulls a sheet out of one of the piles and sets it the right way round in front of her.

«Look at this before you argue about anything.»

It is a movement permit, the paper that authorises taking hives from one municipality to another, with the letterhead of the provincial livestock service. Holding number, origin, destination, dates. In the middle box, in biro and gone over twice: hives, 96. Below it, the signature of the responsible vet, Amaro Cid, and last Tuesday's date.

«That permit is good for what it says,» says Rosalía. «If the register says ninety-six and eighty-five go up, the number doesn't add up, and the one who answers for it isn't you: it's Amaro. To change it you have to apply for a new permit, with an inspection, and he has to come back out and sign again.»

«Then let him come.»

«You ask him.» Rosalía looks at her for the first time. «I've spent two years asking that man for paperwork and he signs it when he feels like it. By the way, on Monday he asked after you outside the surgery. He asked whether you'd been up to the apiary yet.»

Elsa does not answer that.

«Rosalía, if the lorry takes the ninety-six, what happens to what's inside them?»

«Nothing. That's the good thing about a hive.»

«That's not what I'm asking.»

Rosalía wipes the ink off her thumb with the bar cloth and takes a moment to answer.

«Look. Nemesio arrives at night, seals them with the entrance shut, loads them on pallets four at a time, straps them down and takes them up. Nobody opens a hive on a lorry. Not on the lorry, not up at the pasture, not the first day nor the last: they get opened when they get opened, and this year that's October, when they come down. If there's honey inside, there's honey. If there's something else inside, there's something else. It all goes up and it goes up sealed.»

«October.»

«October. The pasture is forty kilometres away and fifteen hundred metres up, and until the heat lets go nothing gets touched at all.»

Elsa has on her knees the folder she took out of the agricultural archive this morning, with the photocopy they would not let her make and the notes she took by hand, and she does not open it. She thinks about eleven wooden boxes sealed with wax, numbered one to eleven, going up to fifteen hundred metres inside eleven hives that nobody is going to open until she has spent two months unable to touch them.

«And you can't hold the lorry back a week?»

«I can try.»

Rosalía picks up the stamp again, and from the way she does it you can tell she has already done the sum.

«But I'll tell you now: Nemesio has the four river villages that same week, and the council signed for the 30th.» She turns the sheet over and points to the last line with her fingernail. «Here it is. The 30th, seven in the morning, ninety-six hives, contents not inspected. Everything inside goes up, Elsa. Yours as well.»