Margen
Previously: the 803 makes twelve runs with no passengers, and on the 31st they lift the track. On the first night Amelia Sanchís boarded with a ticket from 1998.
Eleven nights left. Olalla Berruezo, ticket inspector on the 803 for eleven years, has spent the whole day not writing the report.
She started it three times at the kitchen table. "Incident: unscheduled stop at a closed halt (Vallonga), 00:11, and presence of a person not on service duty aboard." On the fourth attempt she left it half done, because every time she reached "person not on service duty" she had to write a name, and the name belonged to the woman who taught her long division.
At seven in the evening she shut herself in the filing room at Ribadeña station, which smells of 1990s paper because it is 1990s paper. She was looking for that name in the complaints folder. She found it in another one.
November 1998. A sheet stitched by machine, in a schoolteacher's handwriting: "The residents of the district request that the night service not be withdrawn." Below it, columns of signatures with an ID number beside each. The first line, at the top, had been signed by Amelia Sanchís, teacher at the Ribadeña school, and beside it, in brackets, it said "Vallonga, the teacher's house".
Olalla sat down on the floor with the folder on her knees and did the arithmetic slowly. In 1998 Amelia lived on the upper floor of the halt, the one with the window right above the metal canopy, and she came down every morning to catch the train to teach in Ribadeña. The line she was asking them not to close was the line she got to work on.
And it worked. Amelia collected the village's signatures, took them to the Delegation herself, and on 14 November — the night that was going to be the last — the 803 pulled out all the same, and went on pulling out for twenty-eight more years. Nobody thanked her in writing. What Amelia did do that night was buy a ticket from Ribadeña to Puente Alcor, one way, and never use it.
That is what boards at Vallonga. Not a confused old lady: the woman who won the line, waiting on the platform of her own house for somebody to punch the journey she never took.
At 23:31 Olalla left the folder where it was and went out onto the platform.
"Are you going to say anything?" asked Fermín Aizpún, the driver, who retires on the 31st and has had his window down since March.
"I'm going to look."
"Eleven," said Fermín.
"Eleven."
At 23:40 the 803 left Ribadeña with fifty-two clean seats. At 23:52 they passed Sotoclaro. At 00:11 the train braked at Vallonga, and Olalla planted herself at door two with the punch in her hand and a sentence ready that was neither of the two in the rulebook.
There was nobody on the platform.
The metal canopy, the two short platforms, the upstairs window dark. Thirty seconds. The 803 pulled away again and the sentence stayed inside Olalla, which is the most uncomfortable place a sentence can stay.
She went to the cab.
"She wasn't there."
"She wasn't there," said Fermín, without taking his eyes off the point where the headlights stop being any use.
"Then why did you stop?"
"Because I stop."
She went back through the carriage turning off courtesy lights nobody needed, and level with row six she saw a coat.
In row four, seated, knees together, handbag on her lap, was Puri Berruezo, retired seamstress, sixty-eight years old, who sewed Olalla her first inspector's uniform in 2015 and let out two centimetres of sleeve because "your arms are still going to grow".
"Mum."
"Hello, love."
"Mum, where did you get on?"
"Door one, at Ribadeña. You were talking to Fermín."
Olalla stayed standing in the aisle with the punch in her hand.
"This train carries no passengers. I explained it to you at dinner last night and I explained it again today."
"You explained it very well."
"Then I have to put you off at Ermua del Río, at 00:24. And then I have to call it in on the radio and say your name."
"Ermua is twelve kilometres from home and there's no taxi," said Puri, with the calm of someone who did that sum before leaving. "But you do what you have to do."
"Are you going to tell me what you're doing here?"
Puri thought about it for exactly long enough that her daughter would know she was thinking about it.
"No."
Olalla sat down opposite, in row five, facing backwards, looking at her. Eleven years without sitting down on a run, and she had been sitting down for two nights.
"Amelia Sanchís got on at Vallonga yesterday," she said. "With an unpunched ticket from 1998. And today you get on at Ribadeña and sit down in exactly the seat she sat in."
"It's a good row. You can see both doors."
"Mum."
Puri opened the handbag. Olalla knows that handbag: rigid, short-handled, with the lining her mother replaced twice rather than buy another one. Inside there is a purse, a pair of glasses, a handkerchief folded in four, and a paper envelope of the kind you sealed by wetting the flap.
Out of the envelope she took a thin card, with the name of the line printed in worn ink and the station boxes set out in a column. She laid it on the little table, face up, with the date corner turned towards her daughter.
The fourteenth of November, 1998. Ribadeña to Puente Alcor. One way. Unpunched.
"Mum. How many of these are there?"
Puri closed the handbag.