Margen
Previously: Olalla, ticket inspector on the 803, found a 1998 phone list with 87 numbers in Ribadeña. She called forty people and twenty-six numbers no longer exist.
Four nights left. The 803 leaves Ribadeña at 00:12 and, at 00:41 exactly, brakes at Vallonga: a halt the operator closed in 2011, with no lit platform, no ticket office and not a single passenger since.
That night Olalla Berruezo, ticket inspector on the 803, climbed into the cab with the folder under her arm and stood behind the seat.
“Fermín, how long is the Vallonga stop?” “Forty seconds,” said Fermín Aizpún, the driver, without taking his eyes off the track. “Forty-two if there is frost.” “And how many nights have you been stopping?” “The ones between November 2011 and today, minus Sundays and sick leave.” “That is almost three thousand eight hundred.” “Three thousand eight hundred and forty-one. They are all written down.”
He took a hand off the controls, opened the door pocket and pulled out a wad of route sheets folded in half, their corners rounded from so much travelling. On each one, in the box for request stops, the same note in blue biro: V — 00:41. Eleven years of the same line, the handwriting getting smaller.
“Casilda stamps them for you.” “Casilda Trigo has run Ribadeña station longer than I have run the engine. She stamps them and files them. Forty-one boxes.”
The train began to brake. Through the window there was not much to see: Vallonga is a curve, a concrete wall and a lamp post the operator switched off the day it closed the halt.
“Come down with me,” said Fermín. “You have forty seconds.”
He opened up with the service key and the two of them jumped onto the platform. It smelled of wet scrub. Fermín switched on his pocket torch and ran it along the wall, left to right, until a slate panel appeared, bolted to the brickwork, the size of a table, its wooden frame eaten away.
“The district school was here, in the building up there. When they closed it they left the blackboard on the platform.”
On the slate, written in chalk and gone over in white paint so it would last, a heading could still be read: SIGNATURES SO THEY DO NOT TAKE THE TRAIN AWAY. Below it, two columns of strokes where somebody had been noting names down before copying them onto the proper sheet.
“This is where Amelia collected them,” said Fermín. “Eighty-seven, in two afternoons. The kids counted them.”
Olalla brought the torch closer to the second column. There were a hundred and something strokes, many more than eighty-seven.
“People are down twice.” “Everyone signed twice, just in case. Onto the proper sheet went one each.”
She put a hand on the frame and the wood gave a little.
“Fermín, there are four nights left and you retire on the 31st. If you stop here that night with people on board, Serafín Mardones, the service manager, will open a file on you the same as on me.” “He will not open one on me.” “Why not?” “Because Vallonga is still a stop. A withdrawn stop becomes one again if there is a record that it has gone on being made: it is in the rulebook, in the article on request stops. As long as a train stops and logs it, the point stays a stopping point even if it is off the timetable. The moment you leave a year blank, it drops off the map and never comes back.”
The radio crackled. It was Casilda, from Ribadeña, asking whether they were running late.
“Forty seconds, Casilda,” Fermín answered. “The usual ones.”
They got back on. The 803 pulled away with the short jolt of old trains and Olalla sat down on the cab step, the folder open on her knees.
“Eleven years stopping somewhere nobody gets on.” “Eleven years keeping the stop alive.” “And why Vallonga? You live in Puente Alcor.”
Fermín took two curves to answer.
“The train of 14 November ninety-eight was mine.”
Olalla looked up.
“I was twenty-nine. They told me in the morning that it was the last one that night and nobody denied it in the afternoon. I stopped here, went down onto the platform with my cap in my hand and told Amelia Sanchís, the schoolteacher, in front of fourteen kids and two mothers, that if one day there really was a last trip that train would stop everywhere and whoever she named would get on. Then the line did not close, and we went twenty-eight years without needing it.” “So you promised too.” “I signed first and promised second. Amelia kept the tickets and I kept the stop.”
“On the 31st I leave Ribadeña at 00:12,” said Fermín, and looked back at the track. “At 00:41 I open these doors, and I have spent three thousand eight hundred and forty-one nights earning the right to do it.”