The sluice gate on lateral 7 hasn't closed since Thursday

Previously: Felisa Arcediano, ditch keeper of Valdeporrina, shares out 25 usable hours among 43 requested. Pura Mazuelas, the chair, gave up her six without saying why.

Pura Mazuelas, chair of the irrigators' association, was holding a Confederation envelope folded in four when she opened the door to Felisa, on Monday at half past seven, with 30 hours of water left in lateral 7. She didn't let go of it the whole conversation. Felisa had brought her own: Friday's minutes with the reason line half filled in, and that morning's report. On Saturday and Sunday plots 6 and 8 had been watered, three hours between the two, signed and undisputed. Of those 30, 22 were usable. The other eight were still the sill hours, the ones that on the 11th would flow past the sluice gates without going into any of them.

“Come in, you're letting the heat out,” said Pura, though the kitchen was cold.

Pura has lived alone in the house on the square, the one with the green railings, since her daughter got married in Burgos. She keeps her kitchen the way you keep papers: the everyday things to hand, the rest in drawers. She put two cups on the table and didn't put out any coffee.

“I've come about the line in the minutes,” said Felisa.

“I know what you've come about.”

“Begoña needs it for the closing. The Confederation's technician won't sign minutes with a gap in them.”

“Begoña signs whatever you put if it's put properly.” Pura laid the envelope on the table, between the two cups, and smoothed it flat with her palm. “Read it and then tell me if you want it in the minutes.”

It was a letter from March 2013, with the Confederation letterhead at the top and a blue stamp at the bottom. Two paragraphs. The first said that in the 2012 season the Valdeporrina irrigators' association had diverted through lateral 7 a volume greater than its allocation, “equivalent to six hours of turn”. The second said that, if it happened again, a review of the concession would be opened.

Felisa read it twice. The second time, her eyes stuck on the figure.

“Six hours.”

“Six.”

“In my uncle's ledger, in August 2012, there are forty-one. Not one more. I checked on Friday to shut Nazario up.”

“Of course there isn't one more.” Pura finally sat down, with her coat on. “Your uncle didn't write them down. That's why you didn't find them.”

She told it without dressing it up, which is how Pura tells things. 2012 was her first drought as chair. There were forty-one hours for forty-seven requested, like now but with less of a shortfall, and she didn't have the nerve to take anyone's turn away in front of the whole hall. She went to talk to the canal warden, who back then was Donato and still is, and asked him to leave the lateral open six hours longer than scheduled. Donato didn't say yes. He didn't close it either. The six hours ran, everybody watered, Nazario didn't lose a single one of his, and in March the envelope arrived.

“Your uncle told me he wasn't writing it down because what isn't written down hasn't happened,” said Pura. “He had that line for everything. I thought he was doing me a favour. Later I understood he was keeping himself out of it.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“The Confederation knows, they've got the letter. Your uncle knew. Donato knows. And now you know.” She tapped the envelope with one finger. “The ones who watered with those six hours don't know, and of those, four were in the hall on Friday.”

Felisa looked at the empty cup.

“That's why you gave up yours.”

“I gave up mine because after 2012 I can't ask anyone to give up anything unless I give it up first. And because this year not one hour can be watered that isn't in the canal. If it happens again, there's no lateral 7 next year. Not for me, not for Chelo, not for Nazario's grandson.”

“You could have said that at the meeting.”

“To say that at the meeting I'd have had to say the other thing.” Pura stood up, took the envelope, folded it in four again and slipped it into her coat pocket, not into the drawer. “Put in the minutes that the chair gives up her turn so the allocation fits the water there is. It's true, and Begoña will sign it. The letter stays with me.”

Felisa wrote the line right there, at the kitchen table, with the pen she kept clipped to the ledger: “The chair gives up her full turn so that the allocation matches the measured water.” Pura read it upside down, the way she had read the 28 on Wednesday, and nodded just once.

“And now share it out, Felisa. You've got no excuses of mine left.”

At ten past nine Felisa was at kilometre four with the bricklayer's tape in her hand. She hadn't done it again since Wednesday, and she should have done it every morning: the whole lateral, gate by gate, measuring how far the water was from reaching the lip of the sill. On Wednesday, at gate 1, there had been eleven centimetres to spare. At Olimpio's 9, four. At Nazario's 12, two and a half. With three hours less in the canal, on Monday the margin should have come out a little smaller at every gate. It came out a lot smaller.

At 1, eight. At 9, one and a half. At 12, barely a centimetre.

She did the sums standing up, on the parapet, with the ledger propped on her knee. Three hours of watering don't drop the canal that much. Something else was taking the water, and it wasn't the old intake, because that had already been there on Wednesday, when Begoña measured the twenty-three litres, and she had Wednesday's sums written down. At that rate, by Wednesday the water wouldn't reach the lip of gate 12, and Nazario Elorrio, the man with the same six hours as always, would be left staring at an open, dry gate, which is what Begoña had said would happen on the 11th, only sooner.

She walked down the lateral again, more slowly. The old intake at 14 was the same: the metal sheet, the twisted wire, the rust untouched. She carried on to gate 2, the one for the Cuberos' plot, which they had watered on Thursday afternoon with their March turn. She had closed it herself on Thursday at five past seven, with her key. She had it written in the ledger with the time and her initial: “Closed 19.05. F.”

The padlock was on. The gate board was down, in its place. From the track it looked closed, just as the iron at the gauge had looked fine.

But behind the board, in the Cuberos' field ditch, water was running.

Felisa knelt on the concrete. She slid her hand down the side of the board, where the iron guide bites into the metal, and touched wood. A wedge. It had been pushed in underneath, between the board and the lip of the sill, and lifted it just enough not to show from above: four fingers. Through those four fingers came a smooth jet, silent, no foam, invisible until you leaned over.

She didn't pull it out. Her uncle had taught her that you don't touch anything at a gate before you write it down. She took two photos with her phone, one close up and another with the padlock in the frame, and wrote down the time: Monday, 9.48.

Then she followed the water.

The Cuberos' field ditch had no business carrying water: their turn ended on Thursday at five past seven. But the ditch doesn't end at the plot. At the far end, where the track bends, it crosses the old ditch, the one that used to run down to the Cerrada back when the Cerrada had an owner and was watered like all the rest, and that nobody ever got round to filling in when the payments stopped. Felisa had seen it full of thistles all her life. That Monday its bed was dark and soft, and the thistles were flattened downstream, the way they flatten when water has been running over them for days.

Six hundred metres. She walked them along the bank, her shoes full of mud, all the way to the Cerrada's wire fence. On the other side, the four fig trees and the mulberry stood in a wide puddle that shone under the leaves. The ground was so soaked that the water sat on top.

She went back to gate 2 and sat on the parapet. She took out the ledger, found Thursday's page, where her initial and the closing time were, and underneath she wrote what she had seen, without putting down whom she suspected: in that ledger you only write hours, centimetres and what you see. Before closing the ledger she slid her hand down the side of the board again and touched the wedge once more, to be sure of what she was about to write. It was pale, long-grained wood, which isn't poplar or pine. It's mulberry.

She wrote the last line at two minutes past ten, in her uncle's small handwriting: “Gate 2 open four fingers since Thursday. The water runs down the old ditch to the Cerrada.”