They want 14,800 euros back for twenty-three days in hospital

4 November. The letter came with the regional ministry's letterhead and a twelve-digit file number: 14,800.32 euros to be repaid. At the top it said "recovery proceedings". I read it three times standing in the entrance hall before I understood that the money they are demanding is exactly the same money they paid me, and that they are demanding it because of the days my mother spent in hospital.

Twenty-three days. From 2 to 24 August last year. Fourth floor, room 412, the bed by the window.

5 November. I went down to the health centre and was seen by Sixto Berdún, the social worker, who has been signing reports for me for eight years. He explained the logic of the thing with a frankness I am grateful for. The allowance I receive, three hundred and eight euros thirty-four a month, is for someone who cares for a relative at home. The administration takes the view that if my mother is in hospital, the one caring for her is the hospital. Twenty-three days admitted are twenty-three days with no carer at home.

I told him that I slept there those nights, in 412. He said he knows, he saw it, he brought me up a coffee on the twelfth. And then he said the sentence that describes better than any other where I am standing: "I can put in writing that you were there. What I cannot put is that it counts."

7 November. I went to the assessment unit with the folder. The officer handling the file is called Elvira Narbona and she has no wish whatsoever to ruin me; she wishes to close a file properly, which is a different thing and is sometimes worse.

She explained two points. The first sank me. They are not demanding the twenty-three days: they are demanding the four years. The agreement requires continuous care, and the administration holds that those twenty-three days broke the continuity; with the requirement broken, everything paid from the beginning becomes undue. Three hundred and eight thirty-four times forty-eight months is fourteen thousand eight hundred euros and thirty-two cents. A program did the arithmetic and the arithmetic is right.

The second point is a door. There is an exception: hospitalisation of the dependent person does not interrupt continuity if it was notified to the administration. I have until 28 November to submit my case.

9 November. I spent the day with the boxes. My mother, Obdulia Zurita, eighty-six, was a hotel laundress for thirty-one years, the kind with sheets done by hand and a nine-kilo iron, and she has the hands of having been one: her fingers do not close all the way. When you ask her about that job she says the hotel was a good one because they gave you breakfast. This afternoon, while I was cutting her nails, she asked me whether we were going to lose the payment. I told her no. I do not know why I told her that.

I was a workshop seamstress until I was fifty-four. What is left of it is a way of looking at papers: before you sew, you tack. Before answering the ministry, you have to know which piece goes on top of which.

12 November. Small victory. At hospital admissions they gave me the companion sheet for August. Twenty-three nights, with my name and my identity number written out by the nurse on each shift, and on three of them handwriting that is not mine because I was asleep and the supervisor signed. It is all there. It exists in writing that I spent those nights there.

13 November. It is no use, and now I know why. I read the exception again slowly. It does not ask you to prove that the relative was in hospital. It asks that the hospitalisation be notified to the administration within thirty days. In August last year I notified nothing. I was in 412.

I phoned Sixto and told him in the voice I get when I do not want to cry on the telephone. He asked me for twenty-four hours.

15 November. I did the sum I had been avoiding for two days. I have two thousand one hundred euros in the bank. Elvira explained that the repayment can be spread over eighteen months: that is eight hundred and twenty-two euros twenty-four a month, against an allowance of three hundred and eight thirty-four. It does not work even if I stop eating.

What does work is my mother's flat in Tordehúmedo, four rotten windows and a roof that still holds, which a man from Ávila offered to value in March. Tonight I opened the folder with the deeds and closed it again without taking anything out.

My mother has asked twice about the payment. Twice I have answered that nothing is wrong.

17 November. Sixto took four days instead of one and came back with something. The notification was made. I did not make it: the hospital's own social work unit made it on 5 August, as it always does with admissions of people with a recognised grade. There is an outgoing register entry and there is a number.

So, I asked him, why is it not in my file?

Because it did not go into my file. It went into another one.

19 November. Confirmed this morning at the counter, and it took them two minutes to see it once the two of them finally looked at the same time. My mother exists twice. She has two medical record numbers: one from when the village belonged to the old health area and another from after the 2011 reorganisation. Same name, same date of birth, same identity document, two folders.

How a person gets duplicated fits in three sentences and is stupider than it sounds. In 2011, when the areas were merged, patients were migrated from one system to the other by matching them on their identity document number. On my mother's old record that number had had one digit wrong since 1974. The program did not recognise the same woman and opened her a new folder.

So for fifteen years there have been two Obdulia Zuritas with the same date of birth: one gets paid and the other gets ill.

The allowance hangs off one number. The hospital's notification went in through the other. Elvira Narbona never saw that notification because, from her screen, it does not exist: it is attached to a woman who has my mother's name and is not my mother.

21 November. I wrote the submission the way you lay out a pattern. Thirty-nine numbered documents, each with its label, and an index in front explaining in six lines what took me two weeks to understand: that the requirement they accuse me of breaching was met by the hospital within the deadline, and that the paper went missing inside the administration itself because the administration has my mother duplicated.

My mother asked me whether anyone fixes that. I told her the money part, yes.

24 November. Submitted at the registry at twenty past eleven. Forty-one pages. The registry clerk stamped my copy and told me, without lifting her head, to look after that copy better than the original.

26 November. Nothing.

27 November. Elvira Narbona rang at ten past nine. She says the notification of 5 August is valid and the exception applies: continuity was not broken and the four years were properly paid. But the exception runs from the date of the notification, and my mother was admitted on the 2nd. Three days fall outside: 2, 3 and 4 August.

I asked her how much three days is.

28 November. The decision arrived this afternoon on the same letterhead. Where it used to say fourteen thousand eight hundred euros and thirty-two cents it now says thirty euros and eighty-three cents. Ten euros twenty-seven and a bit per day, three days, rounded down in favour of the interested party.

I paid it on my phone, standing in the kitchen, before my coffee went cold. Then I went up to tell my mother and she laughed, which is something she does little of.

And the last thing Elvira Narbona said on the phone, before hanging up, I write down exactly as it was: "The file stands at thirty euros eighty-three. And I will merge your mother myself tomorrow, on a form with eight boxes, which is all it ever took."