Pura gives up her six hours in front of everyone

Previously: Felisa Arcediano, ditch keeper of Valdeporrina, measured the canal: there are 28 usable hours, not 36. Today 33 are left and the canal closes on the 11th.

Friday. Felisa got to the irrigators' hall with the oilcloth ledger in one hand and the Confederation's report in the other, and with the number already written down: 33 hours of water in lateral 7, of which 25 are usable. The other three had gone to plots 1 and 2 on Thursday, with their turn signed since March, and those are not up for discussion.

It was five to nine. She put both things on the papers table, opened the ledger at the allocation page and stayed on her feet, because you cannot read out a list that is going to hurt people while sitting down.

Pura Mazuelas, chair of the irrigators' association since 2011, sat in the front row. She had said so on Wednesday and she kept her word: front row, coat on her knees and hands on top of the coat. Not at the table. In the front row, like everyone else.

Twelve of the fourteen came. Plot 14 was missing, which never comes, and Donato Rebolledo was missing too, the canal warden, who does not belong to the association but has been walking into this hall for thirty years to hear what gets said. Felisa looked for him twice before she started.

At nine on the dot she read the whole report, top to bottom, including the part where Begoña Larrauri, the Confederation engineer who signs off the end of the season, puts it in writing that the gauge at kilometre four reads a hundred and twenty and the canal is carrying ninety-four.

"This is signed," she said. "It is not my doing."

"Nobody has said it is your doing," said Olimpio Sanz, the tractor driver from plot 9. "All I am saying is that on the 3rd I pay for the tractor either way."

"I know."

"That is two hundred and eighty euros, Felisa."

"I know, Olimpio. It is written down next to your five hours."

Then she read the list. Forty-nine hours requested by the twelve plots still waiting. Twenty-five that work. And underneath, the subtraction done in carpenter's pencil: twenty-four.

There was the usual noise, the noise of people shifting on plastic chairs, and then Nazario Elorrio from plot 12, sixty-three years old, spoke without getting up.

"My six hours are mine."

"Nobody has said they are not."

"I have had them since before you were born and I have not lost them, not even the year of the drought."

"And the year of the drought there were forty-one hours in the canal," said Felisa. "I have checked it in my uncle's ledger. August 2012, right-hand page."

Nazario sat there with his stick between his knees and did not answer. It struck Felisa as the first time in three days that somebody in this hall went quiet because of a figure rather than out of politeness.

She proposed the only thing that could be proposed: the same cut for everybody, half of what was asked, and the plots with a living crop first in the calendar. Chelo Bardají, the vet, who irrigates plot 3 and has twelve hectares of sunflowers, did the arithmetic out loud before anyone else.

"Half of nine is four and a half. With four and a half I do not make the 8th."

"With four and a half you do not make it."

"Then I lose it."

"Then you lose it, Chelo. I am telling you here so the field does not tell you on the 9th."

What came next lasted twenty minutes and does not need telling in full: Olimpio wanted his 3rd, Nazario wanted his six hours, two men from the tail end of the lateral wanted to know why they should pay the bill for a bent piece of iron, and a woman from plot 6 asked, very reasonably, who had been collecting the levy all these years if the water was not arriving.

Felisa kept writing. She did not answer a single one of them until they had finished, because her uncle had told her that in an assembly you answer at the end and with the ledger open in front of you.

And when the hall reached that strange moment when nobody has anything new to say but nobody stands up either, Pura Mazuelas got to her feet in the front row, turned towards the chairs and spoke without raising her voice, which is how she always speaks.

"I have six hours requested for plot 5."

Nobody said anything, because everybody knows Pura has six hours requested for plot 5.

"I am giving them up. All six. Share them out among the ones with a crop."

(Nobody had brought a form for a thing like that, so Felisa wrote the waiver in the margin of the allocation page, under the subtraction, and Pura signed it above the pencil line.)

Olimpio was the first to speak and he did it the way he does, with no malice and no tact.

"Pura, plot 5 is three thousand metres of potatoes."

"I know what it is."

"You are going to lose it."

"I know that too."

Chelo got up from her chair.

"Pura, I do not want your hours."

"They are not yours and they are not mine. They belong to the association and Felisa shares them out, that is what she has the key for." She put her coat on. "And I am not going to explain why, so do not ask me on Sunday at mass."

"Pura," said Felisa, and realised she had said it too loudly. "I need a reason for the minutes."

Pura stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame. She looked at the open ledger on the table, not at Felisa.

"Put down that the chair gives up her full turn. That is what has happened and that is what has to be written."

"The minutes ask for the reason."

"Then the minutes get a blank line. You are only eighteen short now, Felisa. Share them out."

She left at twenty past ten. Twelve people watched her go and not one of them stood up.

Felisa was left alone in the hall with the twelve plastic chairs and the unlit stove. She did the subtraction again. Twenty-five usable. Forty-three requested, now that Pura had taken hers off the list. Eighteen hours that still did not exist.

In the reason box on the minutes she wrote what Pura had told her to write, and nothing else. Then she sat looking at the line below, the one the form leaves blank for remarks, and ended up putting down in small handwriting, the kind her uncle used for the things he did not like, the only thing she knew for certain: "The chair has irrigated plot 5 since 1994. This is the first year she is not irrigating it."