Eighty-seven to eighty-seven, and nine envelopes too many

Cebrones has 212 voters on the electoral roll and 198 residents actually sleeping in the village, and until ten past eight on the evening of 28 November nobody cared about the difference. Lorena Prieto Bada, secretary and comptroller of the council, was waiting on her feet beside the table in the school with the record sheet still blank and the council biro, the one on a little chain so that nobody takes it.

At eight o'clock sharp, Casiano Nuez, retired schoolteacher and president of the polling station, said the formula he had read three times in the manual: the vote is closed. There was no queue outside. Inside, the classroom smelled of the stove and of the observers' coats hanging on the children's low pegs, and the word "landscape" was still written on the blackboard from the week before.

"A hundred and sixty-five," Casiano read from the register of voters. "Out of two hundred and twelve."

The two candidates were sitting at the front-row desks, as though they had been kept in. Teodoro Sanz, owner of the gravel pit by the river, had come in a jacket and had not taken it off all afternoon. Herminia Olmedo, the district vet, had brought a flask and had shared it with everyone, Teodoro included.

Before opening the ballot box came the postal business. The station's list had nine names down for postal votes, and the bag with the nine envelopes had arrived at five to eight, within the deadline. Casiano took them out one by one, read the name aloud, checked it against the register and put them in the box unopened, which is what the rules say.

"Bragado Sierra, Nemesio," he read on the last one.

Lorena noted down on the record sheet the time the bag had come in, five to eight, and beside it the figure: nine.

The count took twenty minutes. Casiano called out the names and the two tellers made tally marks on a sheet of squared paper: Sanz, Olmedo, Olmedo, Sanz. Not a single blank ballot came out and not a single spoiled one, which Casiano celebrated as if it were down to him, because in Cebrones people vote with the pen flat on the table and do not make mistakes.

"Eighty-seven," he said at the end. "And eighty-seven."

For three seconds nobody moved. Herminia put the cup of her flask down on the desk. Teodoro stood up, went over to the tally sheet and looked it up and down the way you look at an invoice.

"Count it again."

They counted it again. Eighty-seven to eighty-seven.

Casiano wrote the two figures on the blackboard, under the word "landscape", and underlined them. One of the tellers, Fermín Lobo, a bricklayer, tapped on the window to let the three or four people waiting outside know, and in under a minute half of Calle del Pozo was behind the school door.

Lorena rang the district electoral board from the council telephone, which sits on the same table as the photocopier. A clerk with four record sheets in front of him picked up and told her to put the tie and any incident in writing, that they would look at it with the record sheet in hand. She noted the time of the call in her notebook — she notes everything down, it is the only thing that has saved her in fourteen months — and went back into the classroom.

Lorena knew by heart what came next, because she had looked it up in October, when the election was called and she read the whole law over two nights just in case: a tie is settled by drawing lots. She also knew that nobody in Cebrones had ever seen lots drawn, and that the last time anything in the village had been decided that way was in 1994, over the common grazing, and that two families still do not speak because of it.

She was writing the result on the record sheet, in the block capitals she uses for numbers, when the classroom door swung open and in came Lisardo Vara, the rural postman for the area, in a wet anorak and with a postal sack in his hand.

"Sorry," he said. "The Val de Sanz road was closed for the work on the stream and I had to go round by Quintana."

He put the sack on the table. An ordinary sack, grey canvas, the plastic seal unbroken.

Casiano looked at the clock on the wall, which in that school runs four minutes fast, and then at his own wristwatch.

"Ten past eight," he said. "Lisardo, this is late."

"I bring you what they give me at the office. What arrives late isn't my decision."

Lorena cut the seal with the scissors from the first-aid box because there were no others, and emptied the sack onto the teacher's desk, next to the record sheet. Out came postal ballot envelopes, the big ones, with the stripe and the coat of arms. They fell all at once and spread as far as the edge.

Herminia was the first to count, under her breath, pointing with her finger without touching them. Teodoro counted afterwards, standing, without pointing.

The village's nine postal voters were already inside the ballot box, read out one by one twenty minutes earlier. In the station's register there was not one more name with the postal box ticked. Lorena went through the pages twice to be sure, finger on the column, and came back to the table.

Casiano counted the new envelopes once, gathered them into a pile and counted them again, and turned to the two tellers so they would hear it properly.

Nobody asked the obvious thing until Herminia asked it, looking at Lorena and not at Casiano, because the secretary is the one who signs.

"Whose are they?"

"Nine more envelopes," said Casiano, still counting, "and the nine on my list are already inside the box."