Rita climbs the tower to silence the thirteenth chime

On Thursday, at twenty to eight in the evening, Rita Candame had her toolbag shut at her feet and the bus back already coming in along the Ceza road. In the square of Beiro, a village of two hundred and forty people, a man of seventy-one stood planted in front of her with his hands in his pockets.

"You're the one who went up today."

"Rita Candame. I'm from a bell firm in Ourense; we look after the bells and the striking trains of half the province."

"Nando Mouriz. And what you did up there today, you did to me."

The clock struck eight: eight clean blows, two and four tenths of a second between each, and then nothing. Rita listened with her head slightly tilted, the way you listen to an engine that has just stopped making a strange noise. Nando listened looking at the ground. When it was clear nothing more was coming, he turned and crossed the square towards the doorway of number four, the house that backs onto the tower.

The bus pulled in, opened, waited and left. Rita stood looking at the doorway of number four with her bag still on the ground, and let it go.

Nine hours earlier, at a quarter past eleven in the morning, the bell chamber smelled of old oil and pigeon. There are two bells: the big one, four hundred kilos, and a small one that is no longer rung. The movement that drives them is from 1911. And there are two hammers on the big bell, which was the first thing Rita looked at.

The hour hammer was where it should be, striking the low part of the bronze, on the thickened ring that bell people call the sound bow. The other, smaller one is the warning hammer: on farming clocks it gave a single blow two minutes before each hour, so that whoever was out reaping would lift his head and know the hour was coming. That hammer strikes higher up, at the waist of the bell, and that is why it sounds muffled: up there the bright strike note is barely excited and what comes out is the low hum, an octave below.

Beiro's warning hammer had been disconnected thirty-four years earlier, when the houses on the new street went up. Rita knew because her father disconnected it, having kept this tower before her, and because the way it had been done was his: a galvanised wire tying the lever back to the beam so it could never reach the bronze.

The wire was coiled on the beam, in three tight turns. Someone had taken it off and left it tidy.

Rita did not have to measure anything. She crouched, put the torch on the warning cam and saw the two notches that any warning cam has: one ahead of the hour's passage and one behind it. The lever was hung on the one behind. On the brass, the edge of the notch was bright amid a good century of rust, with the fine scoring left by a precision file properly handled.

The cam releases the warning two minutes after the hour train starts. Mounted the other way round, those two minutes no longer fall before the hour: they fall on the other side, with the clock already finished counting. At midnight the twelve strokes eat twenty-six seconds of those two minutes, so the bonus blow comes in one minute and thirty-four seconds after the last one. Twelve and one. Thirteen.

A cam filed by hand, at night, is not filed by a joker: it is twenty minutes of steady wrist up on a plank scaffold, and whoever did it knew which of the two hammers he wanted to move and at what height on the bell each one strikes. A joker would have untied the wire and thrown it on the floor. There are two keys to the tower: the council's and the one at number four, which the man at number four has always had.

She put a beech wedge between the lever and the shaft, tightened the nut and went down the stairs with the wedge still in her left hand, because the first two times she fitted it, it slipped out again.

On Wednesday at nine in the morning, Xabel Vilaza, who runs the bar on the square and rents the four rooms above it, set down her coffee and the folder of complaints in the same movement.

"Four in writing and the ones that don't get written. I've got four beds up there, and from April to October I live off the people who come walking along the river. Last year they scored me a six for noise. A six, Rita."

"Who signed?"

"The four from the new street: number eleven, number thirteen, the woman at fifteen and the man at nineteen."

Rita spread the four sheets on the bar and sorted them by house number. The new street is a hundred metres from the tower and has nine houses. Four had signed. The other five belong to people who come in summer and are shut up by November.

"And house four," said Rita. "The one on the square, the one touching the tower. That one hasn't signed."

"That's Nando's. He doesn't sign anything."

"Does he complain?"

"Nando complains about everything. The water, the road, the doctor. About the clock I've never heard him complain."

Nine hours before that coffee, at midnight, Rita counted the twelve with her notebook on her knee, in the room above the bar. And then, as she was already closing the notebook, the other one arrived.

It did not sound like the twelve. It sounded lower and duller, with half the body. A bell person recognises that without thinking: that blow had not come from the sound bow.

What she wrote in the notebook was that the clock had not made a mistake. No striking train stops halfway and comes back: when it finishes counting, the detent drops and the thing stays locked until the next hour. A minute and a half after the twelfth there is no machine that gives anything. That had been given by something else.

On Tuesday afternoon the council had called her with one day's work in the order: go up, take out the extra blow, leave the hours as they were and come down. One day, forty-eight euros of travel and the five-to-eight bus.

Twenty-nine days before that call, at half past three in the morning, Nando Mouriz went up the tower with the key he has for being the man at number four, a head torch and a fine file from the workshop.

Nando spent twenty-two years as a foundryman in a shed in Ourense, standing in front of a cupola furnace, with no ear defenders because back then nobody wore them. What you lose that way, you lose from the top: first the high notes, then the consonants, and in the end a four-thousand-hertz chime is something people tell you has sounded and you have not heard. The twelve strokes of the tower, on the sound bow, give the bright blow, and for him they had been rubbing themselves out one by one until they were a graze. Twelve grazes in a row, two and four tenths of a second apart, cannot be counted: they run together.

He did not ask anyone. Nando Mouriz has never signed a piece of paper in his life and he was not going to start with a bell.

He untied the three turns of wire and left them coiled on the beam, because in his trade things are left where they were. He ran the file along the edge of the rear notch until the lever dropped in on its own. He hung the lever. He checked with his finger that the hammer reached the bronze and that it reached the waist, up high, where the hum sounds.

Then he sat down on the floor of the bell chamber, his back against the north wall, and waited for four o'clock.

At four he counted four grazes together. And one minute and fifty-three seconds later — at four there are only four strokes ahead, and far more of the two minutes is left over — with the whole tower quiet and the bronze still, the fifth blow arrived, low and muffled and open, and Nando Mouriz heard it whole, and counted it out loud so as to hear himself counting it.