Nobody Is Wrong in Formation

The tower clock had been stopped since Thursday and in Ontanaya there was no way of knowing the time.

They had taken down the dial to run the cables for the lanterns. In its place there was a round black hole above the square. Perpetua Anduaga had it in front of her every morning from the balcony of her room. For the first two days she found it funny. By Saturday she did not.

"Doña Perpetua."

Melquíades Rúa was calling her from the courtyard with his cap in his hand.

"What time do you make it?"

"Nine something."

"That's what I make it. Something." The porter lifted his chin towards the tower. "Two days I've been winding the drawing-room clock by guesswork, and people come in and ask me, and I'm the only one in this house without a watch."

"Then don't answer them."

"If I don't answer they get cross just the same."

"And what do you tell them?"

"Whatever I feel like," Rúa answered. "And off they go perfectly happy. Do you know how many people there are in Ontanaya today who really know what time it is? Not one. And nobody has been late anywhere."

By the middle of the morning there was a knot of people in the square. Perpetua went down because everybody went down. Above, among the paper lanterns and the little flags, two men were moving about on the scaffolding. One of them was too broad to be up there at all.

"Don Fabián!" shouted the tobacconist. "You'll kill yourself on the eve of the fair!"

"If I kill myself, have them play something cheerful!"

They took a good half-hour. Perpetua stayed because the sun was out. When don Fabián Losilla came down the ladder he had no jacket on, his hands were black and he was very pleased with himself.

"There," he said. "Now you have the time."

The tower clock struck eleven. The whole square put a hand to its pocket. Perpetua saw ten or twelve men take out their watches at once and set them, obediently, one after another, as though they had been told to. She took out nothing. Hers had been sold in March, along with the soup tureen.

"Maestro Lizana might have gone up," said doña Herminia Zaldúa, "since he's the sexton."

"Maestro Lizana is seventy-one and that ladder has forty rungs," don Fabián retorted. "I am fifty-three and a quarter of an arroba over. One of the two had to go up and the one who fell softer went up."

They laughed. They always laughed with him.

"And the valuer from the capital?" the tobacconist asked. "What time does he arrive on Monday?"

"On the morning mail train. That is to say, when God pleases. My father used to say that the day that train is punctual the world ends."

The sexton was standing in the church doorway with his hands folded under his apron.

"I'm grateful to you," he said. "Heights and I are finished."

"It's nothing, man."

"It's that I need the time." Baldomero Lizana pointed at the tower with his chin. "The morning bells I ring by that clock. Not the passing bell. The passing bell I ring when I hear the nuns."

"The nuns?"

"Santa Escolástica has its clock inside the enclosure and it strikes the hours for them alone. Nobody hears it but whoever is in the sacristy or in this lady's garden. When it strikes ten, I pull the rope. Forty-one years I've been doing it and I haven't been late once."

"Then carry on, maestro."

"The nuns and I are the only ones in this village who give the time properly," said the sexton very seriously. "The rest are opinions."

Don Fabián took out his pocket watch, looked at it and put it away again. He did it every few minutes, without noticing, the way other men touch their moustache.

"Five past eleven," he said. "I am four hundred chairs short and they come tomorrow. Goodbye to you all."

---

The Anduaga palace belonged to Perpetua and was of no use to her. She had inherited it from her husband along with the leaks, the forty-two windows and a stone staircase that nobody went up any more. The Casino society paid her a rent that just covered the tiles on the west side. The September fair gave her three days of noise and a small sum for the use of the ballroom.

That year, besides, there was the exhibition.

Aquilino Barbastro, the silversmith, had been setting it up in the green cabinet room since Friday. It was a narrow room with one door only and a walnut display case that had belonged to Perpetua's grandmother. When she came in, the silversmith had the seven pieces in a row on a cloth.

"Look at that for a window," said Aquilino. "All this together has never been seen here before."

There were don Rufino Cebrián's two candlesticks, which were the biggest and the ugliest. There was the ciborium from Aquilino's own workshop and a wedding tray he had made himself. There was doña Herminia's silver and coral rosary. There was the crown of the Virgin of the Cascajo, which comes out once a year and that September was going to come out twice. There was Perpetua's incense boat.

And there was the emerald cross that had belonged to don Fabián's mother, in the middle, on a velvet cushion, because it was the only piece with stones in it.

"And you're bringing the incense boat?" Aquilino asked. "I thought you didn't care to have these things on show."

"I like them to be seen."

It was half a lie. The incense boat was of good silver, it had been her husband's and it was the last thing left to her that stood on a table. On Monday don Isidro Quevedo was coming from the capital, invited by the committee. He was bringing his glass and his scales and would value the seven pieces for the catalogue, free of charge. Perpetua wanted a figure written down by a man from outside. With that figure she could go to a dealer without looking like a widow selling things.

"Monday at eleven," said the silversmith. "And until Monday this is not opened except with two keys. Mine and the porter's, and neither of us goes in alone. It's what they do in the capital."

"And why not one key?"

"Because if there's one key and something is missing, the man who has it is the thief. With two keys there is no thief. There are two gentlemen watching each other."

Doña Sagrario Elizalde was in the doorway with the brotherhood's mantle over her arm. She was chief attendant and had been dressing the Virgin for twenty years.

"The crown is not valued," she said.

"Doña Sagrario, since it's free—"

"The crown belongs to the Virgin and has no price. I put it there so that people can see it. But that gentleman with the eyeglass does not touch the crown."

And she went off with the mantle. Aquilino looked at Perpetua and shrugged.

"A church hen," he muttered. "The day the church hens run out, half the arguments in this village run out with them."

---

The stranger arrived on Saturday at seven in the evening, on the country bus, and it was known in Ontanaya before he got down.

He was very tall and thin, completely bald and hatless, with white eyebrows that ate up his forehead. He wore no moustache, which in that province drew more attention than a moustache would have. His suit was of pale linen and close to one could see it had been turned.

"Duarte Cabral de Meneses," he said in the entrance hall, and gave Perpetua a card she had not asked for. "Both of them, señora. And both of them cost me something."

Perpetua read the card. It was printed in copperplate and was a good deal better than the suit.

"Both of what?"

"Both surnames." He said it looking her in the eye, very pleased with himself. "Cabral is my father's, who sold fish in Setúbal for forty years and never got into a single house on the strength of it. De Meneses I gave myself, and I assure you it cost me more work than the other."

"And you tell me that straight off?"

"If I don't tell you, somebody else will and worse." He put away his card case, which was silver and very worn. "Besides, it would never have got past you. A house can be read from the entrance hall."

Perpetua put the card in her apron pocket and did not answer that.

"And what have you come for?"

"To be seen." He laughed to himself. "Pois, it is true. I am hired to be seen."

Don Fabián appeared from behind, drying his hands. He put a hand on the Portuguese's shoulder, familiarly, as though he had known him all his life.

"This gentleman," he said, "has solved four cases that appeared in the Madrid papers, and I have carried the cuttings in my wallet for two years. When the committee approved the exhibition, I said: there are going to be seven hundred people dancing in that house and seven pieces of silver behind a sheet of glass. And I said: we bring one in from outside."

"And I said they were to pay my fare first class," Duarte added, "and this gentleman paid it without arguing, which had never happened to me before."

"And what are you going to do here?" Perpetua asked.

"Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing?"

"I'll explain, doña Perpetua." Don Fabián talked fast, as always. "I haven't brought this man in as a guard. I have guards, and I have two keys and one door. I have brought him to stand in the ballroom in his pale suit, talking loudly and bowing to the ladies. So that it is known he is here. There has not been a robbery in Ontanaya in forty years and there isn't going to be one now. But let anybody who is thinking about it think twice."

"An expensive scarecrow," said Duarte, delighted. "Ora, I have been hired for worse things."

Perpetua looked at the two of them. One was two heads taller than the other and both looked equally satisfied.

"Well, you cost what a roof costs," she said.

"He costs less," said don Fabián, "and I am paying."

---

Sunday was the day of favours. Afterwards, when she thought about it slowly, Perpetua could not find one odd moment in the whole of that day. Neither she nor anybody else.

At nine in the morning don Fabián came into the ballroom with the clockmaker's son. He climbed on a chair and opened the case of the wall clock.

"This one is slow," he said. "It's getting on for twenty minutes slow against the tower, and tonight there are going to be people in here asking the time every two minutes. Melquíades, hold this."

"And might it not be that the tower is fast?"

"The tower is the tower."

He moved the hand, shut the case and got down off the chair. The porter, Perpetua and one of the cloakroom girls were standing there. It did not take a minute.

At eleven, in the square, he made Obdulia Rúa a present of a dress. The girl was nineteen, was the porter's daughter and had never in her life worn anything but what her mother made over for her. Don Fabián had ordered the dressmaker to make a dress exactly like his own daughter Amparo's: sea green, with two ribbons at the waist.

"Two, señorita," he told the dressmaker in front of half the square. "I will not have Melquíades's daughter going to the ball at my fair in a funeral skirt."

Doña Herminia cried a little. Doña Sagrario said that this was right, and doña Sagrario almost never said that anything was right.

At seven in the evening don Fabián argued with the bandmaster, because the programme closed with the jota.

"The jota first."

"The jota goes at the end, don Fabián. The jota closes."

"The jota is danced by the old people, and the old people are in bed by midnight. You will put it at half past nine and after that play whatever you please."

And so it was. That night, in Ontanaya, the jota was danced at the beginning.

At eight Perpetua crossed the garden to come in by the kitchen. It was getting dark and there was a smell of lime trees. Behind the wall, very far off and very clear, the nuns' clock struck eight for nobody.

---

The ball began at nine.

Perpetua watched the whole of it from the third step of the stone staircase. It was her usual place. From there one could see the courtyard, the ballroom door and the mouth of the gallery. They had put a chair there for her and she did not use it.

At twenty past nine don Fabián was in the courtyard with a group of men, beside the band. Perpetua saw him because don Rufino Cebrián was with him, and don Rufino laughs a laugh that can be heard from the staircase. At half past nine the jota began. Doña Herminia came out to dance it with maestro Lizana and people made a ring and clapped.

At twenty to ten don Fabián was no longer in the courtyard. Perpetua attached no importance to it. That night nobody was ever where they had been a moment before.

The six lads came and went with the trays. They could be told from a distance because they wore a green sash. The committee had ordered them from the dressmaker and it was a good idea: a lad in a green sash crosses anywhere and nobody looks at him twice.

In the gallery, in front of the closed door of the cabinet room, the lumber from the fair was piled up. Two dozen folding chairs, the crates for the lanterns and four sacks of sawdust left over from the dance floor. They had been there since Friday and there they stayed.

At five past ten the mail train whistled. It could always be heard from the courtyard, at the points. That night it was heard over the music.

"Late again," said don Rufino Cebrián, who had sat down on the steps beside Perpetua. "Five past ten. And that train is due at a quarter to."

"It has never once arrived on time in its life."

"Sometimes five minutes and sometimes half an hour. I used to take it to go to the court and I never knew what time it would leave here."

At twenty past ten the passing bell rang.

"Late today as well," don Rufino remarked. "Poor maestro. He's going deaf on us."

Perpetua did not answer. She was looking into the ballroom through the open door. Among the dancing couples the very tall Portuguese went from one group to another with a glass he never drank from. He talked, he laughed and he let himself be seen, which was precisely what he had been paid to do.

At something to eleven she saw Amparo Losilla dancing in green at the far end of the ballroom. At a quarter past eleven she thought she saw her again, coming in from the courtyard, in green as well and with her hair badly done. She thought that girls nowadays come and go.

At half past eleven Melquíades Rúa was not in the lodge. Perpetua went down to fetch a key and there was nobody there. She came back a while later and he was there, red in the face and smelling of tobacco, and he told her he had not moved all night.

At twelve the ball ended and people began to go out into the square. Don Fabián crossed the courtyard loaded to the eyebrows with the committee's things. He had the lantern crates on top and a sack under each arm. Behind him went two men with the chairs.

"Leave that, don Fabián, I'll clear it away tomorrow."

"Tomorrow you have all this to scrub. Open the gate."

"God reward you."

At ten past twelve Aquilino Barbastro and Melquíades Rúa went up to the gallery. They were going to give the seven pieces back to their owners, each with his own key and watching the other as laid down. Perpetua went up behind them, because she wanted to take the incense boat up to her room.

The silversmith opened with his. The porter opened with his. The door opened first time.

The walnut case was shut and without a scratch on it. Inside there was nothing but the cloth and the cushion. In the velvet the mark of the cross could still be seen.

Duarte Cabral de Meneses came into the gallery a minute later, still with his glass in his hand. He stopped in front of the glass case, very still and very tall. For the first time in two days he said nothing.

Sergeant Berrueta arrived on Monday at eight in the morning with two men and a folder, and by nine he had decided how he was going to settle the business.

"What we have here is an hour," he said. "One single hour. I find the hour and I find the man. Doña Perpetua, will you let me have the room off the staircase?"

"You may have whatever you like. There are twenty-six rooms in this house and not one of them is used."

"And you, sir, sit there and don't talk."

He said it looking at the Portuguese, who was standing by the window in his linen suit with his arms folded.

"I shall sit," Duarte answered. "The not talking I can promise you until ten."

"I know you from the papers."

"Pois, that is what they pay me for, sergeant."

"The papers have never solved a case for me in my life, and I have twenty-two years' service."

Berrueta began at nine and finished at seven in the evening. Fourteen statements, written out by himself, slowly and diligently, with his tongue between his teeth. Perpetua came and went with the coffee and heard nearly all of them, because the house was hers and nobody told her to go away. He was a big, clean man.

He believed that the truth is got at by asking loudly. That day he asked loudly thirteen times and got nothing.

Don Rufino Cebrián gave his statement first, being a notary and being old.

"At twenty past nine I was in the courtyard with don Fabián and the tobacconist. At half past nine the jota began. At five past ten the mail train whistled and I remember it well because I said so to doña Perpetua, who was beside me on the steps: five past ten, late again. At twenty past ten the passing bell rang. And at half past eleven I went home."

"Are you sure of the times?"

"Sergeant, I have drawn up four thousand deeds and in every one of them there is a time written down. Times are the only thing in this world that is not disputed."

Doña Herminia Zaldúa confirmed the whole of it without having heard any of it.

"The train whistled at five past ten. I know because I was in the gallery watching the ballroom clock through the door, waiting for my niece, and I was there a good quarter of an hour. Five past ten exactly."

"And did you see anybody in the gallery?"

"A lad. A little before the train. He went past me with empty hands and went off towards the far end, which is where the cabinet-room door is."

"Which lad?"

"One of the ones with the green sash. I didn't see his face, sergeant, and it never occurred to me to look at it. You tell me who looks at the face of a lad with his sash on."

The six lads gave their statements afterwards, one after another. All six said the same thing: that they had not gone up to the gallery all night, that nothing was served up there, that the trays were taken from the kitchen and handed round in the courtyard and the ballroom. Berrueta kept them two hours and came out of the room red in the face.

"There is one lad too many," he said. "And there is no lad too many. Both things at once, and both with witnesses."

The lads stayed out in the courtyard, close together, talking low. They were six village boys and the committee hired them every September.

At that moment all six of them understood the same thing at the same time: that one of them was going to be the thief of Ontanaya for the rest of his life. Perpetua took them out coffee. Not one of them would have any.

In the middle of the afternoon the business turned against don Fabián's daughter.

Three people had seen Amparo Losilla dancing in the ballroom between half past ten and eleven. Two others had seen her go out into the courtyard and not come back. Doña Sagrario, who is never wrong about anything because she never looks at anything twice, swore she had seen her in green by the kitchen door when the passing bell had already rung.

"I was in the ballroom all night, dancing," said Amparo Losilla.

She was twenty-two, she said it looking at the wall and she repeated it without being asked to, which is what people do when they want to convince themselves.

"All night, sergeant. Ask whoever you like."

"The trouble is I have already asked five. Three say yes and two say no," Berrueta answered. "Go away and don't leave the village."

When the girl had gone, the sergeant shut his folder with a slap.

"Fourteen statements!" he said. "And fourteen people who were in fourteen places at the same time. This is a fair, not a case!"

---

Duarte Cabral de Meneses did not ask about the robbery all day.

Not once. Not in passing.

Perpetua watched him at it. She saw him sit down beside people in the courtyard, on the steps, on the stone bench by the kitchen, and start talking about things that did not matter at all.

"Doña Herminia, what did you have for supper last night?"

"Me?"

"You."

"Well… some broth at home, early, and then what there was at the buffet, like everybody. Croquettes and some pasties that were hard."

"Hard?"

"Cold. They brought them out at nine and by eleven nobody could eat them."

"And who served you?"

"The Quiles boy, the tall one, who serves every year and every year drops something."

"What colour were you wearing?"

"Brown. I have worn brown since I was widowed and I am not going to change at this time of day."

"And Señorita Losilla?"

"Green. Sea green, with two ribbons. A lovely dress, and the porter's daughter was wearing one just like it, which don Fabián gave her in front of everybody. That has to be said."

Duarte wrote nothing down.

He never wrote anything down. Perpetua noticed that he did not even carry a pencil on him.

"Don't you write?" Perpetua asked him from the doorway.

"No, señora."

"Then how do you remember?"

"I remember." He got up and pulled his waistcoat straight. "It is the only thing I have, and it has fed me for thirty years. A notebook gets lost. I hardly ever get lost."

Perpetua spent the afternoon following him about the house without admitting to herself that she was following him. She brought him coffee, opened doors for him and stood in the doorway. It was the first time in eleven years that anything had happened in that palace, and she was ashamed of how much it interested her.

Doña Sagrario he asked about the Virgin's mantle. The lads, about the trays and where the ice was kept. Maestro Lizana, about the tower staircase and whether his knees hurt him. The bandmaster he made recite the order of the pieces, and the man recited the whole of it in order, and had one left over.

"What I don't understand," Berrueta said to him at the end of the afternoon, "is what you are doing."

"I am talking about nothing, sergeant."

"So I see, and I have been seeing it all day."

"It's that nobody lies about nothing." Duarte sat down on the steps and hugged his very long knees. "A lie is prepared. You ask a man where he was at ten and that man has spent a whole night preparing the answer. But nobody prepares what colour the ribbons were. Nobody prepares whether the pasties were cold. Trimmings come out by themselves, and that is why they are true."

"And what of it?"

"Of it, nothing. Nothing yet." He laughed. "Trimmings have to be asked for twice, sergeant, and today is Monday. Está bem. I shall come back on Wednesday."

---

Don Fabián Losilla arrived at seven, as the sergeant was leaving, with the committee's accounts folder under his arm and in a foul temper.

"I have had Señor Quevedo five hours at the inn," he said, and dropped into a chair. "Five hours for nothing. I paid his ticket, his dinner and his fare back, and the man has gone without taking out his eyeglass. What a disgrace of a village."

"It isn't your fault, don Fabián. You have put quite enough into this fair."

"I brought him."

Duarte sat down opposite and crossed his legs.

"Don Fabián, today I am not talking about robberies. Tell me about the band."

"About the band?"

"About the band. What they played and in what order."

"Well… the jota first, which I ordered. Then the usual waltz, two pasodobles, and that American thing the young ones like. And at half past eleven the habanera, which is when the mothers start looking at the clock." He passed a hand over his face. "Eight men and eighty duros, and one of them is deaf."

"And did you hear the whole of it?"

"I was in the courtyard until gone ten. And I'll tell you one thing: with the music and the crowd, last night you could hear the mail train whistle from the courtyard as though it were coming in through the gate. And the mail train, for once in its life, went through on time. It put me in mind of my father, who used to say that the day that train is punctual the world ends."

"Pois, your father was a philosopher."

"My father was a miller. Like me."

He took out his pocket watch, looked at it and put it away again. Then he opened the folder and began reading the accounts aloud, because he wanted them closed before Thursday and because he needed to talk about something else.

"Berrocal band, eighty duros. Lanterns, a hundred and ten pesetas. Sawdust for the floor, fourteen. Dressmaker, seven green sashes at nine reales—"

"Seven?" Perpetua asked. "But there were six lads."

"One spare, woman. And if one tears in the middle of the night? Nine reales is what it costs not to have to go looking for anybody."

"I see. Nine reales."

"Wine, two hundred and forty pesetas. Ice, thirty-two. And separately, since this does not go on the account because I paid for it myself: the locksmith, in August, eleven pesetas, for mending the lock of the green cabinet room, which was sticking and one day was going to give us trouble."

"You paid for that as well."

"Eleven pesetas, doña Perpetua. Don't put up a monument to me."

---

Aquilino Barbastro came up with the receipt book at eight, when there was nobody left but the three of them and the porter scrubbing the courtyard.

"Here is what there was," he said. "Seven pieces, seven lines and seven signatures. I read it out and that's an end of it."

And he read it out.

"Number one: silver incense boat, three hundred and ten grammes, doña Perpetua Anduaga. Number two: silver cross with green stones, not weighed, at the depositor's request, don Fabián Losilla. Number three: ciborium, six hundred and forty grammes, Aquilino Barbastro. Number four: tray, one thousand one hundred and eighty grammes, Aquilino Barbastro. Number five: crown, eight hundred and ninety grammes, brotherhood of the Virgin of the Cascajo. Number six: two candlesticks, one thousand five hundred and five grammes, don Rufino Cebrián. Number seven: silver and coral rosary, ninety-five grammes, doña Herminia Zaldúa."

"Five and a half kilos of silver," said Duarte.

"Five and a half kilos, and the stones apart."

"And how much is that in money?"

"In silver, little. Four thousand pesetas of metal, and you don't buy a house with that. What those pieces are worth is what they are." The silversmith shut the book slowly, with both hands. "And there is nobody here who could sell them. Everybody in this province knows them, and melting them down is throwing away ninety per cent."

Don Fabián got up heavily, picked up his folder and said good night. He could be heard crossing the courtyard wishing the porter good night. He stopped to ask after his wife, who was bad in the chest.

Perpetua stayed standing by the window. It had been a long, strange day.

The strangest thing was herself. For eleven years she had wished that nothing would ever happen in that house. Now she did not want it to end. Down below, in the wet courtyard, Rúa was dragging the bucket from one side to the other and scrubbing badly.

"Señor Cabral," she said, "have you got anything today?"

"I have got one thing I do not like at all, and I have been turning it over since teatime."

"Which is?"

Duarte took his time about answering. He had been looking at the ballroom clock through the open door, and the ballroom clock was striking half past eight.

"Doña Perpetua, I have spent thirty years asking people foolish questions. And people do not remember. People remember wrongly, they remember another day, they contradict themselves, they get flustered and they tell me 'I don't know, sir, how should I know?' That is what is normal. That is what I am paid for being able to read."

"And last night?"

"Last night they all remembered. Fourteen people. The colour of the ribbons, the cold pasties, who served the ice, what time the train whistled. Not one of them has said 'I don't remember.'" He turned to her, and there was nothing left in the long face of the good humour of the whole day. "That never happens, señora. When fourteen people remember that well, it is because somebody has helped them."

By Tuesday morning Ontanaya already had its thief, and he was a man who did not exist.

Perpetua heard it three times in the market before eleven. The first time, the lad in the green sash was tall and thin and not from the village. The second time he was short and had a moustache. The third time he was the butcher's wife's brother. That brother had been in the capital since March, and the butcher's wife took it upon herself to say so at the top of her voice in front of the whole market.

"He's two hundred kilometres away, you great fool! I'll show you the letters!"

"What I say," the baker's wife pronounced, "is that anybody could have had a sash. They were made here, at the dressmaker's, and the dressmaker's door stands open from May to September."

It was true and it was of no use. In two days the green sash had gone from being a mark to being a disguise.

In the sacristy the business was going another way.

"I rang at ten," maestro Lizana kept saying.

He had been saying it since Monday and he was no longer saying it to anybody in particular. He was folding an alb on the table and folding it badly, out of sheer vexation.

"Maestro, nobody is accusing you."

"Worse. They are feeling sorry for me." He put down the alb and turned round. "Don Rufino Cebrián has told the sergeant that the passing bell rang at twenty past ten. And then he added: poor maestro, he's going deaf on us. I am seventy-one and I can hear a pin drop in the nave."

"And what time did you ring it?"

"When the nuns struck ten. As I have been ringing it for forty-one years. I sit here, I hear the Santa Escolástica clock, I count the ten, I take the rope and I ring. There is no more science to it than that."

"Then somebody has made a mistake."

"Not somebody," said the sexton. "Everybody. The whole village was wrong on Sunday and the one who is wrong is me."

Perpetua told Duarte about it at midday, in the courtyard, while the Portuguese ate a peach with a tiny penknife.

"And the nuns?" he asked.

"The nuns are enclosed and they speak to nobody."

"Ora, they must speak to somebody."

"To the chaplain, who really is deaf. And to the turn."

Duarte laughed, threw the stone into the flower bed and did not mention the matter again all day. Perpetua was beginning to know that way he had of not insisting. He put things away like a man putting away lengths of string: without knowing what for, certain that one day they will be useful.

---

At four in the afternoon she saw the two girls together in the square and stopped dead on the pavement.

Amparo Losilla and Obdulia Rúa had brought the two green dresses out for an airing, arm in arm, very pleased with themselves. They were identical. The same sea-green stuff, the same two ribbons at the waist, the same collar. From behind and at thirty paces there was no human way of telling which was which, and from the Casino balcony there was no way either.

Perpetua thought it a pretty sight. She remembered don Fabián in front of the dressmaker saying that about the funeral skirt, and thought that there are men who do things properly and tell nobody about it.

Then she remembered the night of the ball. She had seen Amparo twice, a quarter of an hour apart and in two different places. And it had seemed to her the most natural thing in the world.

She stood there with her basket on her arm, turning over something that had no shape.

And she went on understanding nothing. At four in the afternoon on a Tuesday things do not fall into place by themselves.

---

In two days Perpetua had learned what matters to people when something is taken from them.

Doña Herminia came up on Monday and on Tuesday to ask about her rosary, which had been her mother's and was worth ninety pesetas. Don Rufino sent his maid three times about the candlesticks. Doña Sagrario asked about the crown every morning on her way out of mass, in the same words and without saying good morning. Even Aquilino, who was the last man who could afford to open his mouth, asked the sergeant twice whether anything was known about his tray.

The silversmith broke down at six, and not for the reason everybody supposed.

Berrueta had asked him for the receipt book to take to the magistrate. Aquilino Barbastro spent a quarter of an hour looking for excuses. Then he sat down on the stone bench in the courtyard and began to cry like a small boy.

"In June," he said. "It was two pieces and it was in June."

"Which two pieces?"

"A monstrance from the parish of Berrocal, which they brought me to clean, and a set of cutlery belonging to Señora de Elorriaga. I took them to the capital and pawned them, and with that I paid the apprentice and the coal. I got them back in August, both of them, and I returned them clean and in their wrappings, and nobody has ever known anything about it."

"And is it in the book?"

"The gap is in the book. In a receipt book the gap shows, sir. Two months with no entries against the commission pieces."

Duarte listened standing, without moving.

"And on Sunday night?" he asked.

"On Sunday night I was in the ballroom and in the canteen, and half Ontanaya saw me, and I didn't go near the gallery until ten past twelve, with the porter beside me, and you were behind me." The silversmith wiped his face with his sleeve. "I have pawned what belonged to other people, and I shall take that to the grave with me. But I have not stolen the Virgin's crown."

"Pois não, homem. Not you." Duarte sat down beside him on the bench. "A man who leaves the gap in his own book and does not tidy it up is a man who does not know how to steal. Está bem. Calm yourself and go and have your supper."

---

Melquíades Rúa was arrested on Tuesday at eight in the evening.

It was quick and it was ugly. The sergeant had an hour, a man and a key, and he needed nothing more.

"At half past eleven you were not in the lodge."

"I was so."

"Doña Perpetua came down at half past eleven for a key and there was nobody there."

The porter looked at Perpetua from his chair and she did not know where to put herself.

"I'd have been in the lavatory."

"For half an hour."

"I'd have been poorly."

"Melquíades." Berrueta leaned on the table with both fists. "You have one of the two keys to that cabinet room. You are the only man in this house who was absent for a good half-hour and the only one who has said three times that he was not absent. And you are the one who opened the door at ten past twelve, in front of witnesses, with the face of a man who already knew what was inside."

"That's not true."

"Tell me where you were."

Rúa sat silent for a very long while, with his cap on his knees. Perpetua watched what was happening pass across his face: the face of a man who has decided not to speak and is settling himself inside that decision.

"I wasn't anywhere."

"Then we'll be going."

They took him out through the big gate, without handcuffs, walking in front of the two men. There were people in the square. Obdulia ran out after him with her green dress still on, and her father told her from a distance to get into the house.

Don Fabián Losilla presented himself at the Guardia Civil post at half past nine that night. Perpetua went down with him, because he asked her to and because somebody from the house was needed to tell the business about the lodge without its sounding like an accusation.

"Sergeant, I have come to answer for Melquíades Rúa."

"You cannot answer for anybody."

"I can put up the money, which is the only thing I know how to put up." He laid his hat on the table. "That man has spent twenty-two years opening and shutting that gate. He has a wife who is bad in the chest and a daughter of nineteen who has been left alone in the house tonight. You tell me what is needed and I shall put it up tomorrow."

"What is needed is for him to say where he was."

"Well, he won't say, because he is pig-headed and because his father was another pig-headed man." Don Fabián took out his watch, looked at it and put it away. "Sergeant, seven pieces of silver have been stolen from me. Among them my mother's cross, which is the only thing I have of hers. And I swear to you it matters less to me than this man does."

Berrueta did not give way, naturally. Sergeants do not give way in front of a lady and a miller. But Perpetua saw him note the offer down on the sheet, slowly, and saw that when they left he shook don Fabián's hand and did not shake hers.

Before he went home, don Fabián called at the porter's house and left Obdulia twenty duros on the kitchen table. It was known in Ontanaya before midnight. The next day nothing else was talked of, and what was said was always the same: that there are gentlemen and gentlemen.

Duarte had watched the porter being taken away from the third step of the stone staircase, and there he still sat, with his elbows on his knees, when Perpetua came back from the post.

"Doña Perpetua," he said, "do me the favour of listening to this and tell me whether it isn't something to laugh at."

"I have no wish whatever to laugh."

"Nor have I. Listen all the same." He raised one hand and counted on those very long fingers. "A lad crossed the gallery, and the six lads were downstairs. Señorita Losilla was dancing in the ballroom, and Señorita Losilla was in the courtyard. Maestro Lizana rang the passing bell at ten, and he rang it at twenty past ten. The porter never left the lodge, and there was nobody in the lodge. Four things, señora. And all four of them are true and false at the same time."

"Somebody is lying."

"Everybody is lying. That is the trouble." He passed a hand over his bald head. "When one person lies, it shows. When fourteen lie, nothing shows at all, because the lie stops being a stain and becomes the colour of the wall."

"And so?"

"And so one looks for whoever painted the wall."

---

The two of them had supper alone in the kitchen, because there was nowhere else warm in the palace and because Perpetua could not be bothered to pretend.

"I am going to tell you something," she said, "and I am not going to tell the sergeant."

"Tell me."

"For two years I have been selling this house in pieces." She said it looking at her plate. "The soup tureen in March. The armchairs from the yellow drawing room, in January of last year. Two mirrors, my mother-in-law's dinner service and the clock that was in my room. I go to Berrocal on the country bus with the things in a basket under a cloth, and I come back with money for the tiles."

Duarte went on eating.

"The incense boat was the last of it," Perpetua went on. "And I took it to the exhibition so that Señor Quevedo would put a figure to it, because with a figure written down by a man from the capital a widow can go to a dealer and argue. Without that paper, widows are given whatever they are given. That is what I was doing there, Señor Cabral. It was not so that it should be seen."

"I knew that already."

"You don't know the worst of it." Perpetua pushed her plate away. "The first year I was cheated twice. The second time was over a coffee service of my mother's that was sterling and they paid me for it as though it were German silver. I cried on the country bus on the way back and I have not cried over it since. Now I know what silver weighs in the hand and I know a false stone at a handspan, and I have learned it the only way these things are learned, which is by paying for them."

"That is worth money, señora."

"It is worth nothing. What I say is worth nothing, because I am the one saying it. That is why I wanted Señor Quevedo's paper." She shrugged. "A figure written down by a man is two hundred pesetas more. The same thing said by me is a widow making a nuisance of herself."

"It is going to serve you better than you think," said Duarte.

"What do you mean, you knew already?"

"On Saturday you did not take out a watch." Duarte broke his bread. "The whole square took out their watches at once and you did not. And this house has forty-two windows and eleven curtains. And in the yellow drawing room there are four round marks on the carpet and no armchairs. Ora, señora, this is what I live on."

Perpetua sat for a moment not knowing whether she was angry.

"And you weren't going to tell me?"

"What for? You are selling what is yours. That is not a secret: it is a misfortune." He wiped his mouth with his silk handkerchief. "The secrets of this house are others and there are six or seven of them, and until Thursday they are no use to me at all. Coitada, and robbed into the bargain."

She got up for the wine and stood with her back to him longer than she needed to.

"Doña Perpetua."

"Yes?"

"The stationmaster — is he a man to be trusted?"

"He is a man who has spent twenty years writing things down in a book. If you ask him the time, he will give it to you in writing."

"Perfect." Duarte tipped his chair back and stretched his very long legs out under the table. "Tomorrow early I am going down to the station to ask him for the mail train's timetable, and the traffic book for Sunday while I am at it."

"The train timetable?" Perpetua turned round with the bottle in her hand. "What do you want the train timetable for?"

"For nothing, señora."

"Tell me."

"So as to sleep well," said Duarte. "I have gone two nights without sleeping and it is over a triviality, and trivialities grow at night. Once I have looked at it and it is nothing, I shall sleep."

The sack turned up on Wednesday at half past six in the morning, in the basin of the Cascajo fountain, in front of three women who had come for water.

It was half in the water and it was one of the committee's sawdust sacks. Inside, wrapped in a kitchen cloth, were six pieces of silver.

Aquilino Barbastro took them out one by one on the table at the Guardia Civil post, his hands shaking.

"Incense boat. Ciborium. Tray. Crown. The two candlesticks. The rosary."

"Are they all there?" Berrueta asked.

"There are six."

"I asked you whether they are all there."

"And I have answered that there are six, sergeant." The silversmith touched the pieces one by one, with two fingers, the way one touches a sick man. "Not a dent missing. They have not been cleaned, they have not been scraped, not one stone has been taken out of them. These have not been in a scrap dealer's hands. These have been somewhere dry and wrapped up."

"The cross is missing."

"The cross is missing."

By midday Ontanaya had decided what had happened and was very well pleased with its decision. The thief, obviously, had repented. The thief had seen a poor man put in the cells on his account and had not been able to sleep. The thief had kept the cross because it was the only piece with stones in it and because a man has to live on something. At the church door there were those who said it had been the Virgin.

"A thief who gives things back!" doña Herminia kept saying. "Forty years I have been behind a counter in this village and I have never seen such a thing."

"Nor will you," said Duarte.

He was behind her, very much stooped, looking at the six pieces on the table.

"You don't believe it?"

"I believe what is there, señora. And what is there is a man who took seven things and has given back six." He crouched until his eyes were level with the table. "Ora, a thief who repents gives back everything. A thief who is hungry gives back nothing. A man who gives back six and keeps one has repented of nothing at all, doña Herminia. That man has finished the job."

---

That Wednesday Duarte asked everything over again, and he asked it backwards.

He began at the end. Doña Herminia he asked first about the colour of her dress and afterwards about the pasties. The lads he asked about the ice before he asked about the trays. The bandmaster he made begin with the habanera and work backwards to the jota. Doña Sagrario he asked about the mantle and then about supper. Doña Sagrario answered him the same as on Monday and in the same words. She had been saying the same thing in the same words for sixty-six years and was not going to break in new ones at this time of day.

Perpetua followed him again, in silence. She knew by now that this was not chat.

"Don Fabián, the foolish questions again," said Duarte in the courtyard, in the middle of the afternoon. "And today backwards into the bargain, which is how they are learned."

"As you please. I have nothing better to do today than answer you."

"What colour was your daughter wearing on Sunday?"

"Green. Sea green, with two ribbons. The dressmaker here made it for her."

"Did you eat anything?"

"I don't eat at the fair. Broth at seven and nothing until Monday."

"What was the band playing when you left the courtyard?"

"The waltz. That long one, which lasts half an hour and never ends."

"And what time did the mail train whistle?"

"The mail train? Late, as always. Twenty minutes at the least. It hasn't got here on time in forty years."

"Is that so?"

"Ask anybody in this village and you'll see what they tell you."

"I have already asked nine," said Duarte, and smiled with his whole face. "And all nine tell me word for word the same as you."

Don Fabián took out his watch, looked at it and put it away. Perpetua, who was two paces off with a jug in her hand, noticed nothing in particular. Not that day.

---

The business of the porter settled itself, and from a direction nobody was looking in.

Duarte went down to the station first thing, came back at eleven with a borrowed folder under his arm and went into the coal cellar, which was the dirtiest place in the palace. He came out of it black in the face and very pleased. On the floor, behind the baskets, there were two crates set on edge, a burnt-down candle, eleven cigarette ends and a pack of cards with the ace of coins missing.

"Eleven ends of three different brands," he said. "And three men do not smoke three brands if all three of them are poor."

Berrueta came down to look and said nothing.

"Sergeant, do your men smoke out of a pouch or out of a packet?"

The sergeant went up the stairs without answering. By the afternoon he had the confession of the two guardias. They had spent the night of the ball playing brisca with the porter, in the coal cellar, instead of being where they should have been. Melquíades Rúa came out of the cells at five without saying a word. He thanked nobody and went straight off to scrub the courtyard, which had not been scrubbed for two days.

"Why didn't you say so?" Perpetua asked him.

"Because they take the key off me," he answered. "And with the key, the house. I'd rather be called a thief for two days than be out in the street at fifty-eight."

---

The crown came back from the fountain with a green stain of pond bottom on its points, and there was very nearly another arrest.

Aquilino wanted to take it to the workshop to go over the settings before returning it to the brotherhood. Doña Sagrario Elizalde planted herself in the middle of the post with the mantle over her arm.

"The crown goes to the church."

"Doña Sagrario, it is half an hour," said the silversmith, "and I shall give it back to you clean and with the settings tightened."

"Not half an hour and not half a minute. The Virgin has worn that crown for forty-one Septembers and it has never been inside a workshop in its life."

"Señora," said Duarte, "will you let me explain—"

"You least of all."

And she carried the crown off wrapped in the mantle, walking very straight, with her sixty-six years worn like a warning.

"It's green," said Perpetua from the doorway. "It will have to be cleaned all the same. I'll help you."

She said it without thinking and it came out well. Doña Sagrario stopped in the middle of the street, turned round, looked her up and down with those eyes that forgive nothing, and said nine o'clock, in the sacristy, and to bring linen cloths, because the cotton ones leave fluff.

When the old woman had disappeared round the corner, Duarte was laughing to himself.

"What are you laughing at?"

"At myself, señora. At myself, who have spent thirty years being paid to make people talk." He passed a hand over his head. "I should not get one word out of that woman in a month."

---

At eight in the evening he tried it with Amparo Losilla, in the kitchen of the palace, and the same thing happened to him.

Perpetua was there as chaperone and the sergeant was not; Duarte had asked Berrueta for half an hour and Berrueta had given it grudgingly. He spent twenty minutes and needed no more to know that there was nothing to be done there.

"Menina, I do not want to know anything bad about you."

"I was in the ballroom all night."

"Three people say yes and two say no."

"Then let them say what they like."

He asked her about the dress and about the dressmaker, about the waltz and whether it had been cold in the courtyard, and the girl answered everything in four words with her hands pushed between her knees. When he got to the garden she sat looking at the wall and answered nothing more.

"Do you know what happens when nobody will say where they were?"

"The porter came out this afternoon."

"Ora, that is true. He came out." Duarte got up slowly. "And somebody else will go in."

Amparo burst into tears and went on saying nothing. She cried for a long while, quite still and without covering her face. Then she wiped her face with her sleeve, said good night as one says it to a visitor, and went.

Duarte stayed standing by the range.

"I shall never get anything out of that girl," he said. "And it is not from being clever or from being stupid. It is because I am a man, and I am from outside, and I am wearing a suit she has never seen in her life. What she has to tell me is that she was in the dark in a garden with the boy who hands round the trays, and her father is the most respected man in this village. She would sooner let herself be arrested."

"And so?"

"And so it is lost." He looked at the fire. "In thirty years I have lost bigger things than that, doña Perpetua. One gets used to it badly."

Perpetua washed the same plate three times and said nothing.

---

The sacristy smelled of wax and of a closed cupboard.

Doña Sagrario had put the crown on one of the brotherhood's cushions, between two candles. They worked for an hour almost without speaking, the old woman on the bands and Perpetua on the points, which was where the stones were. Spirit, linen cloth and patience.

Within ten minutes Perpetua knew what she had in her hand.

She knew it by the weight, which is the first thing one learns. Then by the temperature: a real stone takes time to warm and glass takes the heat of the hand in a moment, and that had been taught her by a man in Berrocal who first cheated her and afterwards, out of sheer shame, explained how he had cheated her. And last of all she saw it. She held the point against the candle and there it was, inside the big stone at the front: a bubble. Small, round and still, like the one that sits inside a marble.

She said nothing. She went on cleaning.

"So you have seen it," said doña Sagrario.

Perpetua laid the cloth on the table.

"Yes."

"Twenty years I have been waiting for somebody to see it." The old woman did not raise her head from the bands. "And it had to be you, of course. The only one in this village who has had to learn about it."

"The only one who has had to learn about what?"

"My dear, half Ontanaya knows."

Perpetua sat down on the bench because her legs went of their own accord.

Two years. Two years getting off the country bus two stops before Berrocal, with the basket under a cloth, going round behind the market so that she should not be seen going in.

"And why has nobody told me?"

"What for? So that you should have a worse time of it?" Doña Sagrario went on rubbing. "A village can know a thing and not say it. It is the only decent thing we know how to do here, and we don't always manage it."

They were silent for a long while. Outside it began to rain slowly, the September rain that does not wet.

"It was don Emeterio who sold the stones," the old woman said at last. "Twenty years ago, in the capital. He put in Prague glass, well set, so that no silversmith would know it without taking it out of the setting. With that money he paid for the roof of this church, which was falling in, and he got a man from here out of prison with bail. The man is alive, has a shop and does not know."

"And how did you find out?"

"Because I am the one who dresses her. I dressed her before he came and I have gone on dressing her since. Two months later I changed her coif, I lifted her up to the light and I saw it just as you have seen it tonight." She put down the cloth. "I told him to his face, in this very room, standing where you are sitting. And he answered me: doña Sagrario, which would you rather have, a crown or a roof?"

"And what did you say to him?"

"Nothing. I have not answered him yet. It has been twenty years."

The two of them sat looking at the crown, which was clean now and shone tremendously in the candlelight.

"Doña Sagrario, I shall have to tell Señor Cabral about this."

"I know."

"And you don't mind?"

"I mind enormously." The old woman got up and began folding the cloths, one by one, into equal squares. "But I have been saying since Saturday that nobody from outside touches this crown, and the village is beginning to ask why. If you don't tell it, the people will tell it, and the people will tell it worse. You tell it, my dear; you know what it weighs."

Perpetua came out of the church at half past ten and did not go home.

---

In Ontanaya, at eleven at night, one does not call on anybody.

The maid opened the door looking frightened and said that don Fabián was at the mill. Perpetua answered that she had come to see the young lady and went up without being shown, because she had come into that house as a bride and knew where every door was.

Amparo was sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed.

"I have not come to ask you anything," said Perpetua, and shut the door behind her. "I have come to tell you something."

"Doña Perpetua—"

"Be quiet and listen, because this costs me something and if you interrupt me I shan't say it."

She stayed standing, because sitting down she would not have been able to.

"I sold my mother-in-law's silver soup tureen in March, in Berrocal, in a shop behind the market. I sold the armchairs from the yellow drawing room last winter. The two mirrors in the passage, the whole dinner service and the clock from my room. I go on the country bus with the things in a basket under a cloth, like somebody carrying laundry, and I get off two stops early so that I shan't be seen getting off there. I have been doing it for two years. There are weeks when the kitchen fire in that palace is not lit."

Amparo's mouth had fallen open.

"Nobody in this village knows that," said Perpetua, and hearing herself her voice shook, because she had just learned that it was not true. "Or so I believed until tonight. Now you know it from my own mouth, which is another matter. You may tell it in the square tomorrow if you like. I shall not deny it."

"I would never tell that."

"I know." She sat down at last, sideways, on the chair at the dressing table. "I did not tell you for that. I told you so that we should be equal. Until a moment ago you had something of your own and I had nothing of mine, and one cannot talk to anybody like that. Now tell me about the garden or don't tell me, but decide it knowing that I have paid you in advance."

Amparo Losilla took as long to answer as a girl of twenty-two takes to realise that she is being treated as a grown woman.

"Servando went out through the pantry," she said, "and I through the ballroom door. Behind the lime trees."

"How long for?"

"I don't know. A while."

"Amparo, a while is no good." Perpetua leaned forward. "Think slowly. Did you hear anything from there?"

"The dance. And the nuns."

"The nuns?"

"The Santa Escolástica clock. From your garden it can be heard perfectly clearly." The girl wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I counted them, because I was afraid it was later than it was. Half past nine."

"And when the two of you went back in, what was the band playing?"

"The waltz. The long one, the one that never ends. The jota had finished a good while before."

"And what time was the jota?"

"At half past nine. My father ordered that in front of the bandmaster: at half past nine, and after that whatever you like."

Perpetua sat still on the dressing-table chair of a girl of twenty-two, in a house that was not hers, at half past eleven at night. She felt a cold that did not come from the window.

---

Duarte was sitting on the third step of the stone staircase, in the dark, with his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. He did not ask her where she had been.

Perpetua sat down two steps below him and told him the whole of it, both hours, without putting it in order and beginning at the end, which is how things are told when they matter.

When she had finished, the Portuguese was silent for so long that she began to think he had fallen asleep.

"Have you nothing to say?"

"I am saying a great deal. Inside." She could hear him breathing. "Señora, do you know what you have just brought into this house?"

"An hour."

"Two." He held up two fingers in the dark, and they could be seen because there was a moon. "The nuns' half past nine and the jota's half past nine, and between the two of them there are twenty minutes. I do not get that. Nobody from outside gets that."

"It cost me something."

"It can be heard in your voice."

He stood up and shook out his overcoat, and took longer over it than he needed to.

"And the other thing. The crown." He stopped on the step. "Coitada, Señora Elizalde. That woman is not afraid of God: she is afraid of having the Virgin taken away from her."

"Señor Cabral, do you realise what it means?"

"You tell me, since it is yours."

"That there was a false piece in that case," said Perpetua, "and nobody knew it but one old woman."

Duarte did not answer at once. He went up two steps and turned round from above.

"That is exactly what I have been thinking since Monday night, when the silversmith read out seven lines and one of them said not weighed."

---

On Thursday morning the business of the dress cleared itself up, and no cleverness was required.

Obdulia Rúa told it herself, dying of shame. She had been in the ballroom from half past ten until half past eleven. She danced the whole time with the vet's son, in her sea-green dress with its two ribbons. Three people saw her from behind and all three calmly wrote Amparo's name in the sergeant's statement.

"I didn't want anybody to think anything, sir, I swear it," said the girl. "I was dancing and I hadn't done anything wrong."

"You were dancing," Duarte told her, "and you were beautiful, and whoever gave you that dress has a better eye than the dressmaker. Don't cry any more."

Servando Quiles, the moment he knew Amparo had spoken, confirmed the business of the garden in two minutes and in front of the sergeant, the nuns' bells included. He had counted them too. The only thing that worried him was that his mother should not be told.

---

He went to look for don Fabián on Thursday morning, in the mill store, where the miller was doing accounts standing on a sack.

Perpetua went with him and stayed in the doorway.

"I bring you bad news," said Duarte, very cheerfully. "Maestro Lizana went up the tower behind you on Saturday morning. He was going for some cord and he saw you working on the clock mechanism."

Perpetua opened her mouth and said nothing. Maestro Lizana was seventy-one. He had told don Fabián at the church door, in front of her and half the square, that heights and he were finished.

Don Fabián put down his pencil.

"Of course he saw me, if he saw me. I was up there half an hour and the whole village saw me from below, and the clockmaker's son was with me, and I came down black with grease. What I don't know is what you are telling me."

"Nothing. That I am telling you."

"Señor Cabral." Don Fabián stood up and put a hand on his arm, without any violence. "I brought you here and I am paying you. If you have something to ask me, ask me straight, because I have spent fifty-three years answering straight."

"Está bem. I shall ask you one thing straight. Can you gather for me tonight at ten, in the Casino ballroom, everybody who was at the dance?"

"I can."

"Then that is it."

They walked back along the road. Perpetua took two hundred metres to let it out.

"You lied to him."

"I did."

"Maestro Lizana never went up that tower. I heard him say so on Saturday."

"I know, señora. You were standing there and so was I." Duarte went along looking at the ground. "I lied to him to see his face, and he answered me with the truth, and with the whole truth, and without taking his hand off my arm. Ora, two kinds of men do that: the one who has nothing to hide and the one who hid it in plain sight."

"And which do you think he is?"

Duarte did not answer that. He was walking fast with his hands behind his back, and Perpetua found it hard to keep up.

"Doña Perpetua, tonight I need three things from you. The ballroom, chairs for seventy, and that nobody sits down before I do."

"And the third?"

"That between now and ten you say the same thing to everybody you meet. That they are not to touch their watches. Not to put them forward, not to put them back, not to set them by the tower, not to set them by mine. That they leave them exactly as they have had them since Sunday."

Seventy chairs in the ballroom, and the wall clock above the lot of them.

Perpetua had set them out herself with the kitchen girls, in four rows, facing the fireplace. By twenty to ten there was no room for anybody else, and this although they had been summoned for ten. In front of the fireplace Aquilino Barbastro had put a round table with something on it under a green cloth, and nobody knew what it was. The six lads stood against the far wall, and Sergeant Berrueta and his two men by the door, and don Isidro Quevedo, who had come back from the capital without anybody knowing who had sent for him, sat in the front row with his hat on his knees.

In the last chair at the end, very upright and in his Sunday uniform, sat don Eleuterio Naval, stationmaster of Ontanaya, with a leather satchel on his legs.

Duarte Cabral de Meneses came in last, planted himself in front of the fireplace and did not say good evening.

"Put up your hands, those of you who have touched your watch since Sunday."

Nobody put up a hand.

"Nobody? Look carefully. Not to put it forward, not to put it back, not to set it by the tower."

"Nobody touches his watch without a reason," said don Rufino Cebrián.

"Está bem." Duarte turned to the corner. "Señor Naval, what time do you make it?"

The stationmaster took out a silver watch the size of an egg and looked at it closely.

"Twenty past nine."

There was a short laugh in the third row and it died away by itself.

"I beg your pardon. Twenty past nine?"

"Railway time. This watch is set every Monday by the telegraph and I have been setting it for twenty years. If this watch is wrong, sir, then forty trains are wrong."

"Don Rufino, what time do you make it?"

"Twenty to ten."

"Doña Herminia."

"Nineteen minutes to ten."

"Aquilino."

"Twenty-one minutes to ten."

Duarte went along the whole of the first row and then the second, and wrote down not one of them. A noise of chains and watch cases had risen in the ballroom, and every time somebody gave the time they gave it more quietly. By the time he reached the fourth row there was no need for anybody to answer.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "You are all twenty minutes ahead of this gentleman. And this gentleman goes with the world."

"That will be that the gentleman's watch is wrong," said Berrueta.

"It may be." Duarte put his hands in his pockets. "And it may also be that the seventy in this room are wrong. I am not going to argue about it with you, sergeant, because there is no need. In twenty minutes that tower is going to strike ten and Señor Naval's watch is going to say twenty to. Then we shall discuss it. Until then sit down and listen to me, because I have a great deal to tell and I shall not get through it."

Berrueta stayed where he was, on his feet, and folded his arms. But he held his tongue.

---

The whole room stirred. Doña Sagrario crossed herself quickly and nobody knew why.

"On the Thursday of the fair that clock was stopped to hang the lanterns. For two days Ontanaya had no time, and on Saturday at eleven somebody started it again. And that morning, in this square, ten or twelve men took their watches out of their pockets at once and set them by the tower, one after another. I was not here and eleven people have told me about it. It is the only thing they all agree on."

"And those who did not set them?" Quevedo asked from the front row.

"A good question. Answer it for me: when your watch does not agree with the tower, what do you do?"

Quevedo opened his mouth and said nothing.

"You set it by the tower," said Duarte. "Everybody does it and everybody believes they are doing right, because the tower belongs to all of them and the watch belongs to one. A man who sees ten up there and twenty to ten in his pocket does not think the tower is wrong. He thinks his own is losing, he puts it forward and he is easy in his mind. To deceive a whole village you do not need seven hundred watches: you need two, the one on the tower and the one in the ballroom."

"Don Fabián put the ballroom one forward on Sunday morning," said Perpetua, and she heard her own voice as though it belonged to somebody else.

"In front of three people and in under a minute. And you thanked him for it, which is the beautiful part."

Berrueta had come away from the door.

"One moment. Even if every watch in this village were wrong, what does that mend for me? If everybody is wrong in the same way, everybody is still where they said they were."

"That is where I wanted to get to, sergeant. Sit down, this is a long business."

Duarte began walking up and down in front of the fireplace with his hands behind his back.

"On Sunday night, in this house, there were three clocks that nobody could touch."

The first is the mail train. The mail train is due at a quarter to ten and that night it went through at a quarter to ten. It is written in the traffic book and Señor Naval has it in that satchel, with the signature of the Berrocal stationmaster. You all heard it whistle, and in the fourteen statements the sergeant took down it says five past ten. And since in this village that train has for forty years arrived whenever it pleases, nobody thought anything of it.

Don Eleuterio Naval shifted in his chair.

"By your leave. That mail train leaves Berrocal on time and passes those points on time, and has been doing so since before I joined the service. What happens is that in this village nobody has ever been willing to believe it."

"There you are," said Duarte.

The second is the nuns of Santa Escolástica, who strike the hours inside the enclosure for themselves alone and who are heard by nobody except whoever is in the sacristy or in the garden of this house. That night there were two people in the garden and I am not going to say what they were doing, because it is nobody's business and because one of the two is the daughter of a father who is sitting there. They heard the nuns strike half past nine. When they went back in, the band was playing the waltz, and the jota had finished a good while before. And the jota was played at half past nine.

Amparo Losilla put her hand over her mouth.

"Half past nine twice," said Duarte, "with twenty minutes between the one and the other."

And he added, looking at the floor:

"And I did not get this. That girl would never have answered me, and she was right not to. It was got out of her by the mistress of this house, alone, on Wednesday at eleven at night, and it cost her something."

Seventy heads turned at once. Perpetua Anduaga was standing at the back of the ballroom, by the door, with her hands clasped in front of her, and she understood that if she waited one second more she would not be able to.

"I told Señorita Losilla that I have spent two years selling this house in pieces," she said.

She was heard clearly, because nobody was breathing.

"My mother-in-law's soup tureen, the armchairs from the yellow drawing room, the mirrors in the passage, the dinner service and my clock. In Berrocal, in a shop behind the market. I get off the bus two stops early so that I shan't be seen getting off there. I told her so that she could tell me her own thing without being beneath me, and I say it here because I would rather say it myself tonight than hear it on Sunday coming out of mass."

Doña Sagrario Elizalde, from the third row, said that this was very well said. She said it out loud and without anybody having asked her anything, and there were two or three who said the same under their breath.

Duarte waited for the noise to die.

"Ora," he said. "I go on."

And the third is maestro Lizana.

The sexton straightened up in his chair as though he had been struck with a stick.

"This gentleman rings the passing bell when he hears the nuns strike ten, and he has been doing it for forty-one years, and since Monday this village has been telling him he has gone deaf. Maestro, stand up and let them say it to your face."

"There's no need," said Lizana, and stood up.

"On Sunday you rang at your proper time."

"At ten."

"At ten. And since Sunday, every night, at ten. And every night this village says he is late." Duarte turned to the chairs. "The one man in Ontanaya who has given the right time for five days running is the one man they have decided is wrong. Sit down, maestro, and forgive us."

---

"And now the important part, which is not the clocks."

Duarte stopped in the middle and stood silent for a moment, which was a thing he never did.

"People get things wrong. They always get things wrong, and I eat off that. But people get things wrong each in their own direction. One man puts on ten minutes too many, another a quarter of an hour too few, another remembers last year, and another forgets and says 'I don't know, sir, how should I know?' That is a village remembering a night. That is what is normal and that is what I expect to find when I come in at a door."

On Sunday that did not happen. On Sunday fourteen people got it wrong. All fourteen the same, all fourteen by twenty minutes, and all fourteen in the same direction.

He turned slowly towards the front row.

"Gentlemen, nobody is wrong in formation. When fourteen people are wrong in the same way, they have not made a mistake: they have been drawn up in line. And the man who draws up fourteen people is not a thief who happened to be passing. He is somebody from this house who spent a week placing them."

"That is a manner of speaking," said Berrueta.

Duarte did not answer him. He opened one hand in the air, asking for silence, and in the silence came what he had been waiting twenty minutes for.

The tower of Ontanaya struck ten.

All ten strokes were heard, because nobody moved. When the last one died away, don Eleuterio Naval spoke from his corner without being asked, with the silver watch open in the palm of his hand.

"Twenty to ten."

Sergeant Berrueta sat down on the chair next to him, which belonged to one of the lads, and the lad remained standing.

"You have spent five days living twenty minutes ahead of the world," said Duarte, "and nobody has died of it."

He waited for people to finish looking at one another.

"It is a way of working, sergeant, and I shall show it to you in four lines."

He raised his hand and counted on his fingers.

"A lad crossed the gallery a little before five past ten, and not one of the six lads went up. The committee ordered seven green sashes for six men. It is in the dressmaker's bill, I read it out loud on Monday and doña Perpetua was here. Nine reales for a green sash to stop being a person."

Señorita Losilla was in the ballroom and was in the courtyard, and three people swore to her name looking at another girl's back. The committee paid for two identical dresses. One was given away in front of half the square, and it was very well given, and the girl cried and so did her father, and that does not get out of my head that what was bought that day was two green dresses at a ball with seven hundred people at it.

That night the band played in the reverse of the written order, because somebody had it changed so that the old people should hear the jota early. So that whoever was counting the hours by the music counted wrong as well.

And the door of the cabinet room was opened with a key and nobody forced it. There were two keys and two men who did not go in alone. And there is a line in the committee's accounts, separately, which does not go on the account because a private person paid for it out of his own pocket: the locksmith, in August, eleven pesetas, for mending the lock of the green cabinet room, which was sticking and one day was going to give us trouble.

The ballroom had gone quiet.

"Five things," said Duarte. "The tower clock, the ballroom clock, the extra sash, the extra dress and the lock in August. And all five, gentlemen, were done in front of the whole village, out loud, and all five were thanked for."

---

"I am not looking for a cunning man," he said. "Cunning men are easy, because they do things in secret, and a great deal of noise is made in secret."

I am looking for a man who that week deceived nobody, bought nobody and threatened nobody. I am looking for a man who did every person in this village a favour.

He went up the tower so that an old man of seventy-one should not have to. He mended the ballroom clock so that you should not have to ask the time. He paid for a spare sash in case one tore in the middle of the night. He gave a dress to a poor girl so that she should not go to the ball in mourning. He changed the band's order so that the old people could get to bed in time. He paid out of his own pocket for the lock of a door that was not his. And at midnight, when the ball ended and the porter was dead on his feet, he carried out all the committee's lumber himself and took it through the gate, and the porter said God reward you.

Duarte stopped.

"And he brought me here first class and paid my fare without arguing. Not to guard anything: he told me so to my face on Saturday, in front of doña Perpetua, and I thought it was charming. So that I should be seen in the ballroom, in my pale suit, bowing to the ladies." He passed a hand over his lapel. "I was the most expensive green sash at this fair, gentlemen. And I put it on myself."

Nobody moved.

"And there is one last thing, and it is the one that kept me two nights without sleeping."

He went over to the round table and took off the green cloth.

Underneath were the six pieces, in a row and in the same order they had had in the case. The candlesticks, the ciborium, the tray, the crown, the rosary and the incense boat. And in the middle, in the place that belonged to it, the velvet cushion. Alone. With the mark of the cross still in the velvet.

"Señor Barbastro has lent them to me for half an hour," said Duarte. "Seven places and six pieces. Look at it well, for it is the whole case."

This man took seven pieces and has given back six. Without a dent, without a scratch, without taking one stone out of them, wrapped in a kitchen cloth. A thief who repents gives back all seven. A thief who is hungry gives back none. A man who gives back six and keeps one was not stealing, gentlemen.

He looked towards the front row.

"He was hiding one."

And the receipt book says which. Seven lines and seven signatures. Six of them give the weight in grammes, noted by Señor Barbastro with his scales. And number two says: silver cross with green stones, not weighed, at the depositor's request.

On Monday morning Señor Quevedo was coming from the capital, with his eyeglass, to value the seven pieces for the catalogue. Free of charge and at the committee's invitation.

Duarte turned right round.

"And there is a person in this room who spent the whole of that night sitting on the third step of the stone staircase, which is the only place in this house from which the courtyard, the ballroom door and the mouth of the gallery can all be seen at once."

Doña Perpetua, at what time did you stop seeing don Fabián in the courtyard?

"At twenty to ten," she answered.

"And did you see him again?"

"Later. I couldn't tell you when."

"At twenty to ten by this house's clock." Duarte turned towards the stationmaster's corner. "Which by that watch over there was twenty past nine."

Don Fabián, in five days you have not once asked me about your cross. Doña Herminia has asked me nine times about a rosary worth ninety pesetas.

Don Fabián Losilla was in the second row, with his hands on his knees. Perpetua was watching him and so she saw it: he did not go red or get up or say anything. He took out his pocket watch, opened it and looked at the time.

He did it every few minutes. He had been doing it all week.

"That," said Duarte, very low. "That is what I have been waiting five days for. Show it to the sergeant."

"It is a watch," he answered.

"It is the only watch in this room that is right." Duarte did not come closer and did not raise his voice. "The whole of Ontanaya has been twenty minutes ahead for five days, and you have not, because you sell flour and flour goes by train, and a man who works with the railway cannot afford a watch that lies. You are the only man in this village who has known what time it was at every moment. That night, knowing the time was impossible."

Berrueta took two steps and did not quite touch him.

"And one thing more, which belongs to my trade and not to yours, sergeant. I asked this gentleman the same foolish question twice, with two days between, and I ask this room to hear both answers, because doña Perpetua heard both."

On Monday afternoon, talking about the band, without my asking him anything:

Duarte shut his eyes.

"And the mail train, for once in its life, went through on time. It put me in mind of my father, who used to say that the day that train is punctual the world ends."

And on Wednesday, when I did ask him:

"The mail train? Late, as always. Twenty minutes at the least. It hasn't got here on time in forty years."

He opened his eyes.

"The second one you answered me thinking. The first one escaped you, talking about your father, and it was true. That train went through on time, don Fabián, and of everybody in this house the only one who knew it was you."

---

Don Fabián Losilla got up slowly and put his watch away.

He looked at his daughter, who was crying without a sound in the row behind, and then he looked at Perpetua, and then he looked at the floor.

"I pawned it six years ago," he said. "In the capital. A bad year of wheat came and then a worse one, and I thought I should have it back in the spring. The copy cost me eighty pesetas and it is well made. My mother is buried with a rosary worth a real and with that cross in the portrait in the parlour."

"Don Fabián—"

"Let me finish, doña Perpetua, because I shall not say it twice." He did not raise his voice. "When the committee approved the catalogue, I approved it. I wrote the letter to Señor Quevedo myself. And a week later I realised what I had done, and by then I could not withdraw the cross without somebody asking why."

"You could have told the truth," Berrueta observed.

"Yes, sir. I could." He put his hat on and took it off again, because he was indoors. "In this village I am the one who puts up the money. I have been the one who puts up the money for twenty-two years. The day it is known here that my mother's cross is glass, this is finished, and there is no more fair, no more band, no more exhibition and no more dresses for anybody."

He stood still a moment, looking for something more to say, and found it.

"I gave the six back on Tuesday night. I did that too."

"I know," said Duarte. "Nobody ever doubted it."

He went out between the two men, without handcuffs, and at the door he stopped and told the porter that the business of the money still stood, that he should come to the mill for it. Melquíades Rúa began to cry against the doorpost and he was not the only one.

---

The cross never turned up. Don Fabián did not say where it was and nobody pressed him very hard, because a cross of glass and base silver is of no interest to a magistrate.

Duarte left on Saturday on the country bus, with his case and his turned suit, after taking half his fee from the fair committee and renouncing the other half aloud, which was the half his client had put up.

"Doña Perpetua, the incense boat."

"What about the incense boat?" she asked.

"That Señor Quevedo has gone back to the capital, and that a paper signed by him is worth two hundred pesetas more at a dealer's." He turned up the collar of his overcoat. "I have left you the note on the mantelpiece. Three hundred and ten grammes and a date. Haggle with that in your hand and apologise for nothing."

"Señor Cabral." Perpetua clasped her hands. "About the crown."

"I know nothing about the crown."

"I told you about it on Wednesday."

"And I forgot it this morning, which is a thing I am very good at and do not charge extra for." Duarte got on to the step and ducked so as not to hit his head. "I came to look for seven pieces of silver, señora, and I found six. The rest belongs to a woman of sixty-six who has kept it quiet for twenty years, and since Wednesday it belongs to you as well, and the two of you will know what to do with it better than I should. If you want a piece of advice: when they carry that Virgin out in September, look at her face and not at the crown."

The bus pulled away and Perpetua was left standing in the square.

Above her, the dial of the tower clock had been taken down again, because the clockmaker's son had gone up that morning to set it right once and for all. Ontanaya was back to not knowing what time it was, and nobody seemed to mind very much.

When they put it up, three days later, the village spent a whole week complaining that the tower clock was slow.