Saga ⁓ the island carved in wood: Teide rising from the sea inside a ring of glyphs

Episode 31

Guagua

Icod de los Vinos, and the road down to it. The night of the thirteenth of March, 2028.

Welcome back to Nivaria. Slow news from a quiet island. This is Caitlyn Meeks. Thanks for being here.

There were forty liters of diesel in the back of the Santana, in four red plastic jugs with the caps taped, and Mateo Reyes had been saving them since September for a night exactly like this one.

He had not told anybody at Querencia they were there. That was not like him and he knew it was not like him, and he had done it anyway, in October, when the co-op at Icod went to two hundred liters a week for the whole valley and a man he had known for six years looked at the ground while he said so. Mateo had put four jugs behind the spare wheel under a tarpaulin and a sack of onions, and had gone on being the person who lent people things.

He drove with both hands. The wipers on a Series III do what they can.

"Six," Linnea said.

"Six." He looked at the clock on the dash, which had not worked since 2019, and then at his own wrist. "Six minutes. That's four in a row at six."

"Helvete."

"It's good. Six is good."

"You don't know what six is."

"I do not know what six is," he agreed. "Six sounds like a lot of minutes to me. I am very happy about six."

She laughed, and then stopped laughing about a third of the way in, and put her hand flat on the top of the door where the window seal leaked, and breathed out through her teeth, and Mateo started counting.

He counted out loud because it was the only thing he had. He was a man who had spent his adult life putting a pulse under other people's evenings, and it turned out that this was the same job. He gave her a slow one, slower than her breathing, so she had somewhere to come down to. One. Two. Three. Four. The rain came off the laurels in sheets where the road ran under them. One. Two. Three. Four. At El Tanque the streetlights were off, all of them, and had been since the autumn, and the town went past as a smell rather than a place ⁓ woodsmoke and wet stone and somebody's goats.

Forty-eight seconds. He did not say the number out loud.

Below El Tanque the road drops. It drops the whole way, in switchbacks, through the banana terraces and out from under the cloud, and on a clear night you come round the shoulder and the whole coast is laid out under you with Icod in the middle of it burning like a dropped handful of coins.

There were nine lights on in Icod de los Vinos.

He counted them, because he was already counting, and he wished immediately that he had not.

"How many," Linnea said, without opening her eyes.

"I wasn't counting."

"Mateo."

"Nine."

"Vale," she said. And then, in Swedish, something short that he had never asked her to translate and had a fair idea about.

They passed one house with its whole inside out in the road. A sofa, a chest freezer, a stack of dining chairs roped together, a child's bicycle, all of it going gray in the rain, all of it perfectly good. That had started in the summer and by March you did not remark on it. People got a flight or they got a place on a boat, and what they could not take they put in the road, and for about a week the road was a shop and then it was just the road again.

And at the bend above the school there was a light on in a doorway, and a woman standing in it in a dressing gown, watching them go by, because a vehicle moving at night was a thing now. She raised her hand. Mateo raised his off the wheel.

That was the last person they saw before the hospital.

The Hospital del Norte took nineteen years to build. This is a real fact about the north of Tenerife and everybody there says it the way you say a family member's age, with a small pause first. Nineteen years of foundations and a fence and a crane that did not move, and then all at once a hospital, white and enormous and full of light, sitting up on its terraces above Icod with a car park for four hundred cars.

There were eleven cars in it.

The main entrance was locked. A sheet of A4 in a plastic sleeve, taped up at eye height, in three languages, said URGENCIAS with an arrow, and somebody had drawn the arrow on afterward in marker because the printer had done it wrong.

Mateo took the corner at walking pace with his headlights sweeping the glass and there was nothing behind the glass at all, no desk, no chairs, no light, just the reflection of his own truck going by in a building the size of a stadium.

At urgencias there was a folding table in the doorway and a young man behind it in a fleece.

He came out into the rain with a thermometer gun and did Linnea first, through the window, and then Mateo, and then he stood back and did not touch either of them, and said, "Bueno. Vale. In you come. Don't shake my hand, I'm not being rude."

"I wasn't going to shake your hand."

"People do it anyway. It's automatic. Boots in the tray."

The tray was a builder's mixing tray inside the door with an inch of water in it that smelled hard enough to make Mateo's eyes go. They stood in it. Everybody stood in it. There was a mop leaning on the wall beside it that had clearly been in use all night and a hand-written sign above the alcohol dispenser that said NO QUEDA and under that, in different handwriting, SÍ QUEDA, PREGUNTA. There is none left. There is some left, ask.

"She's in labour," Mateo said.

"I can see that."

"Six minutes."

"Then we have time and you should stop driving like that." The young man was about twenty-two. His fleece said CELADOR across the back and had somebody else's name inked out at the collar. "I'm Airam. I'll take you up. The elevator works, mostly. If it stops, it stops for about a minute and then it thinks better of it."

"And if it doesn't think better of it?"

"Then we're in the elevator together and you'll get to know me." He was already walking. "Maternidad is on two. Cande's up there. Cande is the whole thing, so be nice to her."

Linnea said, "Is there a doctor?"

"There is one doctor," said Airam, "and she is downstairs, and she is very good, and you do not want to meet her tonight. That's not me being funny. That's the actual situation."

Here is what the second floor of that hospital was, in March of 2028.

It was a corridor a hundred meters long with the lights on at one end. Somebody had gone down it a long time ago and pulled every third fluorescent tube out of its fitting to make the rest last, so the light came in bands, bright and dim and bright, and you walked through it the way you walk under trees.

There were fourteen delivery rooms. Thirteen of them were dark and had their doors open and their beds stripped, and a chair had been carried into each one and put in the middle of the floor, which Mateo did not understand and did not ask about for another four hours, when Airam explained that it was so nobody would go in there to sleep.

Taped to the wall by the fire door there was a laminated evacuation notice with the date printed on it, three weeks old, showing the muster points for a north-flank event. Next to it there was a vending machine with its front smashed and one packet of cookies still in the spiral, which nobody had taken because nobody could reach it and nobody had wanted to be the one to reach it.

The fourteenth room had the light on.

Candelaria Travieso was sixty-three years old and had been a matrona for thirty-nine of them, and had retired in the November, and had come back in the January when the last of the day staff went out on a plane from Los Rodeos with two suitcases and a cat basket. She was small and square and she had her hair up off her neck with a pen through it. She was wearing scrubs the color of nothing at all, washed to gray, and over them a cardigan that was very obviously her own, off a chair in her own house, and she had the sleeves pushed up past the elbow.

She looked at Linnea for perhaps four seconds before she said anything, and in those four seconds she got most of it.

"Right," she said. "You're not in a hurry, whatever he told you in the car. Take that coat off. Not the sweater, keep the sweater, it's cold in here and it's going to get colder. What's your name, love?"

"Linnea."

"Linnea. Cande." She did not put a hand out. Nobody put a hand out that year. "And you're the father, and you're going to be extremely useful to me tonight, and the first useful thing you can do is stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm about to tell you something."

"Are you about to tell me something?"

"I am about to tell you that this is going to take all night," said Cande, "and that it is going completely normally, and that the two of those go together and always have." She was moving while she talked, and the moving was the thing to watch: she did not hurry once, and she did not stop once, and everything she picked up was already where her hand was going. "First one?"

"First one," said Linnea.

"Then it'll be slow and you'll hate the middle of it. Everybody hates the middle of it. Sit up here."

Mateo stood in the door with the rain still coming off his jacket onto the floor and said the first stupid thing of the night, which was, "Are you on your own?"

Cande did not look up.

"There's Airam. There's Doctora Betancort downstairs and she'll come up if I call her and I am not going to call her. There's Chelo on the desk until six and after six there isn't." She got the cuff round Linnea's arm and started the pump by hand. "So that's four of us and a building. Which is one more than we had on Tuesday. Sit up, love, all the way up, I know."

Somewhere below them, three floors down and through the concrete, a machine changed its mind about something.

Every light in the room went out.

Mateo heard his wife's breath go in and stay in. He heard rain on a window he could not see. He heard, from the dark corridor behind him, the small liquid click of a door on a closer.

Then the lights came back, and with them came the sound that he would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life, which was every machine on the floor of a modern hospital booting up at once ⁓ forty little chimes, each one cheerful, each one in a slightly different key, spread out down a hundred meters of corridor like a music box being opened in another room.

"Ay, qué bonito," said Cande, to nobody, without any expression whatsoever. Oh, how lovely.

She wrote the time on the back of her hand in biro and carried on.

The third time it happened she stopped what she was doing, waited in the dark with her hand where it had been, and said, conversationally, "Does anybody have a light in their car?"

Mateo had a light in his car.

He went down the corridor at a speed he was not proud of and took the stairs because he did not want to know Airam that well yet, and came out into the ambulance bay into rain going sideways under the canopy.

The parking lot was black and shining and had eleven cars in it. Out past the wall the town went down the hill in the dark, and the rain was coming off the sea in long gray walls you could watch arrive, and there were nine lights on down there and one of them moved, which meant somebody was carrying it.

The Drago was down there too. Two streets up from the church, behind the wall, in its own square with its own name on a sign: the oldest living thing on that side of the island and nobody has ever settled its age, and Mateo could not see it and knew exactly where it was, the way you know where a person is in a dark house.

He looked at it for about three seconds. Then he got the light out of the truck.

It was a two-meter LED bar with a V-mount battery, and it had come off a cave party at El Médano in 2026, and it was made for making four hundred people feel a particular way about a bassline. He had bought it secondhand off a lighting man in Los Cristianos who was going home to Naples. It did every color there is.

He carried it up the stairs on his shoulder with the battery under his arm and set it on the bed rail and clamped it and stood there with the little rubber remote in his hand, and the room went magenta, and then a green like the inside of an aquarium, and then a deep hot orange, and then a pink, and Cande said nothing at all and waited, and Linnea, from somewhere down at the end of a contraction, said, "Not the pink."

"I'm going to white."

"Go to white, Mateo."

He went to white. It was a warm white, because he had never in his life owned a cold one, and it came down on the bed and on the gray scrubs and on his wife's hands, and it was, by an accident that had nothing to do with anybody, the best light that had been in that building for a year.

"That," said Cande, "will do."

"It's four hours at half."

"Then we'll want it in four hours." She did not look up. "Turn it down to half."

The middle of it was as bad as she said it would be.

It went from something Linnea was doing to something that was being done to her, and it stopped being interesting to her, and she went quiet in the way that is not a good quiet, and at about half past eleven she said, to the ceiling, in the flat voice of a woman making an administrative report, "I have changed my mind about this."

"Bueno," said Cande.

"I'm serious."

"I know. Everybody changes their mind here. There's a spot on that ceiling and they all find it." She got a hand under Linnea's shoulder. "Up. On your feet. You'll hate me for a bit."

"I already hate you."

"Good. Up."

So they walked her, up and down eleven meters of a room, Cande on one side and Mateo on the other, in a warm white light, at one in the morning, in a building where thirteen doors stood open on stripped beds. And when it came, they stopped, and Linnea put her forehead on Mateo's collarbone and her hands somewhere in his shirt and hung there, and he counted.

One. Two. Three. Four.

He had a click track in his head that had been there since he was nineteen. It was the only genuinely useful thing about him that night and he used it for six hours. He never went faster when she went faster. That was the whole trick and nobody taught it to him.

Somewhere in there the building moved.

It was not much. It was the sort of thing that happens in the north-west of that island every few years and had been happening two or three times a week since Christmas: a long soft shove from underneath, one second, maybe two, and the window frames talked, and the empty bed rails down the corridor all rang at once like somebody walking past a fence with a stick.

Nobody in the room said anything about it.

Cande put her hand on the wall and left it there until it was over, the way you put a hand on a horse. Then she took it off and said, "Right. Again. Up the room."

At twenty past one Airam put his head round the door and said, "Mateo. Two minutes. I need arms."

He looked at Linnea. Linnea, who was somewhere else, said, "Go."

It was a woman of ninety-one on a gurney in the corridor on the first floor. She had come in on the Friday with a broken hip and there was nobody in the building who could operate on a broken hip and there was nobody at her house to take her back to, and so she had been in the corridor since the Friday, and the trolley was needed.

They moved her on the sheet. Airam counted it, one two three, and they lifted, and she weighed almost nothing, and she made a small noise, and Airam said, "Ya está, mi niña, ya está," which is what you say to a child and what you say to a woman of ninety-one, and there is no third thing.

She got hold of Mateo's wrist when he straightened up. She had a grip like a latch.

"Tú," she said. "Where have you been."

"I've been away," said Mateo.

"You've been away."

"I'm here now."

She held on. He stood there and let her, and she looked at his face for a while and did not find in it whatever she was looking for, and it did not matter, and she went on holding his wrist.

He stayed four minutes. He had a fair idea of what four minutes was that night.

Then Airam said his name, quietly, once, and Mateo got his hand free a finger at a time and went back to the stairs.

Halfway up he stopped, on the half-landing, in the dark, with both hands on the rail, and did not make a sound, and then went up.

The store cupboard was on two, at the dark end, and it was called ALMACÉN 2 and it had a padlock hasp with no padlock in it.

"Gloves," Mateo said. "Can I have gloves? I keep putting my hands on things."

"Sure." Airam had the door open and a box down off the shelf before Mateo finished the sentence, and shook a pair out, and held them out to him at arm's length, and he did it the way you hand somebody a beer. There was nothing in it at all. "Medium. You're medium."

Mateo took them.

Then he saw the door.

There was a number on the inside of the store cupboard door, written in marker on the paint, and above it four numbers crossed out, each one bigger than the one below it, going up the door like a tide line. The top one was from December. The bottom one was tonight's and it had been written that afternoon.

He stood and did the arithmetic, which is a thing a man can do very fast when he does not want to.

"How long does that have to last?"

"Nobody's told us," said Airam.

Mateo looked at the pair in his hand for a moment. Then he put them back in the box, and folded the flap down, and put the box back on the shelf where it had been, and turned the box so the label faced out, which was not necessary.

Airam watched him do all of it and did not say one word, and did not stop him, and did not make a face, and afterward closed the cupboard door.

That was the entire conversation and both of them understood it completely.

Mateo went back to room fourteen and put his hands on his wife with nothing on them, for five more hours, and neither of them ever mentioned it, that night or afterward, to each other or to anybody.

At two in the morning Airam came and found him again and said, "You have fuel in that truck."

It was not a question. There is no hiding four jugs from a man who has watched you park.

They went down together. The generator house was a shed of its own out past the ambulance bay with a bunded tank beside it and a stencilled number on the tank and, taped to the tank in a plastic sleeve gone milky with rain, a phone number and a name.

"That's the depot at the port," Airam said. "That's Ramón. He's a good man and he answers every time, and every time he says the same thing, which is that there's a boat coming."

"Is there a boat coming?"

"There is always a boat coming." Airam wiped his face with his sleeve, which did nothing. "It's a hospital. We're on the list. We're quite high on the list."

Mateo stood in the rain and looked at the tank.

"How much do you burn?"

"Twenty-five, thirty an hour, the way we're running it. Which is with half the building off." Airam said the next part quickly, because he had worked out where this was going and wanted to get in front of it. "So forty liters is ninety minutes. It's nothing. It's an hour and a half. Don't. You've got a wife up there and a mountain to go up in the morning and that jug is how you do it."

"Ninety minutes," said Mateo.

"Ninety minutes. It's nothing."

"Bueno," said Mateo, and went and got the first jug.

They did it with a funnel out of the workshop and a flashlight held in Airam's teeth, in the rain, at ten past two in the morning, and it took a long time because the funnel was the wrong funnel, and the diesel came up the neck and went over Mateo's hands and got into a cut on his knuckle he did not know he had, and stung, and the smell of it stayed on him through everything that came after, so that for the rest of his life he could not fill a tank without being, for a second, in that car park.

The fourth jug he tipped up on his shoulder to get the last of it, and stood there holding an empty red plastic jug in the rain outside a hospital, and did not feel anything about it in either direction.

They went back in through the bleach.

The mains went for good at twenty-eight minutes past two and it did not come back.

Down in the guts of the building the generator picked up what it had been told to pick up, which was the operating rooms, urgencias, the elevators, the cold store, and the lights on the stairs.

Maternidad on the second floor was not on that list.

Somebody had made that decision, at some point, on paper, and whoever it was had been completely right, and the corridor outside room fourteen went dark from one end to the other and stayed dark. The banded light was gone. The thirteen open doors stopped being doorways and became nothing at all.

Inside room fourteen there was a two-meter party light off a beach rave, on half, doing a warm white.

The monitor on the trolley by the bed went down with everything else, and the belt came off, and Cande put the whole thing in the corner of the room the way you put a chair out of the way, and it stopped existing.

"So," she said. "Old-fashioned it is."

She went into her own bag ⁓ not a hospital bag, a canvas shopping bag with a supermarket's name on it that had stopped existing about the same time as everything else ⁓ and came out with a thing made of turned wood, about the length of a hand, hollow, flared at one end into a small bell and flat at the other into a disc.

Mateo, who had spent eleven years of his life holding microphones up to things, said, "What is that."

"It's a Pinard." She was warming the flat end against her palm. "It's what I trained on. Everything else in this building needs a socket."

She put the bell against Linnea's belly, low and to the left, and put her ear to the flat disc, and went absolutely still, and the room went still around her, and she listened for about fifteen seconds with her eyes on the middle distance.

Then she straightened up and said, "She's fine. She's completely fine. Do you want to hear her?"

Mateo said yes.

He got down on his knees beside the bed because that was the height it needed to be, and Cande put the wood where it went and moved his head with two fingers on his jaw, the way you aim somebody, and said, "Don't hold it. Just lean."

And he leaned, and he heard it.

It came up through the wood very small and very fast, doubled, a ta-tup, ta-tup, ta-tup going along at about a hundred and forty, hurrying, like something small running on grass. Underneath it, slower and further off, was Linnea's own, which he had heard a thousand times with his ear on her chest and had never once heard from underneath. And under both of them was the whole rest of her, the sea-sound a body makes, gut and blood and breath, the room tone of a person.

He had recorded water in caves and wind in a dead hotel and the inside of a cistern at El Fraile with the microphone hung down on a cable. He knew what a resonant space sounded like. He had never in his life been inside one.

His own pulse came up in his ear against the wood, loud and dull and much too slow, and he could hear all three of them at once, and he stopped being able to do anything about his face.

Nobody in that room looked at him. Cande found something to do with her hands and Linnea put one of hers on the back of his head and left it there.

"How old is this?" he said, eventually, into the wood. "The design. How old is it."

"About two hundred years," said Cande. "It hasn't changed. There isn't anything to change."

Mateo did not say anything to that, then or ever.

At a quarter to three she said it was time and Linnea said several things in Swedish, and after that it went fast, the way Cande had said it would, because everything in that night that anybody had been afraid of turned out to be in the corridors and none of it turned out to be in the bed.

It was work. It was the hardest work Mateo ever watched anybody do and he was four inches from it and he could not help with any of it. What he could do was hold a tempo, so he held one, low and slow and out loud, in Spanish, and he did not go faster when she went faster, and at some point she stopped hearing the words and only had the beat, which was the point of it and always had been.

Cande's hands did what they had done nine thousand times.

"Otra vez," she said. "Y otra. Ya está la cabeza. There's the head. Linnea. Look at me. Not the ceiling. Me."

Mateo said, "La guagua ⁓"

Cande's eyes came up for half a second, sharp, because guagua on that island means the bus and nothing else, and it took her the width of a breath to reroute it, and something went over her face that was almost a laugh in a way that did not break her rhythm at all.

"Chileno," she said.

"Chileno."

"Bueno. Vamos con la guagua." Let's go with the baby, then.

She was born at fourteen minutes past three in the morning on the fourteenth of March, 2028, into a pair of gloved hands, under a light that had been bought to make people dance, in a room where the only piece of working equipment older than her mother was made of wood.

She came out furious and she said so.

Cande put her straight up onto Linnea's chest, hot and gray-pink and shouting, and Linnea got both hands on her and made a sound that was not a word, and then found one.

"Helvete," she said.

She said it very quietly and it meant exactly what it meant.

There was no clean linen in that building. There had not been any since the contract laundry in La Laguna stopped sending the van in the autumn, and what there was got washed in the hospital's own kitchen by whoever was on and hung in a physiotherapy room on two lines and a set of parallel bars.

So Cande went to a shelf and came back with a beach towel.

It was one of a bale of them that had come up from a shop on the Icod front that had shut in January, given by the owner to the hospital because he was going to Málaga and could not sell them and did not want to put them in the road. They were the sort of thing that is sold to people who are on holiday. They were bright, and thin, and printed.

The one that came off the top of the pile was yellow, and it had, printed across the whole of it in green and brown, a map of the island of Tenerife.

Cande dried her with it, briskly, the way you dry a plate, and then wrapped her in it and gave her back, and did not remark on it, because she had done this four times that month and had run out of ways to find it interesting.

Nobody in room fourteen said anything about it at all.

Consuelo Ruiz had been on the admissions desk of one hospital or another in the north of that island for thirty-one years. Everyone called her Chelo. She came upstairs at twenty to five with a folder under her arm and a ballpoint clipped to the neck of her sweater, and she had put her lipstick on at some point in the night, which she did every night, alone, in a building with four people in it.

"Buenas," she said. "Congratulations. I need to be dull at you for ten minutes."

"Be dull," said Linnea.

The folder had a form in it. It had several forms in it. Chelo went through them at the foot of the bed with the folder braced on her forearm, in the light of a party bar off a beach rave, asking questions in a completely level voice.

Full names. Both. Spelled out.

Nationalities. Chilean. Swedish.

Address. Chelo wrote Querencia de los Helechos and then said, "Is that a street or is that the whole thing?"

"That's the whole thing."

"Then that's what it is." She wrote it.

Date and hour of birth. The fourteenth of March, 2028, at 03:14. Sex. Weight, which Cande gave from a spring scale in a canvas sling that had been in that building longer than any of them.

"And the name," said Chelo.

Mateo looked at Linnea, because they had four names between them going into that room and he did not know which one had won.

"Saga," said Linnea.

Chelo's biro stopped.

"Saga," she said. "Con ese. Como suena." With an S. Like it sounds.

"Like it sounds."

"That's not a name I've written before." She wrote it. "What does it mean?"

"It's Swedish," said Linnea. "It means story."

Chelo looked at the form for a second.

"Bueno," she said, and moved on, because she was a professional, and she carried on down the page.

Then she got out the card.

It was a stiff white card the size of a postcard, printed with two boxes and a line of small type. Chelo set it on the bed table with an ink pad beside it, and Cande came round and did the actual work, because a newborn's foot is not an object that co-operates.

She took the foot in two fingers and rolled the sole over the pad, heel to toe, and pressed it onto the card, and the toes curled and it came out as a smudge with nothing in it. She wiped it, and did it again, and got most of the arch and none of the heel. The third one took.

It was about the length of Mateo's thumb.

Then Chelo said, "Mamá. Left thumb," and Linnea gave her hand over, and her thumb went on the pad and onto the card in the box beside it, and the two prints sat there next to each other in the same ink, four minutes apart, at nineteen minutes past five in the morning.

Then the bracelets, two of them, the same number printed on both, one round an ankle and one round a wrist.

"That's it," said Chelo. "That's you done. That's her in the world."

Mateo said, "Where does it go?"

"It goes to the Registro Civil." Chelo squared the papers off on her forearm. "In the ordinary way of things it goes from the computer at my desk down to the registry and neither of us thinks about it again. My computer has not been able to do that since the eleventh of November." She said the date the way you say a date you have said a great many times. "It isn't the cable. Everybody thinks it's the cable. It's that the company that maintained it stopped answering the telephone, and the man from that company was called Josu, and he was very good, and he's in Bilbao."

"So what happens?"

"So I write it in the book," said Chelo, "and I take it down to the registry myself, on my way home, because it's on my way home."

She put the folder under her arm.

"They open at eight. I finish at six." She looked at the towel and the small furious face in it, and something happened around her mouth for about a second and then did not. "I'll have a coffee first."

And she went off down the dark corridor with the last birth certificate anybody would ever file in the north of that island under her arm, and her heels on the tile going away and away, and neither Mateo nor Linnea ever gave her another thought, and she walked it down the hill at six in the morning in the rain and it went through.

They left at half past six.

Nobody stopped them. There was nobody at the main doors, because the main doors were locked; there was nobody at admissions, because Chelo had gone home; there was no porter and no security and no woman behind glass with a stamp, and no ceremony of any kind. Airam was asleep sitting up on a chair by the elevator with his fleece over his head and they went past him quietly.

Cande walked them out as far as the top of the stairs and no further, because the second floor was hers and she was not leaving it.

"Feed her when she asks. She'll ask constantly and then she'll stop asking and that's when you'll worry, and don't." She had her cardigan sleeves down for the first time all night. "Don't come back here unless you have to. I mean that kindly."

"Cande ⁓"

"No, don't." She put both hands up, palms out. It was as close to touching as anybody got that year. "Go up your mountain."

They got about four steps down.

"Y la guagua," said Cande, from the top of the stairs.

Mateo turned round.

"Es preciosa," she said. She's beautiful. And then she went back down the dark corridor to the one lit room in it, and that was the whole of it.

He drove up out of Icod with the wipers going and his wife asleep against the window with the baby inside her coat, and the fuel gauge sitting where a fuel gauge sits when a man has given away his next three months.

The rain stopped at about five hundred meters. It did not thin. It stopped, the way it does on that slope, and the windshield cleared, and then the Santana came up out of the cloud like a thing surfacing.

Above it there was a flat white floor going all the way out to the sea and the sun coming up over the top of it, and the mountain standing up out of it away to the right with snow on the cone, and no sound anywhere except a diesel engine and rain dripping off a truck that was no longer in any rain.

Mateo pulled over onto the gravel at the side of the road and turned the engine off.

Linnea woke up, and did not ask why he had stopped, and looked at it.

"Ja," she said.

They sat there for a while. The baby made the noises babies make, which are not really noises, and the metal of the hood ticked, and somewhere a long way below them the cloud had a town in it.

"We should go," said Linnea eventually. "It's cold."

"Sí."

"Mateo. It's cold."

"Sí," he said, and started the truck, and took his family home.

The card was in the inside pocket of his jacket, in the plastic sleeve Chelo had put it in so it would not smudge, along with the two bracelets and the copy of the form.

He put it in a drawer in the house at Querencia that afternoon, and it is in that drawer now.

Some words from that night, for the curious: