A Girl Who Talks

Chapter One: Fourteen Per Cent

The water went down all through June, and by the first week of July the church came back.

Sabina Alcaraz watched it happen the way everyone in Almanza watched it, in pieces, over mornings. First the cross, black and crooked against the brown, like something snagged in a drain. Then the belfry, with its two empty arches. Then the whole tower, streaked and slick, standing in a lake that had pulled back from it on all sides.

By the fourteenth of July the reservoir was at fourteen per cent and the tower stood on dry ground, and around it, laid out in the cracked mud, was the shape of a village. Doorframes without doors. Low stone walls at knee height. A street you could walk down. A bridge with nothing under it and nothing on the other side, three arches of good masonry going nowhere at all.

Her grandmother had been born in that village. Her grandmother had been eleven when the men came with the compulsory purchase orders and the compensation tables, and the families of Almanza Vieja had carried their doors and their window frames and their saints up the hill to the new houses, and the water had come in behind them and covered it all. Sixty-one years. Sabina had grown up hearing about the drowned village the way you hear about heaven: a place that existed, that you could not visit, that had been better.

Now you could visit it, and it smelled of dead fish and warm clay.

"It's smaller," her mother said. Marta Alcaraz stood at the edge of the mud in her work shoes with her arms folded, and she was crying without any sound at all, which was how she did everything. "She always made it sound so big."

"It is small," Sabina said.

"Don't."

"I'm only saying what it is."

Marta wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "That's your whole trouble, love. You're always only saying what it is."

The drought was in its third year. Sabina was seventeen and could remember rain the way you remember a house you lived in as a child — she knew it had happened, she could not any longer feel it. The hills above Almanza had gone the colour of a paper bag. The almond trees on the terraces had given up, one row at a time, and nobody bothered to cut them down; they stood there grey and hard, holding out their arms.

In the village the taps ran three days a week: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, six in the morning to nine, and again at eight in the evening for two hours. Everybody had drums in the yard, blue plastic drums that had held olives once, and everybody had a system, and everybody's system was slightly different, and by August every argument in Almanza was really an argument about water.

And two kilometres east, past the ridge, the gypsum quarry ran a pump twenty-two hours a day.

It drew from the aquifer under the west face, and it had a permit to do it, a permit renewed every three years by a hydrographic authority in a city four hours away, signed by men no one in Almanza had ever met or seen. The quarry employed sixty-eight people. In a village of four hundred and ten, that was the difference between a place and a set of empty houses. Everyone knew the pump was part of why the wells were dry. Nobody said it out loud in any room where it might be repeated, because sixty-eight jobs is a heavy thing to hold in your mouth.

"They're saying the company's going to bring cisterns twice a week now instead of once," Marta said, as they walked back up. "Gaspar's already down at the depot."

"Gaspar Ferrer would deliver water to hell if they paid him mileage."

"Sabina."

"He would."

Her mother said nothing, which was itself a kind of answer, and they walked the rest of the way in the flat white heat.

---

Sabina worked at El Cruce, the roadhouse out on the highway where the Almanza road met the national. It had a gravel yard, a green canvas awning that had faded to the colour of dishwater, eleven tables inside and four out, a bar with a zinc top, and a bathroom with a sign asking people not to wash in the sink. Chelo Pina owned it and had owned it for thirty years and could carry six plates on one arm at fifty-nine years of age.

The roadhouse was the only place for eighteen kilometres in either direction where you could get a menu of the day for eleven euros, and so it collected everybody. Truckers running gypsum plaster to the coast. Men off the crushing line at the end of a shift, white to the eyebrows with dust, drinking beer that turned grey in the glass from their own hands. Hunters in season. Road crews. And the Guardia Civil, off duty, in polo shirts, at the corner table by the cigarette machine, because the district post was twenty minutes down the road at Villar and there was nowhere else.

Sabina had been pouring drinks there since she was fifteen, first on Saturdays, then most nights. She was good at it in a way that had nothing to do with being pleasant. She remembered orders. She remembered faces. She did not smile at things that were not funny, and after a while the men stopped expecting her to, and after a while more some of them decided that made her stuck up, and after a while more they decided it made her a good girl, and she let them decide whatever they liked because it changed nothing about the wage.

What she was actually doing, all those hours, was listening.

A bar is a machine for hearing things. Men say things at eleven at night that they would not say at eleven in the morning, and they say them to the room without noticing the girl at the tap, because the girl at the tap is furniture. In two years Sabina had learned who was in debt, who was sleeping where, which foreman took a cut of the overtime sheet, which Guardia corporal drank for free and why. She had learned that Almanza had two conversations running at all times: the one it had in the square, and the one it had after midnight, and the second one was truer and shorter.

On the night of the fourteenth of July the whole bar was talking about the drowned village.

"You can walk into the church," said Paco Rueda, off the crushing line, holding his beer at his chest. "Right in the door. The floor's gone but you can walk in."

"There's nothing in there."

"There's a font. There's the stone font, still bolted down."

"They took the font. In sixty-three they took everything."

"Then what's that stone thing, genius?"

Chelo came past with a tray. "They'll be coming out from the city to look," she said. "They always do. Every dry year something comes up somewhere and the city drives out to photograph it. Good for us. Bad for the reservoir."

"There's a woman already," said someone by the window. "Been down there two days with a camera on legs."

Sabina looked up at that, and out through the glass, and saw nothing but the yard and the sodium light and the moths going round it. But she filed it, the way she filed everything.

At half eleven her brother Miro came in through the kitchen door with his hands in his pockets, which meant he wanted something.

Miro was fourteen and had grown eleven centimetres that year and had not grown into any of it. He had their father's long face — their father, who had gone to work in France when Miro was six and now existed as a phone number that rang out and a transfer of two hundred euros in December, some years. He was clever with his hands and careless with everything else.

"Chelo said I could take the fryer oil," he said.

"Chelo says a lot of things."

"For Kike's uncle. He pays for it."

"He pays Chelo for it."

Miro leaned on the ice chest. "You seen the village? Down there?"

"Everyone's seen it."

"There's copper." He said it low, quickly, the way you say the one true thing in a conversation you have staged for the purpose. "In the walls. The old cable. And lead on the roof line of the mill, and the church has—"

"No."

"I didn't ask you anything."

"That's public land under a public reservoir and if the Guardia catch you it's not a slap, Miro, it's a file with your name in it."

"Copper's six euros a kilo."

"It's four."

"It's six in Villar." He straightened up and his voice cracked in the middle of it, which ruined the effect and made her want to put her hand on his head, and she didn't, because he would have hated it. "Mamá's short again. She's short every month. She had to ask Herminia to write it down."

Sabina wiped the zinc. Down the bar somebody laughed at something.

"Don't go at night," she said at last. "The mud's not set. If you go in over your knees out there, nobody's coming for you."

"So I can go."

"I said don't go at night."

He went out grinning, and she stood there with the cloth in her hand and a bad feeling she could not have explained, and behind her the men were still saying that you could walk right into the church, right in the door.

He went four days later, at eleven in the morning, with Kike Puerto and the smaller Rueda boy, three of them barefoot in the mud with a hacksaw and a fertiliser sack.

And behind the church, in the place where the sacristy wall had been, under half a metre of silt that had gone hard as bad bread, they found the bundle.