The pickup was half loaded when Efrén Mojarro walked down toward the well, and half meant the two cattle nets, the saddle with the chipped horn, four fence posts, the two blue twenty-litre drums that in La Yesca they sell without caps, while the rest was still in the corral and would stay there until the afternoon run. His son was waiting with the engine running because at eleven there was the notary in Huajimic, and the notary in Huajimic sees people until noon and then closes, and he really does close.

On the dashboard, folded in four, was the Sedatu document with the list of the goods handed over, which Efrén had already read three times and would read again, not to check anything, but for that way written things have of becoming true by dint of being reread. It was eight forty on the twenty-sixth of August. On the thirteenth, thirteen days earlier, in a single morning, three restitutions had been carried out in that valley, and since then the valley is seventy-one per cent returned, which is a percentage that means little to whoever lives inside it.

According to the surveyor's report, the property handed over included a well with lifting equipment: five words, which include thirty-two years of maintenance, two replacements of the impeller, a rewinding done in Tepic in two thousand fourteen and the pipe, which at the start was galvanised iron and in two thousand six became black polyethylene because iron in the earth of Huajimic lasts eleven years and then flakes away from inside.

Two hundred paces off, the comunero and the surveyor were walking the perimeter with the measuring wheel, they would stop, mark, set off again, and they did not look toward the well, because the well was a thing already written down and written things, unlike boundaries, do not need to be walked.

Efrén began explaining to his son how the system was built, which was his way of standing still. He told him about the fall, that from the well to the trough it is a bare metre eighty over sixty metres and that with that fall the pump can be switched off and the water stays in the pipe, if the elbow is at sixty; with the elbow at ninety the water runs back and the next morning the pump turns dry for two minutes and the motor heats up, and a motor that heats up dry every morning lasts four years instead of twelve; and this he did not know in ninety-four, a man from Ixtlán had told him, one who came around selling pumps and who then stopped coming around.

The trough he had poured himself, and in the rim, toward the uphill corner, there is the print of a dog, gone in while the cement was still soft, and the dog belonged to his sister and was called Reno and died a long time ago, while the print has stayed, the way prints stay in cement, which is the only material that holds forever a thing done by mistake.

His son kept checking the time, and at a quarter past nine he told his father that if he was going to take it, the pump, now was the moment to take it.

At twenty past nine Efrén set the socket on the first bolt and felt straight away that it sat a quarter loose, as he knew it would, because the seventeen socket is metric and the bolts of the plate had been bought in Guadalajara in ninety-four along with the cement and are in inches, and the right inch is eleven sixteenths, and the eleven-sixteenths socket Efrén had lost in two thousand eight on a piece of land that is not his either any more. He turned it anyway, and the bolt came away with the paint stuck to it, and he turned the second one, the northeast one, the one that takes the sun all afternoon and which in fact came out more easily. Then the pump started.

It started on its own, the way it did every morning at half past nine ever since he himself had set the timer to take the cheap-rate current, and it began sending water into the black pipe, and the black pipe stiffened along all sixty metres to the trough, and in the trough the water began to beat.

Efrén put back in the two bolts he had taken out, not all four but two, the diagonal ones, which hold the plate steady on the well and hold up perfectly well under a pump running empty, and hold for a while even under a pump running loaded, and then hold no longer; he screwed them down by hand as far as they would go and did not tighten them with the ratchet.

His son started the engine and Efrén did not get in, but walked the two hundred paces to the trough, where the comunero had now arrived with the measuring wheel still in his hand, and told him, in the same voice with which half an hour earlier he had been explaining the elbow to his son, that the bolts were two and ought to be four; that the seventeen socket sits loose and ruins the head; that the right one is eleven sixteenths, American, and that in Huajimic they do not sell it, nor in La Yesca; that in Tepic they do, in a hardware shop near the market, and that it costs little.

The comunero let him finish, then said he would make a note of it, and did not ask why he was telling him, and Efrén would not have known how to explain it, except perhaps by saying that a thing you have set up yourself goes on being a thing you have set up yourself even when it belongs to someone else, and that this is a property of objects and not of people.

He got into the pickup. The pickup pulled away. The pump went on. The comunero walked back toward the well with the measuring wheel still in his hand, bent over the cement plate and picked up the ratchet.