I learned that people could laugh at your suffering while still believing they were decent.
At first, the jokes in Valdeondo had seemed harmless to everyone except me.
They called me the girl under the ground.
They pretended to dig when I walked past.
They spoke about my tunnel as if it were a foolish game.
I did not enjoy it.
But I could endure being laughed at.
What happened next was different.
Don Baltazar controlled the village store.
Nearly everyone depended on it at one time or another.
In our valley, money did not always arrive when supplies were needed.
People bought flour, salt, and other necessities with the understanding that payment would come later.
My father had used that arrangement when work was slow.
He always settled what he owed.
I believed that history would matter.
It did not.
When I went to the store to arrange for more provisions, I was told that I could no longer buy on credit.
I thought there had been a mistake.
I asked whether someone had confused my father's account with another.
The answer was clear.
There would be no further credit for me.
I knew whose decision it was.
Don Baltazar did not need to stand beside the counter to make his wishes known.
I had refused his offer for the property.
Now the store was closed to me unless I could pay immediately.
I stood there with my hands resting against the edge of the counter.
I wanted to argue.
I wanted to ask how someone could speak about concern for my safety while making it harder for me to feed myself.
But I knew an argument would not change the arrangement.
I counted my remaining coins.
There was enough for one sack of flour.
Not much more.
I paid for it.
Then I carried the sack uphill.
It was heavier than I expected.
The road seemed longer than usual.
I had already spent the morning digging.
My shoulders hurt.
My palms were tender beneath the cloth I used to protect them.
I stopped once to adjust the weight.
From farther down the slope, I could see the roofs of the village.
Sixty houses.
Dozens of families living close enough to call out to one another.
And I felt more alone than I had since the funeral.
I knew some people disagreed with what Don Baltazar had done.
I could see it in the way they avoided my eyes.
But nobody challenged him.
He owned too much.
Too many people depended on him.
I understood their silence.
That did not make it easier to bear.
When I reached home, I set the flour on the kitchen table.
The bag left a pale mark on the wood.
I opened it and looked inside.
It was food.
It was also a measure of how long I might continue before hunger became another problem.
I thought about the coins Don Baltazar had offered me.
I could still picture the bag resting on the same table.
He had known what he was doing.
He had given me a choice that was not really a choice.
Sell while the price was high, or keep resisting until I had too little to eat.
I wanted to prove him wrong.
But wanting something would not make flour last longer.
I began using it carefully.
I had potatoes stored at the house.
I still had the well.
I had shelter.
I was not yet without food.
But every meal now carried a calculation.
How much could I use?
How much would remain?
How many days until I had to find another answer?
The questions followed me into the tunnel.
Digging made me hungry.
The harder I worked, the more food my body wanted.
I tried to ignore it.
That was not sensible.
I knew it even then.
But I was frightened of running short before I reached the well.
Some afternoons, I worked longer than I should have.
I continued after my arms became weak.
I told myself that each bucket of soil brought me closer to safety.
The tunnel was slowly taking shape.
The supports stood behind me in a narrow row.
The opening beneath the kitchen looked less like a hole and more like the beginning of a passage.
I had learned to move within it without striking the roof.
I had learned to keep my tools close.
I could tell when a bucket was full enough to lift safely.
I could also tell when my body had reached its limit.
The trouble was admitting it.
My father had been stronger than I was.
He had worked for years in places far more difficult than this.
But he had also stopped when the ground required patience.
I remembered that whenever I became tempted to hurry.
I kept reminding myself that a finished tunnel would be useless if I did not survive to use it.
Still, the pressure was always there.
Winter.
The first heavy snow.
The possibility that Don Baltazar was right.
The fear that I would run out of food or strength before reaching the well.
And the memory of those eleven paces.
All of it lived with me.
The house was quieter than it had ever been.
When my father was alive, he sometimes spoke to himself while repairing tools.
He made small sounds of approval or annoyance as he worked.
I had scarcely noticed them.
Now I missed them.
I missed hearing another person move a chair.
I missed the scrape of his boots near the door.
I missed being able to ask a question without already knowing that nobody would answer.
One evening, I returned from the tunnel with both knees aching.
I washed my hands.
The water became brown with soil.
I could see the blisters beneath the dirt.
Some had opened again.
I dried them carefully.
Then I looked at the bread I had left.
It was not enough for the hunger I felt.
I ate slowly anyway.
I told myself there would be better days.
I did not know whether that was true.
The next morning, I opened the door and found a loaf of bread resting near the threshold.
It was fresh.
Still warm.
I looked down the path.
Nobody was there.
For a moment, I thought someone must have made a mistake.
Perhaps the bread was meant for another house.
But no one could confuse our place with another.
We lived alone above the village.
There were no neighboring doors nearby.
I picked up the loaf.
It smelled wonderful.
I had been hungry enough that the smell made my stomach tighten.
I carried it inside and set it on the table.
I stood looking at it for a long time.
Someone had brought it.
Someone had climbed the hill.
Someone had chosen to leave without waiting for thanks.
I wanted to know who.
But I was too grateful to be suspicious for long.
I cut a piece.
It was soft inside.
I ate beside the kitchen opening.
For the first time in days, I felt full enough to work without thinking constantly about my next meal.
That bread meant more than the person who brought it could have known.
It did not solve my problems.
I still had a tunnel to dig.
I still had very little money.
Don Baltazar still wanted the land.
But someone in the village had looked at my situation and decided to help.
That mattered.
I spent the rest of the day underground.
I worked with more patience than I had managed the previous afternoon.
I measured the next section.
I checked the wooden supports.
I lifted soil through the opening and emptied the buckets behind the house.
The work remained hard.
But I was less distracted by hunger.
At dusk, I went outside for water.
The air had a sharp chill.
I looked downhill toward the village.
I wondered which house the bread had come from.
There were people my father had helped over the years.
Perhaps someone remembered.
Perhaps somebody felt sorry for me.
I could not know.
I did not want to imagine gratitude where there was only pity.
But I could not deny what had been left at my door.
A week later, another loaf appeared.
Again, I found nobody outside.
This time, I was almost certain the visitor had come early, knowing I would not yet be working in the yard.
I looked for footprints.
The ground showed signs of someone having passed.
But that told me little.
I carried the bread inside.
I considered going down to the village and asking who had brought it.
Then I imagined what might happen.
People would begin talking.
Someone might tell Don Baltazar.
The person helping me might be embarrassed or frightened.
I decided not to ask publicly.
I would be grateful without demanding an explanation.
The following days were difficult again.
I kept digging.
The earth became stubborn in places.
Sometimes the shovel moved easily.
Sometimes it struck stones that took far longer to remove.
I could never predict exactly how much I would accomplish.
That uncertainty frustrated me.
I had a plan for the whole tunnel.
But the ground allowed progress only one section at a time.
I began measuring success differently.
Not by how much distance remained.
By whether the part I had finished was safe.
By whether the supports were solid.
By whether I could return to the kitchen without difficulty.
Those were lessons my father had tried to teach me long before I needed them.
I used to think his carefulness made every job slower.
Now I understood that it allowed him to finish jobs that impatience might ruin.
On the third occasion, I noticed movement near the fence.
It was early.
I had opened the door before going down into the tunnel.
I saw a small figure trying to hide.
At first, I could not tell who it was.
Then a face appeared beside one of the fence posts.
Jacinta.
She was the blacksmith's daughter.
Seven years old.
I knew her from the village.
She was small enough that she could almost disappear behind the fence if she crouched.
When she realized I had seen her, she looked embarrassed.
I stepped outside.
I did not want to frighten her.
I asked whether she had been bringing the bread.
She hesitated.
Then she nodded.
I looked at her hands.
They were empty now.
The loaf was already waiting beside my door.
I asked why she had done it.
She seemed surprised by the question.
She told me she had watched how hard I worked.
She had seen people laugh.
She knew nobody was helping me.
That was all.
I did not know what to say.
I had spent weeks hearing adults explain why my work was foolish.
Why I should leave.
Why I should sell.
Why I ought to accept that I could not manage alone.
And here was a child who had asked herself a different question.
Not whether I would succeed.
Not whether I deserved the land.
Only whether I had enough to eat while I tried.
I remember feeling ashamed of how quickly I had begun believing everyone was against me.
Jacinta looked toward the kitchen.
She asked whether it was true that I was making a passage to the well.
I said yes.
She wanted to know whether I would be able to reach the water without walking through the snow.
I explained that was the plan.
She considered it.
Then she said she thought I could do it.
There was no grand speech.
No promise to change the villagers' minds.
Just a little girl standing near my fence, telling me she trusted what I was trying to build.
I had heard so many people call me foolish that I almost did not know how to receive those words.
I thanked her for the bread.
She looked pleased.
Then she went back down the hill.
I watched until she was out of sight.
The village lay beneath us, quiet in the morning light.
I thought about her father, the blacksmith.
I thought about all the people who must have seen Jacinta carry bread uphill.
Perhaps nobody had noticed.
Perhaps some had noticed and said nothing.
I did not know.
What I knew was that she had come three times.
She had climbed the path with food because she believed I needed it.
There was something difficult about accepting kindness from a child when grown people had refused to give any.
I went back inside.
The kitchen floor was still open.
The tunnel still stretched only part of the way toward the well.
My tools were waiting.
Nothing about the work had become easier overnight.
But the room no longer felt quite so empty.
I put the bread where it would stay clean.
Then I checked the lantern and went underground again.
I had reached the thirty-first day of my work.
I remember the number because I had been counting carefully.
Thirty-one days of digging.
Thirty-one days of carrying soil.
Thirty-one days of measuring the distance between my kitchen and the well.
The tunnel had grown enough that I could no longer see the kitchen opening clearly from where I worked.
I was beginning to feel that the well was no longer impossibly far away.
That morning, I struck something hard.
The shovel stopped abruptly.
I thought it was an ordinary stone.
I tried to work around it.
But the obstruction continued across the width of the passage.
I set down the shovel and examined the ground.
There was a broad slab of rock in front of me.
It extended from one side of the tunnel to the other.
I touched its surface.
Solid.
Heavy.
Not something I could simply lift into a bucket.
I sat back as much as the narrow space allowed.
For weeks, I had measured my progress in the same straight direction.
Now the ground had put something across my path that did not care about my measurements.
I thought about how much work might be required to break through.
I thought about the days I had left.
I thought about the village laughing if they learned I could go no farther.
Then I remembered my father's lessons.
He had never promised that the ground would give us the route we wanted.
He had taught me to examine what stood in front of me before deciding how to proceed.
I lifted the lantern.
I studied the edges of the stone.
Then I put down my tools for a moment.
I was tired.
I was frustrated.
But I was not ready to mistake a difficult piece of rock for the end of my work.
Above me, the kitchen waited.
Beyond the stone, somewhere in the earth, stood my father's well.
I had reached that obstacle through thirty-one days of effort.
The next thing I had to do was understand it.
