Grout Space

Arana sat on a crate of dynamite.

The pine of the box yielded a couple of millimeters beneath his weight, soaked through by a lukewarm brine that smelled of urea and old rags. Overhead, the masonry joint spat a whitish thread of lime grout that fell with exact rhythm onto the left lapel of his black wool overcoat. The fabric no longer absorbed anything; it was stiffened, rigid as a sun-baked tile. With thumbs split into reddish cracks by the chalk dust, Arana wrestled with the bronze ratchet of the measuring tape. The internal spring had jammed with a grit of barite that rasped inside. He pressed his dirt-crrimed nail against the gear until the edge of the blade opened the raw flesh of his cuticle. The safety catch did not release.

Nothing.

Isidro remained squatting in front of the master oak beam, passing his fingers over the clean grooves where the seals had once been stamped. His breathing sounded loud, a wheeze that danced in his chest ever since they climbed down to the traction level by the counterweight ladder.

"The blade was new," Isidro said without turning his head. "A butcher's, almost certainly. They didn't leave a single shaving with ink."

Arana did not lift his gaze from the spool. He slipped his right hand into his inside pocket looking for his pocketknife to lever the ratchet, but found only two worn nickel coins and a crumpled receipt from doña Tomasa's boarding house from three weeks ago, stained with cold bacon grease.

"Got any dry tobacco left?" Arana asked.

"My pouch rotted right through my shirt pocket two hours ago, Don Román."

"Right."

The trouble was that Isidro was twenty-two and still believed things down here were resolved by shouting out loud or looking for culprits with first and last names. The thing is, in the haulage drifts nobody has a name when it comes to stripping a prop; there is a crew that enters at three in the morning with unlit lanterns, a foreman who looks at the crown of the rock and feigns a chest cough, and a bundle of small bills that changes hands right by the drainage sump. Arana knew this because he had spent sixteen winters with an iron knee brace strapped to his left leg with two straps of harsh leather. Every time he rested his kneecap on a rung of the vertical ladder, the loose rivet emitted a dry, metallic click that reminded him with the exactitude of an official report of the '88 fracture in the San Jerónimo shaft. The limp didn't go away with poultices or vestry prayers. It stayed right there, fixed, like that aftertaste of burnt station-machine chicory that nobody ever finishes because it tastes like an old tin can.

Between the slabs of fractured basalt, three paces from the crate, a low, continuous hiss issued forth. It sounded like the broken bellows of a village forge blowing warm air against a puddle of mineral. The vapor dragged a bitter stench of quicklime soaked in fissure water, stirred with the stagnant urine of the cesspool and the rot of decomposed sheep tallow that Isidro smeared on the zinc weights so the humidity wouldn't throw off the plumb line. On the ground, beside Arana's left boot, lay the pieces of a bakelite inkwell shattered against the rock base; the purplish bruised halo of the copying ink dissolved slowly in the grayish mud, tinting the alkaline bubbles that burst at the surface of the sludge without making a sound.

He pulled the dossier out from under his arm. The sheets of onion-skin paper were swollen by condensation, transparent and brittle, stuck to one another at the corners like wet skin. He peeled away the last sheet with his nail, taking care not to tear the boundary grid. There was no need for a prism apparatus or a barometer to understand what was giving way in heading fourteen: it was enough to look at the belly of the oak and the caustic mud boiling three inches from his heels, eating away at the leather welts of his boots. Don Evaristo used to repeat it at the general archive counter back when people still wore glazed-calico sleeve protectors so as not to stain their wrists with copying carbon: a mine collapse does not begin with thunder; it begins with the almost inaudible snap of a paper that should never have been signed. And that beam scraped to the knife was exactly that. A blank space forced at iron point.

"Don Román," Isidro murmured, resting the back of his neck against the living rock while stretching out his legs. "My right boot is rubbing my heel raw. A nail in the sole has bent inward."

Arana blew away the crust of white dust embedded beneath his cuticles.

"Take it off and pound the tip flat with a flint."

"If I take it off here, I won't get it back on even with soap. My instep is bruised purple."

"Then leave it on and stop moving so much."

Isidro let out a foul snort, scratched his wrist with a blackened fingernail, and stared at the lantern flame as if it were about to go out any second.

The air in the drift weighed on the bronchial tubes like a rag soaked in bleach.

The bronze ratchet gave way suddenly with a sharp snap that didn't sound like a clean spring, but rather like a broken tooth. Arana pulled the leaded linen; the first four meters came out viscous, mottled by the verdigris of rust and the grout that never stopped trickling from the ceiling stones. Isidro grabbed the ring at the end with the tips of two fingers so as not to touch the mud on the floor and walked toward the entrance of the crosscut. The gallery narrowed like a funnel toward the haulage drift, a blind shaft that wasn't listed in the work log and that sucked the air downward with a dull hum.

Arana fixed his gaze on the taut tape. The lead mark measured exactly fourteen yards. Meaning, let's say they had driven the crowbar three meters further in than what was recorded in the September expert assessment. An outrage for ground that liquefies the moment a trickle of rainwater gets in. The thing is, clean barite was paid for in cash at the loading dock, and up in the Chancellery nobody soiled their gaiters coming down to check if a rib was shored up with old oak or green pine ribs. Arana felt the usual twinge in his lower back, that dull ache that climbed his spine after half a hour bent beneath four-foot ceilings. He shifted his body weight to his good leg. The metal knee brace struck the rung once more with its scrap-iron rattle.

Silence.

The noise wasn't coming from the main shaft where the ladder went down. It was coming from the lower mouth of the haulage drift. Isidro stood motionless, with the linen ring at knee level and the lantern dangling from his other hand, paralyzed.

"There are footsteps," the boy whispered.

"Lower the wick," Arana ordered. "Cover it with your shirt tail."

"Don Román, someone's coming up the track."

"Lower it, I said."

Stone against stone.

Two dry thuds.

Solid metal.

In the dense silence of the intermediate gallery, Balbina Cuesta emerged alone from the haulage drift with two lead wedges in her hands, ready to block the heading before the report came to light. She wore her rough leather apron tied at the waist with telegraph wire and her coarse-wool shirt sleeves rolled up to her elbows, leaving bare thin arms covered in old drill scars and crusts of lime. She carried no carbide or lantern; she walked in the dark with the shuffling gait of someone who knows the stones by heart. She stopped three yards from the crate where Arana was still seated, weighing the two blocks of lead with a slow, sharp movement of her fingers. She didn't look at Isidro. She didn't look at the iron knee brace or the violet mud staining the floor. Her eyes fixed directly on the onion-skin paper Arana was holding against his thigh, where the numbers noted in pencil were beginning to run thanks to the dripping from the vault.

Up above, very far up in the shaft barrel, a traction pulley gave three short groans and stopped.