Lard and Clean Rag

A tin plate with three tooth marks on the rim. No one remembers whose mouth left them there.

The air in the room never quite clears. It rises from the floor seams, between the basalt slabs that scorch bare soles while a freezing draft, dropping from the loophole open to the gorge, cuts ankles like a water scythe. It is always the same clash: winter that never lets up above, boilers that never sleep below. Darío walks that thermal edge dragging his heels, fingers curled from the cold and the skin of his instep reddened by the overheated floor. In his left hand he carries an earthenware bowl where beef fat, dense and grayish like old wax, gives off a rancid stench that clings to the tongue before brushing the mouth.

Tarsio sits on the edge of the cot, leaning forward, elbows driven into his knees and head hanging between his shoulders. He smells of baked mud and damp wool. The entire right half of his back is a single purplish patch where steam blisters have begun to burst on their own, releasing a thick serum that mixes with the soot clinging to the hair. He breathes slowly. Each time the bellows of his ribs expand, the tight skin cracks with a wet sound, like sausage casing drying in the sun.

Darío does not rush.

The mud from the trench has dried between his fingers forming hard crusts that tug at his knuckles, but he does not pick at them. He plunges two fingers into the bowl. The lard yields with an elastic resistance, cold on the surface and barely lukewarm at the bottom, giving off that sour stench found only in animals slaughtered in winter when no clean pasture remains. When he presses it against Tarsio's raw flesh, the other man does not cry out; he only emits a dull click with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, a dry vibration that travels up the spine and loses itself in the nape.

"It is cold," Tarsio says without lifting his face.

"It is what is in the trough."

"It smells like a rotten stable."

"It is beef. If you want flower oil, ask the warden."

Tarsio lets out a snort that stirs a speck of ash from the coarse wool blanket. He does not talk back. He has a split scab on his earlobe oozing a transparent thread, and his teeth, stained with that yellowish tone left by the air of the lower galleries, bite into empty air with a tired rhythm, chewing nothing.

Darío spreads the grease with an open palm, tracing slow circles over the shoulder blade. The burnt skin is so hot that the lard liquefies almost instantly, trickling in greasy threads toward the base of the kidneys. Beneath the shining layer of grease, the bony reliefs stand out with an obscene clarity: the scapula juts like a broken wing and, right above it, the collarbone that healed crooked two winters ago forms a knotted lump, a calcareous bump the size of a nutmeg that never realigned with the sternum.

It would be enough to close his fist. To press the heel of his hand against that protrusion and let the weight of his body drop with a dry, downward blow toward the stone.

A clean snap. The scream would drown in the rag before crossing the slit.

Yet Darío only keeps smearing. His fingers climb the neck tendon, descend the ridge of the shoulder, measure the thickness of the inflamed flesh with no more force than that of a brush on an old board. To the touch, the muscle trembles from sheer exhaustion beneath the warm suppuration, a small, continuous tremor with nothing fierce about it.

"The linen," Tarsio murmurs. His voice sounds pasty, dragged down by his heavy tongue. "Pass the rag over the armpit. Wring it out."

"If I press there, I will lift the loose skin."

"Pass it anyway."

Darío picks up a strip of frayed hemp that Eusebio left on the chest before withdrawing to the threshold. It is not noble linen; it is the coarse burlap used to wrap loaves of salt, washed so many times in sulfur water that it has lost all color and resembles the skin of a dried eel. He wipes the cloth carefully, clearing away the excess rancid tallow that threatens to stain the pillow. In the outer corridor, through the regulatory three-finger gap that the ajar door leaves open to the cold slabs, the metallic scrape of Eusebio's boot against the lintel can be heard. The guard does not look inside. His back rests against the frame and he cleans his nails with the tip of a bent nail, humming a harvesting tune that no one has sung in the northern provinces for fifteen years.

It takes almost an hour for the lard to cool on the raw flesh.

On the basalt ledge the short-wicked oil lamp sputters, fed with the same residual oil they use to grease the stems of the drainage pumps. The smell is dense, mineral, a blend of rust and animal fat that impregnates the linen and gets beneath Darío's nails with an almost geological persistence. He sits on a three-legged stool, feeling the fatigue of the trench flow down his thighs in dull cramps. His wrists burn. The chafing against the iron of the valve stings with a rhythmic, living pulse, as if he had a tiny clock sewn beneath his flesh.

Tarsio has let his arms drop to the sides of the pallet. The fingers of his right hand brush the stone floor, motionless, stained with soot in the folds of his knuckles.

"Tomorrow we have to go down again," Darío says to the emptiness of the room, watching the wick form a carbon mushroom at the tip. "The gasket on tube three is still leaking. The vapor is going to eat away the mortar at the base before the thaw."

Silence.

The cavernous hiss of the boilers vibrates through the walls like an underground tide that never fully recedes. It is a sound that enters not through the ears, but through the soles of the boots and the bones of the pelvis; a warm hum that makes the film of grease tremble at the bottom of the tin plate left abandoned on the stool.

"Tarsio."

No answer. Only the heavy scrape of breathing changing gears, thickening, dropping to the back of the trachea with a harsh gurgle of phlegm and sulfur. Tarsio has tilted his forehead to one side, crushing his left cheek against the coarse horsehair casing that serves as a headrest. His mouth remains open, slack, revealing his lower row of broken teeth and a thread of thick saliva searching for the gray cloth.

A gruff snore, dry as the dragging of a shovel over gravel, breaks the monotony of the steam.

Darío is left with the dirty rag hanging between his grease-stained fingers. He looks at the bare nape, the swirl of dark hair matted by cold sweat and lard, the curve of the vertebrae rising toward the skull exposed like knuckles in a closed fist. A forearm crossed over that breathless throat. Two minutes of blind kicking against the coarse wool, nothing more, and the debt would be settled before the vapor whistles in the loopholes again.

He does not move.

He wipes his thumbs on the hem of his own tunic, slowly, ridding himself of the cold grease until the cloth is translucent and shining beneath the red light of the lamp.

Outside, in the corridor, Eusebio shifts his weight from one leg to the other with a crack of damp leather. Then, nothing more than the whistle of the pipes buried in the rock, pushing the mist upward, as if the entire earth were snoring with its mouth open.