Copper Thread on the Loom

The sharp smell of hot mutton-bone glue, camphor and virgin beeswax filled every corner of the bindery in Puerto Sauces. Through the great glazed window that looked out on the lake dock, Simón Alós watched the heavy cargo barges rocking gently on the still, leaden water of the anchorage. Late autumn had turned the crowns of the weeping willows a burning, rusty yellow, and the reeds along the low bank creaked under the first gusts of the damp wind coming down from the north.

On the binding frame of turned pear wood, Simón drew taut a very fine strand of annealed copper, as pliant as silk thread yet resistant to mould and to the treacherous water of river holds. With a tempered steel awl he pierced the gatherings of rag paper and wove the leaves together with the quiet rhythm he had learned from his father and his grandfather at that same workbench.

"Stitching an old signature isn't mending paper; it's persuading someone else's memory that it still has a place to rest," Simón murmured to himself, finishing the blind knot with a thumb sheathed in fine leather.

A hard, dry knock on the tarred plank door set the bronze compasses, the awls and the bone folders hanging in order on the walnut wall panel trembling. Before he could set the curved needle down on the felt cloth, the door swung wide open and let in a cold, wet gust that tasted of riverbank silt, pine tar and thick charcoal smoke.

In the doorway stood Lucía Ribes, skipper and owner of the river barge La Noria. She wore a sailor's oilskin coat soaked with morning dew, dark corduroy trousers tucked into tall greased-leather boots and a green wool cap pulled down to her eyebrows that could not keep her unruly brown curls in check. Under her left arm she guarded a bulky, heavy volume wrapped in a double layer of waxed sailcloth.

"They say in the bargemen's tavern that you're the only craftsman in the whole valley who can open a sewn spine without tearing the watermarks on the leaves inside, Simón," she said, kicking the door shut with her heel and crossing to the workbench with a springy, determined stride.

"That depends on who closed the spine and why, captain," he answered calmly, watching her peel back the wet canvas with quick hands. "If some dockside bungler sewed it with coarse hemp or common iron wire, the paper will break like a dry biscuit at the first push of the folder."

Lucía set the book down on the green felt of the counter with a muffled thud. It was a colossal atlas in large folio, bound in indigo-dyed goatskin, its corners guarded by four solid brass cornerpieces and its edges closed by two blind rivets that made it impossible to open the covers without destroying the spine. In the middle of the leather, branded in worn gold letters, it read: Great Pilot-Book of the Valley of Oreb, and beneath, smaller: D. Ribes, master.

"It belonged to my grandfather, old Captain Damián Ribes," Lucía explained, and for a moment the proud hardness of her voice broke into something like a deep, painful respect. "He disappeared twenty winters ago in the Wolf's Bend. Before he set out on his last voyage, he sealed this book with forged rivets so the viceroy's bailiffs wouldn't confiscate his secret river charts. Now the guild barges can't take the harvest grain downriver, because the big floods have moved the sandbars and nobody dares put a keel in the channel."

Simón brought his brass lamp closer and touched the cold metal of the rivets with the tip of his finger. They were tempered with an alloy that kept a miraculous springiness.

"Opening this volume without mutilating the charts will take three full nights of work with mild acid and bone punches, Lucía. If I force the hinges, the leaves inside will crumble like wet ash in our hands."

"Then you have exactly three nights, bookbinder," she said, folding her arms and fixing him with green eyes that seemed to know every treacherous eddy in the river. "Because in four days the new moon will bring the first autumn flood, and either I get that grain down to Puente Viejo, or half the ovens in the valley will be out of flour before the solstice."

With her hand already on the latch, she turned back.

"And with the sandbars moved, there's only one channel left to get down to Puente Viejo," she added, more quietly. "It runs through the Wolf's Bend. The same place the river swallowed him."