Will-o'-the-Wisp on Marble

The magistrate's heir signed. He opened his eyes when the scrivener looked in at the carriage door, held the pen just long enough to trace half a flourish on the sealed document and fell back against the cushions like a sack of grain. Sister Benigna returned the notebooks before lauds, though not to their owners: to Brais she gave the oilcloth one, in Caunedo's angular hand; to Caunedo, the black sheepskin. Neither of them asked for the exchange to be undone. Neither spoke of the clean lungs. Three days later, the chapter held the competitive examination for the chair.

The amphitheater's nave showed no mercy to haste. Its rows of worm-eaten walnut rose in a semicircle toward the dim vaults, crowding the seven electors of the chair like frozen crows on a fence. Julián Caunedo did not pull his torso away from the slab's edge, but tilted his left shoulder just enough so that his brown cloth frock coat, stained with old waxes at the elbows, would intercept the meager glare that the mutton-tallow footlights cast upon the corpse. The wick sputtered, throwing off that pasty soot that always ended up clinging to the rims of the graduated vials and the witnesses' lapels. The subject on the table—a drowned boatman pulled from the water three nights ago near the tide mill, whose whitish flesh still retained the leathery stiffness of brackish silt—lay with his sternal plastron tilted to one side, exposing a mesh of fibers that threatened to fall apart as soon as the warm air of the room reached the deep planes.

On the second tier, seated between the archivist canon and the vicar of accounts, Sister Benigna de la Maza kept her hands hidden beneath the folds of her coarse wool scapular. She took no notes. Her gaze did not rest on the steel instruments waiting upon the raw canvas, but on the small bronze shovel placed next to the washbasin, ready to pour sand over any reflection that the ordinances deemed improper for a pious transition. Beside her, the capitular notary held a goose quill whose tip, parched by inactivity, occasionally scratched the edge of the vellum without managing to trace a single letter.

"Canon Fonseca left his marten-fur muff in the lesser sacristy," Caunedo murmured without turning, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his fingers smeared with vinegar. "He says this draft ruins the joints in his left hand."

"The frost must have settled in the lower orchards," Brais replied.

"Most likely."

Brais Mújica de Lema slid his thumbnail along the brass spigot of the irrigator to dislodge a crust of tartar that hindered the flow of the liquid. He could not feel the contact of the metal against his fingertip; the numbness he had dragged with him for months forced him to guide his fingers by sight, watching the position of the tendons like someone handling a miscalibrated clamp. Upon lifting the greenish Murano glass carboy—whose neck had a crude notch where the cork stopper never quite fit—he noticed that the weight did not match the usual measure. The fluid lacked the opal and faint tone of brine with slaked lime. It presented an oily density, almost translucent, at the bottom of which floated crystalline lamellae that refused to dissolve.

On the acid-etched scale upon the glass, the meniscus rested two lines above the prescribed mark. In the tiers, no one paid attention to the proportions; the electors watched the slight tremor of the ivory crucifix fastened to the railing.

No one looked at the meniscus.

Brais leaned over the drowned man's side and brought the silver cannula to the femoral artery.

On the other side of the table, Caunedo smiled with devout patience. He adjusted the siphon support with a dry flick of his wrist, making the iron clamp screech against the stem. There was a calculated calm in his posture, the certainty of someone who knew that the judges in the tiers were not looking for an exhibition of anatomy, but for the docile liturgical confirmation of the flesh.

"Proceed with the cleansing of the sheath, Licentiate Mújica," Caunedo said in a clear voice, pitched to bounce off the ceiling boards. "The capitular gentlemen do not have all night to wait for the incorruptibility of the muscle."

Brais opened the stopcock.

The liquid rushed down the ox-gut tube with a hurried gurgling. The moment the solution flooded the concavity of the iliac psoas, the tissue did not absorb the moisture as it usually did under warm brine. The muscle mass contracted sharply, instantly acquiring a waxy, whitish, and brittle texture, akin to old bacon exposed to the elements. A very fine white dust began to precipitate over the periosteum's surface with a barely perceptible crunch.

It was concentrated alum.

If the flow did not reach the venous return before the salts—

Brais cut off the spigot so abruptly that the lead joint spat a drop against his jaw. His skin burned instantly, an acid scorch that wrung an involuntary blink from him. Caunedo, however, had already picked up the contact forceps connected to the galvanic basin. His eyes, sunken and ringed with purplish shadows from the insomnia of laboratory vigils, did not seek the success of the procedure; they sought absolute collapse.

"Not enough tension in the arc, colleague," Caunedo whispered, bringing the copper rods closer to the saturated muscle bundle. "We mustn't disappoint the table."

"Wait. The fluid is turbid, we must purge the iliac with clean vinegar or—"

"Too late."

It was not an ordinary spark. Nor the slight spasmodic jolt that the canons permitted as an indication of fibrillar purity before Sister Benigna concluded the examination.

When the copper touched the brine oversaturated with alum, the antimony salts trapped in the lime reacted like damp gunpowder confined in a narrow space. There was no loud thunder. There was a dull puff, a caustic deflagration that burst from the corpse's entrails with a yellowish, fuliginous glare, akin to marsh gas when it finds a torch. The marble of the table cracked with a clean fracture that pierced the slab all the way through, throwing a shower of splinters and boiling grease against the zinc floor.

A dense curtain of white vapor, laden with particles of quicklime and vinegar evaporated at three hundred degrees, spiraled up toward the tiers, enveloping the capitulars in a suffocating fog that stung the eyes like ground pepper.

Muffled screams tore through the theater's dimness. The archivist canon tripped over his own cassock as he retreated toward the exit; the clatter of the walnut railing giving way beneath the friars' panic was heard, the sound of vellum leaves scattering in the gloom, and Sister Benigna's blind blows trying to force the iron bolt of the side door with the mallet of disciplines.

No one was looking at the table anymore.

Brais fell to his knees on the frozen flags, his hands pressed against his eyelids to contain the abrasive tearing that devoured his conjunctiva. Through the acid fog, amid coughs that tore at his trachea with a taste of sulfur and calcination, he managed to make out Caunedo's motionless figure. The man remained standing on the other side of the cracked marble, his frock coat smoking and the copper forceps still clenched in his fists, staring fixedly at him through that ghostly glare that refused to go out.

The bolts of the nave creaked as they were locked from the outside, leaving the amphitheater in a silence broken only by the hiss of scorched flesh and the thick dripping of grease falling, slow and methodical, into the dented bottom of the zinc washbasin.

Brais spat a thread of bitter phlegm against the tiles. He did not dare rub his eyes.

On the split table, the blue flame continued to devour the alum without emitting a single wisp of smoke.