The Empty Chair

Brais was washing his hands in the zinc basin when the bell in the main tower tolled. Quarter past five. The first stroke shook a fleck of soot from the chimney flue, which drifted down onto the surface of the turbid water, amid the iridescent film of potash soap and tallow.

The water was freezing. Brais thrust his hands to the bottom and left them there for a moment, eyes closed, waiting for the numbness to dull the sting beneath his nail beds. The tips of his thumbs and index fingers had lost their fine touch; after months of immersion in alum brine and camphorated alcohol, his skin had the dry consistency of old chamois leather. As he scrubbed his cuticles with the bristles of a worn-out brush, the hangnail on his left ring finger tore. It did not hurt at once; only a thin thread of thick blood welled up, dissolving in the gray water before staining it.

He dried his fingers with a linen rag. One by one. Hard.

Sister Benigna had lifted the bar at three, when the lime stopped seething: not a minute sooner. They found him lying by the gate, his mouth pressed to the thread of air coming in under the leaf and his nails broken from clawing at the wood. No sound came from the pit. The lads filled it in before dawn with three more barrowloads of lime, and nobody asked Brais what had happened in there, then or ever.

The apothecary door creaked on its uneven hinges. Sister Benigna did not step past the threshold. She kept her hands hidden beneath her twill scapular and a clean towel folded over her forearm.

"The well water tastes of rust," the nun said. "It's no good for coffee."

Brais did not turn around.

"It'll boil just the same."

"It'll boil, but it'll be bitter. I brought a handful of dried chicory from the refectory in case you need to fool your stomach. The bells are striking for the seventh time, Don Brais."

The lead faucet dripped onto the zinc with a dry, hollow rhythm. Brais folded the damp cloth into four, matching the frayed edges with a slow, useless habit. As he breathed through his mouth, the caustic vapor of the bleach scraped the back of his throat. He felt a dull ache in his jaw muscles; he had been clenching his molars for hours without realizing it.

"The dossier is on the low table," he said. "The one bound in sheepskin."

"I saw it," the nun replied. "It had a crust of dry lime on the spine. I scraped it off with the nail clippers before bringing up the robe."

Brais was going to tell her not to touch the cords, but he said nothing. It made no difference.

Sister Benigna took two steps forward and placed the black cloth gown with the purple facings of the Faculty of Anatomy upon the stool. The hem of the sleeve brushed the walnut case of the saw; the metal clicked against the brass latches, a short, dry snap. The nun slowly withdrew her hand, not out of disgust, but with that instinctive caution stirred by tools that smell of dried bone marrow.

"The rector won't be coming down," she added, tugging at a loose thread on the bodice. "He says the damp marsh air brings on his gout. He sent the assistant with the gallery key and the minor seal."

"Better."

"The cassock's going to be wide in the shoulders, Don Brais. Don Julián had a different build."

Neither added anything. Sister Benigna turned on her heel and her wooden clogs echoed down the low gallery, dragging her habit across the damp flagstones until she vanished around the corner of the courtyard.

The chestnut gate of the Grand Amphitheater yielded to the sharp upward yank required by its worn lock. Brais entered with the dossier tucked under his arm. The rub of the raw leather against his side reminded him of a sharp pain in his false ribs, a muscle pull he had been dragging since three in the morning, when they hauled him out of that very nave.

The nave was freezing.

It smelled of the four thieves' vinegar with which the lads drenched the timbers every dawn to kill the miasma, mixed with that mineral, muffled damp rising from the ventilation grates. In the center, beneath the whitish light filtered through the skylight fogged by sea salt, the dissection table showed the transverse cleft that split it from end to end. In the drainage grooves remained traces of caked, reddish sawdust, dry since the day before.

Not a single student. Not a beadle. Not a clerk of records.

Seven tiers of pine benches climbed toward the worm-eaten beams, darkened by pitch and scarred by initials the students had carved with penknives over forty years.

Brais climbed the three steps of the dais. The wood groaned beneath his boots. The walnut chair, its armrests finished in griffins' claws and the archbishop's miter carved on the crest, still retained the imprint of Julián's body upon the cushion of worn chamois. He sat down. He rested his elbows on the lectern and untied the twine bow of the dossier.

The pages rustled. His clumsy fingers took a while to separate the first sheet.

The handwriting was small, cramped, traced with gall ink that time turned to a rusty brown. In the margins of folio forty-two, a yellowish grease stain sealed the notes on the intrathoracic path of the vagus nerve and the galvanic response of muscle tissue. At the foot of the page, a hurried jotting: Pulmonary collapse does not extinguish somatic wakefulness; the subject perceives visceral retraction for an undetermined span after the cessation of the pulse.

Brais pressed the pad of his thumb against Julián's name, signed at the end of the sheet with a long, vertical stroke that nearly tore the paper.

The ink was dry. The hand that had guided it now rested beneath three feet of slaked lime, in the pit the lads had filled in at dawn twenty paces from the dais.

In the distance, the last chime of the bells of San Lázaro drowned in the fog without a soul coming near the amphitheater door.