The Alum Brine

It is worth noting that the records of the San Lázaro lazaretto were never known for their neatness, and any man accustomed to the tidiness of provincial archives would have considered those bookworm-eaten folios an insult to sanitary administration. The pages smelled of that unmistakable mixture of damp pulp and ledger mold that has spent thirty winters piled in an unventilated vestry, a scent that clung to the fingertips like a greasy dust and that not even the thieves' vinegar could entirely dispel. Brais Mújica de Lema turned the page with the edge of his fingernail so as not to stain the vellum with the grease of his oilcloth apron. On the upper margin of the death register, someone—perhaps the previous chaplain, before losing his mind to the August fevers—had drawn a series of marks with iron gall ink, small oblique crosses spaced at intervals so geometrically identical that it was hard to attribute them to a pious tremor.

The cast-iron radiator embedded beside the cupboard gave two dull, metallic clicks, a cavernous clack-clack that marked the relentless descent of the steam through the pipes. The crypt always grew cold at the exact same hour, with that mineral punctuality of cellars facing the estuary. A dull ache throbbed in the insertion of Brais's right trapezius, born from holding the weight of his torso leaned over the slab for nearly four hours straight, and he had to push his wire-rimmed glasses up with the clean corner of his wrist. Resting on the worm-eaten pine ledge was his white earthenware bowl, chipped at the handle with a thick tannin ring at the bottom; an infusion of willow bark that had gone ice-cold before noon.

"The laundry chimney is drafting backwards again, Doctor," said Sister Benigna de la Maza, entering through the ashlar stone archway barely lifting the hem of her habit. "If we don't send for the smith before nightfall, the candle grease will turn all smoky."

"Have them throw wet ash on it," Brais replied without turning, feeling blindly along the pewter tray until he found the two-toed dissecting forceps. "And tell Don Evaristo the batch of green soap came in watery. It looks like rancid lard."

"Don Evaristo hasn't listened to a soul since his ears started suppurating, and well you know it. Besides, he has quite enough to do counting the sacks of coarse salt the carts from Cee brought in."

The nun stopped midway between the washing trough and the autopsy table. With a mechanical gesture, devoid of any ceremony, she scratched the fold of her coif where the starched fabric chafed her jaw and set a black cloth-bound notebook on the ledge, its corners curled upward from the damp. She did not look at table number three. No one looked at table three unless they were forced to hold the blade.

"In San Lázaro, the flesh never rests: it only learns to wait beneath a thicker layer of salt," the sister dropped with that rugged dryness the Daughters of Charity reserved for matters of dying. "The carter swore they pulled him from the nets in the cove of El Francés. Says he had no bundles or warm clothes, only the shroud soaked in the ship's brine."

"Carters swear to anything that saves them a requiem mass."

"This one didn't swear by God, Doctor. He swore by his mare."

Sister Benigna closed the oak door behind her. The lock, worn down by the saline rust rising from the marshes, required that sharp upward jolt known only to the women of the house so the latch would drop into its strike plate.

The silence that remained was not absolute.

It was composed, rather, of the tiny screech of the mutton tallow candle sputtering on the tripod, releasing a thread of oily soot that condensed in brownish droplets on the glass of the graduated cylinders, and of a rhythmic, spaced, almost vegetal murmur: the thick squelch of grease sliding down the oblique fissure of the marble and falling into the zinc bucket placed on the floor. Brais breathed deeply through his mouth and the air immediately tasted of the caustic, steely dregs of formalin, a cold burn that settled in his gums and at the root of his tongue as if he had bitten a newly unearthed copper coin.

He approached table three. The hemp canvas covering the body was saturated with alum brine; a whitish, brittle crust had crystallized along the lower edge of the cloth, stiff as birch bark. When he tugged at one of the frayed ends, the fibers protested with a harsh crunch, releasing a microscopic cloud of white dust that made him blink behind his lenses.

He pulled the shroud back to the waist.

The exposed thorax belonged to a man of about forty, lean-bodied and sun-weathered by the ria, dehydrated now to the cold, waxy consistency of old parchment. But it was not the absence of a name on the wrist tag that made Brais freeze his arm in midair, inches away from the instrument tray.

The incision was already made.

It ran with mathematical precision from the sternal notch to the xiphoid appendix: a clean, relentless stroke, free of the tearing hesitations usually left by rural doctors or the bleeding barbers of coastal villages. Moreover, upon reaching the fourth costal cartilage, the cut did not follow the conventional downward trajectory recommended by Brouardel's manual, but instead traced an obtuse angle of exactly twelve degrees toward the left hemithorax, avoiding the fibrous pericardium through a calculated deviation that Brais had only ever seen—and executed—in one place in the world. It was his own anatomical signature. The surgical variation he had perfected himself during the two winters he spent in the amphitheater of San Carlos, described solely in a sheaf of handwritten notes that rested, or ought to rest, in the locked drawer of his desk in Santiago.

No one else cut cartilage like that.

It was not exactly fear that compressed his diaphragm. It was not exactly awe. It was not exactly anything for which a man educated in humoral pathology or modern histology possessed a useful nomenclature. It was rather that sort of administrative stupefaction that overcomes one when finding their own name written on a stranger's tombstone.

The temperature in the nave had dropped another two degrees. Brais took a clean rag, moistened in a weak solution of carbolic acid, and slowly rubbed the surface of the marble table beside the inert arm of the corpse, wiping away a dry splash that had probably been there since Tuesday. The marble shone, gray-veined, smelling of a clean apothecary. He put the rag back in the bucket. He checked again that the key to the reagent cabinet was in his right pocket, feeling the cold iron through the vest fabric. Everything was in its place. The dropper, the Pean forceps, the rib saw with its set-toothed blade that he had sharpened himself with an oilstone the previous eve. The normality of the objects possessed an almost insulting firmness.

He looked at the wound again.

The edges of the cut showed no hemorrhage; the lips of the skin had shrunk due to the alum, revealing the subcutaneous plane tinted an ocher yellow, like old butter exposed to the night air. Had one looked closer—though in San Lázaro no one looked twice at what came out of the salting vats—one would have noted that the opening of the ribcage had not been forced with the amputation lever, but parted rib by rib, slicing the cartilages with a thin, flexible blade of extraordinary temper.

He slipped his index and middle fingers between the two sternal flanges. The muscle tissue retained that brittle coldness of salt-cured meat, a caked-leather feel that yielded with a faint snap, almost inaudible beneath the constant murmur of marsh water beating against the exterior pilings of the building. He pulled the anterior chest wall apart.

If Julián Caunedo had gained access to the basement vats before the morning tide came in, then the dock guard—

Brais broke the train of thought with the same violence he usually used to brush aside a spoiled histological slide. It made no sense. Caunedo hadn't set foot in Galicia since the Therapeutics Chair lawsuit seven years ago, when the university tribunals ordered his preparations burned and he abandoned the cloister without even gathering his books of lithographed plates.

He pushed the right hemithorax aside with the Roux retractor. The anatomical field was dry; there was no coagulated blood, only the crystallized remains of the salt that seeped everywhere, glittering like frost over the great vessels.

He thrust his left hand into the pleural cavity and searched for the base of the collapsed lung. The viscus, devoid of air and soaked in preservative juices, weighed like a bag of wet sand and possessed the slate-gray color of the estuary's bottom silt. As he pulled it upward to clear the posterior mediastinum space—and on the gummy resistance of the adhesions this chronicle prefers to keep a silence that has nothing to do with medical science—his thumb pad brushed against a strange hardness, a sharp edge embedded against the concave face of the sixth dorsal vertebra.

It was not bone.

It was a flat sliver of limestone, a little over four inches long, clean of all organic grease and wedged with millimetric precision between the parietal pleura and the bone. As he wiped it with his gloved thumb, the flickering light of the candle revealed three lines engraved on the polished surface with the tip of a steel stylus.

The handwriting was sharp, vertical, tiny, and perfectly recognizable; the letters crowded against one another like needles in a pincushion, with that downward stroke on the l's that only Julián Caunedo's left hand was capable of tracing upon stone without fracturing the edge.

Outside, the high tide began to strike the foundations with the blind force of things that do not know how to stop.