The Edge of the Collarbone

The lesser cloister of the College of San Lázaro smelled of estuary and rancid tallow. It was never intended to house anatomy lessons, but rather to air out the convalescent cells; hence the clean, freezing draft swept through the ogee arches, scouring the flagstones by mid-morning. Upon the cracked marble table—an old refectory piece that still bore the knife marks left by generations of lay brothers—the light fell turbid, filtered through the oily smoke of the rushlights. Four paces away, the second-year students stifled the urge to cough, pressing their notebooks to their chests. Brais Mújica de Lema rubbed his thumb and forefinger pads against the waxed cloth of his apron. He had lost the fine touch in those fingers months ago, reduced to a yellowish, hard callus; now he calculated the depth of each incision by the crunch of cartilage and the elasticity of the tissue beneath the blade.

The man upon the table was not, formally speaking, autopsy material. The tag pinned to the headpiece stated he was an inshore fisherman recovered after Tuesday's gale, admitted out of pity to rule out signs of corruption before sending him to the common grave of San Cosme. But the cloths soaked in alum wrapping his thighs and the sour smell of scented vinegar rising from his groin gave the lie to any miracle.

There was a thick, flooded-cellar cold.

By the first pillar, seated on a folding stool, Sister Benigna de la Maza held the calfskin ledger of the Holy Office on her lap. Her knuckles were swollen with chilblains and she clicked her jet beads with a dry snap, without praying. She merely watched the table with the same expressionless attention a sacristan uses to gauge the oil level in the lamps. Should the corpse offer a late spasm—a reflex jump of the diaphragm caused by residual acids—her quill would record the impurity on the spot.

"Brother Pelayo," Brais said without lifting his eyes from the ribcage. "The brazier smokes without a flame."

The youngest novice, shrunk inside a habit two sizes too big, looked at the cast-iron box.

"The coal came damp from the cellar, master."

"Take it out to the courtyard. The soot is blurring the glass."

"The cellarer won't provide dry wood until Friday."

"I didn't ask you about the cellarer," Brais said, pulling the skin of the pectoral away with a boxwood spatula. "Take the brazier out. It smells like burning rag and we need air in here."

Pelayo dragged the contraption across the flagstones with a metallic screech. Sister Benigna raised her eyes, stern, but said not a word; the chair still retained a certain jurisdiction in that gallery, if only out of the friars' sheer apprehension toward the cutting instruments.

Brais took up the flat scalpel. The muscle presented the leathery texture of old bacon. Had any of the students looked closely—though they were too busy trying not to swallow the fumes from the belly—they would have noticed that the cut over the sternum disregarded Morgagni's laminae. The stroke veered toward the right with a calculated clumsiness, widening the opening to erase the clean incision—his own signature, traced by another hand—that he had found eleven hours earlier in the crypt.

A physical memory—the edge of the limestone under the pad of his thumb while the tide beat against the foundations—almost stayed his hand.

He stopped.

Footsteps in the southern ambulatory. Firm strides upon the stone, bearing that muffled snap of well-tanned leather unafraid of the courtyard mud. Julián Caunedo crossed the shadow of the arch with his cloak gathered over his arm and his hands thrust into his waistcoat pockets, looking at the table with the half-smile of one entering a tavern when the tab is already paid. He carried no notebooks nor a proctor's staff. His mere silhouette was enough for Pelayo to step back and Sister Benigna to freeze the beads between her fingers.

Seven years without setting foot in Galicia, and he walked into the cloister like a man coming back from a turn around the orchard. He carried, as everyone learned that same afternoon, an appointment as interim regent of the chair while the chapter called the competitive examination. Brais felt the sliver of limestone in his waistcoat pocket weigh on him like a millstone.

"Continue, Master Mújica," Caunedo said, approaching the marble without removing his suede gloves. "Don't interrupt the lesson for my sake. Though I must admit that section of cartilage strikes me as generous. Too generous. It gives the impression of searching for room to maneuver where nothing ought to be moving."

"We are checking the adhesion of the pleurae, Don Julián," Brais replied, holding the blade two millimeters from the ribs. "The statutes mandate opening in a fan shape when desiccation of noble organs is suspected."

"The statutes, of course," Caunedo murmured, stopping beside him. He smelled of lye soap, pipe tobacco, and the warm wool of someone sleeping by a lit hearth. "Always so attached to the dead letter, Mújica. Though I wonder if you aren't neglecting the fundamental."

Before Brais could pull his hand away, Caunedo leaned in and took with two fingers the short-bladed, blunt-tipped bistoury resting in the marble groove. It was a swift gesture, without fuss, yet of an irritating smoothness.

Brais had no time to move away.

Caunedo did not touch the dead man. With a dry movement, he pressed the rounded spine of the steel against Brais's neck, right upon the upper edge of the left collarbone, pressing downward until he overcame the collar of the shirt and sank the metal into living flesh.

Brais did not move. The blunt spine did not cut the skin, but the pressure crushed the periosteum with a dull, lacerating pain that ran down his arm to his insensate fingertips.

"The clumsy anatomist searches for the cause of demise; the knowing one seeks the cleft through which to retain the breath," Caunedo said, raising his voice toward the students, as though that steel driven into his colleague's neck were a schoolpointer. "Observe the angle closely. If you enter above the supraclavicular fossa seeking the apex of the lung, you will find only the useless resistance of collapsed tissue. Life, gentlemen, does not slip away where the theologians say. It seeps through the joints where flesh resists."

None of the novices dared to breathe. One of them fixed his gaze on his own sawdust-covered shoes.

It was no explicit aggression. It was nothing that could be taken before the prior without sounding like a hysterical complaint.

The steel kept pressing.

Sister Benigna raised her gaze. For three heartbeats her eyes locked onto Brais's; she did not blink, but her fingers gripped the edge of the ledger until her knuckles turned white. Then she returned to her beads with a glacial slowness.

"You are pressing too hard, Don Julián," Brais murmured with a rigid jaw, suppressing the urge to drive his probe into the back of the hand.

"You think so?" Caunedo leaned in still further, pretending to study the dead man's collarbone, but bringing his cheek close until his breath blew straight into Brais's ear. "Three hundred and forty-two grams, Mújica."

It was a whisper so low that Brother Pelayo, two steps away, could not distinguish it from the rustle of the breeze in the habits.

"Three hundred and forty-two," Caunedo repeated, withdrawing the bistoury with a slight bow and dropping it onto the zinc tray with a dry clatter. "Not counting the pericardial fat, which I imagine you had the foresight to burn."

Outside, in the estuary, the receding tide laid bare the greenish ashlar blocks of the seawall, where crabs busied themselves among the mud over whatever scrap the sea had refused to swallow.