The Zinc Basins

The tide's push against the cellar's ashlar masonry produced an almost imperceptible vibration in the flagstones, more a suspicion in the bones than a real tremor in the air. At those hours, between midnight and matins, the dissection amphitheater of the College of San Lázaro held the mineral consistency of a dry well. The brackish damp oozing through the joints of the east wall failed to neutralize the slaked lime that the lads scattered at dusk along the gutters; on the contrary, the meeting of stagnant water with the white dust raised a sour, suffocating vapor, interwoven with the acrid fumes of the four thieves' vinegar used to sprinkle the shrouds. Seated on his three-legged stool—whose rear leg, wedged with an oak shim, refused to stay firm—Brais Mújica de Lema slid the blade of a curved gouge over the oil-soaked surface of his Arkansas stone. Thirty biased passes, with a rigid wrist; then the turn to beat down the burr. The stone had an ash-gray vein that made a sandy, regular noise, a dry friction that filled the void left by the wind in the high ventilation slits.

He stopped to check the edge. He did not use the pad of his thumb; for months now, the pads of his first two fingers were no more than two patches of parchment-like skin, insensitive to the grain's roughness and useless for judging the steel's bite. Instead, he brought the bevel close to the smoky flame of the sheep-tallow candle burning by his elbow. The greasy soot rose in a trembling thread, condensing a dark patina on the graduated glass of the test tubes and the precision balance. Brais half-closed his eyelids. The blade was straight. There remained barely a tiny nick near the heel, a souvenir of a spinous process hardened in the previous day's work. He sighed, rubbed the tight skin of his cheekbone with the back of his wrist, and poured two more drops of oil onto the stone.

In the dim light, a drop fell upon the zinc.

The sound was invariable: a dull, viscous click, spaced by seven or eight pulse beats. It came from the basin placed beneath the drain of the second cracked-marble table, where the body of a boatman drowned in the estuary's silt shed the excess brine and cadaveric liquor with lazy slowness. Beyond the circle of oily light, sitting beside the cast-iron stove that crackled as it cooled with metallic snaps as if it had a beetle trapped in its draft, Julián Caunedo flipped through the pages of an inventory with the tedium of one who waits for dawn simply to have an excuse to leave. Caunedo held a coarse earthenware cup with a chipped handle and a bottom stained with the brownish sediment of a cold chicory infusion. He stirred it slowly, tracing lazy circles that failed to dissolve the bitter dregs clinging to the clay walls.

"The shipment of alum from Mondoñedo is adulterated," Caunedo said without lifting his gaze from the yellowish paper. "It brings more gypsum than salt."

"You can tell in the consistency of the quadriceps," Brais replied, without interrupting the rhythmic swaying of steel against stone. "Dehydrated muscle tissue turns brittle, but soft inside. Like old lard left out in the night dew."

"We'll need to double the infusion through the carotid before it starts turning green."

"There's not enough sulfate left."

"Then we'll have to ask for it at Santa Clara's sacristy."

"Sister Benigna isn't going to open the pantry at this hour."

"I know."

Caunedo did not retort. He set the cup down on the small nightstand with a dry thud of wood against earthenware and rubbed his left knee with both open hands, hunching his shoulders beneath the frayed cassock he kept for work. There was in his gesture the old fatigue of a man who has spent too many winters in semi-basements where the sun never enters and where the only measure of time is given by the muffled chimes of some collegiate church or the progressive decomposition of flesh upon the marble. He had the habit of biting his lower lip until he drew blood every time a batch of reagents did not square with the chapter's allocations. That night his lip showed a dark scab, split down the center, which stained itself anew with every repressed yawn.

The screech of the low wicket gate's hinges announced the arrival of Sister Benigna de la Maza before her gray twill habit appeared in the vaulted corridor. She brought with her a wicker basket full of linen sheets freshly boiled in ash lye, whose smell of caustic soda momentarily fought off the sticky stench of the nave. She walked neither fast nor slow; her steps in felt slippers were barely a dull scuffle on the damp gravel of the floor, but her face was pinched by the glacial air of the cloister. Crossing the threshold, she deposited the basket on the wooden bench where the rib saws and accessory gouges rested, pushing aside with two dry fingers a scalpel whose blade retained traces of brown grease.

"The prior has ordered the fire in the lower cells put out," the nun said with a voice that sounded like an empty clay pitcher. "He says the peat smoke gets into the choir vents and ruins his vespers."

"Tell him to come down and sleep here if he's warm," Caunedo muttered, rising with a dry crunch in his hip joints.

"Tell him yourself when you go up for tierce. He ordered me to remove the tallow candles before lauds."

Sister Benigna did not wait for a reply. She leaned over the minor dissection table, spread one of the damp cloths over the drowned man's torso to keep the ambient lime from drying the skin prematurely, and smoothed the edges with mechanical, exact movements, devoid of hesitation. Her hands, reddened by chilblains and covered with age spots, worked with the cold efficiency of one who has shrouded corpses since she could remember. Without looking at either of the two men, she took two burned-down candle stubs resting in tin sconces, put them deep into her apron pocket, and left the way she had come.

Caunedo waited for the echo of the coarse woolen habit to disappear down the spiral staircase before picking up his heavy cloth cloak.

"I'm going to my cell," he announced, fastening the horn buttons with fingers numbed by the cold. "Tonight I can't feel my heels. If you leave the charnel house door open, bar the wicket with the iron rod. I don't want the marsh dogs sneaking in again if the tide keeps rising."

"I'll bar it."

"And don't touch the drowned man's thorax until I bring the antimony salts. The muscle tissue is far too brittle with that brine you prepared; if you drive the gouge in now, you'll splinter the sternum as if it were dry bread."

"I know how to cut," Brais said.

"We'll see."

The oak door of the landing creaked on its moisture-warped hinges. Caunedo had to lift the leaf a few centimeters, pulling upward on the handle so the latch would fit into the box strike, a maneuver requiring the exact knack that only the habit of old things provides. Afterward, silence closed over the amphitheater once more.

Brais laid the gouge upon the oiled flannel. He rubbed his eyes with his clenched fist. A dull throb hammered at his right temple after four hours of breathing the acrid vapor of lime and disinfectant. In a corner of the table, the rib saw rested with its notched teeth impregnated with a white, sticky dust that smelled of boiled marrow. He thought of wiping it down with turpentine to put it back in the walnut case, but the pain in his kidneys advised him not to bend his back any further for the night. He would blow out the large candle and leave as well; he would let the estuary's water lap at the foundations until dawn.

Yet he did not move.

There was something in his stomach. A dull discomfort, the sudden suspicion that the crypt's air draft had reversed its course. Beneath the marble table, the cadaveric fat continued its descent: the drop formed at the apex of the gutter, swelled under its own weight, and detached itself into the void with a click before shattering against the zinc bottom.

Plop.

Six seconds between one and another.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

Plop.

Beside the threshold of the charnel house, the thin layer of slaked lime over the flagstones did not move. The faint current rising from the lower vaults had stopped.

The dripping continued for two more beats.

And then, it ceased.

It was not a gradual tapering. The click cut off sharply, with the dull violence of a cord snapping underwater, at the very moment a barefoot shadow crossed the threshold of the charnel house without kicking up a single speck of lime dust.

Brais did not lift his gaze from the table.

He remained suspended between two breaths, with the gouge clenched against the palm of his hand, waiting for a sound that never came.