A Question of Marrow

The barefoot shadow was Sister Benigna de la Maza. She had left her clogs on the bottom step so as not to wake the prior, and behind her, limping on his bad knee, came Caunedo, who had never reached his cell: the nun had caught up with him on the stairs. Neither of them carried a light. Sister Benigna crossed the nave without looking at Brais, lifted the burlap from the table at the back, where a man from the San Roque gallows had been curing in brine since Saturday, and took Brais by the wrist to guide his hand to the dead man's right arm.

"Before dawn," was all she said.

An hour later, the stillness had brought no relief whatsoever, only an unbearable fixity, as if the ashlar walls had tightened their joints to shut them into a dead-end alley. The gouge rested at last on the lip of the cracked marble table, still warm from Brais's sweaty palm, while the vapor of slaked lime vied with the acrid effluvia of the four thieves' vinegar they had sluiced over the floor. The air did not smell of the sepulchre, nor of the sour plague of ordinary putrefaction, but of something far more sterile and mineral, a heaviness of caustic salts that clung to the palate. Caunedo stood on the other side of the slab, his frock coat unbuttoned and his shirtsleeves rolled up with coarse twine above his elbows, rubbing the left side of his nose with the back of his wrist, where a scaly, reddened crust betrayed the tribute the acid vapors exacted from anyone who frequented that underground.

Neither dared move his feet.

"The wick is drowning," Caunedo murmured in a harsh hiss, without lifting his gaze from the corpse. "Trim it if you're going to stand there planted like an altar candle."

"It's not the wick," Brais replied, forcing his voice down to a flat, almost bureaucratic tone while drying his fingers on his burlap apron. "It's the mutton tallow. You shouldn't have accepted that batch from the dock butchers."

"It was the only one that burned without sputtering. Shut up and hand me the zinc rods. The curved-tip ones."

Caunedo's irritability rarely obeyed any moral urgency; it was simply the body's unease. He was sick of the cold rising from the cobbled floor, sick of the rhythmic clicking with which drops of cadaveric grease fell into the zinc buckets beneath the slope of the stone, and, above all, sick of the presence of Sister Benigna, who waited in the reveal of the vaulted passage, silhouetted against the gloom like a stake of black cloth. The nun had not left since she led them to the dead man. She stood motionless, telling bone beads so worn they made not the slightest sound as they touched, her gaze lost in the blind angle where the master beams sank into the granite. Her vigil did not watch the two men's hands, but the hollow of the stairwell leading to the canons' quarters. There was a dry complicity in her silence, devoid of pity or devotion, as though what they were about to do were nothing more than the enforced fulfillment of an inventory.

The executed man lay on his back, the purplish furrow of the hemp cinching his throat and his ribcage opened in two wings by the sternal cut. What was incomprehensible—what turned the procedure into an anomaly defying every record entered in their notebooks—was the temperature retained by the right upper limb. The rest of the trunk offered to the touch the waxy, frigid, brittle consistency of muscle saturated with brine after three days in the vat, but the arm, from the origin of the deltoid to the fingertips, gave off an animal warmth, almost insolent. It was a stubborn heat that refused to die.

The arm was warm.

Death freezes the flesh long before it corrupts it: anyone who has held a scalpel with fingers numbed by winter knows as much, though scholastic doctrine liked to dismiss such phenomena as the late fermentation of vicious humors. Caunedo brought the two zinc rods close, their filed tips flashing with a dull gleam beneath the tallow light. His hands, clumsy from the loss of feeling in the fingertips—the same numbness that forced Brais to test the edge of a blade by pressing it against his own fingernail—hesitated for an instant as they sought the supraclavicular fossa among the dissected bundles of the scalenes. The smell of vinegar seemed to have been vanquished by a mineral vapor, warm and dense, rising straight from the bottom of the breach.

"Wait," Brais warned him, gripping his forearm with more strength than he thought he had left. "Look at the tension in the carpal tendons. If you apply the zinc at that angle, the spasm will snap the fibers before you reach the primary trunk."

"I know exactly what I'm doing, Brais," Caunedo retorted, pulling free with a dry jerk that made the two metals strike together in a crystalline note. "If we wait for the limb to cool, there'll be nothing left to measure but inert mud. Step aside."

"The nerve is only discharging, Julián. It's a reflex contraction, nothing more."

"Then let me record that contraction before the Chair claims the ashes."

He leaned over the hanged man's armpit with an almost feverish haste and inserted the tip of the left rod into the brachial plexus. The contact produced no immediate contraction, only a faint hiss, a caustic evaporation that wrung a thread of white, pungent smoke from the tissue. For a second Brais thought of the marginal notes that used to be confiscated from them in the college classrooms, but the thought was snapped at the root when a metallic blow resounded from the top of the vaulted flight.

It was the dry crash of a heavy door knocker, followed by the familiar creak the oak steps made only when someone trod on their center in hobnailed boots.

Sister Benigna made no sound. She stepped back into the hollow of an empty niche and, with a quick movement of her fingers, crushed the wick of her hand-lamp, plunging the nave into a suffocating darkness where only the two smoking lamps on the table still burned. Caunedo jerked his head up, livid, yet kept the rod buried among the corpse's tendons, while Brais tried to throw an unbleached sheet soaked in alum over the flayed chest. The lock of the gate screeched. It was a tricky lock, of old sheet iron, that required the bolt to be pushed upward before making a full turn, and whoever was working the latch knew the trick perfectly.

The iron leaf slammed against the wall with a crash that shook the dust from the rafters. On the threshold loomed the corpulent figure of a sworn warden of the Chair, wrapped in his regulation cloak and holding at chest height a dark lantern whose slit threw a horizontal, violent beam straight onto the two anatomists' hands.

"In the name of the Holy Chair!" the guard bellowed, thrusting forward his bronze-ferruled ash staff. "Drop the instruments and take your arms off that slab this instant!"

Caunedo started to obey and stepped back half a pace, stammering a regulatory justification—a string of submissions this chronicle, out of decorum, prefers not to record too faithfully—but his left wrist was caught in midair. The executed man's hand, in a violent, blind flexion unleashed by the zinc still lodged at the root of the nerve, had closed on his forearm with the rigidity of a shackle, digging its nails into the living flesh with the purely mechanical tenacity of tetanic muscle.

The warden raised his staff of justice, ready to charge, but none of the three men in the crypt could take the next step.