The Vinegar of the Four Thieves

Brais came out from among the vats because there was nothing else left to do. He crossed the nave with his hands in plain sight, planted himself before the zinc tray and, in a voice he did not recognize as his own, read his own notes aloud as if they were a commentary on Haller's doctrine of irritability: the calf, the pins, the copper thread, all of it fit within a physiological experiment any faculty in the kingdom would have approved. The Visitor understood not a word and pretended to understand them all. He took the notebook away under his arm, had the tray sealed with wax and never looked again toward the trough in the corner, where Caunedo, while Brais was reading, had tipped handful after handful of quicklime over the body of a laundress who appeared in no ledger.

It is worth noting that survival in the basements of San Lázaro rarely obeys cleverness or purity of method; it resembles rather the sort of involuntary truce granted by draft beasts when thunder stuns them all alike. The Visitor's entourage had withdrawn to the upper cloisters barely half an hour before, leaving behind a trail of trampled candle wax on the cold flagstones, the distant rumble of the bolts sliding home again at the gate, and that warm, vaguely clerical smell cheap incense leaves when it tries to stifle the stench of a sewer. In the lower nave no one remained but the two of them. On one of the cracked marble slabs, rinse water still dripped into the zinc bucket with a rhythmic, dull, heavy plop, muffled by the crust of rancid grease neither of them had bothered to scrape off since Tuesday.

Caunedo was sitting on the edge of the salt chest, legs stretched out and heels wedged into a joint of the damp paving. His shirt was unbuttoned to the sternum and his left sleeve rolled up above the elbow, held with a frayed twine. Above the four half-moons the hanged man had left him, in the middle third of the forearm, where the quicklime had bitten his skin as he tipped it over the laundress, a whitish, turgid blister the size of a piece of eight oozed a thick humor. It barely bled: the burn had cooked the dermis with the harsh, neat dryness alkalis leave when they are not neutralized in time. With his right hand, Caunedo listlessly scratched a dry scab at the corner of his jaw.

"Bring the vinegar," he said, without lifting his gaze from the tiles. "The wormwood and rue one. Saltpeter alone will just open the wound."

"Saltpeter cleans what you neglected out of clumsiness," Brais replied, though he reached from the shelf for the glazed clay jar with the moth-eaten label reading Acetum Quatuor Furum. The cork was swollen by the acid vapors and needed the tip of the scraper to give. "If His Grace had lowered his gaze two inches further toward the trough, you wouldn't have an arm left to treat."

"But he didn't lower it."

"Because he was looking at my notebook. You served me up on a platter."

"I used you as bait, which is not the same thing." Caunedo twisted his mouth. "A calf with three pins in it is a physiology lesson; a laundress with no entry in the register is the stake. I gave His Grace something he could understand."

Outside, it was raining over the estuary.

Brais soaked a strip of raw linen in the yellowish, pungent liquid. The stench of rue, camphor and stale wine, dense as a slap in a closed crypt, mingled at once with the limy damp of the walls. When he pressed the compress directly onto the burn, Caunedo gave a sharp jerk, the cords of his neck tightening, but he did not withdraw his arm. His flesh felt strange under the fingers: cold, slightly brittle at the edges of the wound, stripped of the rubbery elasticity healthy tissue keeps. Brais's own fingertips, hardened and nearly numb after months of rubbing alum brine into the preparations, could barely tell the boundary between the scorched skin and the roughness of the linen.

They hated each other with the meticulous devotion of those who have only a single mirror to look into. There was something profoundly miserable about the closeness of their faces in the smoky glare of the wick: two men of science consumed by the same foul air, with the same premature cracks in their knuckles and that earthy pallor that gives away men who sleep by day and open bellies by night.

Brais finished knotting the strip of linen with a firm tug, careful not to brush the raw flesh.

"Done," he said.

Caunedo bent his elbow slowly, testing the tightness of the bandage, and let his arm drop to his side as if it were someone else's tool.

Brais went to the niche cut into the wall beside the blind fireplace and took out the green-glazed Triana bowl, the one with a deep notch in its rim since last winter. Half a pint of marsh cider was left in the thick glass jug; it was a turbid potion, sour as badly fermented pomace, that scraped the palate but at least stripped the chemical film from the throat. He poured a long drink and handed him the bowl. Caunedo took it with his good hand, blew away a speck of soot floating on the surface and drank without haste, swallowing with a harsh, laborious sound.

"It tastes of iron and silt," he remarked, wiping the back of his wrist across his chapped lips.

"It's what the sacristan left after Candlemas. Be thankful he didn't stretch it with vat vinegar."

"By now I wouldn't notice the difference. My tongue can't tell a dried fig from a boot sole."

He stared at the zinc bucket where the grease from the dissecting table kept falling drop by drop, marking a hollow, monotonous beat, like the pendulum of a clock running down in an empty room. In the trough in the corner, under the white crust Caunedo had tipped over it by the handful, the outline of the laundress could be made out, her thorax half-disarticulated since the day before; the rib saw was still stuck in her sternum and rose out of the lime like the mast of a sunken ship.

It should be said that Julián Caunedo's stillness was never to be trusted; it was the deceptive fixity of swamp water before the rotting silt rises to the surface. He rested the bowl between his thighs, fingers laced over the glazed clay, and fixed his turbid eyes on Brais, their tear ducts inflamed by the antimony salts.

"Do you really think Sister Benigna hands us the pieces out of devotion to the Chair?" he asked suddenly, in a tone that barely rose above the plop of the dripping on the zinc.

"She hands them over because the rector pays her ten silver reales for every cart that leaves the hospice without a parish entry," Brais answered, leaning against the shelf of flasks. "And because at spring tide the graveyard ditches flood and they have nowhere to bury the beggars."

"Ten reales don't buy the muleteers' silence, Brais. Nor the chapter clerk's favor."

He made a deliberate pause. He shifted his weight on the chest, and the old boards creaked with a dry snap. Brais was about to gather the dirty cloths to sink them in the lye tub, but—

He stopped.

"Yesterday afternoon, before they brought this woman down to the basement," Caunedo went on, lowering his voice to a harsh, almost conspiratorial thread, "I untied her shift in the hallway to check the stiffness. She had neither the swelling of typhus nor the livid spots of those who waste away from consumption. On her neck, just below the jaw, she had four small bruises. Four round marks, the exact size of the fingertips of a slight woman's hand. Dry fingers, Brais. Like roots."

The basement air grew dense, almost solid.

"And in her mouth..." Caunedo continued, digging his nails into the chipped rim of the green bowl, "in her mouth there was still warmth. Not the pasty lukewarmness of decay we all know. It was tempered air. Air trying to get out."

Brais looked at the trough. The crust of lime lay smooth and white, untouched as snow in a closed courtyard.

"Sister Benigna de la Maza doesn't send us the dead to empty her hospice wards," Caunedo whispered, draining the sour cider before setting the bowl on the floor with a dry thud. "She sends us the ones who refuse to die on time."