The Vinegar Streak

And the forty-seventh drop fell exactly where all the others did: into the dark crevice of the main beam, right above the straw pallet. Valerio counted them to keep from hearing the curfew, or to trick himself, because by that time of the afternoon the vinegar vapor rising from the alley's communal cauldrons slipped through the floorboards and made the air thick, warm, and sour, an acidic soup that irritated his conjunctiva until his eyes watered without grief or anger. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. The skin of his cuticles was split into microscopic cracks that bled slowly, dried out by the fine white dust of quicklime with which he sealed the window frames every evening. The dust got under his nails, clung to the sweat on his neck, and left a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he were chewing wet chalk.

Outside, Odría was beginning to close like a toothless mouth. In the distance came the metallic screech of the ungreased axles of the pit carts, that heavy rumble over the filthy cobblestones that announced the sealing of the districts before nightfall. Valerio knew the cadence by heart; they passed three times a day dragging remains wrapped in stiff linen, boiled so many times with lye and soda that it scraped the skin just like willow bark. The river fog rose punctually to mingle with the greasy smoke of the bonfires where they burned the clothes of the fallen, dyeing the small window a uniform gray that neither let the light through nor allowed the stench to dissipate.

In the days of the Curia, before Overseer Cosme Almansa decided that the diocese's books balanced much better if there were fewer living scribes in the archive, vinegar was not used to disinfect the dead but to dress endive salads in the upper refectory. Valerio remembered the lunches on vigil Fridays, those endless tables of waxed mahogany where no one dared speak and the only tolerated sound was the monotonous clatter of silver cutlery against white earthenware plates, a meticulous and guilty clicking that lasted exactly forty minutes while novices served water from pewter pitchers without looking anyone in the eyes. Almansa presided at the head without lifting his gaze from his plate, chewing with the patient slowness of an old ox, wiping his lips with a napkin folded in fours before dictating an order of banishment or signing the confiscation of an apothecary shop with the same indifference he used to flick away a black olive pit.

No one said a word at those tables.

Purity is no virtue in Odría; it is only fear boiled down with enough vinegar. Almansa had let it drop during his inaugural sermon and Valerio had copied it three times in thick parchment, with gall ink that smelled of rust, without understanding then that the maxim was not moral theology but the housekeeping rules of a slaughterhouse that operated piece-work.

The cold in Odría always enters first through the wrists.

Valerio rose from the stool, feeling the dry, warm crack of his left knee, and went to the corner where he kept his food on a warped shelf. Half an old apple remained, wrinkled and brown-skinned from a bruise on the bale. He took out his bone-handled pocketknife and began to pare it in a single continuous strip, slowly, careful not to take away the little white pulp that wasn't rotten. On the pine board remained the round, dark ring of a mug that hadn't been washed in three days. He popped a mealy piece into his mouth; it barely had any juice and tasted like a closed cellar, but it served to calm the acidic aftertaste that rose in his esophagus every time he swallowed.

The forty-eighth drop didn't get to fall.

Instead, the rotten wood of the landing groaned. It was an agonizing, damp whine, one of those steps that gave way half an inch under any weight greater than that of a fat rat. Valerio stayed still, the knife halfway to his lips and his thumb pressed against the notched blade. He waited. Sometimes it was the feral dogs coming up the stairs looking for discarded bacon rinds, or, who knows, some ragpicker drunk on pomace wandering into the attic before the Overseer's bailiffs broke his ribs with an ash rod. But the dogs didn't breathe with that broken bellows, that air coming out in thick gurgles from the depths of the lungs.

There was a clumsy stumble against the pine doorframe and a bulk crashed heavily against the esparto mat covering the entrance, shaking the rotten board of the threshold.

Silence.

Valerio left the bitten fruit on the shelf and picked up the hazelwood rod resting beside the wooden basin. The tip was coated in thick lye, whitish and slippery to the touch, giving off that bitter smell of well-chlorine that burned the nose on the first breath. He approached the door without planting his heels on the loose joints of the floorboards. With the thumb of his free hand, he pushed the iron bolt, which slid silently thanks to the rancid grease with which he oiled the mechanism every week.

"Move aside," Valerio said toward the gap, his voice low and dry.

On the other side there were no words, only labored panting and an emanation that was neither the alley's vinegar nor the quicklime of the walls: it was stagnant ditch water, leather rotted by dampness, and that sweetish stench of recent carrion that soaked into the wool of the smock and wouldn't come out even with three boils of soda. Valerio pushed the wooden leaf with the end of the impregnated rod.

The bundle rolled half a span into the room, onto the bare floor. It was Tadeo the Left-Handed. Or the lean shadow of what Tadeo had been before he got lost in the swamps of the lower river. He wore a single cowhide boot tied to his ankle with baling wire; the other leg ended in a stump of blackened bandages oozing yellowish dampness onto the clean boards.

"I dropped my bread," Tadeo murmured with his mouth almost glued to the wood, dragging the syllables with a pasty tongue. "In the ditch. I dropped it..."

"Shut up," Valerio told him.

"It was hard rye, Valerio. With anise."

"Shut your mouth, Tadeo."

Tadeo closed his swollen eyelids and let his forehead drop against the esparto, breathing in fits and starts. Valerio didn't move from his spot. He looked at the empty staircase in the curfew gloom, where the fog from the bonfires was beginning to rise like a dirty rag, and then he looked at the mud plate with the apple parings on the table. He squatted down unhurriedly, picked up the damp linen rag he kept behind the door, and wiped the mud stain from the landing before closing the leaf and throwing the bolt with a sharp click.

She was going to fetch the clay pitcher to wash the soot from his temples, or tell him to crawl to the back of the straw pallet so as not to foul the entrance, but exhaustion weighed heavier than grudge.

With the tip of the lye-soaked rod, Valerio carefully pushed aside the filthy rags Tadeo had wrapped around his chest like a beggar's frock. The bastard cloth was stuck to the flesh by a dry crust of pus and ditch mud, but as it lifted with the wood, it revealed a clean corner, a scrap of crimson silk embroidered with fine gold thread that shone like blasphemy under the tallow candle's light: the intertwined monogram of the Curia, the seal of Almansa's secretariat that three years ago had signed his own sentence of hunger and dispossession. Valerio stepped back, but Tadeo's left hand, fast and stiff despite the tremors, emerged from among the rags and desperately grabbed the hem of his smock, driving five fingers black with fresh carrion into the cloth while his fever-chapped lips parted in a mute grimace.