The Bread and the Crusts

Valerio did not push his hand away with a blow, but shoved it slowly, with the smooth wood of the rod, until Tadeo's knuckles gave way one by one like dry branches snapping without a sound. The fabric of his smock was stained with four streaks of blackened mud and an oily smudge that smelled of rancid tallow, the kind carters use so the wheel hubs do not squeak so much when they go down to the riverbank. Tadeo let himself drop backward, blindly seeking the small pine stool, the one with a wedge of bark tucked under the front leg so it would not wobble on the warped floorboards. He was breathing through his mouth, with that damp whistle of those whose chests are taken by the river mist.

The cauldron in the corner was an iron belly that never rested, bubbling a whitish scum where vinegar and quicklime fought over which burned deeper. The vapor rose in warm, sticky waves that clung to the green pine beams, condensing into milky droplets that fell from time to time onto the loose tiles with a dull snap. Suppose you get used to it after two winters, but your eyelashes stay white, stiff as farmyard frost, and when you blink you feel grit scraping the corners of your eyes until they are left as raw as a hen's gizzard.

Tadeo pulled a piece of rye bread from his doublet pocket, black and hard as an ox's heel. He looked at it for a long while, running his thumb over a patch of green mold before scraping it against the edge of the stool with his dirty fingernail.

"If I bite this, I'll leave the three canine teeth I have left," he said, and his voice came out pasty, as if his tongue were wrapped in old wool.

"Dip it in the tub in the back," Valerio replied without looking at him, stoking the fire beneath the cauldron with a soot-stained ash paddle. "The one with yesterday's rainwater, not the rinse water. The rinse water will peel your palate right off."

"It tastes like stubble smoke anyway."

"Fine then. Eat air if your stomach is so delicate."

Silence.

Tadeo did not move toward the tub. He stayed right there, elbows propped on his bony knees and the crust clutched in both hands, waiting for his saliva to do the slow work his teeth could no longer manage. Around Valerio's cuticles, the dry lime had carved microscopic trenches, red and tight lines that did not quite bleed but burned with a dull throbbing whenever the vinegar vapor brushed his fingers. It is a petty nuisance, the kind that does not kill you but eats away at your patience from early morning, like a pebble in your boot or a horsefly buzzing against the glass of an empty cupboard.

And the truth is there was a time—a time that now seemed to Valerio invented by someone else, who knows, some old man's fabrication to get through the freezing nights—when mornings smelled of anise bread and fresh ink brought from the apothecary shops of Flanders. In the low scriptorium of the Curia, Cosme Almansa had a hammered silver sand-shaker and a cedar box where he kept red wafers to seal rich inheritance protocols, those where orphans divided up oak groves, casks of Toro wine, and Segovia cloth capes lined with sable fur. Almansa always signed with a well-trimmed goose quill, slowly, barely wetting the tip so as not to splatter the vellum, while wiping biscuit crumbs from his cassock with the palm of his left hand, a fat, rosy hand that had never touched a damp shroud or had to scrape the pus crust from someone else's smock to earn a bowl of dry beans.

But memory is a useless trap when wet clothes weigh like lead on your arms.

Valerio plunged the wooden ladle into the bottom of the bundle Tadeo had left lying near the door. It was a shapeless lump, reeking of old sweat and the grease bodies release when fever dries out their entrails before dawn. From the alley below, muffled by the thickness of the fog rising from the rotting river bend, came the screech of axle trees from a parish cart: metal against metal without a drop of grease, a long, uneven lament that made the empty bottles tremble on the pine shelf.

"The four o'clock one passed," Tadeo muttered, sucking on the rye crust with a hollow click. "Today they're bringing few. They toss them three by three in the dump pit because there aren't any trenches left open near the wall."

"Shut up and hand me the dry vine shoot," Valerio ordered, shifting his body weight to his sound leg to ease the hip that had been aching since the wind changed. "If the fire goes out before we put Almansa's batch in, we'll be sleeping with the cold broth stinking up the hovel."

"Almansa doesn't sleep in the cold."

"Nobody asked you about Almansa."

Tadeo shrugged, scratched his neck where the ringworm had left a patch of white, scaly skin, and said not another word. Two men in silence inside a whitewashed room weigh heavier than a regiment of the living out there. The weight is not in what they say, but in the space they leave between one cough and the next, in the breath that stumbles over the same sour air already breathed four times before the draft manages to slip through the crack of the shutter.

The rough-hewn table was a long plank mounted on two empty brine tubs. Valerio began to unroll the shrouds with the tips of his blacksmith's tongs, taking care not to bring his face close to the swirl of steam rising from the raw fabric as the vinegar loosened the hard crust of linen. There were pieces that were almost gauze from being washed so clean, poor parish linens that had wrapped three or four old men before returning to the cauldron, with frayed hems and corners eaten away by warehouse rats.

But Almansa's bundle was different.

The fabric did not yield with the pasty docility of used rags; it was stiff, parchment-like from a sticky salting that gave off a thick, sweetish stench, like meat left out in the sun for three days behind a wall. Valerio hooked a thick fold with the tongs and pulled hard. The linen creaked like green leather, tearing at a poorly finished seam that let out a hot gust which made his eyes water until his vision blurred. He had to blink twice, wiping his forehead with the soot-stained sleeve of his doublet.

"This doesn't come from the hospice beds," Valerio said, bringing the movement of the tongs to a dead stop.

Tadeo raised his head from his stool, listlessly chewing the already softened crumb. His upper gum was visible, purple and receding, with a thread of thick blood staining the corner of his lip.

"The foreman gave it to me at the San Lázaro wicket," Tadeo said, wiping his mouth with the back of his left hand. "He told me it came straight from the archdeacon's manor. That it had to be boiled twice before curfew or they'd take away our granary token."

"The archdeacon died a week ago, you animal. The archdeacon was buried in Bruges cloth and four virgin wax candles in the transept nave. I appraised the inventory jewels myself before they pushed us down into this pit."

"And what are you telling me for? They gave me the bundle tied with esparto rope and told me to load it and shut up. If it weighs more than it should, it's no fault of my spine."

Valerio slid his raw-leather-gloved hand beneath the major fold, searching for the selvedge to spread it across the bench. His fingers brushed against something that lacked the flabby softness of rotten linen or the leathery rigidity of dried pus. It was something small, flat, with corners that poked into his palm through the lye-hardened leather.

He pulled outward.

From between the folds of a sheet that still bore the dark marks of two swollen legs, a cord of tarred hemp slipped out—not cut with a knife, but ripped straight off an oak doorjamb. At the end of the cord, intact, cold, and shining under the yellowish light of the tallow candle, hung a thick lead seal stamped with the arms of the General Superintendency in deep relief: the double-headed eagle and the scales with the broken tongue, the mark Cosme Almansa used exclusively to seal the rooms of the rich dying before the Council scriveners entered to count the coins.

The seal was not broken. The red custody wax surrounding the lead remained firm, bearing the clean imprint of Almansa's signet ring, crossed by two white beard hairs that had been trapped in the warm mixture at the moment of sealing the door.

Those cloths were not shrouds taken from bodies to be washed out of the chapter's charity.

They were the direct linens of the locked bedchamber, the very air of the plague trapped under lock and key and shouldered to two men dying of hunger in an unheated garret, two old men who had seen too many account books to be allowed to live until Easter.

On the shelf, the melted candle grease reached the crack in the wood and began to drip slowly, drowning a woodlouse that was kicking dryly against the pine.