The Weight of the Ash Staff

The cochineal bug was trapped beneath the white crust, a black speck in a puddle of cold grease. Valerio did not touch it. He simply watched it with that heavy, draft-ox patience that had settled into his bones over the past three winters, waiting for the tallow to lose its oily sheen until it grew hard, opaque, a milky stain across the pine grain that someone would have to scrape off the next morning with a dull gouge. In the darkest corner of the garret, sitting on an overturned wicker basket that groaned with every breath, One-Eyed Tadeo scratched his left calf with a dirty thumbnail. It was a dry, rhythmic scratch, like a rat gnawing a table leg. His right sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, revealing the bruised skin where quicklime had eaten away the tender layers of his forearm, and in his other hand he held a folding clasp knife with which he was shaving thin slices off a shriveled turnip he had pulled from his pocket.

"This stew needs beef fat," muttered Tadeo without raising his head, chewing the hard pulp with a grinding snap of molars that sounded hollow in the room. "Even if we tossed in just a spoonful of old grease, the yellow kind they throw out at the river tanneries, it would taste like something. Like real food, I don't know. Like a Christian."

"There is no lard, Tadeo," Valerio replied.

"I know there isn't. I said if there were. A person can remember things even if they aren't on the plate, I reckon."

No one had lard in Odría.

Valerio remembered his uncle Hernando's vegetable patch. Sunday mornings when the river fog brought no stench of burned carrion, but rather the scent of damp earth and frost-rotted grapevine leaves. They would all file into the kitchen with their heavy boots caked in mud. They would sit at the large walnut table, a table scarred by the bottoms of jugs on the bare wood, and no one would open their mouth for half an hour while the pewter spoons clinked against the deep bowls. His aunt would stand by the hearth peeling quinces with infinite patience, letting the peel fall in a single, scented strip over her clean linen apron that smelled of sunlight and oak ash.

Yet his aunt's porridge was five leagues away and four years dead.

The air in the garret weighed heavy as a bale of wet wool. It was that thick mixture of hot vinegar rising from the large tub, a sour vapor that choked the throat and stung the conjunctiva until your eyes watered for no reason at all, condensing into fat droplets that clung to the ceiling beams like dark sweat. Down below, on the greasy paving stones of the alley, the ungreased axles of the pit carts groaned—that screech of iron against iron that drills into your molars around curfew time, announcing that the afternoon's refuse was headed for the common pit before the bell of San Jerónimo closed out the night.

Three heavy thuds dealt with the iron ferrule of a justice staff suddenly shook the rotted frame of the garret, splintering an oak stave and sending down a fine rain of dry sawdust.

"Open up already, De la Torre!" bellowed from the landing the thick, damp voice of the overseer Cosme Almansa, heavy as a blanket soaked in mire. "Open up, I'm not going to spend the night on this piss-soaked staircase waiting for dawn just to haul away the remains!"

Tadeo jumped on the wicker basket and the knife slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the floorboards with a dull thud. He brought both hands to his chest, shrinking back as if iron had struck his ribs.

"Valerio..." he whispered, his voice cracking into a high, thin thread, staring at the wooden bolt that barely fit into the staple. "The San Jerónimo bell struck the last hour half an hour ago. He can't come in here until dawn, that staff doesn't give him the right to force a barred door."

"Cosme Almansa doesn't need rights at this hour of the night," Valerio said. With calculated slowness, he picked up a dry rag from the ledge and wiped the bitter turnip juice from the knife blade before handing it back to Tadeo. Then he rubbed the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His cuticles burned, split into microscopic cracks by the quicklime seeping through the seams of his gloves. Every pore ached with a dry stab.

He smelled chewed tobacco and soaked boots through the cracks.

Valerio slid the bolt without haste, letting the rusted hinge shriek all it liked. As the door swung inward, the black cold of the stairwell rushed into the garret, crashing against the hot vinegar vapor and forming a dense mist at knee height. Cosme Almansa filled nearly the entire doorway. He was a broad, stout man, encased in a fine cloth cassock with wide dark-green velvet lapels that the afternoon drizzle had mottled with round stains. In his right hand he held the polished ash staff, topped with the iron ferrule he had just used to beat the wood; in his left, a hooded brass lantern casting a sickly circle of light over the rotted floorboards. He reeked of cheap pomace and that stale camphor overseers used to cover their noses when crossing the lower parishes.

"You're sleeping on the job, skinner," Almansa spat, hurling a thick gobbet toward the landing corner without fully crossing the threshold, though he wedged the muddy toe of his calfskin boot to jam the wood. "The corregidor wants the tally closed before matins. Those three bales that arrived from the lazaretto mid-afternoon are leaving with me right now."

"They are not leaving," Valerio said. He did not raise his voice by so much as a millimeter. The garret was so thick with steam that the words seemed to float in the air like dirty rags. "They are at the bottom of the boiler, Mr. Overseer. They have to steep in the acid until first light or the fabric will rot before it reaches the pit. And if I pull them out now, the soot will cling to the hemp."

"Don't come at me with your coppersmith tricks, De la Torre," Almansa roared, taking a full step into the garret and making the boards groan beneath his thick soles. The ash staff rose in the air, heavy and menacing, pointing at Valerio's chest. "If I say the bales go out dry or wet, they go out the way I order. That's why I carry the council's insignia and you're nothing more than a plague-marked wretch on the rolls. I'll drag you out of here with beatings and leave you to rot in the wall's mud."

Valerio stared straight into his pupils, dilated by aguardiente. The steam from the tub rose past his collar, scorching his throat with its suffocating acidity. He had seen three corregidors die coughing up black foam on the very mattresses he now boiled every other day, and prominent ladies wrapped in sheets that barely hid their carrion. The arrogance of the living had always struck him as a ridiculous nuisance.

Outside, the silence of the night swallowed the final creak of the distant carts.

Cornered between the threshold and the steaming tub where vinegar bubbled in thick blisters, Valerio did not retreat. He lowered his gaze to his own left hand. With deliberate, almost lazy calm, he hooked his fingers into the cuff of the dry leather glove, stiff as willow bark from lye splashes. He pulled slowly. The leather peeled away from the flesh with a wet sound, tearing tiny scabs at the quick of his nails, and dropped to the floor between the two men with a dull thud.

The hand left exposed was a grayish horror: skin peeled away, cracked by whitish grooves of quicklime oozing a turbid lymph, still venting a warm, stinking vapor of concentrated vinegar. Before Cosme Almansa could guess the motion or raise the ash staff, Valerio took a firm step forward and pressed his bare, wet, ashen palm squarely against the overseer's green velvet lapel, crushing all five fingers into the clean fabric until the caustic powder and acid stained the front of the cassock with a milky, indelible imprint.

The overseer froze, his swollen eyes staring down at his chest as though a red-hot iron had been pressed against it. He let out a muffled groan, a sort of hiccup that emptied his lungs all at once, and took a clumsy backward stumble, tripping over the ferrule of his own staff. He tumbled down the first three steps backward, tripping over his own skirts while desperately and fruitlessly wiping his chest with his sleeve, knowing the poison of the pit would never wash from that velvet.