Margen
Previously: Izaskun Larrauri agreed to put her flat up for the 9,400 euros of the new hearth. Celso has seven schools and the inspection is on Thursday the 28th.
At five to seven on Saturday the twenty-third, with the chalk seven still on the edge of the wall beside the log recess and five days of work ahead, the lorry from Refractarios Ordoiz reversed into the bakery yard. It carried twenty-two refractory bricks on two pallets —the irony was not lost on Celso and he said nothing— four sacks of refractory mortar, an eight-metre inspection camera and an industrial vacuum.
The money had arrived the day before. Izaskun Larrauri, the bakery's administrator and the one who has kept the books of the house since she was twenty-four, signed the guarantee at five past nine on Friday at the main branch, standing up, without sitting down, because she sits when there is something to argue about. The guarantee is joint and several, for the whole nine thousand four hundred and for the whole sixty months, and behind it is her flat in Berriozar, forty-nine square metres, paid off to the last instalment on the smallest wage in the company. At twelve forty Félix Ancín, business manager, sent a message of three words and a figure. At ten past one Celso transferred fifty per cent to Ordoiz, which was what they wanted in order to move the lorry on a Saturday, and at half past eleven that night he let the firebox die and shut down the 1931 oven, with Friday’s five hundred and thirty loaves delivered since quarter past seven. A hundred and eighty-six euros a month for five years, and next Thursday will tell whether it was worth it. The tomorrow he had promised his daughter on Thursday went on the bank, the lorry and the bread.
Gaizka Ordoiz is thirty-four, he is site foreman and the grandson of the man who sold the hundred and seventy-five bricks of 1974, and the first thing he did when he got down from the lorry was to look for Paulino and ask him the temperature.
"Sixty-two. I took it at six and the stone has already given off what it had underneath," said Paulino Garisoain, retired oven man, eighty-one years old and thirty-one of them in front of this mouth, with the needle pyrometer still inside the chamber. "In you go."
"Sixty-two and I go in?"
"For going in it will do, and you've been in worse. What won't take hold until it's under forty is the mortar, and you'll have your forty by the time you've lifted the row and cleaned the flues, which is work that doesn't need cold." Paulino pulled out the probe and showed him the dial, which read sixty-one. "Write it down yourself, that's what you're paid for."
Marcelino Berástegui, refractory bricklayer, fifty-nine years old, twenty-six of them crawling into other people's ovens, went in on his knees at ten past seven with mallet and chisel, and by twenty past the first brick of row one was out. It weighs four and a half kilos and comes out whole if you respect the joint. The six of the mouth were in the quotation, line by line, and the six came out in fifty minutes, with Paulino sitting on a milking stool two metres from the mouth, saying where to go.
The trouble appeared underneath.
"Paulino. Gaizka. Come here."
What lies under row one is the bedding: a course of brick laid as headers on which the facing row rests. Marcelino slid the tip of the chisel between two bricks of the bedding and what came out was a trickle of grey dust that settled on the chamber floor in a small, very tidy cone.
"This is sand," he said.
Paulino put two fingers in, rubbed them and said nothing. Gaizka Ordoiz went in up to his shoulders with his head torch and took four minutes to come out.
"The bedding is dead. The mortar underneath has turned to sand along a metre and a half, right under the joint we were told about. If I set row one on top of that, it holds for a month and shifts on the first batch in May."
"And so?" said Celso Larrauri, master baker and owner of the house, who had been up since five and had not had breakfast.
"And so we lift the bedding as well. Sixteen more bricks." Gaizka wiped his forehead with his forearm. "And before you ask: the quote is a lump sum for labour and it includes the material for row one. The sixteen for the bedding I carry in the lorry because I always carry them, and I'll put them on the delivery note at zero. I'm not going to charge you more and I'm not going to ask you for another day, because you haven't got another day and I know that as well as you do."
"I was told the weekend was charged separately."
"The weekend I settled with Paulino myself on Thursday and it's inside the lump sum. If you like I'll put it in writing before lunch." Gaizka nodded towards the mouth. "Do we lift it or not?"
Paulino got up off the stool and said it himself.
"Lift it. And the camera down the flues before you set anything, because what's underneath has spent two years swallowing what it swallows."
At quarter past eight the small oven was heard being switched off, the two-deck electric one bought for the rolls, which has never given a loaf like the other. Eulogio had started it when he came in, at twenty past six. Eulogio Satrústegui, dough man, fifty-two years old and thirty-three in the house, had made the three hundred and twenty Saturday loaves: a hundred and forty for the bar in the square, a hundred and ten for the Avenida and seventy for Mari Carmen's shop. On Saturdays the bakery serves no school canteen, and that is why Saturday is the only day of the week on which this job can begin without losing a delivery. Eulogio had been speaking only what was needed since Friday the fifteenth, and since Thursday not even that.
Izaskun came down at nine with two notebooks and her phone in her hand and set about doing what she does: counting.
"Twenty-two you bring and twenty-two we are going to lay: six from the row and sixteen from the bedding. Paulino, in seventy-four there were a hundred and seventy-five."
"A hundred and seventy-five and the whole hearth. This is the mouth."
"Right. I'm writing it down anyway."
At half past ten Tránsito Chamorro rang, head of kitchens for the Virgen del Puy group, and she rang not the landline but Celso's mobile, which is what she does when she does not want the conversation going through the office.
"Have they started?"
"At five to seven."
"And have they found anything that wasn't on the paper?"
Celso looked at the pile of old bricks in the yard, which by that hour came to eighteen, and took as long as it takes a man to decide whether to gamble his Monday.
"Yes. There's a course underneath that's finished and has to come out. Sixteen more bricks. It doesn't cost more money and they still finish on Wednesday."
"I'm grateful to you." Tránsito's tone did not change. "And now I'll tell you something before somebody else does: on Monday morning, at head office, Zacarías Urdiain will be there, salesman for Panificadora Duero, with a folder. He has no appointment; he's going to walk past the purchasing office at nine and wait on his feet. I've got the paper signed until the twenty-eighth and nobody can knock that down, but I want to be able to say that the oven is being rebuilt and that the work finishes on Wednesday. May I say it?"
"Say it."
At midday Celso went up to the office for water and found Izaskun sitting in front of the notebook, with the column of schools open and her pen still.
"Izaskun."
"Tell me."
And he did not tell her. Downstairs the industrial vacuum started up, Marcelino shouted for Gaizka from inside the chamber, and Celso went down the steps two at a time with the glass in his hand, which is a way of not answering that nobody minds on a Saturday of building work.
The brick came out at ten past one in the afternoon, the twenty-second of those lifted that day and the fourth counting in from the face, in the exact centre of the mouth, right under the joint that has spent six months letting smoke through. Marcelino took it out with both hands, straightened up on his knees and laid it on an empty sack.
"There's something written here."
Paulino crouched down, cleaned it with the edge of his hand and then with a wet cloth. On the face looking upwards, cut with a twenty-penny nail in the big, doughy handwriting of a man of thirty, it said what he had told them on Saturday the sixteenth: Paulino Garisoain, May 1974.
"We knew that already," said Izaskun.
"Turn it over," said Paulino.
Marcelino turned it over. On the long face, the one that lay against the brick next to it and cannot be seen from anywhere, there were three more lines, cut with the same nail, smaller and tighter, the last one almost without room.
Paulino put his glasses on, lowered them, put them on again and took them off.
"You read it to me, I can't see this any more."
And it was Eulogio who read it, having come out of the bakery with his apron white with flour and stood behind everyone without anybody hearing him arrive.
"'Mouth closed with building mortar. Provisional. Until there is money.'"
Nobody said anything for as long as it takes an industrial vacuum to wind fully down.
"Refractory mortar for the mouth wasn't in your grandfather's budget," said Paulino, and he said it looking at the brick and not at Celso. "He asked the savings bank for a three-year loan for the hundred and seventy-five bricks and they gave him exactly that. By the time we got to row one it was the last day and there wasn't a peseta left. I told him the mouth had to be closed with refractory and he told me to close it with whatever there was and that it would be done the following year. And I closed it with building mortar, which is what was in the yard. I wrote it on the brick because whoever opened this afterwards had to know, and because the blame was going to land on me and I wanted it there in my own hand."
"And nobody opened it."
"Nobody opened it in fifty-one years. You had fifty years of luck: as long as the draught was what it ought to be, the air went inwards through that joint and nothing came out." Paulino got up holding on to the jamb of the mouth, which is how a man of eighty-one gets up off a brick floor. "Building mortar does not take seven hundred degrees. It started turning to sand from the first summer and the centre joint was gradually left with nothing covering it, little by little, a gram a month."
Celso picked up the brick. It weighs four and a half kilos, the same as the others, and the three small lines can be felt with a thumb.
Paulino set it down on the bakery marble, beside the two loaves standing on edge from Tuesday the fifth that nobody has thrown away, and he laid it with the written face upwards.
"Fifty-one years," said Izaskun.
"Fifty-one," said Paulino. "And let it be clear for the inspector and for whoever needs it: the joint in the mouth did not open. It was never closed."