Margen
Previously: Celso Larrauri has the oven under repair until Wednesday, seven schools left and the inspection on Thursday the 28th. His daughter guaranteed the 9,400 euros.
Inside the chamber, at eighteen degrees, Marcelino Berástegui, refractory bricklayer, was bedding the eleventh brick of the base course when the office landline rang and the bakery was down to six schools.
“Celso, don't bring me anything today.”
It was twenty past six on the morning of Monday the twenty-fifth. Jacinta Munárriz, cook at the Hilarión Eslava for fourteen school years — three hundred and twenty children — was talking from the kitchen with the tap running, and she was the last of the eleven that Panificadora Duero had got to.
“Jacinta, today I bring you half the bread and on Wednesday I light the oven.”
“On Wednesday you light it and on Thursday they come and look at it. I have to feed children today, and tomorrow, and on Wednesday.” She turned off the tap. “Last night the head sent me a photo of a letter from a company in Berriozar. Two lines. They say they have no file open against them. That's all the letter says, and that's all it takes.”
“On Tuesday the twelfth you told me nobody had called your kitchen.”
“And it was true. They've called now, only not me: the head.” Jacinta wasn't hanging up. “Celso, call me when you have the signed paper. In September we vote on next year and I have a vote. What I'm not going to do is stand up for you on a Monday morning with your oven cold, the builders inside and half a load of bread in the van.”
Celso Larrauri, master baker and owner of the place, put the phone down and stood in front of the mouth of the dead oven.
The one who went over to the wall was Eulogio. Eulogio Satrústegui, dough man, fifty-two years old and thirty-three of them in this house, had not said a whole sentence since Friday the fifteenth. He took the chalk from the edge of the wall, beside the wood recess, rubbed out the seven with his thumb and wrote a six. He left the chalk where it was and went back to the two-deck electric oven, which had been doing what it can since twenty past six: two hundred and eighty loaves instead of five hundred and thirty, in batches of forty, and the rolls he had mixed himself on Sunday afternoon.
In thirty-three years nobody had seen him touch that wall.
At ten past nine Gaizka Ordoiz, site foreman, thirty-four years old, came out of the chamber with the tape measure in his hand and his white trousers filthy to the knee.
“Both runs of flue are clean and the base course is bedded. What's left is the face course, the one you can see and the one that closes the mouth.” He wiped his hands on the trousers, which were past saving. “I close the mouth tomorrow at midday, the mortar cures overnight, and on Wednesday, as soon as I've checked that it has taken, I'm out. Light it that same Wednesday at midday, gently. By seven on Thursday you'll have it at two hundred and forty.”
“And if the mortar hasn't cured?”
“If it hasn't cured I tell you so on Wednesday and you don't light it. That's in the price too.” Gaizka nodded towards the milking stool. “Ask him — he's been here since seven and he's only opened his mouth to take readings.”
Paulino Garisoain, retired oven man, eighty-one years old and thirty-one of them in front of that mouth, had the needle pyrometer resting on his knee.
“Eighteen inside and twelve out,” he said. “It'll cure.”
Izaskun Larrauri, twenty-nine, office manager of the bakery and Celso's daughter, came down at half past nine with her two notebooks and saw the six on the wall. She did not ask who had written it: she had put the seven up on Thursday, the six was neither her handwriting nor her father's, and in this house there is only one more man who writes on that wall.
“Which one.”
“The Hilarión Eslava. Two thousand six hundred a month.”
She sat on the office step with the notebook on her knees and wrote it into the column that started on Tuesday the fifth with a single line, the one for the lab report. Now it had five: Santa Bárbara, Erreniega, Sagrado Corazón, San Jorge, Hilarión Eslava.
“Six left,” she said. “Four of them are Tránsito's.”
“Four of them are Tránsito's.”
“Then there aren't six left, aita. There's Tránsito, the Monte Carmelo and the Jesuitas.” She snapped the notebook shut. “And Tránsito signed up to the twenty-eighth.”
At half past one they stopped for lunch. The yard was left with the Ordoiz lorry, the twenty-two old bricks stacked against the wall and the hum of the electric oven, which is the noise of a household appliance and not of an oven. Eulogio went home to eat, as he does every day, and walked past Izaskun without saying anything, as he has done since Friday.
She went into the office and stood in front of the desk.
“Aita. Last Thursday, with your hand on that folder, you told me there was something about the oven you had to tell me. You said ‘tomorrow'. Four days have gone by.”
“I know.”
“On Friday at five past nine I signed a joint guarantee for nine thousand four hundred euros over five years with my flat behind it.” She did not raise her voice, which is what she does when she has thought it through at home. “Eulogio hasn't looked at me since Friday. Paulino goes quiet when I walk in. On Saturday, when that brick came out, the three of you knew something I don't, and the only one writing bricks down in a notebook was me.”
Celso stood up, opened the bottom drawer of the delivery-note cabinet and took out the elastic-band folder with the firewood invoices of the last four financial years.
“Come down with me.”
With the oven out you can hear everything: the electric oven, the clock on the wall, the lorry engine cooling in the yard. On the marble slab the two loaves from Tuesday the fifth were still standing on edge, and beside them, written face up, the brick Paulino signed in May 1974.
Celso took two sheets out of the folder and laid them side by side, exactly as Paulino had laid them out for him on Monday the eighteenth. On the second one he left his hand over the foot of the page, covering it, and did not take it away.
“This one is from January of that year. Beech. A hundred and fifty-eight euros a tonne.” He moved the finger of his other hand to the second sheet. “And this is the next one. Pallet offcuts. Thirty-eight euros a tonne, twenty tonnes a year.”
Izaskun read the top two lines without touching the papers.
“Two thousand four hundred euros a year,” she said.
“Two thousand four hundred.”
“And that's what came out in the crust?”
“That's what came out in the crust. Pallet wood has glue, varnish and resinous pine in it, it burns dirty, and what it gives off goes up the flues and into the chamber through the joint at the mouth. The joint is from 1974 and we're paying for it in there, nine thousand four hundred euros' worth. The firewood was mine: I ordered the beech last Tuesday and it came in on Thursday, and no pallet goes into that firebox again.”
“And is burning that in a bread oven against the law, aita?”
“It's been against the law since the first lorry. Waste wood. Paulino told me so with the invoice in his hand, and he was right.”
“So what I guaranteed on Friday is sitting on top of an offence of yours from two years ago.”
“It's sitting on top of that.”
Izaskun said nothing for a long while.
“And there's one more thing, and I'd rather tell you myself before you read it on the paper, because you will read it.” Celso still had his hand over the foot of the invoice. “That delivery note was signed by Eulogio. He signed it because I was at the doctor's and I told him on the phone to sign whatever the man from Noáin brought. The rest I've signed myself, every one of them. I made the call, I negotiated the price and I took the decision on my own, and on Thursday, with the public health inspector standing there, I'm going to say it in those exact words.”
“Take your hand away, aita.”
Celso took it away.
Izaskun read the signature at the foot: small and upright, E. Satrústegui.
“Since when, aita. And this time a date.”
And Celso Larrauri, who had gone two years and one month without saying that date out loud, said all of it, in front of the dead oven and Paulino's brick.
“The third of February, two thousand and twenty-four. At eleven in the morning I called Noáin myself, and at five in the afternoon the first lorry-load of pallet wood came into this yard.”