Mal Não Faz

by Murphy's Law, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Graça Lomba weighed the sulphite at five in the afternoon, before the first trailer came down the lane, on the kitchen scale she kept in the adega and used for nothing else. Six tanks, two thousand litres each. A hundred and seventy-five grams of metabisulphite to the tank. She put the scale on the steel bench by the sink, pressed the zero, and set a two-hundred-gram weight on it out of the drawer, as she did every year on the first night, and it said two hundred. Then she weighed the six doses one at a time into a clean saucer and tipped each from the saucer into a white plastic tub that had once held olives from the market in Ponte de Lima. When the sixth was in she put the whole tub on the scale and took off the tub's weight, which was written on its side. One thousand and fifty. She wrote 1050 on the lid in black marker and put the lid on, and put the tub on the shelf above the sink beside the box of chalk.

The adega was the ground floor of the house, granite on three sides and the fourth open to the yard under a roof of corrugated sheet. It smelled of wet stone and old must and the diesel of the tractor. The six tanks stood along the back wall in a row, stainless steel on three legs, each with a hatch on top and a ladder of five rungs, and a short tap near the bottom for drawing a sample. They were numbered in paint, a long time ago, by her father. Between the tanks and the press there was a drain in the floor and a hose that went everywhere.

The rule was hers and she had made it the year she took over. The dose went in first, into the empty tank, before a drop of must. She dissolved it in a litre of warm water in the measuring jug, climbed the ladder, and poured it in through the hatch, and the must that followed mixed it on the way in. Then she came down and put an S on the steel with the chalk, at the height of her eyes. The S went on when the sulphite went in. Never before. Never after.

---

Zé came at six with the first trailer. He was her father's cousin, sixty-seven, and he had run the press every harvest for longer than she had been alive. The grapes were Loureiro, picked that day off the high trellises along the river, cold and wet from the morning, and they went into the press whole, a trailer at a time, with the sound of a skip being filled with gravel.

The press was pneumatic. A steel drum on its side, with a rubber bladder inside that the compressor blew up slowly against the grapes, and let down, and turned, and blew up again. It took two hours to a load. The juice ran out through the slots into the steel tray beneath, green-gold and cloudy, and the little pump in the corner took it out of the tray and up the hose and over into whichever tank the hose was in.

Tank one by eight o'clock. Tank two by half past ten. Zé ate his supper standing up, bread and chouriço off the blade of his knife, between turns of the drum. The forecast had said rain after midnight, coming in off the sea from Viana, and at eleven the first drops began on the corrugated roof, a few at a time, like somebody dropping coins.

At ten to one the third trailer was in the press, the drum was making its first slow turn, and tank three was empty and waiting. Graça took the tub down off the shelf. She spooned a dose onto the zeroed scale, a little over, took a little back, a hundred and seventy-five. She ran the hot tap until it was warm and filled the jug to the litre mark and tipped the powder in and stirred it with the long spoon. The smell came up out of the jug as it always did, sharp at the top of the nose, and she turned her face away from it as she always did, and her eyes watered. She carried the jug up the five rungs of tank three, opened the hatch, poured, shut the hatch, came down. She rinsed the jug under the tap and stood it upside down on the draining board. She took the chalk out of her apron pocket.

The thunder came first, a long way off, and then not a long way off. The lights went out.

The press stopped with a sigh that went on after everything else had stopped. The pump stopped. The fridge in the kitchen overhead stopped, which she only knew because she could hear the rain now and nothing under it.

"Valha-me Deus," said Zé, in the dark.

She found her phone and turned its light on. Zé was standing by the control panel of the press with his hand still on it. Water was coming through the gap at the edge of the roof in a thin line, as it did whenever the wind was from the west.

"EDP," Zé said. "Half an hour, if we're lucky."

"The bladder?"

"It'll hold. It'll go down a bit." He turned two crates over and sat on one. "Sit down, Graça. It's raining."

She sat. He put the rest of the bread on the crate between them. They turned the phone face down to save it, and in the dark the drum of the press ticked as it cooled and the rain went on and on, and down in the tray the must lay still and made the small sounds of something settling.

"Your father never had chalk," Zé said after a while.

"I know."

"He had his nose. He'd put his head in the hatch and smell. If he couldn't smell it he'd put in another handful." Zé laughed in the dark. "Handful. He didn't have a scale, either. One year, the year you were at the school in Vila Real, the white from tank two smelled of matches until the Easter after. The man from the cooperative stood in the yard and said, Senhor Lomba, what have you done to it? And your father said, Nothing. It's sound. Nothing goes wrong in that tank."

"And?"

"And nothing went wrong in it. Nobody would drink it, but nothing went wrong in it." He tore the bread. "We sold it for vinegar to a man from Braga."

She had heard it before, but not from him, and not in the dark. Water ran along the edge of the roof and dropped onto the floor by the drain in a steady beat, one a second, onto the same stone.

The power came back at twenty past one. The fluorescent tubes over the bench flickered twice and stayed on, very white.

---

Zé went to the panel. Graça stood up and her foot found something on the floor, and she bent and picked up a piece of chalk, broken in two. She put the halves in her apron pocket and looked along the tanks.

One: S. Two: S. Three: nothing. The steel, and the paint of her father's 3, and nothing.

She looked at the bench. The jug was upside down on the draining board, rinsed. She always rinsed it straight away. The tub was on the shelf with its lid on. She tried to see the last minutes before the lights went and they would not come in order: the hot tap, the stirring, the chouriço on the blade of the knife, the first thunder. She could see the jug in her hands at the top of a ladder, and it was any ladder, any year.

The S went on when the sulphite went in.

She took the tub down and weighed out a hundred and seventy-five grams, dissolved it in the jug, and climbed tank three, and poured it in through the hatch, and came down and rinsed the jug and took a new piece of chalk from the box and put an S on the tank. Then she nodded to Zé and he put the hose in three and started the pump.

---

The rain stopped at three. Tank three filled by four, tank four by six, tank five by eight in the morning with the sky going grey and then white over the trellises across the lane. Somewhere in that time Zé's grandson came down in his school tracksuit, carried crates for an hour, and went back up to sleep. Graça dosed four and dosed five. S and S.

The last trailer was in the press by nine. Tank six was empty and waiting. Graça took the tub down and took off the lid and put the spoon in.

The spoon touched the bottom.

She tipped the tub to the light. There was a white dust over the floor of it and in the angle of the side, and that was all. She put the tub on the scale with the lid off and the scale said nineteen grams, and the side of the tub said its own weight was seventeen.

"Zé."

He came over, wiping his hands on his trousers. He looked into the tub.

"Two grams," she said.

"You spilled some." He shrugged. "In the dark. It happens. Weigh another one from the sack." He tipped his head at the paper sack under the bench, with its top folded down and a clothes peg on it. "Deita mais. Mal não faz."

She put the lid back on the tub and turned it so that the marker was facing her. 1050, in her own hand. She took the two-hundred-gram weight out of the drawer and put it on the scale. Two hundred.

"Six doses in the tub," she said. "Five tanks."

"So you spilled one."

"A whole one. A hundred and seventy-five grams of white powder." She went down on one knee and put the light of her phone along the floor, under the bench and round the foot of the ladders and along the drain. Wet granite. The black of the drain. A chouriço skin. She stood up. "You'd smell it. A whole dose on a wet floor, you'd smell it for an hour."

"In the drain, then."

"Maybe."

He looked along the tanks. "One, two, three, four, five. Every one has its S."

"Yes," she said. "Every one has its S."

The press turned in its drum. The tray under it was filling with the juice for tank six, and the pump would want it soon.

"Stop the press," she said. "Leave the pump off."

He looked at her, and went to the panel, and the drum stopped.

---

The lab was the end of the bench nearest the window: a burette in a clamp on a stand, a dropper bottle of acid, a dropper bottle of starch, a brown bottle of iodine solution with its date on the label in her writing, and a card taped to the tiles above the sink, gone soft at the corners, that said in her own capitals from her first year in Vila Real ML × 32 = MG/L LIVRE. Twenty millilitres of sample, a squirt of acid, a squirt of starch, and the iodine dripped in from the burette until the yellow went blue-black and stayed blue-black for half a minute.

She filled the burette to the zero line. Then she went to the press with the small beaker and held it under the slots of the drum, where the juice for six was still running off, and filled it.

"That one has none in it," said Zé.

"That's why."

She pipetted twenty millilitres into the flask and added the acid and the starch and opened the tap of the burette and let the iodine in a drop at a time, swirling the flask under it. The juice was the colour of weak tea. On the fourth drop a dark cloud came and went. On the sixth it came and stayed. She watched the second hand of the clock over the door go round half its face. It stayed.

She read the burette at eye level. "Nought point three."

Zé leaned over and read it too, and frowned at the card. "That's ten."

"Nine point six."

"So it says there's sulphur where there isn't any."

"A little. There's other things in juice that eat iodine." She wrote branco 9.6 on the tiles with the chalk. "Now we know how much a little is."

She rinsed the flask and went to tank two and ran a little out of the sample tap onto the floor to clear it, and filled the beaker. Twenty millilitres. Acid. Starch. The iodine went in for longer this time. At one point one the cloud stayed.

"Thirty-five," said Zé, who had his phone out now as a calculator.

She wrote 2 — 35 under the first figure.

Then five, because five was the last one dosed, in daylight. One point two. 5 — 38. Then four. One point one. 4 — 35. Zé was standing closer now, with his arms folded, and he read each one before she did.

"Same, same, same," he said. "So it's the drain."

"Three," she said.

"Three you did after the lights came on," he said. "I was standing there."

She went to tank three and ran the sample tap and filled the beaker. Twenty millilitres. Acid. Starch. The iodine dripped and she swirled. At one point one nothing. At one point five nothing, the cloud coming and going, coming and going. Zé had unfolded his arms. At two the cloud stayed longer and went. At two point four it stayed. She looked at the clock. Half a minute.

Neither of them did the multiplication out loud. She wrote 3 — 77 on the tiles.

She put her hand in her apron pocket for the chalk and there were three pieces. The new one from the box, worn flat now at one end. And the two halves of the one from the floor, which had never touched any steel at all.

---

Zé sat down on a crate.

"Seventy-seven," he said. "What does that do?"

"Nothing tonight. Nothing for a week." She was looking at the row of tanks. "Then the yeast won't start in three, or it'll start and stop. And it'll smell of matches until Easter. And whatever we put in it after, we can't take that back out."

"So." He nodded at the sack under the bench. "If we'd done six from the sack."

"Six would be fine." She took the chalk and drew on the tiles under the numbers: a box for three, a box for six. "Two thousand litres at double. Take a thousand out of three, it's still double. Put that thousand in six." She drew an arrow. "Then this load, with nothing in it. Half on top of three, half on top of six. Two thousand each, and both single."

Zé looked at the tiles for a long time. "If the load gives two thousand."

"If it gives eighteen hundred, they're both a bit under. We'll test them."

He got up off the crate and went to tank three and put the hose on the bottom valve and walked the other end of it along the floor to six, and climbed six's ladder with it, and she opened three's valve, and he started the pump. The level in three's sight glass went down slowly, with the pump's noise going on and on in the corner. At the halfway mark she shut the valve. Zé started the drum again, and when the tray had juice in it he put the hose in six, and when six was full he moved it to three. Nobody touched the sack.

At half past eleven, when the tray was empty and the press was standing open with its cake of skins inside, she drew from six. One point one. 6 — 35.

Then from three. One point one.

She went to tank three with the chalk. The S she had put there at twenty past one was at the height of her eyes. She left it. Next to it, smaller, she wrote another S, and then 77, and under that ½ → 6, and under that 35. Then she went to six and wrote S de 3 and 35.

Zé came and stood beside her and read three with his finger, the way he read the newspaper, one line and the next.

"You'll want a new rule," he said.

She took the two halves of the other chalk out of her pocket and laid them on the shelf above the sink, beside the empty tub, and went to help him with the press.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ā Lēge Murphiānā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Murphy's Law, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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