The night shift, hour by hour
The key
No. 1 of 7
Nobody on Calle Alba can tell you when the bakery closes, only when it begins: at nine at night, when the barber’s window goes dark and Marta Ferrer turns a key that is older than she is. The shutter goes up with a sound like a dry cough. Inside, the room is cold and smells of last night’s oak, of scorched flour, of that mineral note old brick keeps like a memory. She does not switch on the big lights. She switches on the small one above the starter jar and looks at what is inside it the way you look at a sleeping child.
- 1931The year the oven was first fired
- 420Loaves out of it on an ordinary night
- 2Bakers on shift, Marta and Tomás
- 8½hFrom key to shutter, 21:00 to 05:30
Flour, water, salt
No. 2 of 7
The starter has domed overnight, freckled with bubbles, smelling of green apples and cellars. Tomás Ibáñez, who arrived at fifteen to sweep the floor and never left, tips two sacks into the trough, the first of four batches: twenty-five kilos each, milled forty kilometres away by a man who still names his wheat by the field. Water goes in warm, salt last. The mixer turns. Around minute six the shaggy mass gives up and becomes one glossy body, and Tomás lays a palm flat against it, the way you steady a horse, and nods. For Sunday’s sweet buns he still beats the eggs by hand, in a chipped enamel bowl, with a whisk whose handle has worn to the shape of his grip.
“Bread is the only thing we make that has to be finished before anybody can ask for it.”
The fire
No. 3 of 7
Then comes the waiting, which is most of the job. The dough rests under linen while the oven is fed: oak splits stacked in a crosshatch inside a hearth that has been fired every night since 1931, except two. Both nights are pencilled on the wall beside the flue, one for the flood, one for Marta’s father. Tomás strikes a match. The first smoke leans toward the chimney like something curious. For three hours the oven eats, and the room warms until the windows weep and the two of them work in shirtsleeves in October.
Shaping
No. 4 of 7
At one the dough is cut with a steel scraper into rounds the weight of a newborn, nine hundred grams each, checked on a brass scale neither of them needs. Marta shapes with the flat of her hand, dragging each piece toward her across the bench until the skin tightens and squeaks. Each boule goes seam-up into a linen basket dusted with rye. Four hundred and twenty times, under yellow light, without a word. In twenty-six years they have never once had to say behind you.
“The oven doesn’t care what time it is. It only cares what you did three hours ago.”
The hearth
No. 5 of 7
At half past two Tomás rakes the embers into a glowing drift at the back and swabs the floor with a wet cloth on a pole: a hiss, a white rush of steam, the bricks going from red to black. Marta holds her palm at the mouth and counts. At three she pulls away; that is two hundred and sixty degrees, and no thermometer has ever argued. She scores each loaf with a razor on a stick, one stroke, curved like the lip of a wave. Tomás cuts a cross into his, as his grandmother did, to let the bread breathe or the devil out; he has never decided which. Then the peel whispers across the hearth, shh, and the loaf lands with a soft knock. Shh. Knock. Shh. Knock. It is the rhythm the whole street sleeps to without knowing.
The singing
No. 6 of 7
Forty minutes on, the first loaves come out the colour of strong tea and begin, faintly, to sing: a fine crackling as the crust contracts, like rain arriving on a tin roof.
“That’s the sound of it being finished,” Marta says, and tilts her head at each one, listening. Tomás loads the cargo tricycle for the hospital kitchen, the café on the plaza, the school that will not open for hours. The street is blue and empty, except for a sweeper, and a cat on the rim of the fountain who has, apparently, also been up all night.
“People think we get up early. We don’t get up. We just haven’t gone to bed.”
The city wakes
No. 7 of 7
At half past five the first tram shivers past and Marta rolls up the shutter. The light that falls in is not sunlight yet, only the grey-blue idea of it. A nurse coming off nights buys a loaf too hot to slice and carries it against her chest like a hot-water bottle. A taxi driver takes two. By six the city will be up and hungry, and nobody will wonder where the bread came from, which is how Marta knows it went well. She hangs her apron, feeds the starter, and turns the old key. Then she walks home through a city that is only beginning to smell of her work.