Goldbeater

Zebedee went to the goldbeaters shop, which smelled like lamb because the goldbeater ate a sandwich of lamb every day for lunch.

The membrane had been used, perhaps since antiquity, to make gold leaf, which goldbeaters produced by starting out with a small ingot of gold and beating it thinner, then sandwiching the leaves between sheets of cow intestines, ultimately creating a stack of alternating goldbeater's skins and gold leaf that could be more than 100 layers deep.

In my mind's eye, I see Cristiano on the day he first arrived in my father's workshop, the old goldbeater's assistant now grown into a man.