The Carpenter's Pencil

by Rivas, Manuel

  From the sentry box in a corner of the prison wall, with the carpenter’s pencil behind his ear, Herbal listened to what the painter was telling him.

  He was telling him that beings and things are clothed in light. That even the Gospels talk of men as “the children of light”. Between the prisoners in the courtyard and the women on the cliffs, there had to be threads of light running over the wall, invisible threads that would however transmit the colour of clothing and the trousseau of memory. And not just that, a gangway of luminous and sensory ropes. The guard imagined that, still as they were, the prisoners and the women on the cliffs were making love and it was the gale of their fingers tossing their skirts and long hair.

  One day he saw her among the other women wearing shabby clothes. Her long, russet hair stirred by the breeze, laying threads to the doctor in the prison courtyard. Silk threads, invisible threads. Not even an accurate marksman would know how to tear them.

  Today there were no women. A group of children with shaved heads, making them look like small men, were playing soldiers with sticks instead of swords. They were fighting for the top of the cliffs like the towers of a fort. They tired of fencing, and started using the same sticks as rifles. They would fall down dead and roll over, like extras in a film, and then stand up laughing and again roll down the hillside until they were close to the prison wall. One of them, having fallen, raised his eyes and met the guard’s gaze. He picked up the stick, rested it against his shoulder, with one foot forward in a marksman’s stance, and aimed at him. “Brat,” said the guard. And he decided to give him a fright. He picked up his rifle and aimed in turn in the kid’s direction. The others were stunned and shouted out to him from behind. “Run, Chip! Run!” The boy slowly lowered his stick weapon. He had a freckled face and a bold, toothless grin. Suddenly, in one swift movement, he placed the stick back against his shoulder, shot – bang, bang! – and took to his heels, pulling himself up the hillside in his patchwork trousers. The guard followed him with the front sight of his rifle. Herbal could feel his cheeks burning. When the boy disappeared behind the cliffs, he laid down the weapon and breathed deeply. He was short of breath. The sweat was pouring off him. He heard the echo of a guffaw. The Iron Man had caused the painter to dismount. The Iron Man was laughing at him.

  “What’s that you’re carrying behind your ear?”

  “A pencil. A carpenter’s pencil. It’s a way of remembering someone I killed.”

  “That’s quite some booty!”

  On I April 1939, Franco signed the victory dispatch.

  “Today we are celebrating the victory of God,” said the chaplain in his homily during the High Mass held in the courtyard. He did not say it with any great haughtiness, rather as someone who is stating the law of gravity. That day, guards had been placed in between the rows of prisoners. Authorities were in attendance and the governor did not want unpleasant surprises, insurrections of laughter or coughing, as had happened on previous occasions when some preacher had rubbed salt into the wound, blessed the war he called a Crusade and urged them to repent, fallen angels of the band of Beelzebub, and to ask for divine protection for General Franco. The chaplain, however, was different, his fanaticism less prosaic. It had a certain theological framework, which he had worked on in discussions with the inmates, most of whom were fanatical readers. They would read anything they could lay their hands on, be it Bibliotheca Sanctorum or Wonders of Insect Life. The Curia would have envied them such knowledge! They knew Latin, God, they knew Greek. Like that Doctor Da Barca fellow, who one day embroiled him in a spider’s web of soma, psyche and pneuma.

  “Pneuma tes aletheias. The Spirit of Truth. You know? That is what the Holy Spirit means. Of Truth, Father.”

  “God does not go into battle against men for the sake of it,” the chaplain said. “No creature is an enemy in God’s eyes. It is sin, the manifestation of Satan, that angers God. Besides, who are we from his heights? Small pinheads. What God does is guide the waters of history, in the same way that the miller governs the river’s course. God wages war against sin, not against venial sins, which we are left to handle by means of confession, repentance and forgiveness. First of all there is original sin, peccatum originale, the stigma we bear for having been born. Then there are the venial sins (or veritable sins!) of the person per se, peccatum personale, those slip-ups along the way. But the worst of them all, the one that hovers over us and possessed a part of Spain in recent years, betraying her essential being, is the Sin of History. Sin with a capital S. This terribly pernicious caste of Sin takes root above all in the vanity of intellect, in the ignorance of simpler folk, who are swept along by temptations in the form of revolutions and ludicrous social Utopias. Against this Sin of History, God will wage war. And, as the Scriptures clearly tell us, the wrath of God exists, a wrath that is just and implacable. God chooses the instruments of his victory. God’s chosen ones.”

  The chaplain read out the telegram that Pope Pius XII had sent Franco on 31 March, “Lifting up our hearts to God, we give sincere thanks to His Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.”

  At this point someone cleared their throat.

  “It was Doctor Da Barca,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “I know because I was standing next to him and gave him a hard stare, calling him to order. We were under instructions to quell any incident. But aside from staring at him like something the cat brought in, which he really didn’t care about, there wasn’t much I could do. He had a dry, artificial cough, the cough of refined people who go to concerts. I was almost relieved when the cough spread like a disease among all the prisoners. It sounded like a huge carillon peeling off the bell tower.

  “We didn’t know what to do. We could hardly lay into them all in the middle of Mass. The authorities stirred uneasily in their seats. Deep down, we were all hoping the chaplain, in other respects no fool, would quash the rebellious murmur with a timely silence. But, like a cogged wheel engaging with another, bigger wheel, he was inflamed with the gears of his own sermon.”

  “The wrath of God exists! It was God’s victory!”

  His voice was drowned out by the coughing, no longer the delicate clearing of the throat at the opera but the undertow of a surging sea. The prison governor, assailed by looks from the authorities, decided to go over to him and mutter in his ear that he should cut it short, today was Victory Day and if things carried on as they were they would be celebrating it with a massacre.

  The chaplain’s flushed face turned pale, undone by the frenzy of men coughing as if with silicosis. He went quiet, scanned the rows with disconcerted eyes, as if coming to, and mumbled some Latin under his breath.

  What the chaplain said, and Herbal would be unable to remember, was, “Ubi est mors stimulus tuus?”

  At the end of the ceremony, the governor gave the cries that were de rigueur.

  “Spain!” Only the voices of the authorities and guards were heard, “One!”

  “Spain!” The prisoners remained silent. The same voices cried, “Great!”

  “Spain!” And then the whole prison thundered, “Free!”

  Herbal had found out about the victory a long time before from the defeated. “Contrary to what people think,” he said to Maria da Visitação, “prison is a good place to receive information. The news you get from the conquered is often the most reliable.” Barcelona fell in January, Madrid fell in March. Toledo fell on the first of April, April showers. Every time a city fell you could see it on their faces like a wrinkle, a circle of shade around their sunken eyes, you could see it in their languid walk, their neglected appearance. Bombarded with bad news, the inmates bore the fatigue of a defeated column down corridors and in the courtyard. And with renewed force, like a virus lurking in the miasma, the ailments and epidemics returned.

  Doctor Da Barca continued to shave every day. He would wash methodically at the washstand using a small mirror with a crack that split his face in two. He regularly combed his hair as for a feast day. And cleaned his
worn-out shoes, which had the sheen of a sepia photograph. He attended to such details as a chess player attends to his pawns. He had asked Marisa for a photograph. Then he had thought better of it.

  “Take it, it wasn’t a good idea.”

  She seemed offended. No-one likes being given back a photograph, especially in prison.

  “I don’t want to see you stuck between four walls. Give me something of yours. Something I can use to go to sleep.”

  She was wearing a scarf tied in a knot around her neck. She held it out to him. Never less than a yard apart. Forbidden to touch.

  Herbal intervened. He inspected it with apparent indifference. Made of cotton with a red frill. How he would have liked to inhale the scent! “Red is not allowed,” he said, which was true, but he dropped it into Marisa’s hands.

  “I’m leaving,” the deceased told Herbal shortly after the end of the war. “I’m going to see if I can find my son. You wouldn’t happen to know anything, would you?”

  “He’s alive, I told you so,” replied the guard, somewhat annoyed. “When we went to find him, he’d left. We later learnt he’d dressed up as a blind man and boarded a coach. Even with a blind man’s glasses, he must have seen the corpses in the ditches at the side of the road. We lost track of him here, in Coruña.”

  “Well, I’m going to see if I can find him. I’d promised to teach him how to paint.”

  “I don’t suppose he’ll be up to much painting,” the guard remarked crudely. “He’ll be living like a mole.”

  From the moment the painter left, and as he feared, Herbal noticed the sense of unease return. Unable to face up to his brother-in-law, he left his sister’s house and asked for authorization to spend nights at the prison. In the morning, when he stood up, he felt giddy, as if his head were unwilling to get up with his body. He was not looking well.

  That Doctor Da Barca fellow got on his nerves. His sprightly bearing. His serenity. His Daniel’s smile.

  The Iron Man made the most of the painter’s absence. Herbal listened to what he had to say.

  He reported Doctor Da Barca. He reported him for something he had known for quite some time.

  The doctor had a secret radio. The parts had been smuggled in from the outside, hidden in jars from the infirmary. The aerial was the metal sprung base of a bed. The prisoners’ organization had arranged shifts of patients needing urgent attention as a way of covering up the traffic in and out of the infirmary at night. He had caught the doctor with the headphones. The doctor had tried telling him sardonically it was a stethoscope, but he was not stupid.

  He reported him for something else. He had very serious suspicions. Doctor Da Barca was administering drugs to some of the sick.

  “One night,” Herbal explained to the governor, “we took an inmate to the infirmary complaining of sharp pains. He was shouting like someone was sawing at his bones. And in fact, in between screams, he said his right foot really hurt. But the funny thing is the patient, by the name of Biqueira, didn’t have a right foot. It had been amputated some months previously for gangrene. He was one of those who tried to get away, sir, if you recall, when they were painting the front of the prison. It was me who shot him in the ankle. Messed it all up. ‘It must be the other foot,’ I told him, ‘the left foot.’ But no, he said it was the right foot and clung with desperation, sticking in his nails, to the thigh on that side. He had a wooden leg, a walnut leg they had made for him in the workshop. ‘It must be the wood not fitting the stump.’ And I removed the leg, but he said, ‘It’s the foot, idiot, the bullet in my ankle.’ So we took him to the infirmary and Doctor Da Barca said very seriously that it was the foot, the right foot at the ankle. That the bullet was giving him pain. It struck me by now they were putting it on. Then the doctor gave him an injection before my eyes, saying it would make him better. ‘It’s all right, Biqueira. It’s the sleep of Morpheus.’ Almost immediately Biqueira went quiet and a happy look came over his face, as if he were daydreaming. I asked the doctor what had happened, but he didn’t bother to reply. He’s a stuck-up customer. He doesn’t even deign to address me. I heard him explaining to the others that what Biqueira had was a phantom pain.”

  “And what else?” the governor frowned.

  “It happened again, sir. I discovered they were stealing morphine from Doctor Soláns’s safety cabinet.”

  “I have heard nothing about that cabinet being broken into.”

  The last remark struck Herbal as exceptionally naive. He said, “There are a dozen thieves in this prison, sir, able to open that cabinet in a flash using a toothpick. You can be sure they pay more attention to the doctor than to you or me.” And then he calmly produced a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “They’re open phials, sir, recovered from the rubbish in the infirmary. I took it upon myself to find out that they contained morphine.”

  The governor scrutinized this vocational justiciary who had turned up in his office, as if discovering for the first time that he was at his service. He thought of a dog trailing a string of cans tied to its tail, causing an almighty racket.

  “Doctor Soláns has had no complaint.”

  “He’ll have his reasons,” Herbal said, holding his gaze.

  “I appreciate your professionalism, officer.” He stood up. The conversation was at an end. “Leave this to me.”

  Herbal kept an eye on events. Doctor Da Barca was held in solitary confinement for a time, on account of the confiscated radio. Doctor Soláns was off sick for a long period. As for him, he was notified one day of his promotion to corporal.

  He felt worse and worse. He would vent his anger on the prisoners and soon became especially hated. He would deliberately do bad things. One day he told Ventura, a young lad who was a fisherman, “Go to the watchtower this afternoon. I’ll let you see into the women’s courtyard. We’ve a new little slut who’s got two tits like Arzúa cheeses. If you signal to her, she’ll show you the lot.” “But we’re not allowed up there,” said the inmate. “I’ll pretend not to notice,” replied Herbal.

  At the time of the military coup, Ventura had been playing a conch shell day and night in Coruña Bay until they silenced him with a gunshot. The bullet pierced his forearm, as if they had deliberately aimed at a tattoo there of an opulent mermaid, which was now deformed by the scar.

  At the agreed hour, Ventura climbed up the tower. There was only one young girl in the courtyard, squatting against the wall. The young inmate whistled and signalled with his arm. The girl struggled to her feet and made her way awkwardly towards the middle of the courtyard, as if she were on stilts. She was wearing an old fur-lined coat and blue wellington boots. She looked up and Ventura thought she had the saddest eyes he had ever seen. She was blonde, her face was swollen, and deep bags coloured like tortoiseshell arched below her eyes. Suddenly, she opened her coat. She was naked underneath. She opened and closed it, as if performing in a marquee at the fairground. The girl had two shrunken tits, hair on her chest, and a penis. “What are you doing here?” Herbal asked, “don’t you know you’re not allowed?”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!”

  Every day he would stop by at the punishment cell where Doctor Da Barca was and spit through the small window in the door. One night he woke up, gasping for breath. His heart was thrashing inside his chest. He was so frightened he could not get back to sleep and went to the punishment cell where Da Barca was sleeping, leant panting beside the door and was on the verge of asking for help. In the end, he went out into the fresh air of the courtyard and began to breathe deeply.

  It was then he noticed the deceased settling himself behind his ear. A miraculous relief.

  “Is that you? Where the hell have you been?” he asked, concealing his delight. “Did you find your son?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I heard the family say he was safe.”

  “I told you so. You should trust me.”

  “Should I now?” the dead man replied ironically.

  “Listen,
painter. Tell me something. Do you know what phantom pain is?”

  “I’ve heard of it. Daniel Da Barca explained it to me once. He carried out a study for Local Welfare. Apparently it’s the worst pain you can get, a pain that becomes unbearable. The memory of pain. The pain of what you have lost. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  15

  MARISA MALLO LOOKED IN THE DIRECTION OF THE monkey puzzle and felt, in turn, the weight of another’s eyes. That majestic specimen planted in the ground of her grandfather’s country home dominated the valley and reached the sky with its huge, vegetal steps.

  The dogs had come out to welcome her. They recognized her smell and fought over it with savage delight. In leaps and bounds, they showed off the visitor, like a precious conquest. But Marisa had never felt that other sensation, of being spied on by the monkey puzzle.

  “So you’re back again, are you, girl?” it said to her from on high.

  As she made her way towards the house, she felt the trees in blossom were scrutinizing her as well, next to the path of white pebbles. As if the camellias were giving each other a nudge and the Chinese magnolias were whispering gently.

  Somehow that world belonged to her. It had been both her playground and hideaway. There, something her grandfather had particularly wanted, she had made her debut in society with an exotic party in the Fronteira tradition. She laughed with ironic melancholy just to remember it.

  Her grandfather, Benito Mallo, sat with her by his side beneath the vine arbour, presiding at the long banquet table. So long in her mind’s eye that the white of the tablecloths merged at the edges with the foliage of the garden. Next to his grandchild, that red-haired girl already blossoming into a beautiful woman, Benito Mallo smiled with satisfaction. It was the first time he had managed to assemble all the so-called bigwigs. There, in pride of place, were the people who despised him most, the town’s top pedigree, meekly rendering thanks. There were the bishop and the priests, including the parish priest who had singled him out from the pulpit one day as the captain of sinners. There were the border-guard chiefs, the very ones who had sworn when he was an audacious nobody to hang him upside down from the bridge, so that the eels could pick out his eyes. But something had happened to reality. It was still the same. The same values, the same laws, the same God. Only that Benito Mallo had crossed the border, had got rich from smuggling. Coffee, oil and bacalao were talked about. But the popular imagination knew more: the tons of copper amassed by means of electric cables that terminated in a handle turning day and night; the jewellery that came across in the cattle’s stomachs; the silk carried by a legion of falsely-pregnant women; the weapons bestowing honours on a dead man in a coffin.