The Carpenter's Pencil

by Rivas, Manuel

  “Do you need some help?”

  “I’m not an invalid.”

  He tells her they can talk walking towards the rose garden, the sunny spell will not last, the winter sun is effective against what he calls this accursed rheumatism.

  “You look very pretty,” he said. “As ever.”

  Marisa recalled the last time they had seen each other. Her bleeding to death, her veins open in the bathtub. They had been forced to break down the door. He had wiped the scene from his mind.

  “I’ve come to ask you a favour.”

  “You’re in luck. That’s my speciality.”

  “The war ended a year and eight months ago. As I understand it, there’ll be pardons around Christmas.”

  Benito Mallo stopped and breathed in. The winter sun blinked on the majestic stained-glass window of the monkey-puzzle. “Irregular breathing,” Marisa thought, searching with her eyes for the gardener’s cloud of smoke.

  “I’ll be honest, Marisa. I did everything I could to have him killed. Now the greatest favour I can do you both is to do nothing.”

  “You can do more than you say.”

  He turned towards her and held her gaze, but not defiantly, with the curiosity of someone discovering a foreign face reflected in the river. If you stir the water, the face slips through your fingers, evasive, and re-forms like a second reality.

  “Are you sure about that? You were too much for me.”

  She was going to tell him, “When will you realize there is such a thing as love?” And remind him, just to tease him, of the delirium he had suffered with the poetry. The episode of his sole recital had remained as an indelible farce in the annals of Fronteira. Benito Mallo had given the books from that enchanting shelf to a gypsy on his way to Coimbra and had them replaced with the volumes of Civil Law. But Marisa kept quiet. “Love, grandfather, does exist,” was all she said.

  “Love,” he murmured, as if he had grains of salt in his mouth. And then he said in a hoarse, guttural voice, “I shall do no more. Follow your path. That is my favour.”

  Marisa did not protest. This was what she expected to achieve. According to Fronteira’s laws, you have to throw in ten to get one out. Besides, her grandfather’s word bound the whole clan, starting with her parents, submissive as lambs before Benito Mallo’s whim. A family safe-conduct. No more manoeuvres, no more suitors for Penelope. Follow your path: I shall marry my imprisoned love.

  “I’m going to marry him,” she said.

  Benito Mallo was silent. He gave the monkey-puzzle’s vegetal window one last look and turned in the direction of the house. The walk was at an end.

  The dogs were heard whining. Couto, the chauffeur who acted from time to time as his guardian, approached discreetly.

  “Excuse me, my lord. The wife of that man from Rosal is here. The fugitive has reached Lisbon. And she wishes to thank you.”

  “Thank me? Tell her to pay what she owes and leave.”

  Marisa knew what they were referring to. Her grandfather was one of the victors. The repression in Fronteira had been especially cruel. An ossuary of skulls with bullet holes. Too much for the practically minded. And he was practically minded.

  “The day after tomorrow,” he said, turning back to Marisa, “a train will be leaving from Coruña. A special train. And your doctor will be on it.”

  16

  THE CLOCK AT CORUÑA RAILWAY STATION HAD ALWAYS stopped at five minutes to ten. The boy selling newspapers sometimes had the impression that the minute hand, the longer of the two, trembled slightly before giving up again, unable to cope with its weight, like the wing of a hen. The boy thought that, deep down, the clock was right and that eternal malfunction was a stand in favour of realism. He would also like to have stopped, not at five minutes to ten, but four hours earlier, at the exact time his father was waking him in the hovel that was their home in Eirís. In winter and summer alike, a cloud of mist would settle there, compact damp that seemed gradually to be shrinking the house year after year, weighing down the roof, opening cracks in the walls. The boy was sure that, at night, one of its tentacles came down the chimney and stuck to the ceiling with its huge suckers, leaving behind those circular stains like the images of craters from a grey planet. The first waking landscape. The boy had to cross the city to Porta Real, where he would pick up the copies of La Voz de Galicia. Sometimes, in winter, he would run to chase away the cold from his feet. His father had made him some soles with pieces of car tyre. When he ran, the boy went vroom vroom vrooooom to clear a way through the mist.

  Everyone knew the Madrid Express would be very late. The boy could not quite understand why they said late if the train was always on time two hours afterwards. But there they all were, taxi drivers, porters, old Betún, saying, “It looks as if it’ll be late.” They were the ones, set in their error, who were out of time. Were they to accept reality, he could sleep a little longer and would not have to slice through the mist with his imaginary horn.

  Old Betún said to him,

  “Yes, right. But, what if one day it arrives on time? You think you’re pretty clever, eh, big-head?”

  He would have liked to sell tobacco. But that was already the job of old Betún, who had been a bootblack previously. He sold tobacco and all sorts of things. His overcoat was a department store with an unexpected range of goods. For this reason he wore it in summer as well. But the boy sold newspapers only. Today could be a good day if some of those men were to buy them. Between them and the passengers on the Express, he could get rid of the lot and he would not have to go around calling out. He could wander home with his hands in his pockets and buy a small bottle of lemonade.

  But none of those men marching in a line was going to buy the paper. Only one, tall, in an old suit without a tie and carrying a small leather case with polished corners, paused to look at the front page. A headline in large characters, “Hitler and Franco meet.” The man in the suit without a tie and carrying the leather case continued reading as he moved away. The introduction to the piece was in bold, “The Führer met today with the Head of the Spanish State, General Franco, on the border between Spain and France. The meeting took place in the spirit of camaraderie that exists between the two nations.” Given that he seemed to be interested in the article, were the man to buy the paper, he would find a commentary inside from the official news agency, Efe, stating that “the unique and sovereign figure of General Franco, in his already historic meeting with the Führer, has confirmed before Europe and the world the imperial will of our Homeland”. But the man could not open the paper for the simple reason that he formed part of the line, even though he was almost the last one, and had a guard right behind him in a tricorne and cape, armed with a rifle, who did not halt before the young lad selling newspapers, but continued marking time.

  No departure was due at that time, but this morning there was a train stationed at one of the main platforms. The carriages were built of wood, of the kind used for the transport of freight and cattle. The men lined up on the platform and placed the tiny clothes bundles they held in their hands on the ground. A guard counted them, calling out their numbers one by one. The boy thought that, if he were to be called by a number, he would like to be number 10, the one Chacho, his favourite footballer, wore on his shirt, who used to say, “You’ve got to pass the ball as if it were hanging by a thread!” But a different guard came back and counted them again. A station clerk went along also, chanting out their numbers, much more quickly, as if competing with the others. “Maybe they’re missing someone,” the boy thought, and looked around and under the carriages. But who should he find except old Betún, who said to him?

  “They’re prisoners, big-head. Sick prisoners. With tuberculosis.”

  And he spat a large gobbet on to the ground and then trod on it as you would deliberately step on a bug.

  From where he was, in line with the main entrance, and the ticket hall in between, the boy selling newspapers could keep a check on who came into the station.
No surprise, therefore, that he should see the two women as soon as they alighted from the taxi. One was older, without being old, the other was younger, but they dressed in a similar way, as if they shared the same clothes and lipstick. “Right,” thought the boy selling newspapers, “these two are almost certain to buy the paper.” Because he could guess who was going to buy the paper or not as soon as he saw them, though, obviously, he got it wrong at times and was even taken by surprise. Once, for example, a blind man bought the paper. Aside from the passengers, he had some very special established customers, his regulars: the barefoot florist, the fishwife and the chestnut seller. No doubt, many journalists do not realize how useful newspapers can be. The chestnut seller, for example, would make cones as perfect as the arum lilies sold by the florist with bare feet.

  “These two pale-faced, young ladies,” thought the newspaper boy now, “are bound to buy a paper off me.” But he got it wrong. And maybe he was to blame, because the younger one, initially, heeded his call and even drew up before the front page with the historic photograph of the Führer and Franco. But then she looked over towards the platform and it occurred to him to say,

  “They’re prisoners, madam. Sick prisoners. With tuberculosis.”

  And he was unsure whether to spit on the ground as old Betún had done, but he did not through lack of confidence and because the woman looked at him suddenly with tears in her eyes, as if she had grit in them, and started running towards the platform as if she were on a spring. Her medium-heeled shoes echoed around the whole station and even seemed to shake the minute hand out of its sleep.

  The newspaper boy saw how the young woman anxiously went down the line of prisoners, without counting numbers, and finally embraced the man in the old suit without a tie. Now everything in the station came to a halt, even more so than usual, since after the commotion you get with arrivals or departures, the station would take on the atmosphere of a blind alley. Time stood still, except for the two of them embracing. Until a lieutenant who was there emerged from his own statue, walked towards them, and separated them as the pruner does with the stems of plants.

  In the end, a guard passed by counting very slowly, as if he did not mind their thinking he could not count and, as he did so, he pointed at the prisoners with a baton in the form of a thick, red pencil.

  “Like the one grandpa uses,” thought the boy selling newspapers. “A carpenter’s pencil.”

  17

  “THEY EMBRACED IN THE STATION,” HERBAL TOLD Maria da Visitação. “None of us moved. We weren’t quite sure what to do. So the lieutenant went and separated them. He pulled them apart, one from the other, as the pruner does with the stems of plants.

  “I had seen them like this once before, when no-one could separate them.

  “It was the day I found out they were in love. Prior to that I’d never seen them together, nor could I have imagined that Marisa Mallo and Daniel Da Barca would become a couple. That was fine for a novel, but not for the reality of that time. It was like sprinkling gunpowder on a censer.

  “I actually came across them by chance, walking around the Rosaleda in Santiago together at dusk, and I decided to follow them. It was the end of autumn. They were engrossed in conversation, not taking hold of one another, but drawing closer when the gusts of wind raised swarms of dry leaves. In the Alameda they had their photograph taken, one of those that comes in a heart-shaped frame. The photographer had a bucket of water, in which he bathed the photographs. It started raining and everyone ran towards the bandstand, but I took shelter in the public lavatories. I imagined them laughing, their bodies touching, while the breeze dried the photograph. And when the sky cleared, night having fallen, I followed them again down the old city streets. The walk seemed as if it was never going to end, there was no getting close or caressing, and I began to get bored. Besides, it started raining again, that Santiago rain that works its way into your bronchial tubes and turns you into an amphibian. Even the stone horses have water coming out of their mouths.”

  “And what happened?” Maria da Visitação asked anxiously, uninterested in the horses with water coming out of their mouths.

  “Oblivious of the rain, they stopped right in the middle of the Quintana dos Mortos. They must have been soaked, because I was dripping, and I’d been walking down the arcade. ‘They’re mad,’ I thought, ‘they’ll catch their death of cold. Blasted doctor!’ But then that happened. The Berenguela.”

  “Who’s the Berenguela?”

  “It’s a bell. The Berenguela is a bell of the Cathedral, overlooking the Quintana. At the first stroke, they embraced. And it was as if they were never going to let go, because it was midnight. The Berenguela chimes so slowly it’s supposed to be good for giving the wine in the barrels that extra something, but I don’t know how it doesn’t drive all the clocks mad.”

  “How did they embrace, Herbal?” the girl from the nightclub asked him.

  “I’ve seen man and woman get up to all sorts, but these two, they drank each other. They licked the water off each other with their lips and tongues. They sucked in each other’s ears, the bowl of their eyes, from the breast to the neck upwards. They were so drenched they must have felt naked. They kissed like two fish.”

  Suddenly, Herbal drew two parallel lines with the pencil on the white paper napkin. And then he drew thicker, shorter lines across. The sleepers.

  The train, the train lost in the snow.

  Maria da Visitação noticed the white of Herbal’s eyes. A white gone slightly yellow, like smoked lard. Against that background, the iris flared up in the silences like a piece of burning wood. Allowed to grow, the white of his hair might have acquired a venerable tone, but it had the appearance of darkened grey due to a conscript’s drastic haircut. He was already advanced in years, you could even say old. But he had a lean, tense constitution, like reddened, knotty wood. Maria da Visitação had begun to think about age, having turned twenty in October. She knew older people who seemed a lot younger than they were due to a kind of happy-go-lucky pact with time. Other people, and Manila, who owned the bar, was one of them, had an almost pathetic relationship with age, trying to cover up its traces in a vain obsession, the adornments, the overly tight dresses and wealth of jewellery, doing nothing except to accentuate the contrast. But she only knew one person, and that was Herbal, who stayed younger through misfortune. It was unclear whether his breathlessness was because he wanted or did not want to breathe. The rage against the slow passing of time came to the surface whenever things got difficult at night. It was enough for him to look daggers from the end of the bar, for a client holding the stage to cough up the money without a murmur.

  “Sometimes, when I wake up out of breath, I have the sensation we’re still there, stuck on a snow-covered track in the province of Leon. And there’s a wolf watching us, watching the train, so I lower the half window and aim with the rifle on the glass and the painter says to me, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Can’t you see?’ I reply, ‘I’m going to kill that wolf.’ ‘Don’t spoil the painting,’ he says. ‘It took me a lot of hard work.’

  “The wolf turns around and leaves us on our own, on a siding.”

  “Another one, sir,” a guard tells the lieutenant. “In coach nine.”

  The lieutenant swears the way you do in the face of an invisible enemy. When it came to the dead, he did not like the number three. One corpse is a corpse. The second keeps the first company. He had remained impassive. But from there on up was a stack of corpses. A situation. He was still a young man. He cursed that mission without the slightest glory. To command a forgotten train, laden with defeat and tuberculosis, and on top of that blocked by nature’s absurd, mad shells. An unstitched war rag. He put a startling hypothesis out of his head: I cannot arrive in Madrid at the head of a funeral parlour.

  “Three dead already. What the hell is going on?”

  “They drown in their blood, sir. They get a coughing fit and they drown in their own blood.”

  Withering
look: “Yes, I know what happens. I don’t need it explained. And what about the doctor? What’s the doctor doing?”

  “He hasn’t stopped, sir. From one coach to the next. He said to tell you we should empty out the last carriage and set it aside for the corpses.”

  “Well, then do it. I’ll go with this chap here,” he said, referring to Herbal, “to that damned station. Meanwhile inform the driver. We shall move this train even if it’s on our hands and knees.”

  The lieutenant looked anxiously outside. On one side, the plain, white as nothing. On the other, a frozen archaeology of stranded trains and sheds that resembled pantheons of railway skeletons.

  “This is worse than war!”

  Inmates had been brought together on that train from the prisons in the north of Galicia, suffering from an advanced stage of TB. In the misery following the war, tuberculosis spread like a plague, a situation made worse by the humidity of the Atlantic coast. Their final destination was a prison hospital in the Valencia mountain range. But first they had to reach Madrid. A passenger train at that time could take eighteen hours to cover the distance between Coruña and North Station in the capital.

  “Ours was termed a Special Transport Train,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação. “Special is exactly what it was!”

  When the inmates boarded the carriages, many of them had already eaten their allowance of food: a tin of sardines. To keep them warm they had each been given a blanket. The snow put in its appearance in the heights around Betanzos and did not leave them until Madrid. The Special Transport Train took its seven hours to reach Monforte, the railway junction connecting Galicia and the Meseta. But the worst was yet to come. They still had to cross the mountains of Zamora and Leon. When the train stopped in Monforte, darkness was already falling. The prisoners shivered with cold and fever at the same time.