“I was frozen as well,” Herbal continued. “Those of us on guard detail travelled in a passenger carriage, with seats and windows, behind the locomotive. It was a steam engine, which had difficulty pulling the train, as if it too suffered from tuberculosis.
“Yes, I had volunteered. I put myself forward as soon as I heard about that train taking TB sufferers to a prison hospital in Valencia. I was convinced I had the very same disease, but covered it up the whole time, avoided the medical examinations, which for me was not difficult. I thought they’d lay me off sick, with a miserable wage, and I’d be sidelined for good. I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ village or to my sister’s house. The last time I had spoken to my father was coming back from Asturias. We argued a lot. I refused to work, told him I was on leave and said that he was an animal. And then my father, with a calmness I didn’t know he possessed, replied, ‘I didn’t kill anyone. When we were kids and got called up for Morocco, we took to the hills. Yes, I am an animal, but I didn’t kill anyone. Sit back and feel satisfied if, as an old man, you can say the same!’ I haven’t spoken to my father since.
“When I heard about the train, I went back to see Sergeant Landesa, who by then had been promoted. ‘Arrange for me to go with them, sir, in the hospital guard. I need the change of climate. And that doctor, Doctor Da Barca, is going too, you recall. I believe he is still in contact with the resistance. I shall, of course, keep you informed.’”
The lieutenant, Herbal and the driver approach the Leonese station. The snow covers their boots. They shake it off on the platform. The lieutenant is fuming. He is planning to shout at the stationmaster, tell him a few things. But out of the office comes a commanding officer. The lieutenant is caught off guard and takes a while to stand to attention. The commanding officer, before he speaks, eyes him severely and awaits the gesture of compliance with rank. The lieutenant clicks his heels, stands to attention and salutes with mechanical precision. “At your orders, my commander.” It is very cold, but he has sweat on his forehead. “I am in charge of the Special Train and …”
“The Special Train? What train are you talking about, lieutenant?”
The lieutenant’s voice trembles. He does not know where to begin.
“The train, the train of prisoners with TB, sir. We’ve three dead already.”
“The train of prisoners with TB? Three dead? What are you telling me, lieutenant?”
The driver is about to speak, “I can explain, sir.” But the commanding officer, with an energetic gesture, shuts him up.
“We left Coruña, sir, forty-eight hours ago. What we have here is a Special Transport Train. With prisoners, sick prisoners. With tuberculosis. We should have been in Madrid by now. But there seems to have been some confusion. In Leon we were allowed through, but on a diversion towards the north. This went on for several hours. When we realized, we turned back. But it was not easy, commander. Since then, we have been sitting on a siding. We were told there were other special trains.”
“Indeed there are, lieutenant. You ought to know,” said the commanding officer sardonically. “The north-west coast is being reinforced. Or have you not heard of the Second World War?”
He called the signalman.
“What can you tell me about a train of prisoners with TB?”
“A train of prisoners with TB? That went through yesterday, sir.”
“There was some confusion,” the lieutenant was about to explain once more. But he realized that the commanding officer was gazing in astonishment at the railway lines.
Swaying, walking sluggishly and swept along by the snow, a small procession drew near with a man on a stretcher. Before his mind could confirm the vision to him, he sensed what was happening. At the head walked that damnable doctor, flanked by two of the guards. As they came closer, Lieutenant Goyanes spliced that slow sequence with other recent images. The unrestrained embrace in the station, which he cut using the pliers of his hands, disturbed by that unending kiss that upset the foundations of reality like an earthquake. The conversation that followed on the train, an aborted approach on his part. He had tried to justify himself with a splash of humour, without it sounding like an apology,
“Someone had to separate you. Quite clearly you’d have kept us waiting till the cows came home. Ha, ha! Was that your wife then? You’re a lucky man.”
He realized that everything he was saying had a wounding double meaning. Doctor Da Barca made no reply, as if all he could hear were the din of the train taking him further away from the warm, perfumed embrace of woman. The lieutenant had told him to take a seat in his carriage. After all, he was also in charge of the expedition. They had things to talk about.
Leaving behind the large tunnel that blotted out the urban horizon, the train entered the green and blue watercolour of the Burgo estuary. Doctor Da Barca blinked as if the beauty hurt his eyes. From their boats, with long rakes, the fishermen combed the bottom of the sea for shellfish. One of them stopped working and looked in the direction of the train, his hand shielding his face, erect on the sea’s swaying surface. Doctor Da Barca recalled his friend the painter. He used to like painting scenes of work in the fields and at sea, but not according to the traditional clichés, which turned them into pretty, bucolic pictures. On his friend the painter’s canvases, people were shown merging into the earth and the sea. Their faces seemed furrowed by the very plough that clove the earth. The fishermen were captives of the very nets that seized the fish. It reached the point where their bodies fragmented. Sickle arms. Sea eyes. Face stones. Doctor Da Barca empathized with the fisherman standing erect on his boat, looking at the train. He may have wondered where it was going and what it was taking there. The distance and the din of the engine would prevent him from hearing the terrible litany of coughing ringing out in the squalor of the cattle trucks like skin tambourines soaked in blood. The panorama brought to mind a fable: with its cries, the cormorant flying over the fisherman was telegraphing the truth about the train. He remembered the bitterness his friend the painter felt when he stopped receiving the avant-garde art magazines he was sent from Germany: the worst illness that can strike is the suspension of conscience. Doctor Da Barca opened his case and pulled out a brief treatise with worn covers, The Biological Roots of Aesthetic Feeling, by Doctor Roberto Nóvoa Santos.
Lieutenant Goyanes sat down opposite. He looked at the small book’s cover out of the corner of his eye. This Doctor Da Barca, he calculated, had to be a little older than he was, but not much. After the incident of their departure, when he was informed that he was the doctor, he had adopted an attitude of camaraderie, but with the superiority of a hiking guide. Now, unconcerned about interrupting the other’s reading, he began to tell him how he had also gone to University, taking a few courses in Philosophy, before enlisting in Franco’s army, where he had started out as second lieutenant. After that he had decided to continue with a military career. “Philosophy!” he exclaimed in an ironic tone. “I too was attracted by Marx and all those prophets of social redemption. Like il duce Mussolini. He was a socialist, you know? Yes, of course you know. Till the blessed day the Warrior Philosopher turned up. Destroyer of the Present. He freed me from the flock of slaves.”
Doctor Da Barca carried on reading, deliberately ignoring him, but the other knew how to make him talk.
“That was when I stopped worrying about the apes and became interested in the gods.”
He had hit the nail on the head. The doctor at last put down his book and stared at him,
“I’d never have guessed, lieutenant.”
He burst out laughing and slapped him on the knees.
“Good, good,” he said, standing up, “a Republican with balls. Stick to worrying about the apes.”
There was no time for jokes after that. Things began to get complicated as if the train were driven by the devil. In Monforte the expected replenishment of food for the prisoners did not arrive. Then came that calvary in the mountains of snow. The doctor moving tirelessl
y from carriage to carriage. The last time the lieutenant had seen him he had been on his knees, by the light of an oil lamp, cleaning the dark, clotted blood from the spikes of the beard of the first corpse.
Snowflakes covered the doctor’s hair, which had curled. One of the guards stepped forward to give explanations, “He told us it was a matter of life or death, sir, and that you had authorized it.” In front of the commander, in the station whipped by the blizzard, Lieutenant Goyanes felt obliged to offer a show of authority. He snatched the guard’s rifle and with the butt knocked Da Barca down.
“He did not have my permission!”
On the ground, the doctor strokes the wound with the back of his hand. It is bleeding where the blow has landed, on his cheek. Unhurriedly, he takes a handful of snow and applies it like a balm. “An oil painting with blood and snow,” says the painter inside Herbal’s head. “The ointment of history. Why don’t you help him to stand up?”
“You’re mad,” mutters the guard.
“Help him, can’t you see the reason he’s doing all this is to get us back on the blasted move?”
Corporal Herbal hesitates. Suddenly, he steps forward and lends the wounded man a hand so that he can get to his feet.
“He reacted with complete surprise,” he told Maria da Visitação. “He may have been remembering the day he was arrested, when I knocked him about. But then he returned the lieutenant’s blow with a piercing look. He had that about him. He made the other feel smaller.”
Coughing. The signalman turned to the sick man on the stretcher as if the bell on the crank telephone were ringing.
The commander moves the lieutenant to one side,
“Now what the hell is going on?”
“This man is not far off a final haemoptysis,” Doctor Da Barca tells him. “Any moment now he’ll drown in his own blood. We’ve lost three already.”
“And what’s the point of bringing him here? I know what tuberculosis is. If he’s going to die, well, he’ll have to die. The nearest hospital is miles away.”
“There’s only one thing to do. We mustn’t lose any more time. I need a room with plenty of light, a table and boiled water.”
The signalman’s table had a pane of glass on the wood. The glass covered a map of the Spanish railways. They threw a blanket on top and laid the sick man down. In the small saucepan on the stove, the water with the syringe needle began to boil. The bubbling sound was similar to the patient’s breathing. Witnessing the preparations for that crude operation, Herbal attempted to listen to his own chest. The sea’s tickling on the spongy sand. He rolled a ball of spit against his palate to see if he could detect the sweet taste of blood. Only the painter was aware of his anguish, the secret of his hidden illness. He kept watch on the others’ symptoms. He pretended not to care, but made a mental note whenever a medical comment referred to TB. He learnt from every sign of his body.
“The Ailing Generation! The best Galician artists died very young, of tuberculosis,” the painter had told him. “The scythe in Galicia has an artistic streak, Herbal. If you’ve got it, yours is a famous disease. They were very attractive too, with a melancholy beauty. Women were crazy about them.”
“Well, thank you. That’s some consolation.”
“Not about you, Herbal.”
He looked at the sick man before him, lying on the signalman’s table. He was only a boy, young and fresh-faced. But in the expression of his eyes there was an ancient lichen. He knew his story. His name was Seán. A deserter. He had spent three years on the run on Mount Pindo, living like a rock-animal. There were dozens of men in those caves. When they scoured the area, the Civil Guard could never find them. Until they broke the code of signals. The washerwomen were accomplices, writing messages over the thickets with the colours of their clothes.
“What are you going to do?” the commander asked him.
“A pneumothorax,” Doctor Da Barca said, “an artificial pneumothorax. The idea is for air to enter the chest, compressing the lungs and stopping the haemorrhage.”
And then he assembled the syringe, looked at Seán calmly and winked at him in encouragement.
“Let’s to it, eh, my friend? It’s only a prick in between the ribs.”
Just so. Only a prick. A bee’s sting in the wolf’s chest.
But then the doctor is quiet, so absorbed he seems to X-ray the chest with his eyes. He slowly finds a place for the needle and punctures very quickly. Herbal helps to hold the patient down by the wrist. The boy clenches his fists, digs his nails into his own palm. The doctor stands still, the needle sticking into the boy’s chest, attentive to the bag of air. On the signalman’s table, in the caverns of man, the sound of running water, the organ of the wind.
“The train left the very same afternoon,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “At all the stations it passed straight through. The train lost in the snow was now a phantom train. When it did stop, it was briefly, and no-one came near. A couple of us would alight in order to sort out the food supplies. We returned empty-handed. All the stations smelt of hunger,” said Herbal, looking at the air freshener on the table. “And yet, in spite of everything, I remember one detail. In Medina del Campo a man banged on the window and greeted Da Barca. Then he disappeared. The train was already leaving when he returned with a sack of chestnuts. I caught it almost in midair, at the door to the carriage. He shouted, ‘They’re for the doctor!’ He was a big bloke, with laboured breathing. Genghis Khan. Among the chestnuts, a wallet. ‘He must have swiped it right here, in the station,’ I thought. I was going to keep it. In the end, I took half the notes and handed the sack to the doctor.”
“And what happened to that boy, the deserter?” Maria da Visitação asked anxiously.
“He died in Porta Coeli. Yes, he died in that hospital which was known as the Doorway to Heaven.”
18
DOCTOR DA BARCA WAS WRITING A LOVE LETTER. That is why he kept crossing out. He thought that language was extremely poor for such a task, and he was sorry not to have a poet’s lack of shame. He did have when it came to the other prisoners. Part of his therapy consisted in encouraging them to recall their loves and to put a few words in the post. He lent his hand good-humouredly to writing some of those letters. “Her name’s Eileen, doctor.” “Eileen?” “Eileen …” “The scent of unripe lemons and tangerine. What do you think?”
“She’ll like it, doctor. She’s very natural.”
But when it came to him, he felt that, in effect, all love letters were ridiculous. At times he was amazed at the things a sick man could say without affectation. “Doctor, write down that she’s not to worry. As long as she’s alive, I shan’t die ever. When I’m short of air, I breathe through her mouth.”
And another, “Write down that I’ll be back. I’ll be back to seal all the leaks in the roof.”
He crossed out the opening again. Today’s had to be a special letter. Finally, he wrote, “Wife.” It was then he heard a knock at the door of his room. It was late for the prison hospital, after eleven o’clock at night. Perhaps it was an emergency. He opened the door, prepared to disguise his displeasure. Mother Izarne. On another occasion he would have joked about her Mercedarian order’s white habit, “Ah, I thought you were an ectoplasmic crumb!” but this time he noticed an air of unreality that disturbed him in his modesty. The nun had a woman’s saucy smile. Suddenly, with no other greeting, she produced a bottle of brandy from underneath her skirt.
“For you, doctor. For your wedding night!”
And she scuttled off down the corridor, like someone fleeing cheerful audacity, leaving behind an aura of blazing eyes.
Bluish-greyish-green. Eyes slightly torn, with a fold of skin in the shape of a half-moon on her eyelids.
Like Marisa’s. “God did not exist,” thought Da Barca, “but providence does.”
It had been Mother Izarne in person who had come to him that evening in high spirits with the telegram confirming the celebration of the wedding ceremony. That s
ame morning, Marisa had said “I do” in the church in Fronteira. He knew the time. In Porta Coeli, seven hundred miles away, the doctor was accompanying his patients on their morning walk. He wore a white shirt and his old festive suit. Between pines and olive trees, he closed his eyes and said, “I do, of course I do.”
“Hey, everyone! The doctor’s daydreaming.”
“My friends, I have some news. I have just got married!”
“The others had an inkling,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação, “because they surrounded him shouting, ‘Congratulations, Da Barca!’ They each had a handful of broom flowers in their pockets, which they had picked up along the way, and they showered him with that mountain gold. The two of them had got married by proxy. Do you know how that works? Her brother, Fernando, took the bridegroom’s place in the church, and the doctor had to complete a document before a notary. In all of this he was helped a great deal by the Mother Superior, Mother Izarne, who even signed as a witness. She took as much interest as if she were the one getting married.”
“I think you were jealous!” Maria da Visitação remarked, smiling.
“She was a very pretty nun,” said Herbal. “And very clever. She did look a bit like Marisa. There was a kind of resemblance. But she was a nun, of course. She hated me. I don’t know why she hated me so much. When it came to it, I was a guard and she was the Mother Superior of the nuns who worked in the prison hospital. We were, at least I thought we were, on the same side.”
Herbal looked out of the open window, as if searching for the distant, flickering light of memory. It was dusk, the time the headlights of the cars began to appear on the Fronteira road.
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