“One day she caught me opening the prisoners’ correspondence. I was interested most of all in the letters addressed to Doctor Da Barca, of course. I read them very closely.”
“For your report?” Maria da Visitação asked him.
“If I spotted something strange, that’s right. I had to fill out a report. My attention was drawn particularly to his correspondence with a friend, by the name of Souto, in which he only ever spoke about football. His idol was Chacho, a Deportivo da Coruña player. I found it strange, this passion for football in Doctor Da Barca, whom I’d never heard enthuse about the game. But in his letters – because I read them as well, the control went both ways – he would say things as pertinent as that you should pass the ball hanging by a thread, or that the ball should do the running and not the player, that is why it was round. I liked Chacho as well, so I let them go and didn’t give them another thought. In reality, the ones that interested me most were Marisa’s. I discussed them with the dead painter. He was particularly fond of one that had a love poem that spoke of blackbirds. I held it back for a week. I carried it in my pocket to re-read it. There was no-one who wrote to me …
“But what happened was that one day Mother Izarne came into the porters’ lodge and caught me brimming with confidence, with a pile of opened envelopes scattered across the desk. I carried on as normal. I assumed she knew all about the control of correspondence. But she worked herself up into a fury. I said to her a bit nervously, ‘It’s OK, Mother, it’s official procedure. And don’t shout so much, absolutely everybody’s going to hear you.’ At which point she got even more enraged and said, ‘Take your dirty hands off that letter!’ She snatched it from me, with the unfortunate result that it tore in two.
“She looked at the opening. It was Marisa Mallo’s letter to Doctor Da Barca, the one with the love poem that talked about blackbirds.
“The pieces trembled in her hands. But she carried on reading.
“I said to her,
“‘It’s of no interest, Mother. There’s no mention of politics.’
“She said to me,
“‘Pig.
“‘Pig in a tricorne hat.’
“Since arriving, I had been feeling well. Compared to the climate in Galicia, Porta Coeli’s was one long spring. But, during that unexpected altercation with the nun, I again felt the damned bubbling in my chest, the sense of breathlessness arriving.
“She must have noticed the terror coming into my eyes. Every one of those nuns was worth a mutual insurance company. She said,
“‘You are ill.’
“‘Heavens above, Mother, don’t say that. It’s nerves, that’s all. Nerves getting inside my head.’
“‘That is an ailment as well,’ she said. ‘It is cured by prayer.’
“‘I already pray. But it doesn’t get any better.’
“‘Then go to hell!’
“She was very clever. And had a fearful temper. She left with the letter torn in two.
“I discussed what had happened with a police inspector, by the name of Arias, who used to come up from time to time from Valencia, without referring, needless to say, to the matter of my health. ‘Never get between a nun and where she wants to go,’ he exclaimed laughing, ‘or you can be certain you’ll end up in hell.’
“Inspector Arias, with his trimmed moustache, was a great theoretician. He said,
“‘Spain will never have a perfect dictatorship that runs like clockwork, to match Hitler’s. And do you know why, corporal? Because of women. Half the women in Spain are whores and the other half are nuns. I am sorry for you. I got the first half.
“‘Ha, ha, ha!’
“An old barracks joke.
“‘I can tell the odd story, but I’m terrible at jokes,’ I said to him.
“‘There once was a dog named Joke. The dog died and that was the end of the Joke.’
“‘Ha, ha, ha! That’s ridiculous, my Galician friend!’”
Hell. Never get between a nun and where she wants to go. Herbal took the opportunity to tell the inspector it would be better for him to stop dealing with the correspondence.
“Absolutely,” the other said. “We’ll have it sent via the police station.”
“Do you think she liked him?” Maria da Visitação asked, getting to the point that interested her.
“He had a certain something, as I told you. To women he was like a pied piper.”
No-one was quite sure when Doctor Da Barca slept. His vigils were always with a book in his hand. There were times he would collapse from exhaustion in the patients’ block or on the ground outside, the open book keeping his chest warm. She began to lend him works that they would then discuss. Their conversations continued in the fine weather, into the night, when the patients went outside for a breath of fresh air.
Under the moon, they would walk up and down the path that led to the mount of pines.
What Herbal did not know was that the nun Izarne had also on one occasion told Doctor Da Barca to go to hell. It was in the spring after his arrival in Porta Coeli and on account of Saint Teresa.
She said,
“You disappoint me, doctor. I knew you were not religious, but I thought you were a sensitive man.”
He said,
“Sensitive? In the Book of Life Saint Teresa writes, ‘My heart hurt.’ And this was true, her heart, the viscus, did hurt. She had angina and later suffered a heart attack. Doctor Nóvoa Santos, the master pathologist, went to Alba, where the reliquary is kept, and examined the saint’s heart. He was an honest man, believe me. Now, he reaches the conclusion that what is understood to be a wound, inflicted by the angel’s dart, is nothing other than the atrioventricular groove, the fissure separating the right atrium from the ventricle. But he also finds a scar, of the type left behind by sclerosis, indicating a heart attack. The clinical eye, as the master Nóvoa underlines, cannot explain a poem, but a poem is quite capable of revealing to the clinical eye what it does not know. And that poem, I live but outside myself, I await a life so high, that not dying yet I die. Not dying yet I die! That poem …”
“Is a marvel!”
“Yes. It is also a marvellous diagnosis.”
“That is very crude of you, doctor. We are talking here of poetry, of some sublime verses, and all you can do is talk to me of viscera like a forensic scientist.”
“Forgive me, but I am a pathologist.”
“Indeed, more like a bar-tologist!”
“Listen, Izarne. Mother Izarne. These verses are exceptional. No pathologist could describe an ailment in the same way. She transforms that weakness, the transitory death causing her the angina, into an expression of culture or, if you prefer, of the spirit. A sigh become a poem.”
“To you, not dying yet I die is a sigh, and that’s it?”
“Yes. A sigh, albeit a highly-qualified one.”
“Mother of God! You are so cold, so cynical, so …”
“So what?”
“So proud. You do not recognize God out of pure pride.”
“Quite the opposite. Out of pure modesty. If Saint Teresa and the mystics really are addressing themselves to God, it is with an arrogance such as falls within the boundaries of pathology. To see God who is my prisoner! To be honest, I prefer the God of the Old Testament. High in the highest, directing the stars, like someone directing a Hollywood film. I prefer to think that the God of Saint Teresa has a real incarnation, an absent-minded human being who was not even informed of the saint’s yearning. How bitter is the life in which the Lord cannot be enjoyed! Why not conclude that she was taken with an impossible love? Besides, she was the granddaughter and daughter of Jewish converts. She was forced to use more guile. Hence she talks of prison and the soul’s irons. She expresses the angina, her physical weakness, but also a real, impossible love. Some of her confessors were intelligent, very attractive men …”
“I’m leaving. I find what you’re saying repugnant.”
“But why? I believe in the soul, M
other Izarne.”
“You believe in the soul? Well, you talk about it as if it were a secretion …”
“Not exactly. We might go so far as to say that the soul’s material substratum are the cellular enzymes.”
“You are a monster, a monster who thinks he’s funny.”
“Saint Teresa compares the soul to a medieval castle, the whole is a single diamond cut by the divine glazier. Why a diamond? If I were a poet, and I wish I were, I would speak of a snowflake. No two are the same. They melt away in existence, in the sun’s rays, as if to say, ‘Immortality, how boring!’ Body and soul are bound together. As music to an instrument. The injustice that gives rise to social suffering is basically the most terrible soul-destroying machine.”
“And why do you think I’m here? I am not a mystic. I fight against suffering, the suffering that you, the heroes of one and the other side, cause in ordinary people.”
“You’re wrong again. There’ll be no trace of me left. You won’t find me in any calendar of saints’ days. In the words of the Nazi doctors, I belong to the field of ballast lives, lives that don’t deserve to be lived. I shan’t even have the relief of seeing myself seated, like you, at the right hand of God. But I shall tell you something, Mother Izarne. If God exists, he is a schizoid being, a kind of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And you belong to his good side.”
“Why do you make me tear my hair out?”
“I don’t even know what colour it is.”
Mother Izarne took off her white wimple and shook her head, freeing her long, russet hair.
She said,
“Now you know. And go to hell!”
And he said,
“I shouldn’t mind finding there a star.”
“Do you think there are beings on other planets?” Herbal asked Maria da Visitação suddenly.
“I don’t know,” she said with an ironic smile. “I’m not from here. I don’t have any papers.”
“The nun and Doctor Da Barca,” Herbal continued, “were always talking about the sky. Not heaven, but the starry sky. After dinner, when the patients lazed about outside, the two of them would compete at identifying the stars. Apparently a sage had been burnt many years ago for saying there was life on other planets. In those days there was no beating about the bush. They both thought that there was, that there were people up above. They agreed about that. And they thought it would be a wonderful thing for the world. I’m not so sure. There’d be more people wanting a piece of their own land. Considering how well-read they were, they were a bit crazy. But I found them amusing to listen to. The truth is if you sit and look at the sky for any length of time it fills with more and more stars. There are even some we see that no longer exist. The light takes so long to get here that, by the time it reaches us, the star’s gone out. Amazing, isn’t it? To be seeing what no longer exists.
“Maybe it’s all like that.”
“But what happened next?” Maria da Visitação asked impatiently.
“They caught him and that was the end of the hospital. This really messed things up. The climate suited me, and it wasn’t a bad life. I was a guard who didn’t guard. No-one was going to escape. What for? The whole of Spain was a prison. That was the truth. Hitler had invaded Europe and was winning all the battles. The Republicans had nowhere to go. Who was going to move in a situation like that? The odd couple of madmen. Including Doctor Da Barca.
“We had been in the hospital for little over a year. One day Inspector Arias turned up with some other policemen. They looked very serious. They said to me, ‘Bring us that doctor by the ears.’ I knew, of course, who they were talking about. I pretended not to, ‘What doctor?’ ‘Come off it, corporal, bring us that Daniel Da Barca fellow.’”
The doctor had just done the rounds of the patients in the main building. He was going over new developments with the nuns who were nurses, Mother Izarne being one of them.
“Doctor Da Barca, you’ll have to accompany me. They wish to see you.”
The white cortège exchanged silent glances.
“Who wishes to see me?” he said with ironic suspicion. “Have they come with the coal?”
“‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ve brought sticks.’
“It was the first time that a joke had come to me spontaneously. The doctor seemed to appreciate it. On his part, it was the first time he had turned to me without giving the impression he was wasting his energy. Mother Izarne, on the other hand, looked at me in horror.”
“Hello there, Chacho,” said Inspector Arias when the doctor was before him. “How’s that left foot of yours?”
The doctor put on a brave face. He replied in the same sardonic manner, “I’ve been injured this season.”
The inspector dropped his cigarette, which he had not finished smoking, and crushed it slowly into the ground as if it were a lizard’s loose tail.
“We’ll see about that at the police station. We’ve some good orthopaedists there.”
He took Doctor Da Barca by the arm. There was no need to push him. He allowed himself to be led towards the car.
“I think someone should explain to me what is going on,” said Mother Izarne, confronting the inspector.
“He’s a ringleader, Mother. He conducts the orchestra.”
“This man is mine!” she exclaimed, her eyes ablaze. “He belongs to the hospital. He has been admitted here!”
“You look after your kingdom, Mother,” Inspector Arias rejoined coldly, without stopping, “and leave hell to us.”
One of the other policemen was still heard to mutter the remark,
“I’ll be damned! That nun’s got character.”
“More than the Pope,” the inspector said in an angry voice. “Now for fuck’s sake get us out of here.”
“I had never seen a nun cry before,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “It’s a very strange sensation. Like a walnut statue that weeps.”
“It’s OK, Mother! Doctor Da Barca always lands on his feet.”
“The truth is I wasn’t exactly an expert at consoling people. She told me to go to hell for a second time.”
They brought him back after three days, long enough for him to have lost weight. One of the guards who escorted him told Herbal that the police had been searching for this Chacho fellow for some time. It had never occurred to them that he might be singing from inside the cage. He was a legend in the resistance. The player combinations he suggested in his letters, the comments regarding footballing tactics, were in fact coded messages for the underground organization. From his time as a Republican leader and his stay in prison, Da Barca was a walking archive. He stored all the information in his head. His texts, giving evidence of the repression, were being published in the English and American press. He was going to be put back on trial.
“But he’s already got a life sentence!”
“Then they’ll give him another one. In case he resurrects.”
“I suppose he had been badly beaten,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação, “but the doctor made no reference to the time he had spent in the police station, not even when Mother Izarne came to him and searched his face for marks of torture. He had a bruise on his neck, under his ear. The nun massaged it with the tips of her fingers, but soon withdrew her hand as if she had received a shock.”
“Thank you for your interest, Mother. They are sending me to another, damper hotel than this. To Galicia. To San Simón Island.”
She looked away towards a window. The boundary stood out between the field and the hillside, against the golden background of broom. But then she reacted with a novice’s smile.
“You see? God closes one door and opens another. Now you’ll be close to her.”
“Yes. That is a good thing.”
“As soon as you can, give her a big hug from me. Don’t forget that I had a hand in your marriage.”
“I’ll do that. I shan’t forget.”
19
DANIEL DA BARCA QUICKLY SCANNED THE ROWS of windows looking fo
r the reflection of a wimple shaped like a dove. But he found none. He had said goodbye to all the prisoners, his patients, and a cluster of Mercedarian nuns had gathered at the exit. She was not among them. “Mother Izarne is at prayer in chapel,” the eldest nun told him, as if she were on an errand. He nodded. They watched him expectantly. The breeze swayed their habits in a white farewell. “I should say a few words,” he thought. “Or better nothing.” He smiled at them.
“My blessing, Mothers!” And he made the sign of the cross in the air like a dean.
They laughed like young girls.
“And what did you say?” Maria da Visitação asked Herbal.
“I didn’t say anything. What was I going to say! I left as I had arrived. As his shadow.”
The scene must have affected Sergeant García in some way. “They’re orders, doctor,” he said as he handcuffed him, seemingly upset at having to interrupt their leave-taking with chains. In the warrant informing him of the custody of the prisoner, which he would carry out in the company of Corporal Herbal, who was heading back to his posting in Galicia, he was told that he would be dealing with a “prominent element opposed to the regime”, sentenced to life imprisonment. He had, therefore, made the journey up to the prison hospital in an alert frame of mind, ill at ease with a transfer mission that would cause him to travel the breadth of Spain, on trains that crawled along like penitents with the cross on their shoulders. He had been relieved to see the prisoner with that cluster of captive nuns. He had once heard an old warrant officer say that an intellectual is like a gypsy: once he has fallen, he never revolts. The one that was a corpse, he thought as they settled on to the first train, from Valencia to Madrid, was the colleague he had been given as an escort. Boredom itself. Like a drunk who has sobered up in the morning. Like a punctual gravedigger. By the time they arrived in Vigo, a cobweb would have formed on his eyelashes.
“Forgive me for interrupting your reading, doctor, but I should like a consultation. It’s something I’ve been toying with for some time. You are a doctor, you ought to know about this. Why are men always up for it? You know what I mean.”
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