Octavio put his things down.
‘I’m the man who lived here before.’
‘Before what?’ the woman asked haughtily.
He didn’t answer. Looking around the room, he recognised the table, which still had traces of charcoal on it. The partition dividing the two rooms was still standing and the bedroom door was closed. As he scoured every detail of the room, the taller woman held on to the back of the chair and said, as if she had already tried and failed to make herself clear, ‘If you’re new here, I know someone who can find you a bed. I can rent you an electricity meter. There are wires hanging out of it like a creeper. But, Señor …’ she said, turning serious, ‘this is our place now.’
Without any deeds to the property, Don Octavio knew he had no chance of getting his house back. The land had never really been his. As he picked up his bundle of belongings and made to leave, he heard a groan like a death rattle coming from the bedroom, a long, loud cry of pain. The woman in rollers did not react. A second moan shattered the moment, and Octavio put down his things.
‘I’d like to see the bedroom one last time,’ he said.
‘It’s private,’ she said in a tone that admitted no further discussion.
‘Señorita,’ he said defensively, ‘I’ve lived here all my life.’
Huffing irritably, the woman stopped protesting, stomped over to the bedroom door and yanked it open. Inside, there was a bed, a wardrobe and a chair. The little altar had been turned into a bedside table with a radio sitting on top of it.
Octavio stepped inside the room. Something stirred between the bed and the wall. A dog must be sleeping under the bed. But as the shape moved and became clearer, he saw it was a young man, probably in his twenties, who stood up, his face puffy and wrists bound. His foot was attached to the bottom of the wardrobe by a long chain. Both men jumped. They considered one another in the dim light like two animals locked in a wordless exchange.
The man brought his hand to his side and gasped in pain. The chain clinked with every step he took. He had long hair, a thin body and red eyes. His trousers were stained with trails of blood. His breathing was laboured and uneven. He seemed to have been left in this prison for days without medical or loving care.
‘What is that …’ Octavio could not help mumbling.
The woman went blank, looking at the boy with a mixture of pride and sacrifice.
‘That …’ she said, ‘is my son.’
‘Why’s he chained up?’ Octavio asked, outraged.
‘So they don’t kill him,’ she replied, her voice catching in her throat.
Octavio had no wish to hear more, and the woman did not elaborate. There was no anger or suffering in her eyes, but they shone with Virginal splendour. Perhaps it was she who was truly enchained. And Octavio saw burning in her gaze a secret resemblance to the forests of San Esteban.
Hoisting his bundle onto his shoulder, he hurried out, passing the girl on his way and stopping to announce bluntly, ‘I’d like my table back.’
The woman in rollers nodded her consent. She told the girl to clear away her nail polish and make-up. Bread had been broken over this table; it had been sewn and ironed on; dough had been kneaded, onions sliced; tears of grief had fallen on it. New scars shone on its surface. Octavio lifted it onto his back and this time it felt heavier to him. He went the way he used to go, his back bent, his heart full of splinters, leaving his days of ignorance and solitude behind him, leaving the house that was no longer his.
XV
The church restoration works began in June and went on until the following August. The architect in charge was a man from Valera, Temístocles Jerez, who had been born in the ashes of the state of Trujillo and had helped to restore the Mario-Briceño-Irragory Library and the Teatro Municipal de Caracas. He was obese, with very white skin and very black gelled curls, known for his colourful Spanish and rhetorical flourishes. He was referred to as Doctor despite having dropped out of university midway through his course, and he smelt of sweet currunchete. He had shaved off his beard in an effort to attract women, but still found himself trying to stroke it out of habit when deep in thought.
He had come up the slope to the restoration site with the foreman, Bracamonte, in a handcart filled with materials. The ground around the church was yellow and rocky and strewn with rubbish. Bracamonte looked up to assess the state of the roof joists and took measurements. Using a chisel, he made a groove between the stones of a collapsed section of wall.
‘The pointing is crumbling, and there’s only an old wooden frame holding up the walls,’ he observed, roughly calculating the solidity of timber and pillars. ‘It needs steel reinforcements.’
Temístocles Jerez always wrote everything down in a little notebook so he wouldn’t have to worry about it later. He noted down ‘steel reinforcements’ and moved on to the topic of sanding.
He explained that the façade must be preserved in keeping with the neoclassical style but, given the pollution levels in the city, advised replacing the white paint with a granite colour. He talked of props and supports for load-bearing walls. He asked Bracamonte to look for leaks in the roof and then had two workers force open the door.
Under the fragile arches of the nave, everything was in disarray. There was a huge mountain of prayer benches piled up on top of one another, and the scent of regret hung in the air. Ripples of light came in through broken stained-glass windows and fell on the rough plaster walls. The ceiling was caving in and birds of prey had made their nests in the gabled roof frame.
Temístocles lifted up his little notebook. ‘Panelling: highly flammable … replace with bent aluminium.’ A niche housing a statue of the Virgin seemed like the perfect spot for the box office. With his fingers, he peeled off a flake of paint that had been hanging to the right of the doorway. He took out his notebook and crossed out the last entry. ‘Before the aluminium,’ he wrote, ‘strip off lead paint.’
Behind the altar, he noticed a little bolted door, slightly below floor level. He pushed the lock gently with his foot, imagining the strike plate to be fragile, but it did not budge. He tried harder, pushing back against the altar table: the bolt was well and truly stuck and the door would not give. He slid a crowbar between the wall and the lock, but as he was preparing to lever it, Bracamonte called him from outside.
The top of the demolition crane was too wide for the narrow alleyways and could not get between the tightly packed houses. Temístocles felt his head spin with all the unexpected hiccups that lay ahead. He asked Bracamonte to send the crane back, told the workers to unload the demolition tools and, when everyone was gone, he sat down on a prayer bench and wrote in his notebook in a burst of inspiration, ‘Ad augusta per angusta’.
From then on, they avoided heavy machinery in favour of easily transportable tools that could be put together on the spot. Work started at the beginning of the week. A truck stopped at the bottom of the hill and the workmen unloaded tiles, beams, bricks and fibreglass. They used the garden with the pomegranate trees as an assembly area. While the builders put up the scaffolding, the joiners worked elbow to elbow trimming planks, driving in wedges and planing wood on their workbenches. The carpenters climbed ladders to plug leaks by nailing slats of wood between the roof tiles.
At the sight of the ruined church, passers-by stopped to look and give their opinion or walk off in protest. Standing among them, Don Octavio felt no trace of nostalgia. On the contrary, he was fascinated by this display of human alchemy and the quiet pride of the men who had replaced the burglars. He decided to try his luck.
They offered him a labouring job, paid at a piece rate. His role was to bring materials to the building site, clear up rubbish, empty skips and move planks. He was given a hatchet with which to cut up the old plaster and square off blocks of stone.
His job was simple but the other workers were in awe of the way he went about it. He had more stamina and strength than several machines put together. He distributed the weight he was carrying eve
nly in order to remain steady on his feet, knew how to use a trowel and break things down with a mallet. He worked as quickly by hand as a cement mixer. With his neck and arms covered in sweat, he embodied an animal strength that pushed forward blindly, unthinkingly, his breathing regular, recovering more quickly than others. Temístocles Jerez himself was rendered almost speechless the day he looked down from the wooden balcony and saw Octavio shiny with sweat under the lights, laden with a dozen bags of lime that three ordinary men could not have carried between them, as if he had nothing but a bundle of wheat on his back.
At lunchtime, workers took off their hard hats and ate on site, sitting on stacks of wood among the planes and saws. There was no chatting; their minds emptied by work, they silently passed a bottle of grain spirit among them. After a short siesta, the carpenter got up, the joiner went back to his wood, the builders woke the labourers, and the whole silent crowd kept on like the anvil under the hammer of hard labour. Octavio was struck by this industrious scene in which every man was as distinct and necessary as a word in the music of a sentence.
Those who were paid extra to patrol the site set up beds to sleep there. They lay their foam mattresses on the bare ground and installed a TV which could only receive one channel. At night, Octavio wandered the church alone, keeping watch as he had done before, in his thirty years of servitude, in order to protect another treasure.
One evening, while inspecting inside the building, he noticed a bolted door, slightly below floor level, whose lock appeared to have been forced. He leant against it and it gave way, opening into a small side room whose only source of daylight was a window at floor level.
A large number of sculptures had been hidden away here. Stepping inside, he saw porphyry vases, plaster monks and golden blowpipes. Behind a small stack of maple chairs was an inlaid Algerian thuya piano on top of which a pair of candelabras and some silver coffee pots gathered dust. A Veracruz hammock hung between the beams, concealing the back of the room. He made out a black lacquered chest of drawers covered in eggshell mosaic, two mirrored console tables and a set of blue stone adzes. Guerra’s treasure had been left untouched.
Pushing the chairs out of his way and drawing the hammock to one side, he saw hidden under a white sheet at the back of the room the statue of the Nazarene of St Paul shining like never before in the pale-purple light. The scent of processions still seemed to hang around it. The heavy black walnut cross rested on its right shoulder, which was draped in a mantle. Dried orchids hung from its chasuble and a crown of thorns gave the top of its head a spring-like air. Though stooped and leaning, the statue was built to last centuries, dominating the room.
Octavio moved closer, holding on to the hammock as the shadows became dense. Reaching out his hand, he was two, perhaps three centimetres from the statue when his foot became caught in the fabric of the hammock, the beam from which it was hanging opened up like a fruit and the whole structure of the building came crashing down.
The collapse of the church woke the workers with a start. It took several men to clear a path to the little door, which had been blocked by the splintered beam. Panicking, they pushed their way through to find Octavio’s body lying beneath a pile of bricks and rubble, his arm pinned to the floor by the wreckage. In spite of the tight space inside the tiny room, the men joined together to form a human chain and the heap of rubble gradually reduced. When Octavio felt a crack opening up in the stones above him, he drew back his arm like a wounded dog. He tucked it inside his jacket without taking the time to examine it, and fled the church.
XVI
The discovery of the side room meant that the first inventory of props could be drawn up. Everything that had survived the collapse of the building was logged on the books of the new theatre, registered as national patrimony, and put at the set designers’ disposal. But the recovered artworks were in a sorry state: statues were turning to dust, paintings were falling out of their frames and tabletops were unsteady on their legs. Specialist restorers were called in, arriving in the neighbourhood on the main road. They demanded foreign products, wielded acids willy-nilly and cut corners every step of the way. Within hours they had given up and were on their way again.
Amid the comings and goings, Octavio reappeared, his arm bandaged up to the elbow. The building site had felt his absence keenly. As he was no longer up to working outdoors, he was assigned the job of maintaining the interior. After clearing out the rubbish, throwing stones into skips and piling debris into sacks, he took it upon himself to clean every item that had been catalogued.
The tableware had been dulled by dust and humidity. He recognised tin by weight, silver by smell. He scraped ochre off the building and mixed it with washing powder and oil to make a polishing paste. He treated light marks with ether and ingrained stains with warmed talc. The antiquarians had left turps, pine tar and whiting piled up in a corner. For the first time in his life, Octavio was able to read the labels.
Someone told him the best way to get rid of spots on glass was with a knob of butter, another advised him to clean the paintings with slices of onion. Bracamonte claimed that a mixture of freshly slaked lime and ox-blood serum was all that was needed to treat chestnut. Octavio set to work making concoctions. In the absence of brimstone, he would polish the carvings with antimony; lacking cuttlefish bones, he buffed the reliefs with pumice.
When he saw the results, Temístocles Jerez encouraged Octavio to keep going. He pointed out several old pieces of abandoned furniture at the back of the side room, their legs and crosspieces riddled with woodworm. Octavio made identical pieces at his workbench, replaced them and sealed them. Using two glasses of potassium per litre of water, he applied a greyish foam to the tables and chairs as they lay on their backs, rinsing off the crystals with a fine-spouted watering can. To dry them off, he would sprinkle over wood bleach, which gave the oak a lovely golden sheen. The upholstery fabric was often fringed, which sometimes made it difficult to tidy up. Octavio would run a razor blade carefully along the edge and stick it back down with glue.
The labourers gazed at the wonder of static electricity as Octavio rubbed amber with a woollen cloth. They saw how, after painting pieces of potash with distemper, the solder came together. They lavished compliments on Octavio, heaping words of praise on him that made him blush. He brushed off any suggestion that he was some kind of scientist. He simply got back to work without a word, burnishing bronze, polishing ivory and buffing up lock fittings. As he worked on his adornments, he cloaked himself in silence.
Temístocles Jerez often came into the side room, knocking on the door and opening it soundlessly to find Octavio standing in the half-light at the back of the room. He had the devoted air of a saint in a stained-glass window. He wore a large apron with a chisel, a veneer saw, a ruler and several scrubbing brushes sticking out of the front pocket. He ate on his own and worked through the night. Though bent by his humble condition, he revelled in the grandeur of his task. Watching him, Temístocles seemed to understand the mystery of servitude, from which this giant drew his strength.
‘How’s your arm?’ he asked.
Octavio’s arm was bound in a handkerchief. He spoke only when spoken to.
‘Strong as an oak.’
And with that he returned to his work.
Around November, he was asked to tidy up the statue of the Nazarene of St Paul, which had fallen into a pitiful state not so much because of the disaster at the church as through years of neglect. Woodworm had eaten into the reliefs and the face had been scorched by church candles and covered in various drips and traces of mastic. The collapse of the building had ripped off one of its arms, which now lay close to the window.
Octavio began by injecting insecticide into the heart of the statue. Then he diluted some wood filler with acetone to make it the consistency of runny honey and proceeded to touch up the statue, tending to the cracks in the wood. Having no gold to hand, he made up a mixture of white lead, gypsum and ash. He repaired the bells using tissue
paper and an iron. He spent entire days heating sand to fill gaps. He used shellac on the burr wood and stuck missing pieces back on to match the grain. He removed ink stains with household hydrochloric acid and blood with sodium thiosulphate. He touched up the paintwork with gouache and polished it with virgin beeswax. At last he gilded the crown of thorns, but only on one side; since it was to be used as a prop on stage, it would only be seen from the front.
The rainy season came, the cool December wind turning to fat drops of rain which made the ground boggy, running with filthy streams. Long showers washed the sky. From time to time the sun appeared and the stifling heat quickly dried the theatre’s boards.
In spite of the bad weather, Temístocles Jerez came to check up on the works regularly, accompanied by an official from the town hall. One day, he appeared alongside a straight-backed man in a panama hat and white linen jacket. Though he looked like a tourist, it was clear that he was also a man of the world.
Without touring the church, they headed straight for the side room where Octavio was working, his face buried in the gloom. They paid no more attention to him than they would have to a painting. Outside, the rain was pelting down. Temístocles’ mind went blank.
‘Señor …?’ he asked his companion apologetically.
‘Señor Paz,’ the man replied.
Temístocles cleared his throat and turned to Octavio.
‘Señor Paz has all the necessary paperwork to reclaim the statue of the Nazarene. Apparently it was stolen from his apartment by the burglars who used to operate out of the church.’
‘Real brutes,’ the man added emphatically.
At the sound of his voice, Octavio spun round. Beneath the straw hat, he saw a man of average size with a round, high-coloured face hidden behind dark glasses. Something about him was familiar. The man looked Octavio straight in the eye: Guerra did not blink.
Octavio's Journey Page 7