The Carpenter's Pencil Read online

  Also by Manuel Rivas in English translation

  BUTTERFLY’S TONGUE

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2002 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  for bulk and special sales, contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1998 by Manuel Rivas

  Copyright © 1998 Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, S.A.

  English translation Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Dunne

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-525-8

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The Carpenter’s Pencil is already the most widely-translated work in the history of Galician literature. Very few other works of Galician literature have been translated into English: Cunqueiro’s Merlin and Company, Murado’s A Bestiary of Discontent, an anthology of Galician short stories, of Méndez Ferrín’s short stories, of Rosalía de Castro’s poetry.

  We have taken the unusual step of including two poems at the end of the book, with the author’s approval. The first is Rosalía de Castro’s poem “Justice by the Hand”, referred to in chapter 6. Rosalía is Galicia’s most revered writer. The second is described in chapter 19 as “the best poem of humanity”. It seemed unfair to leave such an assertion hanging in the air without clarification. Whether or not the reader agrees, of course, is quite another matter.

  The translator expresses his heartfelt gratitude to The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, where he translated part of this novel, to Graham Watt and Doctor Edward Coomes, and to the author, Manuel Rivas, for his help at all times.

  To Chonchiña, and in memory of her great love, Paco Comesaña,

  Doctor Comesaña, healer of melancholy.

  To Ánxel Vázquez de la Cruz, paediatrician at Coruña

  Maternity and Children’s Hospital.

  Without them this story would not have come into being.

  In memory also of Camilo Díaz Baliño, painter murdered on 14 August 1936,

  and Xerardo Díaz Fernández, author of Os que non morreron

  (“Those who did not die”)

  and A crueldade inútil (“Pointless cruelty”), who died in exile in Montevideo.

  With my gratitude to Doctors Héctor Verea, who guided me

  in the matter of tuberculosis,

  and Domingo García-Sabell, who acquainted me with the

  beguiling figure of Roberto Nóvoa Santos,

  professor of general pathology, who died in 1933.

  I was also helped a great deal by reference to the historical research of

  Dionisio Pereira, V. Luis Lamela and Carlos Fernández.

  To Juan Cruz, who said quite simply, “Why don’t you write this story?”

  and gave Rosa López a pretty carpenter’s pencil from China to give to me.

  To Quico Cadaval and Xurxo Souto, who breathe stories and the light of mists.

  To Xosé Luís de Dios, who with his painting reminded me of the washerwomen.

  And to Isa, on the crags of Pasarela,

  among the apiaries of Cova de Ladróns.

  Contents

  Also by Manuel Rivas in English translation

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Author’s Note

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  About the Carpenter’s Pencil

  1

  “HE’S UPSTAIRS, ON THE BALCONY, LISTENING TO the blackbirds.”

  Carlos Sousa, the journalist, said thank you when she invited him in with the gesture of a smile. “Yes, thank you,” he thought as he went up the stairs, “there should be two eyes like those at every front door.”

  Doctor Da Barca was sitting in a wicker chair, a small brazier under the table next to him, his hand resting on an open book, as if pressing and pondering on a brilliant page. He was looking out over the garden, which was shrouded in winter light. The scene would have been a peaceful one had it not been for the oxygen mask he was using to breathe. The tube linking him to the cylinder was draped over the white azalea flowers. Sousa found the image disturbingly and comically sad.

  Doctor Da Barca, realizing he had a visit on account of the creaking floorboards, stood up and put the mask to one side with surprising agility, like the control of a child’s console. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and held up his arms in a gesture of greeting. He seemed made for the act of embracing.

  Sousa felt confused. He was expecting someone on their death-bed and was ill at ease with the task of drawing the last words from an old man whose life had been eventful. He thought the voice would be thin and incoherent, locked in a pathetic struggle against Alzheimer’s disease. He never could have imagined such a luminous demise, as if in reality the patient were connected up to a generator. This was not his disease, but Doctor Da Barca had the consumptive beauty of those suffering from tuberculosis. His eyes wide like lamps veiled in blue. Pale as pottery, a pink varnish on his cheeks.

  “Your reporter’s here,” she said, still smiling. “Isn’t he young?”

  “Not that young,” Sousa replied with a modest look in her direction. “I’m not the man I used to be.”

  “Sit down, sit down,” said Doctor Da Barca. “I was just trying the oxygen. Would you like some?”

  The reporter Sousa felt partially relieved. This beautiful, ageing woman who had come to the door, seemingly chosen on a whim by the chisel of Time. This very sick man, out of hospital two days previously, with the spirit of a cycling champion. It had been suggested to him at the newspaper, “Why don’t you give him an interview? He’s an old exile. Apparently he even had dealings with Che Guevara in Mexico.”

  Who was interested in that nowadays? Only a head of local news who read Le Monde Diplomatique at night. Sousa detested politics. To tell the truth, he detested journalism. He had recently been working in Accident and Crime. It had got too much for him. The world was a dung-heap.

  Doctor Da Barca’s elongated fingers flapped like keys of their own volition, as if attached to the organ out of age-old loyalty. The reporter Sousa felt those fingers were exploring him, percussing his body. He had the suspicion the doctor was observing him, analysing the meaning of the bags under his eyes, his prematurely puffed-up eyelids, as if he were sick.

  “I could well be,” he thought.

  “Marisa, love, bring us something to drink. We don’t want to spoil the obituary.”

  “The things you come out with!” she exclaimed. “You shouldn’t joke like that.”

  The reporter Sousa was about to decline but realized that turning down a drink would be a mistake. His body had been asking for one for hours – drink, blasted d
rink – ever since he had got out of bed, and it was at that moment he knew he was dealing with one of those sorcerers who can read others’ minds.

  “I don’t suppose you’re an H-Two-O man?”

  “No,” he said, continuing with the irony, “my problem is not exactly water.”

  “Wonderful. We’ve a Mexican tequila that brings back the dead. Two glasses, Marisa, if you please.” He then winked in his direction, “My grandchildren do not forget their revolutionary grandfather.”

  “How are you feeling?” Sousa asked. He had to start somehow.

  “As you can see,” said the doctor, jovially spreading his arms, “I’m dying. Do you really think an interview with me holds any interest?”

  The reporter Sousa recalled what he had been told over drinks at the Café Oeste. Doctor Da Barca was an old and uncompromising Republican, who had been condemned to death in 1936 and had saved his skin by a miracle. “By a miracle,” one of the informants had concurred. After his prison sentence, he had gone into exile in Mexico, from where he had returned to the ancestral home only on the death of Franco. He still had his ideas. Or the Idea, as he used to say. “A man of another time,” the informant had called him.

  “I am what you would call an ectoplasm,” the doctor told him. “Or an alien if you prefer. That is why I have trouble breathing.”

  The head of local news had given him a cutting from the paper with a photograph and a short notice about a public homage to the doctor. People were grateful for the way he cared for the humblest among them and never charged. “His front door’s not been locked since the day of his return from exile,” said one woman living next door. Sousa explained he was sorry not to have visited him sooner, the interview was meant for before his admission to hospital.

  “You’re not from here, are you, Sousa?” said the doctor, switching the conversation away from himself.

  He replied that he wasn’t, that he came from further north. He had only been there for a couple of years and what he liked most was the clemency of the weather, which was tropical for Galicia. Occasionally he would go to Portugal and eat bacalao à la Gomes de Sáa.

  “Forgive my curiosity, but do you live alone?”

  The reporter Sousa looked around for the woman, but she had slipped away quietly, leaving the glasses and the bottle of tequila. It was a strange situation, the interviewer being interviewed. He was going to say he did, he lived very alone, far too alone, but he responded by laughing. “I’ve got my landlady, she worries terribly that I’m growing thin. She’s a Portuguese, married to a Galician. When they argue, she calls her husband a Portuguese and he says she’s just like a Galician. That’s without the adjectives, of course. They’re a bit strong.”

  Doctor Da Barca smiled thoughtfully. Then he said, “The only good thing about borders are the secret crossings. It’s incredible the effect an imaginary line can have. It gets traced one day by some doddering king in his bed or drawn on the table by powerful men as if they were playing a game of poker. I remember a terrible thing a man once said to me, ‘My grandfather was the lowest of the low.’ ‘Why? What did he do?’ I asked. ‘Did he kill someone?’ ‘No, no. My paternal grandfather served a Portuguese.’ He was drunk with historical bile. ‘Well,’ I said to annoy him, ‘if I were to choose a passport, I’d be a Portuguese.’ Fortunately, however, this border will soon be swallowed up in its own absurdity. True borders are those that keep the poor away from a share of the cake.”

  Doctor Da Barca moistened his lips on the glass and then raised it in a toast. “You know? I am a revolutionary,” he said suddenly, “an internationalist. Of the kind that existed before. Of the kind who belonged to the First International, I would have to confess. Now, I bet that sounds strange to you.”

  “I’m not interested in politics,” Sousa replied instinctively. “I’m interested in the person.”

  “In the person, yes,” murmured Da Barca. “Have you heard of Doctor Nóvoa Santos?”

  “No.”

  “He was a very interesting person. He expounded the theory of intelligent reality.”

  “I’m afraid I do not know him.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Hardly anyone remembers him, beginning with the majority of doctors. Intelligent reality, that was it. We all let out a thread, like silkworms. We gnaw at and fight over the white mulberry leaves, but that thread, if it crosses over with others and intertwines, can make a beautiful fabric, an unforgettable cloth.”

  It was getting late. A blackbird flew in a pentagram out of the orchard as if in haste to make a forgotten rendezvous on the other side of the border. The beautiful, ageing woman approached the balcony again with the gentle flow of a water-clock.

  “Marisa,” he said all of a sudden, “what was that poem about the blackbird, the one poor Faustino wrote?”

  So much passion and so much melody

  Was squeezed into your veins,

  Add another passion, your body

  Is so frail it would break.

  He recited it uncoaxed and unaffected, as if in response to a natural request. What moved the reporter Sousa was his expression, a glow of stained-glass windows in the twilight. He took a swig of the tequila to see how much it burned.

  “What do you think?”

  “Very beautiful,” Sousa said. “Who’s it by?”

  “A priest who was a poet and was very fond of women.” He smiled, “A case of intelligent reality.”

  “So how did you two meet?” the reporter asked, ready at last to take notes.

  “I had noticed him walking in the Alameda. But the first time I heard him speak was in a theatre,” explained Marisa, her eyes on the doctor. “Some girl friends had taken me. It was a Republican event to debate whether or not women should have the right to vote. Now it seems strange, but in those days there was a lot of controversy, even among women. Isn’t that so? And then Daniel stood up and told the story about the queen of the bees … Do you remember, Daniel?”

  “What’s the story about the queen of the bees?” Sousa asked, intrigued.

  “In antiquity no-one knew where bees came from. Wise men such as Aristotle invented outlandish theories. It was said, for example, that bees emerged from the stomach of dead oxen. This carried on for centuries. And do you know why it carried on for so long? Because no-one had the courage to see that the king was a queen. How can freedom be maintained on the basis of such a lie?”

  “The clapping went on for ages,” Marisa added.

  “Well, it was not an indescribable ovation,” remarked the doctor humorously. “But yes, there was some applause.”

  Marisa continued,

  “I liked him. But after hearing him that day I began to like him a lot. Even more so when my family warned me off him, ‘You should have nothing to do with that man.’ They soon found out who he was.”

  “I thought she was a seamstress.”

  Marisa laughed,

  “Yes, I lied to him. I went to get a dress made at a tailor’s opposite his mother’s house. I came out of the fitting and he was on his way back from visiting patients. He looked at me, carried on walking, and suddenly turned around, ‘Do you work here?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you’re the prettiest seamstress I know. You must sew with silk.’”

  Doctor Da Barca looked at her, his old eyes tattooed with desire.

  “Somewhere amongst the archaeological ruins of Santiago, there must still be a rusty revolver, the one she brought us in prison in an attempt to save us.”

  2

  HERBAL HARDLY EVER SPOKE.

  He would wipe down the tables, meticulously, like someone buffing an instrument. He would empty the ashtrays. He would sweep the floor, very slowly, allowing the broom time to rummage in the corners. He would use a spray whose fragrance was Canadian pine, so it said on the can, and it was he who lit the neon sign by the roadside, with its red lettering and Valkyrian figure who seemed to be lifting her tits like weights with her brawny biceps. He would plug in the stereo and play that al
bum, Ciao, amore, which would continue all night long like a litany of the flesh. Manila would clap her hands, do up her hair as if about to perform in a cabaret for the first time, and then Herbal would unbolt the door.

  Manila would say,

  “Come on, girls. It’s the white shoes today.”

  White tuna. Fishmeal. Cocaine. The white shoes had taken over the territory of the old smugglers from Fronteira.

  Herbal would remain with his elbows on the end of the bar, like a sentry in his box. They knew he was there, filming every movement, scrutinizing the ones who, he used to say, had silver faces and razor-tongues. Only occasionally would he leave his lookout post to help Manila with the drinks, at the rare times it got busy, and he would do so in the manner of a barman at the height of war, as if he were pouring the spirits straight into the client’s liver.

  Maria da Visitação had arrived not long before from an island off the African Atlantic coast. Without any official documents. She had been sold to Manila, so to speak. Of her new country she had seen little more than the road that went to Fronteira. She would look at it from the window of the flat, in the same building as the club, which was set on its own, away from neighbouring houses. In the window was a geranium. If we could see her from the outside, as she watched motionless at the window, we would think red butterflies had landed on the beautiful totem of her face.

  On the other side of the road, there was a chestnut grove with mimosas. They had helped her a great deal that first winter. They flowered like candles on a roadside altar, and that vision kept her from feeling cold. That and the blackbirds’ singing, the melancholy whistling of black souls. Behind the grove was a dump for cars. Sometimes people could be seen searching through the scrap for spares. But the only full-time resident was a dog chained to a car without wheels that served as its kennel. It would climb up on to the roof and bark all day. This made her feel cold. She thought that she was very far north; that from Fronteira upwards was a world of mists, gales and snow. The men that descended bore lighthouses in their eyes, rubbed their hands together on entering the club and drank strong liquor.