The Carpenter's Pencil Read online

  With a few exceptions, they spoke very little.

  Like Herbal.

  She got on well with Herbal. He had never threatened her nor raised his hand to strike her, as she had heard happened to the girls at other clubs on the road. Manila had not hit her either, though there were days her mouth resembled the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun. Maria da Visitação had realized that food dictated her mood. When she inclined to eating, she would treat them like daughters. But the days she thought she had put on weight, she would spit out blasphemies as if in an attempt to spew out the fat. None of the girls was sure what kind of relationship existed between Herbal and Manila. They slept together. Or at least they slept in the same room. In the club they behaved like proprietress and employee, but without giving or receiving orders. She never blasphemed when she was talking to him.

  The club opened at nightfall and they slept in the day. It was early in the afternoon when Maria da Visitação came downstairs. She had woken with a hangover, her mouth like an ashtray, her vagina sore from the traffickers’ strenuous thrusts, and she felt like mixing a lemon juice with cold beer. Seated at a table under a lamp that opened a pool of light in the semi-darkness, with the shutters closed, was Herbal.

  He was drawing on paper napkins with a carpenter’s pencil.

  3

  “‘I’M SORRY, PAL.’ AND MY UNCLE WOULD SQUEEZE the trigger. ‘I wish I didn’t have to, my friend.’ And then my uncle would hit hard with the stick, a well-aimed blow to the back of the fox’s neck as it lay caught in the trap. A look would flash between my uncle, the trapper, and his prey. His eyes would be saying, and I heard the murmur, that there was nothing he could do. This is what I felt before the painter. I did a lot of bad things, but when I was with the painter, I murmured to myself that I was sorry, that I wished I didn’t have to, and I don’t know what he thought when our eyes met, a moist blaze in the night, but I want to believe that he understood, that he saw that I was doing it to save him torment. Without further ado, without moving from where I was, I put the pistol to his temple and blew off his head. And then I remembered the pencil. The pencil he carried behind his ear. This pencil.”

  4

  THE MEMBERS OF THE PARTY, THE ESCORTS WHO called themselves the Dawn Brigade, were fuming. First of all they looked at him in surprise, as if to say, “What an idiot, he didn’t mean to shoot, that’s not how you kill.” But then, on the way back, they kept thinking that his diligence had spoiled their fun. They had envisaged something really evil. Perhaps cutting off his balls while he was still alive and stuffing them into his mouth. Or cutting off his hands as they did to the painter Francisco Miguel or the tailor Luís Huici. Try sewing now, dandy!

  “Don’t upset yourself, girl, these are the sort of things that happened,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação. “I know of one who went to offer a widow his condolences and left a finger of her husband’s in her hand. She knew it was his on account of the wedding ring.”

  The prison governor, a tormented man and, rumour had it, an old friend of some of those inside, had asked him to go with them that night. He called him aside. His wristwatch trembled in his hand. And he whispered very gently, “Don’t let him suffer, Herbal.” Even so he managed to put up a show. He followed the escorts to the cell. “Painter,” he said, “you can go now.” The Berenguela bell had just been heard to strike midnight. “I can go at midnight?” the painter asked warily. “Come on, get out, don’t make this difficult for me.” The Falangists laughed, still hidden in the corridor.

  Herbal found the task to be an easy one. When he killed, he simply remembered his uncle the trapper, who would even give the animals names. He called the hares Josefina and the fox Don Pedro. And besides, to tell the truth, he had respect for the man. The painter was exactly how a man should be. Going about the prison, he treated the warders as if they were ushers at a cinema.

  The painter knew nothing about his guard, but Herbal knew something about him. The story went that his son, in the company of others, had thrown stones at the German’s house, a German who had relations with Hitler and taught his language in Santiago. They had smashed his window-panes. The German had gone to the police station in a rage, as if it were an international conspiracy. In no time at all the painter turned up with his son, a slight and nervous-looking boy, with eyes bigger than his hands, and reported him as one of those responsible for the stoning. Even the superintendent was amazed. He took a statement, but sent both father and son on their way.

  “That’s the kind of man the painter was,” Herbal explained to Maria da Visitação. “He was one of the first we arrested.

  ‘He’s very dangerous,’ Sergeant Landesa had said. ‘Dangerous? He’d avoid stepping on an ant if he could help it.’ ‘What do you know?’ he replied enigmatically. ‘He does the posters. He’s the one who paints the ideas.’”

  At the time of the Rising, the most renowned Republicans were imprisoned. There were also others who were less well known, but they always coincided with the names on Sergeant Landesa’s mysterious black list. The prison in Santiago, known as A Falcona, was behind Raxoi Palace, on the slope leading down from Obradoiro Square, right opposite the Cathedral, so that if you built a tunnel you would emerge in the Apostle’s crypt. It was at the start of the area known as Little Hell. Every medieval cathedral, God’s great temple, had a Little Hell nearby, the home of sin. Because behind the prison was Pombal, the red-light district.

  The prison walls were slabs of stone coated with moss. Luckily for them, if it is possible to say such a thing, it was summer on the threshold of death. In winter, A Falcona was like an icebox and stank of mildew, the air heavy with wet leaves. But no-one there had thought as yet about winter.

  For the first few days, everyone, prisoners and guards, carried on as normal, like passengers who had broken down on the slope of life, waiting for someone to crank up the engine so that they could continue their journey. Even the governor allowed relatives to visit and bring them home-made food. Meanwhile they, the detainees, seated with their backs against the walls, would while away the hours in the courtyard, chatting with apparent ease, in the jovial manner some of them had been doing only a couple of days previously, around the pedestal tables with steaming cups in the Café Español, whose walls were decorated with the painter’s murals. Or like workmen on their break, ironically saluting their boss the sun with the peak of their caps, and spitting genteelly to mark their patch, heading off in search of some bread-and-water shade and after-lunch banter. Arrested in a suit or nightshirt, the long wait and the dust of the calendar were gradually making all of them in the courtyard appear the same, just as sepia does in a group portrait. We look like harvesters. We look like tramps. We look like gypsies. “No,” said the painter, “we look like inmates. We are taking on the colour of prisoners.”

  When he was on duty, the guard Herbal could listen to what they were saying. They kept him amused like a radio. The dial of their chatter, to and fro. He would lazily sidle up to them and smoke a cigarette, leaning against the hinge of the door into the courtyard. When he had gone, they would talk about politics. “As soon as we’re out of here, and we will be,” Xerardo, a teacher from Porto do Son, would say, “the Republic will need refloating, as soon as there’s a big enough wave. The federal Republic.”

  Next they would be talking about the missing link between ape and man.

  “In a way,” Doctor Da Barca would say with a half-smile, “human beings are the result not of improvement, but of an ailment. The mutant we descend from had to stand up on account of some pathological problem. It was clearly inferior to its quadruped ancestors. And that’s without the loss of hair and tail. From the biological point of view, it was a disaster. I believe it was the chimpanzee that invented laughter the first time Homo erectus and it met on that stage. I mean, can you imagine? An upright, balding bloke missing his tail. Pathetic. You’d fall about laughing.”

  “I prefer Bible literature to literature on evolution,” the painter
said. “The Bible is the best script written so far of the film of the world.”

  “No. The best script is the one we do not know. The cell’s secret poem, gentlemen!”

  “Is it true what I read in the bishop’s newsletter, Da Barca?” Casal intervened ironically. “That at a conference you said man hankered after his tail.”

  Everyone laughed, beginning with the doctor, who picked up the thread. “That’s right. Apparently I also said the soul is in the thyroid gland! But now that we’re about it, let me tell you something. In surgery we come across cases of dizziness and vertigo that occur when a human suddenly stands up, traces of the functional disorder brought about by the adoption of a vertical position. You see, what we humans suffer from is a kind of horizontal nostalgia. As for the tail, let’s just call it a peculiarity, a biological deficiency, that man does not have one, or he does, but it’s been trimmed, so to speak. The absence of a tail is a factor worth bearing in mind when discussing the origins of speech.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said the painter in amusement, “is how you, who are so materialistic, can believe in the Holy Company of Souls.”

  “Hang on! I am not materialistic. It would be vulgar of me and offensive to matter, which tries so hard to come out of itself to avoid getting bored. I believe in an intelligent reality, in a supernatural environment, as it were. The erect mutant gave the chimpanzee back his laughter next to the ground. It recognized the jibe for what it was. It realized it was defective, abnormal. And that is why it also had the instinct for death. It was both plant and animal. It had and did not have roots. The great intrigue came about because of that upheaval, or peculiarity. A second nature. Another reality. What Doctor Nóvoa Santos called intelligent reality came about.”

  “I knew Nóvoa Santos,” Casal said. “I published a book or two of his and I’d say we were good friends. He was a genius, that man. Far too good for this ungrateful country.”

  The mayor of Santiago, who spent his small private wealth on publishing books, paused and cast his mind back in sorrow. The poor referred to him in Galician as Novo Santo, which means New Saint. But the more rudimentary clergymen and academics hated him. One day he entered the casino in Santiago and turned the place upside down. A young boy had made a loss and committed suicide. Nóvoa’s ideology was worth a constitution: be good and rebellious to a degree. The lecture he gave on being awarded the chair in Madrid was masterly and the whole auditorium, two thousand people, rose to its feet. They applauded him like an artist, like Caruso. And he had talked about the body’s reflexes!

  “When I was a student, I was lucky enough to attend one of his clinics,” said Da Barca. “We went with him to see an old, dying man. It was a strange case. No-one could tell what was wrong with him. In Charity Hospital it was so damp your words turned mouldy in midair. As soon as he saw him, without even touching him, Don Roberto said, ‘The trouble with this man is he’s cold and hungry. Give him a couple of blankets and all the hot broth he can eat.’”

  “But, doctor, do you really believe in the Holy Company of Souls?” Dombodán asked ingenuously.

  Da Barca looked around the circle of friends, with a dramatic, investigative air.

  “I believe in the Holy Company because I have seen it. It’s not just a piece of local colour. One night when I was a student, I went poking about the ossuary next to Boisaca Cemetery. I had an exam and needed a sphenoid, a very complex bone in the head. An amazing bone, the sphenoid, shaped like a bat with wings! I heard something that was not a noise, as if the silence were performing a Gregorian chant. And there before my eyes was the procession of lanterns. There, if you’ll forgive my pedantry, were the ectoplasmic crumbs of the dead.”

  The apology was unnecessary. Everyone knew what he meant. They listened carefully, though the look on their faces was increasingly one of disbelief.

  “And?”

  “That was it. I had my tobacco to hand, in case they asked for it. But they carried on straight past me like silent motorists.”

  “Where were they going?” Dombodán asked uneasily.

  Doctor Da Barca adopted a serious expression, as if keen to dispel all remnants of doubt.

  “Towards Eternal Indifference, my friend.”

  But then, seeing the effect this had on Dombodán, he added with a smile, “To tell the truth, I think they were on their way to San Andrés de Teixido, where if you don’t go when alive, you must go when you have died. Yes, I think that’s where they were heading.”

  “Let me tell you a story,” the typographer Maroño broke the silence. He was a socialist and his friends called him The Good. “It’s not a story. It’s an incident.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “In Galicia,” said The Good with an air of defiance. “Where else could it have been?”

  “True.”

  “Well, there were two sisters who lived in a place called Mandouro. They lived on their own, in a bungalow left to them by their parents. From the house you could see the sea and all the ships leaving Europe bound for the South Seas. One sister was called Life and the other, Death. They were two good girls, a pleasure to look at and be with.”

  “The one called Death was pretty as well?” Dombodán asked with concern.

  “She was. Well, she was pretty, if a bit horse-like. The point is the two of them got on very well. Since they had so many suitors, they had made a promise: they could flirt with men, even get involved, but never go their separate ways. And they kept their word. On feast days they would go down to the dance together, in the company of all the other young people in the district, to a place called Donaire. To get there, they had to cross marshland, full of mud-flats and known as Fronteira. The two sisters would wear their clogs and carry their shoes. Death’s shoes were white and Life’s were black.”

  “Don’t you mean the other way round?”

  “No, I mean just what I say. In reality, all the girls did what the two sisters did. They would wear their clogs and carry their shoes, so that their shoes were clean when it came to the dancing. This way, at the door of the dance, you’d get as many as a hundred pairs of clogs lined up like rowing-boats along the sand. The boys were different. The boys would ride on horseback. And perform all kinds of tricks on their mounts as they arrived and left, especially as they arrived, to impress the girls. And so time passed. The two sisters attended the dance, had the occasional fling, but always, sooner or later, they returned home.

  “One night, a cold, winter’s night, there was a shipwreck. As you know, there have always been and still are a lot of shipwrecks off our coast. But this was a very special shipwreck. The boat was called the Palermo and contained a cargo of accordions. A thousand accordions packaged in wood. The storm sank the boat and swept the cargo towards the coast. The sea, its arms like those of a crazed stevedore, smashed up the boxes and carried the accordions in towards the shore. The whole night, the accordions played tunes which you can understand were fairly sad. The music was driven in through the windows by the gale. Everyone in the district was woken and heard it, and the two sisters were scared stiff, like everyone else. In the morning, the accordions lay on the beaches like the corpses of drowned instruments. All of them were useless. All of them bar one. It was found by a young fisherman in a cave. He was so struck by the coincidence that he learned to play it. He was already a spirited, cheerful young man, but the accordion gave him an unusual grace. At the dance, Life fell for him so completely that she decided that love was worth more than the bond with her sister. And they absconded together, because Life knew that Death had a foul temper and could be very vindictive. And so she was. She has never forgiven her for it. This is why she roams to and fro, especially on stormy nights, stops at houses with clogs at the door, and asks whomever she meets, ‘Do you know of a young accordionist and that slut, Life?’ And because the person asked does not know, she takes them with her.”

  When the typographer Maroño finished the tale, the painter murmured, “Yes, I like th
at incident very much.”

  “I heard it in a bar. There are some taverns which are like universities.”

  “They’re going to kill us all! Don’t you see? They’re going to kill us all!”

  The person shouting was an inmate who had remained in a corner a little way off from the group, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.

  “You don’t stop babbling on. And what you don’t realize is that they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill us all! Every single one of us!”

  They looked at each other, sick at heart, not knowing what to do, as if the hot, blue August sky had shattered above them into shards of ice.

  Doctor Da Barca approached him and took his wrist.

  “It’s all right, Baldomir, calm down. Talking is a way of letting off steam.”

  5

  THE PAINTER HAD GOT HOLD OF A NOTEBOOK AND a carpenter’s pencil. He carried it behind his ear, as they do in the trade, ready to draw at a moment’s notice. The pencil had belonged to Antonio Vidal, a carpenter who called a strike in defence of the eight-hour day and used it to write a column for El Corsario. He had given it to Pepe Villaverde, a shipwright, who had a daughter called Mariquiña and another named Fraternidade. Villaverde was a self-confessed libertarian and humanist, and would open his speeches on the factory floor talking of love, “We live in communism if, and in proportion to how much, we love each other.” When he became a timekeeper on the railways, Villaverde gave the pencil to his friend in the trade union, also a carpenter, Marcial Villamor. And before he was killed by the escorts who would swoop down on A Falcona, Marcial gave the pencil to the painter when he saw him trying to draw the Pórtico da Gloria with a piece of slate.