The Carpenter's Pencil Read online

As the days went by, trailing the worst omens in their wake, the painter concentrated more and more on the notebook. While the others chatted, he tirelessly copied down their features. He sought their profile, a particular gesture or look, the areas of shade. And he did so with more and more dedication, almost feverishly, as if in response to an urgent request.

  The painter would then explain who was who on the old façade.

  The Cathedral was a few feet away, but the guard Herbal had only visited it twice. Once, as a child, when his parents had come from the village to sell cabbage and onion seed on Saint James’s Day. From that time he remembered they had taken him to the Saint of the Bumps and he had placed his fingers in the carved-out shape of a hand and been told to bang his forehead against the stone crown. He had been captivated, however, by the blind man’s eyes of the saint and it was his father who, with that toothless grin, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and made him see stars. “If he doesn’t do it himself,” his mother said, “he won’t get the inspiration.” “Don’t you worry,” said his father, “he won’t get it anyway.” The second time he went was in a uniform, to an offertory Mass. The nave was bristling with people, they had Latin coming out of every pore. But what amazed him was the Botafumeiro. This he remembered well. The huge censer shrouded the altar in mist, as if the whole thing were a strange story.

  The painter would talk about the Pórtico da Gloria. He had drawn it with the thick, red pencil he always carried, like a carpenter, behind his ear. Each of the figures in the drawing turned out to be one of his friends from A Falcona. “You, Casal,” he said to the former mayor of Santiago, “you’re Moses with the Tables of the Law. You, Pasín,” he said to one who was in the union of railwaymen, “you’re Saint John the Evangelist, with his feet on top of the eagle. Saint Paul, that’s you, my captain,” he said to Lieutenant Martínez, who had been a border guard and then a councillor under the Republic. Then there were two old inmates, Ferreiro of Zas and González of Cesures, and he told them they were the elders at the top, in the centre, with the organistrum in the orchestra of the Apocalypse. And he told Dombodán, who was the youngest and a bit naive, that he was an angel playing the trumpet. He went around everyone and showed them their likeness on the sheet. And he explained that the base of the Pórtico da Gloria was full of monsters, with talons and beaks like birds of prey, and hearing this they all went quiet, a silence that gave them away, because Herbal could feel their gaze fixed on his silhouette as he stood there, a silent witness. And finally the painter spoke about the prophet Daniel, who it would seem was the only one smiling unashamedly on the old façade. An artistic marvel, a mystery to the experts. “That, Da Barca, is you.”

  6

  ONE DAY THE PAINTER HAD GONE TO PAINT THE lunatics in the asylum at Conxo. He wanted to capture the landscapes ploughed on their faces by psychic pain, not from morbidity, but out of an awful fascination. Mental illness, the painter thought, provokes in us an expulsive reaction. Fear before the madman precedes compassion, which sometimes never arrives. It seemed to him this might be because we sense that illness as part of a kind of common soul, out there on the loose waiting to pick off bodies as they come along. Hence the tendency to hide the sufferer away. The painter could remember a room in a house next door that was always closed. One day he heard wailing and asked who was in there. The lady of the house replied, “No-one.”

  The painter wanted to capture the invisible wounds of existence.

  The scene in the asylum was horrifying. Not because the inmates approached him in a threatening way. Very few of them had done that, and in a way that was more like a ritual, as if they were trying to shake off an allegory. What amazed the painter was the expression of those who were not looking. Their renunciation of space, the absolute nothingness they were walking through.

  His mind in his hand, he had stopped feeling afraid. With his brush strokes he followed the line of anguish, stupefaction, delirium. His hand spiralled feverishly between the walls. The painter came to momentarily and looked at his watch. It was a while since he had been due to leave and already getting dark. He picked up his notebook and made his way towards the lodge. The door had been bolted with a huge padlock and there was no-one to be seen. The painter called out for the porter, gently at first and then out loud. He heard the clock strike in the church. Nine o’clock in the evening. He was half an hour late, it was not that long. What if they had forgotten all about him? A madman stood in the garden with his arms around the trunk of a box-tree. The painter thought it must be two hundred years old, that tree, and the man needed somewhere to hold on to.

  The minutes passed and the painter saw himself shouting in anguish and the inmate moored to the box-tree viewed him with fraternal pity.

  At this point a smiling man appeared, young but wearing a suit, and asked him what was wrong. The painter told him he was a painter, that he had been allowed in to portray the patients, and he had not realized what time it was. The young man in a suit adopted a very serious expression, “That’s exactly what happened to me.”

  And he added,

  “And I’ve been shut up in here for two years now.”

  The painter could see his own eyes. Snow-white, with a solitary wolf on the horizon.

  “But I’m not mad!”

  “That’s exactly what I said.”

  Seeing he was on the verge of panicking, he smiled and revealed who he was, “It’s only a joke. I’m a doctor. Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here in a trice.”

  And so the painter met Doctor Da Barca. It was the beginning of a great friendship.

  The guard looked at him from the semi-darkness, as he had done so many times before.

  “I also knew the doctor very well,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “Very well. He never could have suspected how much I knew about him. For a long period I was his shadow. I tracked him like a gun dog. He was my man.”

  It was after the elections in February 1936, which were won by the Frente Popular. Sergeant Landesa assembled in secret a group of men he could rely on and the first thing he told them was that this meeting had never taken place. “Get this into your heads. What is spoken here was never spoken. There are no orders, no instructions, no bosses. Nothing. I am the only one that exists and I am the Holy Spirit. I don’t want any crap. From now on, you are shadows and shadows do not crap or crap white like seagulls. I want you to write me a novel on every one of these elements. I want to know it all.” When he spread out the list with the objectives they were to stick close to, names of public and other, unknown figures, the guard Herbal became aware of a burning sensation on his tongue. One of those on the list was Doctor Da Barca. “I can take care of this one, sergeant. I’m already on to him.” “But does he know you?” “No, he doesn’t even know that I exist.” “Just remember that there’s nothing personal, information is all that is required.”

  “There’s nothing personal, sergeant,” Herbal lied. “I shall be invisible. I’m not much good at writing, but you’ll have a novel on the man.”

  “I am led to believe he’s quite a preacher.”

  “He’s a bomb waiting to go off, sergeant.”

  “Good. In which case go ahead.”

  From that meeting that never existed, some time later Herbal would remember – once more the sound of memory like the murmur of the fountain where the guts are washed – the moment when someone referred to the painter. “He’s not a house painter,” Sergeant Landesa informed the agent finally put in charge of his surveillance. “This one paints ideas. Lives round at the Madame’s.” Everyone had laughed. Everyone but Herbal, who did not know the reason and did not ask. Years later he would find out from the deceased. A madame was the old whore who taught the young girls their trade. She taught them above all how to carry the weight of the man on their bodies for as little time as possible and the golden rule, which was to charge before offering their services. “From time to time,” the dead man told him, “people would still knock at the door. Fathers and moth
ers with a young girl asking for the madame. My wife would bite her tongue, tell them there was no madame living there any more. And then she would cry. She would cry for each and every one of them. And she was right. Very near there, in Pombal Street, they would find the madame they were looking for.”

  Four months after the meeting, at the end of June, Herbal handed in his report on Doctor Da Barca. The sergeant weighed it in his hand. “Why, it does seem like a novel.” There was a folder with a pile of notes, written by hand in a tortuous script. The ink smudges everywhere, which blotting paper had sealed and turned into scars, looked like traces of a tiresome fight. Had they not been blue, you would have thought they were drops of blood fallen from the scribe’s brow. In a single paragraph, the letters above the line leaned over in different directions, to the left and to the right, like ideograms of a fleet bowed by the wind.

  Sergeant Landesa started reading from a page at random. “What does this say? Lesson in autonomy with a corpse!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Anatomy, Herbal, anatomy.”

  “I’ve already told you I wasn’t very good at writing,” the guard cut in, somewhat offended.

  “Another note, ‘Lesson in death throes. Clapping.’ And what’s this?”

  “That was a professor, sir, Da Barca’s boss. He lay down on a table and showed how the dead breathed before dying, in dual time. He talked about this thing some people get when they’re dying, a sort of hallucination that helps them to pass away in peace. He said that the body was very wise.

  And pretended to be dead as in the theatre. The applause went on for quite a while.”

  “Well, I’ll have to go and see him,” remarked the sergeant sarcastically. And then he asked in some surprise, “And what does it say here?” He read with difficulty, “Corrump … corruptive beauty?”

  “Let me see,” said Herbal, moving closer to read over his shoulder. His voice trembled as he recognized the words he himself had written. “Consumptive beauty, sir.

  “He – I mean the doctor – examined a sick young girl from Local Welfare in front of the students. First of all he asked her questions. What her name was, where she was from. Lucinda, from Valdemar. And he would tell her what a lovely name, what a lovely spot. Then he took her by the wrist and looked into her eyes. He told the students that the eyes were the windows of the mind. Then he did that thing they do, tapping here and there with his fingers.”

  Herbal fell silent for a moment and stared into space. He was again recreating that scene that had both disturbed and astonished him. The girl in the thin nightdress. The sensation that he had seen her before, combing her hair in a window. The doctor delicately placing two fingers of his left hand and percussing with his right middle finger. “The elbow should not move. Appreciate the purity of sound. Like this.” Tock. Tock. Hmm. Not a tock or a drum. And then with that instrument, the one for the ears, on the same parts of the body. On the lungs. Hmm. “Thank you, Lucinda, you can get dressed now. It’s a bit cold. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.” When she has gone, he tells the students, “It is the sound of a chipped pot. Though really none of this would be necessary. Her pale, drawn face. A slight colour in her cheeks. The varnish of sweat in this cold hall. The melancholy gaze. That consumptive beauty.”

  “Tuberculosis, doctor!” shouted a student in the first row.

  “Exactly.” And he added in a bitter tone, “Koch’s bacillus sowing tubercles in the rosy garden.”

  Herbal felt the stethoscope’s cold tentacle on his chest. A voice shouted, “It has the sound of a chipped pot!”

  “Consumptive beauty. The phrase attracted my attention, sergeant. So I copied it down.”

  “Wasn’t it a bit rash to go to the faculty?”

  “I went in with a group of Portuguese students on a visit. I wanted to find out if he indoctrinated in class.”

  The sergeant did not look up again from the papers until he had finished reading. He seemed enchanted by the story unfolding and would murmur from time to time as he went along. “So he’s Cuban, is he?” “That’s right, sir, the son of returned emigrants.” “He likes to dress up?” “Cuts a dashing figure. Though he can’t have more than one suit, sergeant, and a couple of bow ties. He never wears an overcoat or a hat.” “He’s only twenty-four?” “He looks older, sir. He sometimes grows a beard.” “It says here the maimed raise their stumps like fists. The man must speak well.” “He’s better than a priest, sir.” “What about this young Miss Marisa Mallo? She sounds interesting.” Herbal was silent.

  “Is she something to look at?”

  “She’s very pretty, yes, but she’s not involved.”

  “In what?”

  “In his business, sir.”

  The sergeant flicked through some newspaper cuttings which Herbal had included in his report: “The soul’s substratum and intelligent reality.” “Children’s coffins in the time of Charles Dickens.” “Millet’s painting, washerwomen’s hands and a woman’s invisibility.” “Hell in Dante, the painting Mad Kate and the asylum at Conxo.” “The problem of State, basic confidence and Rosalía de Castro’s poem ‘Justice by the Hand’1.” “The landscape’s engram and the feeling of homesickness.” “The horror to come: genetic biology, the fanatical desire to be healthy and the concept of ballast lives.” The sergeant viewed with circumspection the same signature under each article: Dr Barkowsky.

  “So it’s Barkowsky, is it? It would seem,” he said, “your man never stops. Doctor for Local Welfare. Assistant in the Faculty of Medicine. Delivers pamphlets, conferences and meetings. Goes from the Hospital to the Republican Centre and still has time to take his girlfriend to the cinema in the Teatro Principal. He’s a close friend of the pro-Galician painter who does the posters. He meets with Republicans, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists … what the hell is this guy?”

  “I think he’s a bit of everything, my sergeant.”

  “Anarchists and Communists are constantly at each other’s throats. The other day, at the tobacco factory in Coruña, they almost came to blows. A strange creature, this Da Barca fellow!”

  “He seems to act on his own. As a link.”

  “Well, don’t take your eye off him. He’s clearly up to no good!”

  There, in clumsy, handcrafted terms that made it more useful and reliable, was everything there would be to know about a man. The friendships he had, the routes he took, the brand of tobacco he smoked.

  The guard Herbal knew the doctor very well, though he never could have imagined it. He had tracked him for some time, not under orders but through need. You could say he had followed him like a sick dog, sniffing out his footsteps. He hated Doctor Da Barca. It was not long since he had graduated and already he had a reputation for being a great medical talent. That and a revolutionary. At meetings in different towns he spoke Galician with a Cuban accent, having been born there of an emigrant family, and he had that special way of preaching, like a bomb waiting to go off, that made cripples stand up and even the maimed raise their fists. He would say that the battle to be waged was against melancholy.

  A lot of people did not understand the doctrines of politicians, but melancholy was something people did understand. Herbal had been taken ill as a child. He had turned green, an ugly green colour like fiddle-dock, and swelled, so that he waddled like a duck. He was led from one healer to another, until one of them told his father to immerse him in water sprinkled with tobacco. And this is what he did. He was convinced, on account of previous occurrences that are not worth going into here, that his father was capable of drowning him. He spun around and bit him on the hand. And then his father got even more annoyed. “You son of a whore!” he cursed, and dropped him full into the cask with the brew. He kept him there under the water right up until he saw that his arms had stopped flailing.

  “As soon as I came out, I went this tobacco colour and shot up, all skin, like a razor-shell, the way I am today.”

  Yes, he understood very well what was discussed at those meetings of the Frente P
opular. The first time he had really left the village was to do military service. That for him had been like a breath of fresh air. Aside from the odd short leave, the only time he had gone back was to bury his parents. As a serving soldier he had formed part of the troops led by General Franco when he stifled – this was the word everyone used – the miners’ revolt in Asturias of 1934. A woman, kneeling before the body of her husband, had shouted with tears in her eyes, “Soldier, you’re one of the people as well!” “Yes,” he thought, “that’s true.” Damn people, damn misery. From now on he would try to earn a wage for his services. He became a guard.

  Doctor Da Barca was right. His melancholy would not be long coming. Herbal was one of those who arrested him, who in fact overpowered him, bringing down the butt of his rifle on the back of his neck. Daniel Da Barca was tall, he had a fire burning in his chest. Everything about him was assertive: his forehead, his Jewish nose, his mouth, its fleshy lips. When he expressed himself, he would spread his arms like wings and his fingers seemed to speak for the dumb.

  During the first days of the Rising, he had stayed away. It was only a matter of waiting until he grew confident and thought that the hunt had eased up. When he did finally return to his mother’s house, the five of them in the patrol jumped on top of him and he resisted like a wild boar. His mother shouted like a madwoman from the window. But what riled the soldiers most of all was when the seamstresses came out of a shop opposite. They cursed them, they spat on them, and one or two of those little seamstresses actually dared to pull at their trench coats and scratch their necks. Doctor Da Barca was bleeding from the nose, the mouth, the ears, but he would not give up. Until he, the guard Herbal, caught him on the head and knocked him to the ground.

  “And then I turned round to face the seamstresses and aimed at their stomachs. And had it not been for Sergeant Landesa, I don’t know what I would have done, because if there was one thing that got me it was those girls shouting for him like a chorus of mourners. The bit about the mother I could understand, but with them I saw red. And that is when I let go of what was gnawing at me, ‘What the fuck is it about this guy? What do you care? Sluts, you’re a bunch of sluts!’ Sergeant Landesa took hold of me and said, ‘Come on, Herbal, we’ve still got work to do.’”