The Carpenter's Pencil Read online

  The second time he went into shock, Genghis Khan kept watch by his side.

  When he woke up, he said to him, “What are you doing here, LP?”

  “Getting rid of the lice, doctor. And keeping the rats at bay.”

  “Have I slept for so long?”

  “Three days and three nights.”

  “Thank you, Genghis. I’m going to buy you lunch.”

  “And you see,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação, “he had the power of the look.”

  At lunchtime, in the dining hall, Doctor Da Barca and Genghis Khan sat down opposite one another and all the prisoners were astonished witnesses of that banquet.

  “You’re going to start with a seafood cocktail. Lobster with mayonnaise, served on a heart of lettuce from the Barcia Valley.”

  “And to drink?” Genghis Khan asked incredulously.

  “To drink,” Doctor Da Barca said very seriously, “a white Rosal.”

  He was staring at him, drawing him into his eyes, and something was happening because Genghis Khan stopped laughing, hesitated for a moment as if he were at a height and suffering vertigo, and then fell into a daze. Doctor Da Barca stood up, went around the table and gently closed his eyelids as if they were lace curtains.

  “Is the cocktail good?”

  Genghis Khan nodded with his mouth full.

  “And the wine?”

  “Ju … just right,” he stammered ecstatically.

  “Well, take it slowly.”

  Afterwards, when Doctor Da Barca served him a main course of rump steak and creamed potatoes, washed down with a red Amandi, Genghis Khan slowly changed colour. The pale, lean giant exhibited now the healthy glow of a gluttonous abbot. He gleamed with expansive, country abundance, in a sweet revenge on time, affecting everyone present. A hush of tongues on palates and fabled eyes fell over the dining hall, silencing the stirring of spoons during the meal, an unfathomable soup they called water for washing meat.

  “Now, Genghis,” Doctor Da Barca said solemnly, “the promised dessert.”

  “Treacle tart!” someone shouted out, unable to repress their anxiety.

  “Millefeuille!”

  “Almond cake!”

  A cloud of icing sugar swept across the dark hall. Meringue bubbled up in the draught from the doors. Honey oozed down the bare walls.

  Doctor Da Barca gestured with his hands for silence.

  “Chestnuts, Genghis,” he said at last. There followed the murmur of disconcerted voices, because that was the kind of rubbish poor people ate.

  “Look, Genghis, chestnuts from the Courel Mountains, from the land of chestnut groves, boiled in calamint and fennel. You’re a child, Genghis, the dogs howl in the wind, the night trembles in the oil lamp and the adults stoop under the weight of winter. But there’s your mother, Genghis, placing the dish of boiled chestnuts on the middle of the table, young creatures swathed in warm rags, the waft of an animal that softens the bones. It’s the incense of the earth, Genghis, can’t you tell?”

  And of course he could tell. The spell’s fumes took hold of his senses like tendrils of ivy, stung him in the eyes and made him cry.

  “And now, Genghis,” said Doctor Da Barca, switching tone like an actor, “let us pour chocolate sauce over those chestnuts, in the French style, yes, indeed.”

  Everyone approved this daintiness.

  In the report detailing anything untoward in the dining hall, the prison governor read, “The inmates refused lunch today, showing no sign of protest and giving no reason for their attitude. The withdrawal from the hall passed off without incident.”

  “Does he not look well?” Doctor Da Barca said. “You see, it’s true what they say, you can feed off the fantasy as well. It’s the fantasy that raises his glucose.”

  Genghis Khan came out of hypnosis, woken by his own belch of pleasure.

  13

  ON OCCASION THE DECEASED WOULD DISMOUNT from the saddle behind his ear, leave the guard’s head and not return for some time. “He’ll be out there somewhere, looking for his son,” Herbal would think with a touch of nostalgia, because, after all, it was the painter who kept him company during the hours he was on duty, the nights he was on watch. Not only that, he taught him things. For example, that nothing was more difficult to paint than snow. And fields and the sea. Wide, open surfaces that give the impression of being monochrome. “Eskimos,” the painter told him, “distinguish up to forty colours in snow, forty types of whiteness. That is why the best person to paint the sea, fields and snow is a child. Then the snow can be green and the field grow white like a peasant farmer in old age.”

  “Have you ever painted snow?”

  “I did once, for the theatre. A stage-set of werewolves. If you put a wolf in the middle, it’s a lot easier. A black wolf, like a piece of smouldering wood in the distance, and at most a bare beech tree painted on to a sheet. Then all you need is for someone to say snow. The theatre is wonderful.”

  “It seems strange to hear you say that,” said the guard, scratching his tangled beard with the front sight of his rifle.

  “Why?”

  “I thought for you, as a painter, images were more important than words.”

  “What is important is to see, that is what is important. In fact,” the painter added, “Homer, the first writer, is reputed to have been blind.”

  “Which means,” the guard remarked with a touch of sarcasm, “that he must have had very good eyesight.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what it means.”

  The two of them fell silent, drawn by the sun setting on the stage. It slid behind Mount San Pedro on its way to a quay of exile. On the other side of the bay, the first watercolours from the lighthouse intensified the sea’s ballad.

  “Shortly before dying,” the painter said, and he said it as if the fact of having died were alien to them both, “I painted this very scene, the one we are seeing now. It was part of the set design for Canto Mariñán sung by the Ruada Choir at the Theatre Rosalía de Castro.”

  “I’d like to have seen it,” said the guard with heartfelt politeness.

  “It was nothing out of this world. What suggested the sea was the lighthouse, Hercules Tower. The sea was the shadows. I didn’t want to paint it. I wanted it to be heard like a litany. The sea is impossible to paint. A painter in his right mind, for all the realism he would like to introduce, knows that you cannot transfer the sea on to a canvas. There was one, an Englishman – Turner he was called – who did it very well. His shipwreck of a slave traders’ boat is the most astonishing image of the sea that exists. In it, you can hear the sea. In the shout of the slaves. Slaves who possibly knew no more about the sea than the rolling of the hold. I should like to paint the sea from within, but not having drowned, in a diving suit. To go down with a canvas, paintbrushes and the rest, as I’m told a Japanese painter did.

  “I have a friend who might do this,” he added with a nostalgic smile. “That’s if he does not drown in wine first. His name is Lugrís.”

  Dusk, for some reason, was when the painter preferred to visit the guard Herbal’s head. He would alight on his ear with firm gentleness, with one leg on either side, like the carpenter’s pencil.

  When he felt the pencil, when they spoke of these things – of the colours of snow, of the scythe of the paintbrush on the green silence of the meadows, of the underwater painter, of a railwayman’s lantern breaking through the night mist or of a glow-worm’s phosphorescence – the guard Herbal noticed how the feeling of breathlessness would disappear, as if by magic, the bubbling of his lungs like a pair of moist bellows, the delirium and cold sweat that followed the nightmare of an explosion in his temple. The guard Herbal felt good being what he was then, a forgotten man in his sentry box. He managed to keep his heart in time to the stonemason’s chisel, so that it beat with a minimum routine. Thinking was the luminous projector in a cinema. As when he was a shepherd boy, and his gaze held a goldcrest pecking the profile of time on the bark’s vertical line or ke
pt a blade of grass on the edge of the eddy’s fatal clock in the fountain.

  “Look, the washerwomen are painting the hillside,” the dead man was telling him now.

  Over the thickets around the Lighthouse, between the rocky outcrops, two washerwomen were hanging out the clothes to dry. Their load was like a magician’s cloth stomach. From it, they produced endless coloured articles that repainted the hillside. Their plump, rosy hands obeyed the guard’s eyes, eyes that in turn were guided by the painter, “Washerwomen have pink hands because they scrub so much on the stone in the water that the years are lifted from their skin. Their hands are the hands they had when they were girls and first became washerwomen.

  “Their arms,” the painter added, “are the handles of a paintbrush, coloured like alder wood, because they also formed by the side of the river. When they wring out the wet clothes, the washerwomen’s arms tense like roots along a riverbank. The hillside is like a canvas. Look. They are painting over gorse bushes and brambles. The prickles are the best pegs the washerwoman has. There she goes. The long brush stroke of a white sheet. Two dashes of red socks. The slight tremor of some lingerie. Hanging out to dry, each article of clothing tells a story.

  “Washerwomen’s hands have hardly any nails. This also tells a story, as, if we had an X-ray, would the spine’s upper vertebrae, deformed by the weight of the loads piled on to their heads over the years. Washerwomen have hardly any nails. The salamander is said to have stolen them with its breath. But that, as far as it goes, is a magical explanation. Their nails were consumed by caustic soda.”

  In the dead man’s absence, the Iron Man strove to take his place in the guard Herbal’s head. The Iron Man would show up not at a lazy, melancholy time such as twilight, nor in order to settle himself like a carpenter’s pencil on the saddle behind his ear, but first thing in the morning, in the mirror, when he was shaving. Herbal did not find waking up easy. He spent the whole night panting, like someone climbing up and down mountains pulling at a mule laden with corpses. So the Iron Man found him more than receptive to pieces of advice that were really commands. “Learn to hold your gaze and use it to dominate. That is why you should clench your teeth. Open your mouth as little as possible. Words, however imperious and rude, always represent an open door to dilettantes, and the weakest grab on to them as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a mast. Silence, accompanied by martial, categorical gestures, has the effect of intimidation. Human relationships, do not forget, are always established in terms of power. As with wolves, exploratory contact leads to a new order: dominance or submission. And button up that trench coat, soldier! You’re a winner. Let them know it.”

  In the room his sister had given him, there was a bicycle hanging on the wall. It was a bicycle that no-one used, the tyres so clean they looked as if they had never been placed on the ground. The tin mudguards gleamed like sheets of German silver. Before going to sleep, he would sit on the bed in front of the bicycle. As a child he had dreamt of something similar. Or had he? Perhaps it was a dream he dreamt he had dreamed. Suddenly, he felt cheated. All he could remember having dreamt, the dream that displaced all his dreams, was that girl, that young woman, that woman, called Marisa Mallo. There she was, on the wall, like a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the altar.

  Grazing the cattle, he would often run off with his uncle the trapper. But he had another uncle. Another loner. Nan, his carpenter uncle.

  When he returned with the cows, he would stop off at Nan’s workshop, a shed that gave on to the road, made of planks coated with pitch, like a grounded ark at the entrance to the village. To Herbal, Nan was a strange creature. There was in the orchard an apple tree covered with moss, the blackbirds’ favourite. It was the same, in his family, with that carpenter great-uncle. Old age was on the lookout in the village. Suddenly, it would fling teeth into a dark corner, cloak the women in mourning in a misty side street, change voices with a swig of firewater, and wrinkle skin in the stepping stone of a winter. But old age had not pierced Nan. It had fallen over him, covered him in white hair, tufts that curled on his chest and clothed his arms the way the moss clothed the apple tree’s branches, but his skin shone yellow like the heart of a local pine, his teeth sparkled with good humour, and then he always carried that red plume behind his ear. The carpenter’s pencil. It was never cold in Nan’s workshop. The ground was a soft bed of shavings. The aroma of sawdust soaked up the humidity. “Where’ve you been?” he would ask, knowing full well. “A kid like you should be at school.” And then he would murmur with a disapproving gesture, “They cut the wood too soon. Come here, Herbal. Close your eyes. Now tell me, just by the smell, as I taught you, which is chestnut and which is birch?” The child sniffed in the air, bringing his nose closer until the tip was brushing the pieces of wood. “Not like that. Do it without touching. Just by using the smell.”

  “This one’s birch,” Herbal pointed finally with his finger.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It smells of woman.”

  “Very good, Herbal.”

  And then he would draw the stump of birch towards him and breathe in deeply, half-closing his eyes. Woman bathed in the river.

  Herbal takes the bicycle down from the wall. The handlebars and mudguards gleam like German silver. Underneath the bed is Nan’s box of tools, which he ties to the rack. He makes some coffee in the pot, like an infusion, the way Nan would. It is dawn outside and he starts pedalling along the road that follows the river, bordered by birch trees. A strange figure is coming the other way. It is wearing a robe and is so made up it looks like a mask. It gestures to him to stop. Herbal tries to pedal harder but the chain comes off the sprocket.

  “Hello, Herbal, dear. I am Death. Do you know where a smiling young accordionist and that slut, Life, might be?”

  But then Herbal, searching for a weapon, something with which to defend himself, grabs hold of the pencil behind his ear. It grows to the length of a red spear. The graphite at the end glitters like polished metal. Death opens her eyes in horror. She vanishes. All that is left is a petrol stain in a puddle on the road. Herbal repairs the bike and pedals along, happily whistling a goldfinch’s paso doble, with the red pencil behind his ear. He arrives at Marisa Mallo’s house in the country and greets her cheerfully, looking up at the sky. “Lovely day!” “Beautiful,” she agrees. “Right,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “what’ll it be today?” “A trough, Herbal. A kneading trough.”

  “Fashioned out of walnut, my lady. With the legs nicely turned and an escutcheon on the keyhole.”

  “And a cabinet, Herbal. Will you make me a cabinet as well?”

  “With a baluster of scrolls.”

  He woke up to the Iron Man’s orders. He had fallen asleep on top of the bed, fully clothed. In the kitchen he could hear his sister’s docile screams. He recalled what Sergeant Landesa had told him. “Give him a kick in the balls from me.” “That’s enough,” he murmured. “The bastard.”

  “Did you catch that? I want a hot plate of food waiting for me on the table. And I don’t care what time it is!”

  His sister was in a nightdress, her hair dishevelled, carrying a bowl of soup in her hands. Herbal’s presence seemed to startle her further because she spilled part of the bowl. The husband was wearing uniform. The blue shirt. The leather straps. The pistol in its shoulder holster. He stared at him. Through stretch-marked eyes. Drunk. He gave the hint of a cynical smile. Then he wiped his tongue over his teeth.

  “Can you not sleep, Herbal?”

  He took out the pistol and placed it on the table. Next to the cutlery and piece of bread, the Star resembled some absurd, helpless tool. Zalo Puga filled two glasses with wine.

  “Hey, come and sit down. Have a drink with your brother-in-law. You,” he addressed his wife, “can put that away.”

  He winked at Herbal and began to slurp straight from the bowl. He was always like this. He would swing from
aggressive arrogance to drunken camaraderie. Beatriz attempted to hide the marks of ill-treatment, but sometimes, when they were alone, she would break down and cry in her brother’s arms. Now, having untied the sack her husband had brought home with him, Herbal saw how she was taken aback and shuddered, as if she might fall.

  “Well, what do you think? A good day’s hunting! Go on then, get it out.”

  “I’d rather do it tomorrow.”

  “Come on, woman. It won’t bite. Let your brother see.”

  Overcoming her disgust, she put her hands in and finally pulled out a pig’s head. She turned it around to face the men, holding it as far away as possible. Grains of salt in the oblique hollows of its eyes.

  “Poor thing!”

  Herbal’s brother-in-law laughed at his own joke. “It’s all there, the tail and everything!” Then he added, “The stupid old woman didn’t want to let it go. She said she’d already given a son for Franco. Ha, ha, ha!”

  Zalo Puga had put on a lot of weight since the start of the war. He worked in Supplies. He would go around the different villages in the company of others, confiscating foodstuffs. And keep a part of the booty for himself. “She didn’t want to let it go,” he said again in a sordid tone. “She clung on to the hams like relics. I had to shake her loose.”

  When Beatriz dragged the sack out to the pantry, he produced two cigars from his shirt pocket and offered one to Herbal. The first wisps of smoke crossed and ascended, locked in a struggle, towards the lamp. Zalo Puga stared at him through the stretch marks in his eyes.

  “You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you? But you don’t have the balls.”

  And he burst out laughing for a second time.

  14

  IN BETWEEN THE PRISON AND THE FIRST HOUSES of the city were some high cliffs. Sometimes, when the men were taking their break in the courtyard, women would appear on the cliffs’ summit, seemingly sculpted but for the sea breeze that ruffled their skirts and long hair. In the sunny corner of the courtyard, some of the men would shield their eyes from the sun and gaze at them. They made no gesture. Only once in a while would the women slowly wave their arms, as with a flag code that grows more agitated the moment it is recognized.