The Carpenter's Pencil Read online

  Benito Mallo had attained that level of wealth at which people stop asking where it has come from. He had forged a legend. The country boy who wore cut suits made in Coruña. Who bought a Ford with leather-covered seats where the hens laid their clutches. Who had taps made of gold but went to the toilet on the hillside and cleaned himself with cabbage leaves. Who gave his lovers fake banknotes.

  Some of this changed when Benito Mallo bought the manor house with the large araucaria. An unwritten rule said that whoever owned the monkey-puzzle owned the mayorship. And one of Benito Mallo’s trusted lawyers was appointed mayor during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. This did not mean that the invisible border kingdom ceased to function. Benito Mallo wove a firm tapestry with the shuttle of day and night. He stepped with confidence into the carpeted drawing-rooms, made the haughtiest of civil servants and judges diligent, but, sometimes, at night, you might spot him on a wharf beside the Miño, in his unmistakable wide-brimmed hat, telling whoever wanted to see him here I am, the king of the river. And then, spitting on the ground in a bar, he would be celebrating the unloading of some goods. “Those months I was away, I was in New York, you know? I bought this suit and a gas station on 42nd Street.” And his men knew that it might not be a bluff. “That’s great, boss, just like Al Capone.” They would laugh when he laughed. He had a very good sense of humour, but it would depend. When he was angered, you could see the bottom of his eyes, the flames of an oven. “That Al Capone is a criminal. I’m not.” “Of course, Don Benito. Forgive the joke.”

  Benito Mallo read with some difficulty. “I never had an education,” he would say. This declaration of ignorance sounded like a warning on his lips, which became more emphatic the more his position improved. The only papers he considered to be of any value were the deeds to property. He would read them aloud, very slowly, almost spelling out the words, unconcerned by the show of stupidity, as if they were verses from the Bible. And then he would sign with a kind of ink stab.

  In order to buy the manor in Fronteira, Benito Mallo had first had to overcome the qualms of the heirs to the estate. They were based in Madrid and only visited in the summer holidays and at Christmas. At Christmas they would mount a living crib. The poor children of the parish would play the figures in the stable, except for the Virgin Mary and Joseph, who were played by the family’s two children. It was they who at the end of the function handed around a Christmas box containing chocolate and dried figs. On one occasion Benito Mallo had taken the part of a shepherd, with a fur waistcoat and bag. He carried a lamb in his arms, which he had to place as an offering before the Virgin Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. The child in the cradle that year was a maidservant’s, a son from behind the bushes. Rumour had it in Fronteira that the father was Luís Felipe, the lord of the manor. Benito Mallo was an illegitimate child as well, but he already knew who his father had been: a reckless man who organized firework displays and was stabbed to death at a village fête. Years later, when he was a young man on the brink of fame, Benito Mallo had burst in drunk, on horseback, during the local festivities, and broken up the dance firing shots into the air. Everyone remembered the words he had shouted with resentful melancholy, before disappearing into the funnel of night.

  “At the village fête, my father died!”

  In the crib in the manor chapel, in his role as a shepherd, he had to sing a short carol. The night before, his mother taught him some verses, which made him crease with laughter. After placing the lamb at the foot of the cradle with the baby Jesus, Benito Mallo stepped towards the audience and, looking deadly serious, came out with the song.

  For our Christmas box

  we don’t want a lot:

  a rasher of bacon

  and a half on top.

  The lord and lady of the manor and their friends were initially stunned into silence. Then they burst out laughing. An unending guffaw. Benito Mallo saw how some of them wiped away the tears. They were crying with laughter. He could feel the burning in the bottom of his eyes. Had it been night, they would have glinted like the eyes of a wild cat.

  The intermediaries Benito Mallo sent to Madrid were having no success. It was like hammering at cold iron. The family, who had come down in the world, would set new conditions each time the deal was virtually closed. One day Benito Mallo called for his chauffeur and told him to prepare for a long journey. They loaded two drums into the boot, of the sort used for packing smoke-dried fish. “I have brought this for his lordship and her ladyship,” he said on arrival at the flat in Madrid. “Tell them it is from Benito Mallo.” He was shown into the drawing-room and opened the first drum there and then, in the presence of the family, without further ado. The notes were carefully stacked in concentric circles, like slim herrings. Appetizing. See how they shine and smell. Go ahead. Try them. Chew them. Tasty, smoked fish. But what Benito Mallo said was, “Go ahead. Count them. Take your time.” He looked at his pocket watch. “I have to buy a lottery ticket. If you’re in agreement, I suggest you call a notary, one you trust.” But when he came back, the sardonic smile on the lord’s face was more pronounced. The wife remained speechless, unable to contain her breathing. The two children, boy and girl, flanked their father. Craning their necks, on the lookout, as if witnessing an affront.

  “So …”

  “We appreciate your interest,” said Luís Felipe, “but it all seems so sudden. It’s not just a question of money, Mr Mallo. Certain things you can’t put a price on, things with strong sentimental value.”

  “The library, daddy,” the daughter prompted.

  “Yes. Take the library, for instance. It is an extraordinary library. One of the best in Galicia. Its value is incalculable.”

  “I see. Couto,” Benito Mallo turned to the chauffeur, “bring up another drum of fish.”

  It would be years before Benito Mallo paid any more attention to that library, which lined the walls of the study, the drawing-room and a long corridor of the house. Once in a while a visitor would make some admiring comment, after leafing through the old volumes.

  “What you’ve got here is amazing, a real treasure.”

  “I know,” Benito Mallo would proudly agree. “Its value is incalculable.”

  At the far end of the study that he used as an office was an illustrated encyclopaedia. The solid, symmetrical volumes looked as if they were bound in marble and gave the room the heavy air of a mausoleum. But whenever he stood up from his chair and went to the right of the table, the old smuggler would find himself at eye level before a worrying shelf of uneven books, some of them without their binding, under an epigraph of letters carved in wood:

  Poetry

  One day he stood up and sat down again. In his hands he had a book entitled The One Hundred Best Spanish Poems by Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. From then on, he would devote a little leisure time every day to reading that book. Sometimes he would leave it open in his lap and deep in thought gaze at the film the sky was projecting on the balcony or close his eyes in a daydream. He gave the servants instructions that he should not be disturbed, and they invented a new expression, as if this were an age-old custom, “His lordship is with the book.”

  The grandfather’s obsessions were sacred and no-one had given too much thought to this sudden interest, ascribing it to the softening of the head that comes with age. But one day he took a step forward, appeared before his family, in the dining room, and recited the first stanza of Jorge Manrique’s Coplas on the death of his father. The effect it had, grandmother Leonor’s emotion and the others’ astonished expressions, opened the door to a dimension of human triumph that he had not known existed. Benito Mallo had a problem, however. He was so practically minded that he confused the conclusions he came to, even those that were false, with the natural order of life.

  On the day Marisa made her debut, when the banquet had been cleared away, her grandfather stood up and with his teaspoon clinked a glass like a bell calling for silence. He had spent the night before shut up in the study, and ha
d been heard talking to himself and declaiming in different registers. Here was a man who despised speeches. Actions speak louder than words. “And yet today,” he said, “I wanted to say something straight from the heart, like water rising at the soul’s source. And what better opportunity than this festive occasion on which we celebrate, not without nostalgia, the spring of life, the flower’s awakening, the passage from innocence to Cupid’s sweet arrows?”

  One or two people cleared their throat and Benito Mallo silenced them with a glare out of the corner of his eye.

  “I know that many of you will be surprised by these words, and even I am not above the mockery more sentimental feelings receive in this day and age. And yet, my friends, there are times in life when a man needs to pause and take stock.”

  As if speech and eyes journeyed along separate paths before converging at a single point, look and voice hardened. “I don’t beat about the bush. To eat or to be eaten. That is the question. I have always defended this principle and I think I can say, with all modesty, that I shall be leaving my family rather more fortune than ill-fated destiny reserved for me in the cradle. But man cannot live by bread alone. He must also cultivate the spirit.

  “Meaning culture.”

  As he spoke, the most implacable Benito Mallo’s eyes slowly panned the assembled company, transforming the most ironic and amused expressions into attentive servility.

  “Culture, gentlemen! And, within culture, the most sublime art of all. Poetry.

  “With discretion and humility, I have recently given over some of my most intimate waking hours to her. I have sown the fields that lay fallow. I am well aware that there is a beast in every one of us, in some more than others. But the seasoned man is moved when he listens to the strings of his soul, as the child who winds up a music box in the attic.”

  The speaker took a swig of water and savoured it in his mouth, visibly pleased at pulling off in public this image of the beast and the child he had thought so long and hard about the night before. For their part, the audience of guests maintained a deathly silence, intimidated by Benito Mallo’s blazing eyes, but no less intrigued to find out whether through his mouth it was sarcasm or disorder speaking.

  “The reason for all these preambles is that I did not want to take you completely by surprise. This has been a huge step for me, but I judged the occasion worthy of my daring. This is the result. I entrust these my poems to your leniency, aware that the novice’s enthusiasm cannot remedy the lack of experience.

  “To start with, a poem I composed in honour of our elders and ancestors.”

  Benito Mallo seemed to hesitate momentarily, as if touched by emotion, but soon recovered his natural elegant and undersized bearing, and began to declaim with a bard’s verve.

  The lives we lead are the rivers

  that flow out into the sea,

  which is the dying …

  “The joke was nearing its end,” thought some of them. And they applauded Jorge Manrique’s verses, laughing with a complicity that met with no response. On the contrary, Benito Mallo gave them a withering look and they shrank back in their seats until he reached the end of the poem.

  “And now,” he said, a Neronian menace to his voice, “now a composition that took a lot of work. A whole afternoon, at least, for as you see the first quatrain resists like an uncut diamond.”

  Violante has asked a sonnet of me,

  I never have been in such a dilemma …

  There was no laughter left. Not even for Lope de Vega. Only the odd murmur, which he dissolved with an icy stare. At the end, they applauded him, not any old how, but in the regimental manner of formal concerts.

  “And finally, a poem I dedicate to youth. In particular to my granddaughter, Marisa, who is, after all, the reason we are here today. What would we not give to be young again? There are times when we chide them for being rebellious, but this is only natural at their age, the romantic spirit. Thinking of you, the young ones, I imagined a character who embodied freedom and came up with this pirate song.”

  Ten cannons on either side

  with a tail wind at full speed

  a brigantine does not cleave

  the waves of the sea but flies …

  There was an ovation with vivas for Don Benito, poet. He no longer cared if the tone was burlesque. He toasted the future. He downed a glass of brandy in one. He said, “And now enjoy yourselves!” And he disappeared, a solitary figure, into the house not to be seen for the whole of the rest of the day.

  In the evening, Marisa, still embarrassed, asked for an explanation, but realized that he had gone into a daze. He had got drunk on his own. The bottle of herb liqueur stood empty on the table, a hint of golden viscosity in the glass and his voice.

  “You see, girl? Power!”

  When the Republic was created, he turned Republican. This only lasted a few months. Soon, his hero became the smuggler, banker and conspirator Juan March, known at the time as “The Last Pirate in the Mediterranean”. With a glint in his eye, he told the story of what seemed to him one of the most brilliant expressions of wit in modern times. Like him, Don Juan read and wrote badly, but was a prodigy at doing sums. Primo de Rivera was amazed by this ability. At a meeting with his ministers, he addressed March and said, “So, Don Juan, what’s seven times seven times seven times seven plus seven?” March replied in an instant, without time to think, “Two thousand four hundred and eight, my general.” The dictator turned to the Finance Minister and said, “Listen and learn, distinguished minister!”

  In 1933, Benito Mallo had sent seafood to Juan March in jail, which he would later escape from in the company of the prison governor. They had the same motto on their coat of arms: “Diners o dinars.” Money or food. They believed that everything could be bought using these weapons.

  The dogs bit now at her wrists, with savage affection, as if reproaching her. Marisa greeted the Portuguese gardener with magical delight.

  “Hey, Alírio! How are you?”

  Wrapped in the mist of burnt leaves, the gardener raised his arm in a slow, vegetal gesture. He returned to feeding the wood’s censer, lost in a world of his own. She knew the rumours, Fronteira’s secret radio waves. Which said that Alírio was the son of her grandfather’s old employer, from the time he had set off as a young man to earn a living, and that Benito Mallo had not stopped until he had placed one of the employer’s descendants in his service, less out of gratitude than in a twisted revenge on history. According to Fronteira’s unwritten laws, there was no worse stigma than having served someone on the other side of the river. Be that as it may, in that walled universe, Alírio seemed the freest spirit. He lived apart from the others and moved about the estate like the silhouette of a sundial. As a girl, Marisa thought that the seasons were in part the creation of this gardener, who was so quiet he seemed dumb. He extinguished and kindled colours, as if he had an invisible underground fuse in the garden, connecting bulbs, trees and plants. The yellow never went out. The decree of winter turned off the last lights of the Chinese golden rose, but it was then, in that funereal atmosphere, that the lemons ripened and the souls came out with thousands of candles amid the canopy of mimosas. And, at the same time as the sparks flew on the brave mountain gorse and broom, the branches of forsythia caught fire. And by then the lanterns of the first irises and daffodils were appearing on the ground. Until in spring the splendour of gold dust exploded. It was Alírio who looked after the display with his lighter.

  When Benito Mallo showed his distinguished visitors the manor’s magnificent botany, among which the varieties of camellias stood out like a coat of arms, Alírio would follow them at a short distance, with his hands interlocked behind his back, like the master of keys of that cathedral. He would supply his lordship with the names of the different species when asked and with great tact make the necessary corrections.

  “Alírio, how old do you think this bougainvillea is?”

  “This wisteria, my lord, must be as old as the house.”r />
  Marisa would be amazed by the sentimental diagnosis with which he summed up the state of the trees, something he did only on unforeseen occasions, as if writing out a prescription in the air. “Those pale leaves! The lemon tree has melancholy. The rhododendron is genial. The chestnut has irregular breathing.” The chestnut tree was like a secret home to Marisa. In the hundred-year-old trunk with its porthole, there was the space of a cabin from which you could spy on the world without being seen. The chestnut and she shared at least one secret, that of the chauffeur and Aunt Engracia. Ssssh.

  When she told Da Barca what Alírio had said about the chestnut, the doctor had been astonished. “That gardener is a professor! A sage!” And then her lover said thoughtfully, “The trees are his windows. He’s talking about himself.”

  Alírio fades now into the fog of fallen leaves.

  Her grandfather appears at the top of the steps to receive her. His arms hang stiffly from his drooping shoulders and the cuffs of his jacket almost conceal his hands. All that is visible are the claws clenching his walking stick, its metal handle in the shape of a mastiff’s head. The hawk in his eyes, Benito Mallo’s unmistakable characteristic, is still alive, but there is about him the kind of resentment with which a lucid mind fights sclerosis. And that is why he comes down the steps.