The Carpenter's Pencil (12 page)

“And what happened?” Maria da Visitação asked anxiously, uninterested in the horses with water coming out of their mouths.

“Oblivious of the rain, they stopped right in the middle of the Quintana dos Mortos. They must have been soaked, because I was dripping, and I’d been walking down the arcade. ‘They’re mad,’ I thought, ‘they’ll catch their death of cold. Blasted doctor!’ But then that happened. The Berenguela.”

“Who’s the Berenguela?”

“It’s a bell. The Berenguela is a bell of the Cathedral, overlooking the Quintana. At the first stroke, they embraced. And it was as if they were never going to let go, because it was midnight. The Berenguela chimes so slowly it’s supposed to be good for giving the wine in the barrels that extra something, but I don’t know how it doesn’t drive all the clocks mad.”

“How did
they embrace, Herbal?” the girl from the nightclub asked him.

“I’ve seen man and woman get up to all sorts, but these two, they drank each other. They licked the water off each other with their lips and tongues. They sucked in each other’s ears, the bowl of their eyes, from the breast to the neck upwards. They were so drenched they must have felt naked. They kissed like two fish.”

Suddenly, Herbal drew two parallel lines with the pencil on the white paper napkin. And then he drew thicker, shorter lines across. The sleepers.

The train, the train lost in the snow.

Maria da Visitação noticed the white of Herbal’s eyes. A white gone slightly yellow, like smoked lard. Against that background, the iris flared up in the silences like a piece of burning wood. Allowed to grow, the white of his hair might have acquired a venerable tone, but it had the appearance of darkened grey due to a conscript’s drastic haircut. He was already advanced in years, you could even say old. But he had a lean, tense constitution, like reddened, knotty wood. Maria da Visitação had begun to think about age, having turned twenty in October. She knew older people who seemed a lot younger than they were due to a kind of happy-go-lucky pact with time. Other people, and Manila, who owned the bar, was one of them, had an almost pathetic relationship with age, trying to cover up its traces in a vain obsession, the adornments, the overly tight dresses and wealth of jewellery, doing nothing except to accentuate the contrast. But she only knew
one person, and that was Herbal, who stayed younger through misfortune. It was unclear whether his breathlessness was because he wanted or did not want to breathe. The rage against the slow passing of time came to the surface whenever things got difficult at night. It was enough for him to look daggers from the end of the bar, for a client holding the stage to cough up the money without a murmur.

“Sometimes, when I wake up out of breath, I have the sensation we’re still there, stuck on a snow-covered track in the province of Leon. And there’s a wolf watching us, watching the train, so I lower the half window and aim with the rifle on the glass and the painter says to me, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Can’t you see?’ I reply, ‘I’m going to kill that wolf.’ ‘Don’t spoil the painting,’ he says. ‘It took me a lot of hard work.’

“The wolf turns around and leaves us on our own, on a siding.”

“Another one, sir,” a guard tells the lieutenant. “In coach nine.”

The lieutenant swears the way you do in the face of an invisible enemy. When it came to the dead, he did not like the number three. One corpse is a corpse. The second keeps the first company. He had remained impassive. But from there on up was a stack of corpses. A situation. He was still a young man. He cursed that mission without the slightest glory. To command a forgotten train, laden with defeat and tuberculosis, and on top of that blocked by nature’s absurd, mad shells. An unstitched war rag. He put a startling hypothesis out of his head: I cannot arrive in Madrid at the head of a funeral parlour.

“Three dead
already. What the hell is going on?”

“They drown in their blood, sir. They get a coughing fit and they drown in their own blood.”

Withering look: “Yes, I know what happens. I don’t need it explained. And what about the doctor? What’s the doctor doing?”

“He hasn’t stopped, sir. From one coach to the next. He said to tell you we should empty out the last carriage and set it aside for the corpses.”

“Well, then do it. I’ll go with this chap here,” he said, referring to Herbal, “to that damned station. Meanwhile inform the driver. We shall move this train even if it’s on our hands and knees.”

The lieutenant looked anxiously outside. On one side, the plain, white as nothing. On the other, a frozen archaeology of stranded trains and sheds that resembled pantheons of railway skeletons.

“This is worse than war!”

Inmates had been brought together on that train from the prisons in the north of Galicia, suffering from an advanced stage of TB. In the misery following the war, tuberculosis spread like a plague, a situation made worse by the humidity of the Atlantic coast. Their final destination was a prison hospital in the Valencia mountain range. But first they had to reach Madrid. A passenger train at that time could take eighteen hours to cover the distance between Coruña and North Station in the capital.

“Ours was
termed a Special Transport Train,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação. “Special is exactly what it was!”

When the inmates boarded the carriages, many of them had already eaten their allowance of food: a tin of sardines. To keep them warm they had each been given a blanket. The snow put in its appearance in the heights around Betanzos and did not leave them until Madrid. The Special Transport Train took its seven hours to reach Monforte, the railway junction connecting Galicia and the Meseta. But the worst was yet to come. They still had to cross the mountains of Zamora and Leon. When the train stopped in Monforte, darkness was already falling. The prisoners shivered with cold and fever at the same time.

“I was frozen as well,” Herbal continued. “Those of us on guard detail travelled in a passenger carriage, with seats and windows, behind the locomotive. It was a steam engine, which had difficulty pulling the train, as if it too suffered from tuberculosis.

“Yes, I had volunteered. I put myself forward as soon as I heard about that train taking TB sufferers to a prison hospital in Valencia. I was convinced I had the very same disease, but covered it up the whole time, avoided the medical examinations, which for me was not difficult. I thought they’d lay me off sick, with a miserable wage, and I’d be sidelined for good. I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ village or to my sister’s house. The last time I had spoken to my father was coming
back from Asturias. We argued a lot. I refused to work, told him I was on leave and said that he was an animal. And then my father, with a calmness I didn’t know he possessed, replied, ‘I didn’t kill anyone. When we were kids and got called up for Morocco, we took to the hills. Yes, I am an animal, but I didn’t kill anyone. Sit back and feel satisfied if, as an old man, you can say the same!’ I haven’t spoken to my father since.

“When I heard about the train, I went back to see Sergeant Landesa, who by then had been promoted. ‘Arrange for me to go with them, sir, in the hospital guard. I need the change of climate. And that doctor, Doctor Da Barca, is going too, you recall. I believe he is still in contact with the resistance. I shall, of course, keep you informed.’”

The lieutenant, Herbal and the driver approach the Leonese station. The snow covers their boots. They shake it off on the platform. The lieutenant is fuming. He is planning to shout at the stationmaster, tell him a few things. But out of the office comes a commanding officer. The lieutenant is caught off guard and takes a while to stand to attention. The commanding officer, before he speaks, eyes him severely and awaits the gesture of compliance with rank. The lieutenant clicks his heels, stands to attention and salutes with mechanical precision. “At your orders, my commander.” It is very cold, but he has sweat on his forehead. “I am in charge of the Special Train and …”

“The Special Train? What train are you talking about, lieutenant?”

The lieutenant’s voice
trembles. He does not know where to begin.

“The train, the train of prisoners with TB, sir. We’ve three dead already.”

“The train of prisoners with TB? Three dead? What are you telling me, lieutenant?”

The driver is about to speak, “I can explain, sir.” But the commanding officer, with an energetic gesture, shuts him up.

“We left Coruña, sir, forty-eight hours ago. What we have here is a Special Transport Train. With prisoners, sick prisoners. With tuberculosis. We should have been in Madrid by now. But there seems to have been some confusion. In Leon we were allowed through, but on a diversion towards the north. This went on for several hours. When we realized, we turned back. But it was not easy, commander. Since then, we have been sitting on a siding. We were told there were other special trains.”

“Indeed there are, lieutenant. You ought to know,” said the commanding officer sardonically. “The north-west coast is being reinforced. Or have you not heard of the Second World War?”

He called the signalman.

“What can you tell me about a train of prisoners with TB?”

“A train of prisoners with TB? That went through yesterday, sir.”

“There was some confusion,” the lieutenant was about to explain once more. But he realized that the commanding officer was gazing in astonishment at the railway lines.

Swaying, walking
sluggishly and swept along by the snow, a small procession drew near with a man on a stretcher. Before his mind could confirm the vision to him, he sensed what was happening. At the head walked that damnable doctor, flanked by two of the guards. As they came closer, Lieutenant Goyanes spliced that slow sequence with other recent images. The unrestrained embrace in the station, which he cut using the pliers of his hands, disturbed by that unending kiss that upset the foundations of reality like an earthquake. The conversation that followed on the train, an aborted approach on his part. He had tried to justify himself with a splash of humour, without it sounding like an apology,

“Someone had to separate you. Quite clearly
you
’d have kept us waiting till the cows came home. Ha, ha! Was that your wife then? You’re a lucky man.”

He realized that everything he was saying had a wounding double meaning. Doctor Da Barca made no reply, as if all he could hear were the din of the train taking him further away from the warm, perfumed embrace of woman. The lieutenant had told him to take a seat in his carriage. After all, he was also in charge of the expedition. They had things to talk about.

Leaving behind the large tunnel that blotted out the urban horizon, the train entered the green and blue watercolour of the Burgo estuary. Doctor Da Barca blinked as if the beauty hurt his eyes. From their boats, with long rakes, the fishermen combed the bottom of the sea for shellfish. One of them stopped working and looked in the direction of the train, his hand shielding his face, erect on the sea’s swaying surface. Doctor Da Barca recalled his
friend the painter. He used to like painting scenes of work in the fields and at sea, but not according to the traditional clichés, which turned them into pretty, bucolic pictures. On his friend the painter’s canvases, people were shown merging into the earth and the sea. Their faces seemed furrowed by the very plough that clove the earth. The fishermen were captives of the very nets that seized the fish. It reached the point where their bodies fragmented. Sickle arms. Sea eyes. Face stones. Doctor Da Barca empathized with the fisherman standing erect on his boat, looking at the train. He may have wondered where it was going and what it was taking there. The distance and the din of the engine would prevent him from hearing the terrible litany of coughing ringing out in the squalor of the cattle trucks like skin tambourines soaked in blood. The panorama brought to mind a fable: with its cries, the cormorant flying over the fisherman was telegraphing the truth about the train. He remembered the bitterness his friend the painter felt when he stopped receiving the avant-garde art magazines he was sent from Germany: the worst illness that can strike is the suspension of conscience. Doctor Da Barca opened his case and pulled out a brief treatise with worn covers,
The Biological Roots of Aesthetic Feeling
, by Doctor Roberto Nóvoa Santos.

Lieutenant Goyanes sat down opposite. He looked at the small book’s cover out of the corner of his eye. This Doctor Da Barca, he calculated, had to be a little older than he was, but not much. After the incident of their departure, when he was informed
that he was the doctor, he had adopted an attitude of camaraderie, but with the superiority of a hiking guide. Now, unconcerned about interrupting the other’s reading, he began to tell him how he had also gone to University, taking a few courses in Philosophy, before enlisting in Franco’s army, where he had started out as second lieutenant. After that he had decided to continue with a military career. “Philosophy!” he exclaimed in an ironic tone. “I too was attracted by Marx and all those prophets of social redemption. Like
il duce
Mussolini. He was a socialist, you know? Yes, of course you know. Till the blessed day the Warrior Philosopher turned up. Destroyer of the Present. He freed me from the flock of slaves.”

Doctor Da Barca carried on reading, deliberately ignoring him, but the other knew how to make him talk.

“That was when I stopped worrying about the apes and became interested in the gods.”

He had hit the nail on the head. The doctor at last put down his book and stared at him,

“I’d never have guessed, lieutenant.”

He burst out laughing and slapped him on the knees.

“Good, good,” he said, standing up, “a Republican with balls. Stick to worrying about the apes.”

There was no time for jokes after that. Things began to get complicated as if the train were driven by the devil. In Monforte the expected replenishment of food for the prisoners did not arrive. Then came that calvary in the mountains of snow. The doctor moving tirelessly from carriage to carriage. The last time the lieutenant had seen him he had been on his knees, by the light of an oil lamp, cleaning the dark, clotted blood from the spikes of the beard of the first corpse.