The Carpenter's Pencil (15 page)

“Are you all right, corporal?”

“Yes, sergeant. The train makes me sleepy.”

“That will be low blood pressure. How does all that blood pressure work, doctor? Does it really have something to do with sugar?”

Sergeant García was very talkative and had the Andalusians’ genial accent. Whenever the conversation trailed off and Doctor Da Barca returned to the shelter of his book, he would pick up another thread as if he wanted to prevail over the monotonous jolting of
the train. They sat opposite one another, next to the window, while Herbal dozed at a distance, with his rifle in his lap. Alone in the compartment. At one of the stops, when night was already falling, Herbal was woken by the sound of the door. A woman leant in with a child in her arms, holding another by the hand. She wore a headscarf. She said quietly, “Keep going, child, not here.”

When he went back to sleep, Herbal heard Doctor Da Barca talking to the nun, Mother Izarne. He was saying to her, “Memories are engrams.” “And what are they?” “They’re like scars in your head.” And then he saw a row of people making scars in his head with the carpenter’s chisel. He told most of them that they shouldn’t, that they weren’t to make scars in his head. Until Marisa appeared, Marisa as a girl, and he said to her, “Yes, make me a scar in my head.” And Nan. His head was a piece of alder wood. Nan made a slit and brought his nose closer in order to smell. And then his uncle, the trapper, arrived and stood with his knife in the air, saying, “I’m really sorry, Herbal.” And he said, “If you’ve got to do it, do it, uncle.” But then, his head was covered in mud and soot, in Asturias, and a woman was shouting, and the officer was saying, “Shoot, will you, for fuck’s sake!” And he was saying, “No, don’t make that scar.” And then he appeared on a hillside, next to a road, on a moonlit night in August. A young man stood before him in uniform, with a trapper’s face, and he was going to ask him why. Why are you making that scar? He remembered the pencil. The carpenter’s pencil. The woman with the headscarf said to him, “Keep going, child, not here.” And he woke up soaked in sweat, rummaging through his kitbag.

“Hey,
corporal! This is your country. Can’t you see it’s raining? You owe me three night watches!”

And then he muttered, “Some guard! He’d sleep through an air raid.”

He found the pencil in the bottom of the bag.

“Hello, Herbal!” the painter said to him. “We’ve reached Monforte. Here the train divides. I’m off north, to Coruña, and you’re heading south. Look after that man!”

“What do you expect me to do?” murmured Herbal. “The relationship’s over. I’m not going to San Simón. I’ve a different posting.”

“Look,” said the painter. “Look at her!”

And there she was. Her russet hair, the rainbow in her eyes, gradually dispelled the mist on the station platform. The doctor, handcuffed, banged with his two fists on the glass.

“Marisa!”

Sergeant García, who had been so talkative, was struck dumb as if the window were a screen at the cinema.

“Goodbye, Herbal!” said the painter. “I’m off to see how my son is.”

“That’s my wife!” said the doctor, shaking the sergeant with his handcuffed hands, as excited as if he were announcing the arrival of a queen.

And this is what she was, or rather a queen of seamstresses. “Sergeant García certainly had not been expecting that,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação. “Nor had I. When she leant into the compartment, we did not know whether to fire a salute or to get down on our knees. I pretended not to notice.”

Marisa had
a picnic basket and a sleeveless dress with a pattern of flowers that clung to her body. It was like the whole of a garden in spring, with bees and everything, entering a cell. The initial contact was inevitable. The wicker basket crackled between the two bodies like a skeleton in the air.

“The embrace knocked me out,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “The chain of his handcuffs slipped down her back and landed at her waist, above her buttocks.”

With the train on the move, Sergeant García decided it was time to take control of the situation. His genial accent became sharp as scissors of steel. They stood apart.

“This is my wife, sergeant,” said Doctor Da Barca, as if he were giving water a name.

“We’ve been on the same train for a thousand years and you never said anything about your wife waiting for you.” He exclaimed, gesturing towards the people on the platform, “You might have saved me this circus!”

“He had no idea,” Marisa said.

The sergeant gave her a bewildered look, as if she were speaking in French, and took the telegram she offered him. It was signed Mother Izarne from the prison hospital in Porta Coeli and gave her the train times of the transfer.

“I do not wish to appear impolite, doctor,” said Sergeant García, “but how do I know you are husband and wife? Your word’s not good enough. You must have papers.”

“Then I was a coward,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “I don’t know what came over me. I wanted to say, ‘They are, I know they are.’ But my voice was swept away.”

“I have
the papers,” replied Marisa with great dignity. And she produced them from the picnic basket.

“The sergeant’s attitude changed at once. He was impressed and I’m not surprised,” Herbal said. “That woman turned night into day, or
vive-cersa
, as Genghis Khan would say. He took one look around, as if observing procedure, and removed the doctor’s handcuffs.”

“You may sit down together,” he said, pointing to the window. And he kept the basket. He had a healthy appetite.

“Doctor Da Barca took Marisa’s hands,” said Herbal, before Maria da Visitação could ask him what they were doing. “He was counting her fingers in case she was missing one. She was crying, as if it hurt her to see him.”

Suddenly, he stood up and said, “Sergeant, can I interest you in a cigarette?”

They moved to the corridor of the train and smoked not one cigarette, but half a dozen. The train swept alongside the River Miño, tinged with greens and lilacs, and the sergeant and the doctor chatted eagerly as if they were at the bar of the last tavern.

“From the corner where I had been dozing,” Herbal said, “I watched her with pity. I felt like throwing the rifle out of the window and embracing her. She was crying and couldn’t understand a thing. Nor could I. In a few minutes we would arrive at the station. After that, nothing. Years and years of prison without being able to touch that sewing queen. But there he was, chattering away with the sergeant, like a pair of marketeers. So it went on until we arrived at Vigo station.

“I was
surprised when he didn’t handcuff him. The sergeant called me to one side, ‘Absolute discretion with what we’re about to do. If you ever set your tongue wagging, I’ll come and find you, even if it means going to hell, and shoot you in the mouth. Understood?’”

“Absolutely, sergeant.”

“Well then, take your share. And act normal, for Christ’s sake!”

Herbal felt the notes in his hand and put them in his trouser pocket without looking.

“We’re both agreed then?”

He looked at him in silence. He had no idea what he was talking about.

“Good. Let’s do this couple a favour then. After all, they are married.”

Herbal thought that Sergeant García had lost his mind, mesmerized by Doctor Da Barca’s hypnotic gaze and persuasive powers. He ought to have foreseen it. Aside from the money he had been given, and it could not be much, what on earth had he told him to cast him under this spell?

“That Daniel is a genius,” said the painter in his ear.

“I thought you’d gone,” said Herbal in surprise.

“I reconsidered. I couldn’t miss this journey!”

“What shall we do then, corporal?” the sergeant asked. “He told me you’d know. He said that you were familiar with Vigo.”

The painter
punched him on the temple, “The time has come, Herbal. Behave!”

“We can take them to a hotel that’s nearby, sir. And let them spend their wedding night at last.”

Marisa, unaware of all the scheming going on, quickened her pace across the platform. She wept in silence. To Herbal she was incredibly beautiful, like camellias about to fall. Finally, Da Barca approached her affectionately, but she rejected him, annoyed. “Who are you? You’re not Daniel. You’re not the man I was waiting for.” Until he clasped her by the shoulders, stared into her eyes, embraced her, and whispered in her ear.

“Listen. Don’t ask questions. Let yourself go. Tonight will be our wedding night.”

Marisa transformed as she began to understand. “Her face turned into that of a bride,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “They walked peacefully as far as Príncipe Street, as the first lights of evening came on, feigning interest from time to time in the shop windows. Until we arrived at the small hotel nearby. Doctor Da Barca gave a look in the sergeant’s direction. The sergeant nodded. And the couple resolutely stepped in.”

“Good evening. I am Commander Da Barca,” he introduced himself in reception in a severe tone of voice. “Two rooms, if you please, one for me and my wife, and another for the escort. Right. We’ll be on our way up. The sergeant will give you the details.”

“At your orders, commander. Good night, madam. May you sleep well.”

“Good night,
Commander Da Barca,” Herbal said, standing stiffly to attention. He lowered his head slightly, “Good night, madam.”

Sergeant García showed his papers. He said to the receptionist, “Under no circumstances must the commander be disturbed. Please have any messages passed on to me.”

“It was a very long night,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “At least for us it was. I imagine for them it was very short.”

“I shouldn’t think the turtle-doves will escape,” the sergeant said on reaching the room. “But we’re not going to run the risk.”

So they spent the night taking turns to listen outside the door. “I volunteer for the first shift,” Sergeant García had said, winking theatrically at Herbal. “Three times!” he exclaimed when he returned. “Shame there wasn’t a hole in the wall.”

Had there been a hole in the wall, they would have seen two naked bodies on the bed, the one dressed only in the scarf tied in a knot around her neck that she had once given Daniel in prison.

“I thought I heard someone crying,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “The wind was up, the sea alive with the sound of accordions.

“Then I heard the bedsprings creaking as well.”

Very early, at daybreak, the sergeant gave them a knock at the door. After the long night’s vigil he began to feel uneasy about the path they had taken. He paced anxiously around the bed.

“Had the two of you really come to an agreement?”

“I was
aware of what was going on,” Herbal lied.

“Don’t even tell your wife about this,” said the sergeant, all of a sudden very serious.

“I don’t have a wife,” replied Herbal.

“Good. Let’s get moving then!”

They kept up the pretence as they left the hotel like a group of poachers. Had the receptionist followed them from the door, he would have seen how Commander Da Barca became a prisoner and was put into handcuffs. In the streets, there was the hung-over light of early morning, the melancholy of cheap rubbish, after a night of accordions in the estuary.

On the quay, a photographer of emigrants offered absentmindedly to take a photograph. The sergeant discouraged him with a rough gesture, “Can’t you see he’s a prisoner?”

“Are you taking him to San Simón?”

“What do you care?”

“Hardly anyone comes back from there. Let me take their photograph.”

“Hardly anyone comes back?” said the doctor suddenly with a bold smile. “A romantic cradle, gentlemen! Which produced the best poem of humanity!”
²

“Well, it’s a graveyard now,” muttered the photographer.

“Quick!” the sergeant ordered. “What are you waiting for? Take that photograph, but leave out the chains!”

He embraced her from behind and she covered his arms, so that the handcuffs could not be seen. Merged into one, with the sea in the background. Bags under their eyes from their wedding night. Without a great deal of conviction, as a formality, the photographer asked them to smile.

“The last
time I saw her,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação, “was from the anchorage. We were on the boat. She was standing there, high on the wharf, on her own, leaning against the bollard, her long, russet hair buoyed by the wind.

“He remained upright on the boat, without taking his eyes off the woman on the bollard. I sat in a huddle in the bow. I must be the only Galician who was not born to travel by sea.

“When we reached San Simón, the doctor jumped on to the wharf with a determined air. The sergeant signed a document and handed him over to the guards.

“Before leaving, Doctor Da Barca turned to me. We stared each other in the eyes.

“He said to me,

“‘Your problem is not tuberculosis. It has to do with the heart.’”

“You see those on the shore?” said the boatman on the return journey. “They’re not washerwomen. They’re the prisoners’ wives. Sending them food across the sea in Moses baskets.”

“
THEY WERE
THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED
to me.”

Herbal took the carpenter’s pencil and drew a cross on the white of the obituary notice in the newspaper, two coarse lines like the lines a burin makes on a tombstone.

Maria da Visitação read the deceased’s name: Daniel Da Barca. Underneath, the name of the wife, Marisa Mallo, the son, daughter, and a long trail of grandchildren.

At the top, on the right, by way of an epitaph, a poem by Antero de Quental. Maria da Visitação read it out slowly in her Portuguese with a Creole accent.

“Herbal, you’re going to spoil the girl for me with all that literature!”

Manila, who had just come down from the first floor, was pouring herself a coffee at the bar. Today she seemed in a good mood.

“I only
ever knew one man who could recite poems. And he was a priest! They were beautiful poems that talked about blackbirds and love.”