The Carpenter's Pencil (16 page)
Read The Carpenter's Pencil Online
Authors: Manuel Rivas
Tags: #FIC000000, #FIC032000, #FIC019000, #FIC056000, #FIC014000
“You and a priest poet?” said Herbal mockingly. “A fine couple, indeed.”
“He was a charming man. A gentleman, and not like others in a cassock. Don Faustino. According to him, God had to be a woman. Whenever he went out for the night wearing plain clothes, he’d say, ‘Now, to be sure, Christ himself wouldn’t recognize me!’ A bit naive. His life was made impossible for him.”
She swallowed the coffee in one gulp, “Right, you can think about finishing the conversation. We open in half an hour.”
“I never saw them again,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “I found out Marisa had given birth to a boy, when he was still on San Simón. The child from their wedding night! Doctor Da Barca was released in the mid-fifties. After that they left for America. And I heard nothing more about them. I didn’t even know they had returned.”
Herbal did a conjuring trick with the carpenter’s pencil. He managed it as if it were a finger on the loose.
“My life changed pretty soon afterwards. Having handed over the prisoner on San Simón, I went back to Coruña, where I discovered that my sister was very ill. In the head, I mean. I shot Zalito Puga. To be honest, I shot him three times. That’s what let me
down. I had planned it all carefully. I was going to allege that a bullet had fired off as I was cleaning the gun. That kind of thing happened a lot in those days. But I lost control at the last moment and fired at him three times. So I was expelled from the corps and ended up in prison. There I met Manila’s brother. And then I met her, when she came visiting. I had no-one any more. She was my only window on to the world. When they let me out, she said to me, ‘I’m fed up of pimps. I need a man who’s not afraid.’
“And here I am.”
“And what happened to the painter?” Maria da Visitação asked.
“He came to see me once in prison. A day of anguish, when I was short of breath. The deceased spoke to me and the breathlessness went away. He said to me, ‘You know something? I found my son. He spends his time painting mothers and their newborn babies.’
“‘That’s a good sign,’ I said to him. ‘It signifies hope.’
“‘Very good, Herbal. Now you know something about painting.’”
“And didn’t he come back?”
“No, he never came back,” Herbal lied. “As Doctor Da Barca would have said, he disappeared into eternal indifference.”
Maria da Visitação had tears in her eyes. She had learnt to hold back the tears, but not to control her emotions.
“Look, the camellias glisten after the rain,” the painter said in Herbal’s ear. “Give her the pencil! Give it to the dark-haired girl!”
“Here, a
present,” he said, holding out the carpenter’s pencil.
“But …”
“Take it, please.”
Manila clapped her hands in the air as usual and opened the door to the club. There was one client waiting.
“He was here the other day,” said Herbal in a changed voice. The guard’s voice, “You’ve work, girl!”
“He’s grown attached,” she said ironically. “He told me he was a journalist. He’s a bit depressed.”
“A depressed journalist?” The voice had turned to one of disgust, “Watch out. Make sure he pays before he goes to bed.”
“Where are you off to?” Manila asked him in surprise.
“I’m going outside a while. For a breath of fresh air.”
“Wrap up warm!”
“I’ll only be a minute.”
Herbal leant against the hinge of the door. In the wet and windy night, the neon sign with its Valkyrian figure flickered with sad obscenity. The dog in the scrapyard barked at the procession of headlights, a burin’s litany in the dark. Herbal noticed the sense of breathlessness and longed for a gust of wind to sweep through him. On the sand track leading to the road, he saw her coming at last. Death with her white shoes. Instinctively, he felt for the carpenter’s pencil. “Come on, bitch, I’ve nothing now!” Why was she so quiet? Why did she not curse that slut, Life, and the smiling accordionist who had taken her?
“Come inside,
Herbal!” Manila said, wrapping him in her black lace shawl. “What are you doing out here on your own like a dog?”
“Phantom pain,” he muttered under his breath.
“What was that, Herbal?”
“Nothing.”
Out of consideration
for those who inspired me to write this story, I should point out that it is a work of fiction, and in no way biographical. All of the characters, except for those who are mentioned by name in the scene from the old prison of Santiago, are the fruit of invention. There is no real correspondence to be found. That they should belong to what Doctor Nóvoa Santos called the “overworld” is quite another matter.
ROSALÍA DE
CASTRO’S POEM
“JUSTICE BY THE HAND”
(CHAPTER 6)
The ones in the town that are viewed with respect
Stole all of the purity I once possessed,
They covered in litter my own Sunday best,
The clothes I was wearing they tore into shreds.
Where I had been living no stone was there left,
No hearth and no shelter, I turned and I fled.
In fields with the hares in the open I slept.
My children … my angels! … for whom my heart wept
Put up with such hunger they died, they were dead!
My honour was broken, my life at an end,
Of brambles and gorse was the bed they had made,
And meanwhile the villains of damnable name
At ease amid roses were taking their rest.
“O judges, please save me!” I cried … but in vain!
They laughed at me, justice knew not what I meant.
“Good God, won’t you help me?” I cried, I cried yet …
Good God was so high that he missed what I said.
So then like a she-wolf that suffers in pain,
I leapt for the sickle and left in a rage,
I circled round slowly … No grass heard my step!
The moon clouded over, and on a soft bed
The beast with its partners had yet to awake.
I looked
at them calmly, my arms were outstretched,
In one, one fell swoop! their lives there I reft.
And next to my victims I sat down content,
At ease as I waited for morning to break.
And then … it was then that our justice was kept:
On them, mine; the laws on the hand they had met.
(Rosalía de Castro,
Follas novas
(1880), II.xxv;
translated by Jonathan Dunne)
“THE BEST
POEM OF HUMANITY” (CHAPTER 19),
BY THE 13th-CENTURY GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE
TROUBADOUR POET MENDINHO
At Saint Simon’s chapel I took my seat
and was caught by the waves, how tall they seem.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
At the chapel before the altar-stone
I was caught by the waves, they seem to grow.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
And was caught by the waves, how tall they seem,
I have no boatman to row for me.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
And was caught by the waves, the sea below,
I have no boatman, nor know how to row.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
I have no boatman to row for me,
fair maid I shall die on the open sea.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
I have
no boatman, nor know how to row,
fair maid I shall die on the sea below.
I was waiting for my friend! Will he come?
(Mendinho in Giuseppe Tavani,
A poesía lírica galego-portuguesa
(3rd edition, 1991), p. 132;
translated by Jonathan Dunne)
Manuel Rivas
M
ANUEL
R
IVAS HAS BEEN HERALDED
as one of the brightest in a new wave of Spanish writers influenced by Spanish and European traditions, as well as by the history of Spain over the past seventy years.
Principally set in the summer
of
1936,
at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War,
The Carpenter’s Pencil
charts the linked destinies of several characters. There is Doctor Daniel de Barca, who, like his Biblical namesake, cheats death in Franco’s prisons; he is a Republican and a revolutionary who is in love with Marisa Mallo. Marisa is in love with the Doctor but family prejudice and the bitter, wrenching effects of the civil war keep them apart. Herbal, the narrator, who is also in love with Marisa, is a Francoist bully and soldier. He has killed a Republican painter and, as a keepsake, he holds on to the artist’s pencil. As if not willing to be separated from the instrument, though, the ghost of the painter remains with Herbal, whispering in his ear as Herbal tells the story of how the love between Daniel and Marisa deepened and managed to stay alive in those awful days. All are bound by the events of the Civil War—artists and peasants alike—and all are brought to life, in Rivas’s skillful hand, with the power of the carpenter’s pencil, a pencil that draws both the measured line and the artist’s dazzling vision.
“A profound tale of love, art, politics and the lingering effects of a gentleness and cruelty on the soul.”
—
The Miami Herald
“Luminous … Rivas is a superb stylist and he presents his view of Spain’s grim past through small, sharp dots of light, in the manner of a pointillist … He succeeds in conveying through language the waves of the Atlantic breaking against the coast of Galicia.”
—
The Washington Post
“He is an important storyteller because he is sensitive and has an incredible ear, which, in his fiction, is allied to great ingenuity.”
—J
OHN
B
ERGER
Manuel Rivas
was born in Galicia, in Spain, in 1957. A journalist and bestselling novelist, he has been hailed as one of the leading writers of his generation.
The Carpenter’s Pencil
has been published in nine countries and several of Rivas’s stories from the collection
Butterfly’s Tongue
were made into an award-winning film.
1
See Appendix I.
2
See Appendix II.