The Carpenter's Pencil (2 page)

He recited it uncoaxed and unaffected, as if in response to a natural request. What moved the reporter Sousa was his expression, a glow of stained-glass windows in the twilight. He took a swig of the tequila to see how much it burned.

“What do you think?”

“Very beautiful,” Sousa said. “Who’s it by?”

“A priest who was a poet and was very fond of women.” He smiled, “A case of intelligent reality.”

“So how did you two meet?” the reporter asked, ready at last to take notes.

“I had noticed him walking in the Alameda. But the first time I heard him speak was in a theatre,” explained Marisa, her eyes on the doctor. “Some girl friends had taken me. It was a Republican event to debate whether or not women should have the right to vote. Now it seems strange, but in those days there was a lot of controversy, even among women. Isn’t that so? And then Daniel stood up and told the story about the queen of the bees … Do you remember, Daniel?”

“What’s the story about the queen of the bees?” Sousa asked, intrigued.

“In antiquity no-one knew where bees came from. Wise men such as Aristotle invented outlandish theories. It was said, for example, that bees emerged from the stomach of dead oxen. This carried
on for centuries. And do you know why it carried on for so long? Because no-one had the courage to see that the king was a queen. How can freedom be maintained on the basis of such a lie?”

“The clapping went on for ages,” Marisa added.

“Well, it was not an indescribable ovation,” remarked the doctor humorously. “But yes, there was some applause.”

Marisa continued,

“I liked him. But after hearing him that day I began to like him a lot. Even more so when my family warned me off him, ‘You should have nothing to do with that man.’ They soon found out who he was.”

“I thought she was a seamstress.”

Marisa laughed,

“Yes, I lied to him. I went to get a dress made at a tailor’s opposite his mother’s house. I came out of the fitting and he was on his way back from visiting patients. He looked at me, carried on walking, and suddenly turned around, ‘Do you work here?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you’re the prettiest seamstress I know. You must sew with silk.’”

Doctor Da Barca looked at her, his old eyes tattooed with desire.

“Somewhere amongst the archaeological ruins of Santiago, there must still be a rusty revolver, the one she brought us in prison in an attempt to save us.”

HERBAL HARDLY
EVER SPOKE.

He would wipe down the tables, meticulously, like someone buffing an instrument. He would empty the ashtrays. He would sweep the floor, very slowly, allowing the broom time to rummage in the corners. He would use a spray whose fragrance was Canadian pine, so it said on the can, and it was he who lit the neon sign by the roadside, with its red lettering and Valkyrian figure who seemed to be lifting her tits like weights with her brawny biceps. He would plug in the stereo and play that album,
Ciao, amore
, which would continue all night long like a litany of the flesh. Manila would clap her hands, do up her hair as if about to perform in a cabaret for the first time, and then Herbal would unbolt the door.

Manila would say,

“Come on, girls. It’s the white shoes today.”

White tuna. Fishmeal. Cocaine. The white shoes had taken over the territory of the old smugglers from Fronteira.

Herbal would remain with his elbows on the end of the bar, like a sentry
in his box. They knew he was there, filming every movement, scrutinizing the ones who, he used to say, had silver faces and razor-tongues. Only occasionally would he leave his lookout post to help Manila with the drinks, at the rare times it got busy, and he would do so in the manner of a barman at the height of war, as if he were pouring the spirits straight into the client’s liver.

Maria da Visitação had arrived not long before from an island off the African Atlantic coast. Without any official documents. She had been sold to Manila, so to speak. Of her new country she had seen little more than the road that went to Fronteira. She would look at it from the window of the flat, in the same building as the club, which was set on its own, away from neighbouring houses. In the window was a geranium. If we could see her from the outside, as she watched motionless at the window, we would think red butterflies had landed on the beautiful totem of her face.

On the other side of the road, there was a chestnut grove with mimosas. They had helped her a great deal that first winter. They flowered like candles on a roadside altar, and that vision kept her from feeling cold. That and the blackbirds’ singing, the melancholy whistling of black souls. Behind the grove was a dump for cars. Sometimes people could be seen searching through the scrap for spares. But the only full-time resident was a dog chained to a car without wheels that served as its kennel. It would climb up on to the roof and bark all day. This made her feel cold. She thought that she was very far north; that from Fronteira upwards was a world of mists, gales and snow. The men that
descended bore lighthouses in their eyes, rubbed their hands together on entering the club and drank strong liquor.

With a few exceptions, they spoke very little.

Like Herbal.

She got on well with Herbal. He had never threatened her nor raised his hand to strike her, as she had heard happened to the girls at other clubs on the road. Manila had not hit her either, though there were days her mouth resembled the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun. Maria da Visitação had realized that food dictated her mood. When she inclined to eating, she would treat them like daughters. But the days she thought she had put on weight, she would spit out blasphemies as if in an attempt to spew out the fat. None of the girls was sure what kind of relationship existed between Herbal and Manila. They slept together. Or at least they slept in the same room. In the club they behaved like proprietress and employee, but without giving or receiving orders. She never blasphemed when she was talking to him.

The club opened at nightfall and they slept in the day. It was early in the afternoon when Maria da Visitação came downstairs. She had woken with a hangover, her mouth like an ashtray, her vagina sore from the traffickers’ strenuous thrusts, and she felt like mixing a lemon juice with cold beer. Seated at a table under a lamp that opened a pool of light in the semi-darkness, with the shutters closed, was Herbal.

He was drawing on paper napkins with a carpenter’s pencil.

“
‘I’M SORRY,
PAL.’ AND MY UNCLE WOULD SQUEEZE
the trigger. ‘I wish I didn’t have to, my friend.’ And then my uncle would hit hard with the stick, a well-aimed blow to the back of the fox’s neck as it lay caught in the trap. A look would flash between my uncle, the trapper, and his prey. His eyes would be saying, and I heard the murmur, that there was nothing he could do. This is what I felt before the painter. I did a lot of bad things, but when I was with the painter, I murmured to myself that I was sorry, that I wished I didn’t have to, and I don’t know what he thought when our eyes met, a moist blaze in the night, but I want to believe that he understood, that he saw that I was doing it to save him torment. Without further ado, without moving from where I was, I put the pistol to his temple and blew off his head. And then I remembered the pencil. The pencil he carried behind his ear. This pencil.”

THE MEMBERS OF THE PARTY,
THE ESCORTS WHO
called themselves the Dawn Brigade, were fuming. First of all they looked at him in surprise, as if to say, “What an idiot, he didn’t mean to shoot, that’s not how you kill.” But then, on the way back, they kept thinking that his diligence had spoiled their fun. They had envisaged something really evil. Perhaps cutting off his balls while he was still alive and stuffing them into his mouth. Or cutting off his hands as they did to the painter Francisco Miguel or the tailor Luís Huici. Try sewing now, dandy!

“Don’t upset yourself, girl, these are the sort of things that happened,” Herbal said to Maria da Visitação. “I know of one who went to offer a widow his condolences and left a finger of her husband’s in her hand. She knew it was his on account of the wedding ring.”

The prison governor, a tormented man and, rumour had it, an old friend of some of those inside, had asked him to go with them that night. He called him aside. His wristwatch trembled in his hand.
And he whispered very gently, “Don’t let him suffer, Herbal.” Even so he managed to put up a show. He followed the escorts to the cell. “Painter,” he said, “you can go now.” The Berenguela bell had just been heard to strike midnight. “I can go at midnight?” the painter asked warily. “Come on, get out, don’t make this difficult for me.” The Falangists laughed, still hidden in the corridor.

Herbal found the task to be an easy one. When he killed, he simply remembered his uncle the trapper, who would even give the animals names. He called the hares Josefina and the fox Don Pedro. And besides, to tell the truth, he had respect for the man. The painter was exactly how a man should be. Going about the prison, he treated the warders as if they were ushers at a cinema.

The painter knew nothing about his guard, but Herbal knew something about him. The story went that his son, in the company of others, had thrown stones at the German’s house, a German who had relations with Hitler and taught his language in Santiago. They had smashed his window-panes. The German had gone to the police station in a rage, as if it were an international conspiracy. In no time at all the painter turned up with his son, a slight and nervous-looking boy, with eyes bigger than his hands, and reported him as one of those responsible for the stoning. Even the superintendent was amazed. He took a statement, but sent both father and son on their way.

“That’s the kind of man the painter was,” Herbal explained to Maria da Visitação. “He was one of the first we arrested.

‘He’s very
dangerous,’ Sergeant Landesa had said. ‘Dangerous? He’d avoid stepping on an ant if he could help it.’ ‘What do you know?’ he replied enigmatically. ‘He does the posters. He’s the one who paints the ideas.’”

At the time of the Rising, the most renowned Republicans were imprisoned. There were also others who were less well known, but they always coincided with the names on Sergeant Landesa’s mysterious black list. The prison in Santiago, known as A Falcona, was behind Raxoi Palace, on the slope leading down from Obradoiro Square, right opposite the Cathedral, so that if you built a tunnel you would emerge in the Apostle’s crypt. It was at the start of the area known as Little Hell. Every medieval cathedral, God’s great temple, had a Little Hell nearby, the home of sin. Because behind the prison was Pombal, the red-light district.

The prison walls were slabs of stone coated with moss. Luckily for them, if it is possible to say such a thing, it was summer on the threshold of death. In winter, A Falcona was like an icebox and stank of mildew, the air heavy with wet leaves. But no-one there had thought as yet about winter.

For the first few days, everyone, prisoners and guards, carried on as normal, like passengers who had broken down on the slope of life, waiting for someone to crank up the engine so that they could continue their journey. Even the governor allowed relatives to visit and bring them home-made food. Meanwhile they, the detainees, seated with their backs against the walls, would while away the hours in the courtyard, chatting with apparent
ease, in the jovial manner some of them had been doing only a couple of days previously, around the pedestal tables with steaming cups in the Café Español, whose walls were decorated with the painter’s murals. Or like workmen on their break, ironically saluting their boss the sun with the peak of their caps, and spitting genteelly to mark their patch, heading off in search of some bread-and-water shade and after-lunch banter. Arrested in a suit or nightshirt, the long wait and the dust of the calendar were gradually making all of them in the courtyard appear the same, just as sepia does in a group portrait. We look like harvesters. We look like tramps. We look like gypsies. “No,” said the painter, “we look like inmates. We are taking on the colour of prisoners.”

When he was on duty, the guard Herbal could listen to what they were saying. They kept him amused like a radio. The dial of their chatter, to and fro. He would lazily sidle up to them and smoke a cigarette, leaning against the hinge of the door into the courtyard. When he had gone, they would talk about politics. “As soon as we’re out of here, and we will be,” Xerardo, a teacher from Porto do Son, would say, “the Republic will need refloating, as soon as there’s a big enough wave. The federal Republic.”

Next they would be talking about the missing link between ape and man.

“In a way,” Doctor Da Barca would say with a half-smile, “human beings are the result not of improvement, but of an ailment. The mutant we descend from had to stand up on account of some
pathological problem. It was clearly inferior to its quadruped ancestors. And that’s without the loss of hair and tail. From the biological point of view, it was a disaster. I believe it was the chimpanzee that invented laughter the first time
Homo erectus
and it met on that stage. I mean, can you imagine? An upright, balding bloke missing his tail. Pathetic. You’d fall about laughing.”

“I prefer Bible literature to literature on evolution,” the painter said. “The Bible is the best script written so far of the film of the world.”

“No. The best script is the one we do not know. The cell’s secret poem, gentlemen!”

“Is it true what I read in the bishop’s newsletter, Da Barca?” Casal intervened ironically. “That at a conference you said man hankered after his tail.”

Everyone laughed, beginning with the doctor, who picked up the thread. “That’s right. Apparently I also said the soul is in the thyroid gland! But now that we’re about it, let me tell you something. In surgery we come across cases of dizziness and vertigo that occur when a human suddenly stands up, traces of the functional disorder brought about by the adoption of a vertical position. You see, what we humans suffer from is a kind of horizontal nostalgia. As for the tail, let’s just call it a peculiarity, a biological deficiency, that man does not have one, or he does, but it’s been trimmed, so to speak. The absence of a tail is a factor worth bearing in mind when discussing the origins of speech.”