The Carpenter's Pencil (3 page)

“What I don’t understand,” said the painter in amusement, “is how you, who are so materialistic, can believe in the Holy Company of Souls.”

“Hang
on! I am not materialistic. It would be vulgar of me and offensive to matter, which tries so hard to come out of itself to avoid getting bored. I believe in an intelligent reality, in a supernatural environment, as it were. The erect mutant gave the chimpanzee back his laughter next to the ground. It recognized the jibe for what it was. It realized it was defective, abnormal. And that is why it also had the instinct for death. It was both plant and animal. It had and did not have roots. The great intrigue came about because of that upheaval, or peculiarity. A second nature. Another reality. What Doctor Nóvoa Santos called intelligent reality came about.”

“I knew Nóvoa Santos,” Casal said. “I published a book or two of his and I’d say we were good friends. He was a genius, that man. Far too good for this ungrateful country.”

The mayor of Santiago, who spent his small private wealth on publishing books, paused and cast his mind back in sorrow. The poor referred to him in Galician as Novo Santo, which means New Saint. But the more rudimentary clergymen and academics hated him. One day he entered the casino in Santiago and turned the place upside down. A young boy had made a loss and committed suicide. Nóvoa’s ideology was worth a constitution: be good and rebellious to a degree. The lecture he gave on being awarded the chair in Madrid was masterly and the whole auditorium, two thousand people, rose to its feet. They applauded him like an artist, like Caruso. And he had talked about the body’s reflexes!

“When I
was a student, I was lucky enough to attend one of his clinics,” said Da Barca. “We went with him to see an old, dying man. It was a strange case. No-one could tell what was wrong with him. In Charity Hospital it was so damp your words turned mouldy in midair. As soon as he saw him, without even touching him, Don Roberto said, ‘The trouble with this man is he’s cold and hungry. Give him a couple of blankets and all the hot broth he can eat.’”

“But, doctor, do you really believe in the Holy Company of Souls?” Dombodán asked ingenuously.

Da Barca looked around the circle of friends, with a dramatic, investigative air.

“I believe in the Holy Company because I have seen it. It’s not just a piece of local colour. One night when I was a student, I went poking about the ossuary next to Boisaca Cemetery. I had an exam and needed a sphenoid, a very complex bone in the head. An amazing bone, the sphenoid, shaped like a bat with wings! I heard something that was not a noise, as if the silence were performing a Gregorian chant. And there before my eyes was the procession of lanterns. There, if you’ll forgive my pedantry, were the ectoplasmic crumbs of the dead.”

The apology was unnecessary. Everyone knew what he meant. They listened carefully, though the look on their faces was increasingly one of disbelief.

“And?”

“That was it. I had my tobacco to hand, in case they asked for it. But they carried on straight past me like silent motorists.”

“Where were
they going?” Dombodán asked uneasily.

Doctor Da Barca adopted a serious expression, as if keen to dispel all remnants of doubt.

“Towards Eternal Indifference, my friend.”

But then, seeing the effect this had on Dombodán, he added with a smile, “To tell the truth, I think they were on their way to San Andrés de Teixido, where if you don’t go when alive, you must go when you have died. Yes, I think that’s where they were heading.”

“Let me tell you a story,” the typographer Maroño broke the silence. He was a socialist and his friends called him The Good. “It’s not a story. It’s an incident.”

“Where did it happen?”

“In Galicia,” said The Good with an air of defiance. “Where else could it have been?”

“True.”

“Well, there were two sisters who lived in a place called Mandouro. They lived on their own, in a bungalow left to them by their parents. From the house you could see the sea and all the ships leaving Europe bound for the South Seas. One sister was called Life and the other, Death. They were two good girls, a pleasure to look at and be with.”

“The one called Death was pretty as well?” Dombodán asked with concern.

“She was. Well, she was pretty, if a bit horse-like. The point is the two of them got on very well. Since they had so many suitors, they had made a promise: they could flirt with men, even get involved, but never go their separate ways. And they kept their
word. On feast days they would go down to the dance together, in the company of all the other young people in the district, to a place called Donaire. To get there, they had to cross marshland, full of mud-flats and known as Fronteira. The two sisters would wear their clogs and carry their shoes. Death’s shoes were white and Life’s were black.”

“Don’t you mean the other way round?”

“No, I mean just what I say. In reality, all the girls did what the two sisters did. They would wear their clogs and carry their shoes, so that their shoes were clean when it came to the dancing. This way, at the door of the dance, you’d get as many as a hundred pairs of clogs lined up like rowing-boats along the sand. The boys were different. The boys would ride on horseback. And perform all kinds of tricks on their mounts as they arrived and left, especially as they arrived, to impress the girls. And so time passed. The two sisters attended the dance, had the occasional fling, but always, sooner or later, they returned home.

“One night, a cold, winter’s night, there was a shipwreck. As you know, there have always been and still are a lot of shipwrecks off our coast. But this was a very special shipwreck. The boat was called the
Palermo
and contained a cargo of accordions. A thousand accordions packaged in wood. The storm sank the boat and swept the cargo towards the coast. The sea, its arms like those of a crazed stevedore, smashed up the boxes and carried the accordions in towards the shore. The whole night, the accordions played tunes which you can understand were fairly sad. The music was driven in through the windows
by the gale. Everyone in the district was woken and heard it, and the two sisters were scared stiff, like everyone else. In the morning, the accordions lay on the beaches like the corpses of drowned instruments. All of them were useless. All of them bar one. It was found by a young fisherman in a cave. He was so struck by the coincidence that he learned to play it. He was already a spirited, cheerful young man, but the accordion gave him an unusual grace. At the dance, Life fell for him so completely that she decided that love was worth more than the bond with her sister. And they absconded together, because Life knew that Death had a foul temper and could be very vindictive. And so she was. She has never forgiven her for it. This is why she roams to and fro, especially on stormy nights, stops at houses with clogs at the door, and asks whomever she meets, ‘Do you know of a young accordionist and that slut, Life?’ And because the person asked does not know, she takes them with her.”

When the typographer Maroño finished the tale, the painter murmured, “Yes, I like that incident very much.”

“I heard it in a bar. There are some taverns which are like universities.”

“They’re going to kill us all! Don’t you see? They’re going to kill us all!”

The person shouting was an inmate who had remained in a corner a little way off from the group, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.

“You don’t stop babbling on. And what you don’t realize is that
they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill us all! Every single one of us!”

They looked at each other, sick at heart, not knowing what to do, as if the hot, blue August sky had shattered above them into shards of ice.

Doctor Da Barca approached him and took his wrist.

“It’s all right, Baldomir, calm down. Talking is a way of letting off steam.”

THE PAINTER HAD
GOT HOLD OF A NOTEBOOK AND
a carpenter’s pencil. He carried it behind his ear, as they do in the trade, ready to draw at a moment’s notice. The pencil had belonged to Antonio Vidal, a carpenter who called a strike in defence of the eight-hour day and used it to write a column for
El Corsario
. He had given it to Pepe Villaverde, a shipwright, who had a daughter called Mariquiña and another named Fraternidade. Villaverde was a self-confessed libertarian and humanist, and would open his speeches on the factory floor talking of love, “We live in communism if, and in proportion to how much, we love each other.” When he became a timekeeper on the railways, Villaverde gave the pencil to his friend in the trade union, also a carpenter, Marcial Villamor. And before he was killed by the escorts who would swoop down on A Falcona, Marcial gave the pencil to the painter when he saw him trying to draw the Pórtico da Gloria with a piece of slate.

As the days went by, trailing the worst omens in their wake, the
painter concentrated more and more on the notebook. While the others chatted, he tirelessly copied down their features. He sought their profile, a particular gesture or look, the areas of shade. And he did so with more and more dedication, almost feverishly, as if in response to an urgent request.

The painter would then explain who was who on the old façade.

The Cathedral was a few feet away, but the guard Herbal had only visited it twice. Once, as a child, when his parents had come from the village to sell cabbage and onion seed on Saint James’s Day. From that time he remembered they had taken him to the Saint of the Bumps and he had placed his fingers in the carved-out shape of a hand and been told to bang his forehead against the stone crown. He had been captivated, however, by the blind man’s eyes of the saint and it was his father who, with that toothless grin, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and made him see stars. “If he doesn’t do it himself,” his mother said, “he won’t get the inspiration.” “Don’t you worry,” said his father, “he won’t get it anyway.” The second time he went was in a uniform, to an offertory Mass. The nave was bristling with people, they had Latin coming out of every pore. But what amazed him was the Botafumeiro. This he remembered well. The huge censer shrouded the altar in mist, as if the whole thing were a strange story.

The painter would talk about the Pórtico da Gloria. He had drawn it with the thick, red pencil he always carried, like a carpenter,
behind his ear. Each of the figures in the drawing turned out to be one of his friends from A Falcona. “You, Casal,” he said to the former mayor of Santiago, “you’re Moses with the Tables of the Law. You, Pasín,” he said to one who was in the union of railwaymen, “you’re Saint John the Evangelist, with his feet on top of the eagle. Saint Paul, that’s you, my captain,” he said to Lieutenant Martínez, who had been a border guard and then a councillor under the Republic. Then there were two old inmates, Ferreiro of Zas and González of Cesures, and he told them they were the elders at the top, in the centre, with the organistrum in the orchestra of the Apocalypse. And he told Dombodán, who was the youngest and a bit naive, that he was an angel playing the trumpet. He went around everyone and showed them their likeness on the sheet. And he explained that the base of the Pórtico da Gloria was full of monsters, with talons and beaks like birds of prey, and hearing this they all went quiet, a silence that gave them away, because Herbal could feel their gaze fixed on his silhouette as he stood there, a silent witness. And finally the painter spoke about the prophet Daniel, who it would seem was the only one smiling unashamedly on the old façade. An artistic marvel, a mystery to the experts. “That, Da Barca, is you.”

ONE DAY THE
PAINTER HAD GONE TO PAINT THE
lunatics in the asylum at Conxo. He wanted to capture the landscapes ploughed on their faces by psychic pain, not from morbidity, but out of an awful fascination. Mental illness, the painter thought, provokes in us an expulsive reaction. Fear before the madman precedes compassion, which sometimes never arrives. It seemed to him this might be because we sense that illness as part of a kind of common soul, out there on the loose waiting to pick off bodies as they come along. Hence the tendency to hide the sufferer away. The painter could remember a room in a house next door that was always closed. One day he heard wailing and asked who was in there. The lady of the house replied, “No-one.”

The painter wanted to capture the invisible wounds of existence.

The scene in the asylum was horrifying. Not because the inmates approached him in a threatening way. Very few of them had done that, and in a way that was more like a ritual, as if they were trying to shake off an allegory. What amazed the painter was the expression of those who were not looking. Their renunciation of space, the absolute nothingness they were walking through.

His mind
in his hand, he had stopped feeling afraid. With his brush strokes he followed the line of anguish, stupefaction, delirium. His hand spiralled feverishly between the walls. The painter came to momentarily and looked at his watch. It was a while since he had been due to leave and already getting dark. He picked up his notebook and made his way towards the lodge. The door had been bolted with a huge padlock and there was no-one to be seen. The painter called out for the porter, gently at first and then out loud. He heard the clock strike in the church. Nine o’clock in the evening. He was half an hour late, it was not that long. What if they had forgotten all about him? A madman stood in the garden with his arms around the trunk of a box-tree. The painter thought it must be two hundred years old, that tree, and the man needed somewhere to hold on to.

The minutes passed and the painter saw himself shouting in anguish and the inmate moored to the box-tree viewed him with fraternal pity.

At this point a smiling man appeared, young but wearing a suit, and asked him what was wrong. The painter told him he was a painter, that he had been allowed in to portray the patients, and he had not realized what time it was. The young man in a suit adopted a very serious expression, “That’s exactly what happened to me.”

And he
added,