The Carpenter's Pencil (9 page)

The chaplain read
out the telegram that Pope Pius XII had sent Franco on 31 March, “Lifting up our hearts to God, we give sincere thanks to His Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.”

At this point someone cleared their throat.

“It was Doctor Da Barca,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “I know because I was standing next to him and gave him a hard stare, calling him to order. We were under instructions to quell any incident. But aside from staring at him like something the cat brought in, which he really didn’t care about, there wasn’t much I could do. He had a dry, artificial cough, the cough of refined people who go to concerts. I was almost relieved when the cough spread like a disease among all the prisoners. It sounded like a huge carillon peeling off the bell tower.

“We didn’t know what to do. We could hardly lay into them all in the middle of Mass. The authorities stirred uneasily in their seats. Deep down, we were all hoping the chaplain, in other respects no fool, would quash the rebellious murmur with a timely silence. But, like a cogged wheel engaging with another, bigger wheel, he was inflamed with the gears of his own sermon.”

“The wrath of God exists! It was God’s victory!”

His voice was drowned out by the coughing, no longer the delicate clearing of the throat at the opera but the undertow of a surging sea. The prison governor, assailed by looks from the authorities, decided to go over to him and mutter in his ear that he should cut it short, today was Victory Day and if things carried on as they were they would be celebrating it with a massacre.

The chaplain’s
flushed face turned pale, undone by the frenzy of men coughing as if with silicosis. He went quiet, scanned the rows with disconcerted eyes, as if coming to, and mumbled some Latin under his breath.

What the chaplain said, and Herbal would be unable to remember, was, “
Ubi est mors stimulus tuus?
”

At the end of the ceremony, the governor gave the cries that were de rigueur.

“Spain!” Only the voices of the authorities and guards were heard, “One!”

“Spain!” The prisoners remained silent. The same voices cried, “Great!”

“Spain!” And then the whole prison thundered, “Free!”

Herbal had found out about the victory a long time before from the defeated. “Contrary to what people think,” he said to Maria da Visitação, “prison is a good place to receive information. The news you get from the conquered is often the most reliable.” Barcelona fell in January, Madrid fell in March. Toledo fell on the first of April, April showers. Every time a city fell you could see it on their faces like a wrinkle, a circle of shade around their sunken eyes, you could see it in their languid walk, their neglected appearance. Bombarded with bad news, the inmates bore the fatigue of a defeated column down corridors and in the courtyard. And with renewed force, like a virus lurking in the miasma, the ailments and epidemics returned.

Doctor Da
Barca continued to shave every day. He would wash methodically at the washstand using a small mirror with a crack that split his face in two. He regularly combed his hair as for a feast day. And cleaned his worn-out shoes, which had the sheen of a sepia photograph. He attended to such details as a chess player attends to his pawns. He had asked Marisa for a photograph. Then he had thought better of it.

“Take it, it wasn’t a good idea.”

She seemed offended. No-one likes being given back a photograph, especially in prison.

“I don’t want to see you stuck between four walls. Give me something of yours. Something I can use to go to sleep.”

She was wearing a scarf tied in a knot around her neck. She held it out to him. Never less than a yard apart. Forbidden to touch.

Herbal intervened. He inspected it with apparent indifference. Made of cotton with a red frill. How he would have liked to inhale the scent! “Red is not allowed,” he said, which was true, but he dropped it into Marisa’s hands.

“I’m leaving,” the deceased told Herbal shortly after the end of the war. “I’m going to see if I can find my son. You wouldn’t happen to know anything, would you?”

“He’s alive, I told you so,” replied the guard, somewhat annoyed. “When we went to find him, he’d left. We later learnt he’d dressed up as a blind man and boarded a coach. Even with a blind man’s glasses, he must have seen the corpses in the ditches at the side of the road. We lost track of him here, in Coruña.”

“Well, I’m going
to see if I can find him. I’d promised to teach him how to paint.”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be up to much painting,” the guard remarked crudely. “He’ll be living like a mole.”

From the moment the painter left, and as he feared, Herbal noticed the sense of unease return. Unable to face up to his brother-in-law, he left his sister’s house and asked for authorization to spend nights at the prison. In the morning, when he stood up, he felt giddy, as if his head were unwilling to get up with his body. He was not looking well.

That Doctor Da Barca fellow got on his nerves. His sprightly bearing. His serenity. His Daniel’s smile.

The Iron Man made the most of the painter’s absence. Herbal listened to what he had to say.

He reported Doctor Da Barca. He reported him for something he had known for quite some time.

The doctor had a secret radio. The parts had been smuggled in from the outside, hidden in jars from the infirmary. The aerial was the metal sprung base of a bed. The prisoners’ organization had arranged shifts of patients needing urgent attention as a way of covering up the traffic in and out of the infirmary at night. He had caught the doctor with the headphones. The doctor had tried telling him sardonically it was a stethoscope, but he was not stupid.

He reported him for something else. He had very serious suspicions. Doctor Da Barca was administering drugs to some of the sick.

“One night,” Herbal explained to the governor, “we took an inmate
to the infirmary complaining of sharp pains. He was shouting like someone was sawing at his bones. And in fact, in between screams, he said his right foot really hurt. But the funny thing is the patient, by the name of Biqueira, didn’t have a right foot. It had been amputated some months previously for gangrene. He was one of those who tried to get away, sir, if you recall, when they were painting the front of the prison. It was me who shot him in the ankle. Messed it all up. ‘It must be the other foot,’ I told him, ‘the left foot.’ But no, he said it was the right foot and clung with desperation, sticking in his nails, to the thigh on that side. He had a wooden leg, a walnut leg they had made for him in the workshop. ‘It must be the wood not fitting the stump.’ And I removed the leg, but he said, ‘It’s the foot, idiot, the bullet in my ankle.’ So we took him to the infirmary and Doctor Da Barca said very seriously that it was the foot, the right foot at the ankle. That the bullet was giving him pain. It struck me by now they were putting it on. Then the doctor gave him an injection before my eyes, saying it would make him better. ‘It’s all right, Biqueira. It’s the sleep of Morpheus.’ Almost immediately Biqueira went quiet and a happy look came over his face, as if he were daydreaming. I asked the doctor what had happened, but he didn’t bother to reply. He’s a stuck-up customer. He doesn’t even deign to address me. I heard him explaining to the others that what Biqueira had was a phantom pain.”

“And what else?” the governor frowned.

“It happened again, sir. I discovered they were stealing morphine from Doctor Soláns’s safety cabinet.”

“I have
heard nothing about that cabinet being broken into.”

The last remark struck Herbal as exceptionally naive. He said, “There are a dozen thieves in this prison, sir, able to open that cabinet in a flash using a toothpick. You can be sure they pay more attention to the doctor than to you or me.” And then he calmly produced a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “They’re open phials, sir, recovered from the rubbish in the infirmary. I took it upon myself to find out that they contained morphine.”

The governor scrutinized this vocational justiciary who had turned up in his office, as if discovering for the first time that he was at his service. He thought of a dog trailing a string of cans tied to its tail, causing an almighty racket.

“Doctor Soláns has had no complaint.”

“He’ll have his reasons,” Herbal said, holding his gaze.

“I appreciate your professionalism, officer.” He stood up. The conversation was at an end. “Leave this to me.”

Herbal kept an eye on events. Doctor Da Barca was held in solitary confinement for a time, on account of the confiscated radio. Doctor Soláns was off sick for a long period. As for him, he was notified one day of his promotion to corporal.

He felt worse and worse. He would vent his anger on the prisoners and soon became especially hated. He would deliberately do bad things. One day he told Ventura, a young lad who was a fisherman, “Go to the watchtower this afternoon. I’ll let you see into the women’s courtyard. We’ve a new little slut who’s got two tits like Arzúa cheeses. If you signal to her, she’ll show you the lot.” “But we’re not allowed up there,” said the inmate. “I’ll pretend not to notice,” replied Herbal.

At the time
of the military coup, Ventura had been playing a conch shell day and night in Coruña Bay until they silenced him with a gunshot. The bullet pierced his forearm, as if they had deliberately aimed at a tattoo there of an opulent mermaid, which was now deformed by the scar.

At the agreed hour, Ventura climbed up the tower. There was only one young girl in the courtyard, squatting against the wall. The young inmate whistled and signalled with his arm. The girl struggled to her feet and made her way awkwardly towards the middle of the courtyard, as if she were on stilts. She was wearing an old fur-lined coat and blue wellington boots. She looked up and Ventura thought she had the saddest eyes he had ever seen. She was blonde, her face was swollen, and deep bags coloured like tortoiseshell arched below her eyes. Suddenly, she opened her coat. She was naked underneath. She opened and closed it, as if performing in a marquee at the fairground. The girl had two shrunken tits, hair on her chest, and a penis. “What are you doing here?” Herbal asked, “don’t you know you’re not allowed?”

“You’re a bastard.”

“Ha, ha, ha!”

Every day he would stop by at the punishment cell where Doctor Da Barca was and spit through the small window in the door. One night he woke up, gasping for breath. His heart was thrashing inside his chest. He was so frightened he could not get back to sleep and went to the punishment cell where
Da Barca was sleeping, leant panting beside the door and was on the verge of asking for help. In the end, he went out into the fresh air of the courtyard and began to breathe deeply.

It was then he noticed the deceased settling himself behind his ear. A miraculous relief.

“Is that you? Where the hell have you been?” he asked, concealing his delight. “Did you find your son?”

“No, I didn’t. But I heard the family say he was safe.”

“I told you so. You should trust me.”

“Should I now?” the dead man replied ironically.

“Listen, painter. Tell me something. Do you know what phantom pain is?”

“I’ve heard of it. Daniel Da Barca explained it to me once. He carried out a study for Local Welfare. Apparently it’s the worst pain you can get, a pain that becomes unbearable. The memory of pain. The pain of what you have lost. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

MARISA MALLO
LOOKED IN THE DIRECTION OF THE
monkey puzzle and felt, in turn, the weight of another’s eyes. That majestic specimen planted in the ground of her grandfather’s country home dominated the valley and reached the sky with its huge, vegetal steps.

The dogs had come out to welcome her. They recognized her smell and fought over it with savage delight. In leaps and bounds, they showed off the visitor, like a precious conquest. But Marisa had never felt that other sensation, of being spied on by the monkey puzzle.

“So you’re back again, are you, girl?” it said to her from on high.

As she made her way towards the house, she felt the trees in blossom were scrutinizing her as well, next to the path of white pebbles. As if the camellias were giving each other a nudge and the Chinese magnolias were whispering gently.

Somehow that world belonged to her. It had been both her playground and hideaway. There, something her grandfather had particularly wanted, she had made her debut in society with an exotic party in the Fronteira tradition. She laughed with ironic melancholy just to remember it.

Her grandfather,
Benito Mallo, sat with her by his side beneath the vine arbour, presiding at the long banquet table. So long in her mind’s eye that the white of the tablecloths merged at the edges with the foliage of the garden. Next to his grandchild, that red-haired girl already blossoming into a beautiful woman, Benito Mallo smiled with satisfaction. It was the first time he had managed to assemble all the so-called bigwigs. There, in pride of place, were the people who despised him most, the town’s top pedigree, meekly rendering thanks. There were the bishop and the priests, including the parish priest who had singled him out from the pulpit one day as the captain of sinners. There were the border-guard chiefs, the very ones who had sworn when he was an audacious nobody to hang him upside down from the bridge, so that the eels could pick out his eyes. But something had happened to reality. It was still the same. The same values, the same laws, the same God. Only that Benito Mallo had crossed the border, had got rich from smuggling. Coffee, oil and
bacalao
were talked about. But the popular imagination knew more: the tons of copper amassed by means of electric cables that terminated in a handle turning day and night; the jewellery that came across in the cattle’s stomachs; the silk carried by a legion of falsely-pregnant women; the weapons bestowing honours on a dead man in a coffin.

Benito Mallo had attained that level of wealth at which people stop asking where it has come from. He had forged a legend. The country boy who wore cut suits made in Coruña. Who bought a Ford with leather-covered seats where the hens laid their clutches. Who had taps made of gold but went to the toilet on the hillside and cleaned himself with cabbage leaves. Who gave his lovers fake banknotes.