The Carpenter's Pencil (8 page)

“Their arms,” the painter added, “are the handles of a paintbrush, coloured like alder wood, because they also formed by the side of the river. When they wring out the wet clothes, the washerwomen’s arms tense like roots along a riverbank. The hillside is like a canvas. Look. They are painting over gorse bushes and brambles. The prickles are the best pegs the washerwoman has. There she goes. The long brush stroke of a white sheet. Two dashes of red socks. The slight tremor of some lingerie. Hanging out to dry, each article of clothing tells a story.

“Washerwomen’s hands
have hardly any nails. This also tells a story, as, if we had an X-ray, would the spine’s upper vertebrae, deformed by the weight of the loads piled on to their heads over the years. Washerwomen have hardly any nails. The salamander is said to have stolen them with its breath. But that, as far as it goes, is a magical explanation. Their nails were consumed by caustic soda.”

In the dead man’s absence, the Iron Man strove to take his place in the guard Herbal’s head. The Iron Man would show up not at a lazy, melancholy time such as twilight, nor in order to settle himself like a carpenter’s pencil on the saddle behind his ear, but first thing in the morning, in the mirror, when he was shaving. Herbal did not find waking up easy. He spent the whole night panting, like someone climbing up and down mountains pulling at a mule laden with corpses. So the Iron Man found him more than receptive to pieces of advice that were really commands. “Learn to hold your gaze and use it to dominate. That is why you should clench your teeth. Open your mouth as little as possible. Words, however imperious and rude, always represent an open door to dilettantes, and the weakest grab on to them as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a mast. Silence, accompanied by martial, categorical gestures, has the effect of intimidation. Human relationships, do not forget, are always established in terms of power. As with wolves, exploratory contact leads to a new order: dominance or submission. And button up that trench coat, soldier! You’re a winner. Let them know it.”

In the room his sister had given him, there was a bicycle hanging on the
wall. It was a bicycle that no-one used, the tyres so clean they looked as if they had never been placed on the ground. The tin mudguards gleamed like sheets of German silver. Before going to sleep, he would sit on the bed in front of the bicycle. As a child he had dreamt of something similar. Or had he? Perhaps it was a dream he dreamt he had dreamed. Suddenly, he felt cheated. All he could remember having dreamt, the dream that displaced all his dreams, was that girl, that young woman, that woman, called Marisa Mallo. There she was, on the wall, like a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the altar.

Grazing the cattle, he would often run off with his uncle the trapper. But he had another uncle. Another loner. Nan, his carpenter uncle.

When he returned with the cows, he would stop off at Nan’s workshop, a shed that gave on to the road, made of planks coated with pitch, like a grounded ark at the entrance to the village. To Herbal, Nan was a strange creature. There was in the orchard an apple tree covered with moss, the blackbirds’ favourite. It was the same, in his family, with that carpenter great-uncle. Old age was on the lookout in the village. Suddenly, it would fling teeth into a dark corner, cloak the women in mourning in a misty side street, change voices with a swig of firewater, and wrinkle skin in the stepping stone of a winter. But old age had not pierced Nan. It had fallen over him, covered him in white hair, tufts that curled on his chest and clothed his arms the way the moss clothed the apple tree’s branches, but his skin shone yellow like the
heart of a local pine, his teeth sparkled with good humour, and then he always carried that red plume behind his ear. The carpenter’s pencil. It was never cold in Nan’s workshop. The ground was a soft bed of shavings. The aroma of sawdust soaked up the humidity. “Where’ve you been?” he would ask, knowing full well. “A kid like you should be at school.” And then he would murmur with a disapproving gesture, “They cut the wood too soon. Come here, Herbal. Close your eyes. Now tell me, just by the smell, as I taught you, which is chestnut and which is birch?” The child sniffed in the air, bringing his nose closer until the tip was brushing the pieces of wood. “Not like that. Do it without touching. Just by using the smell.”

“This one’s birch,” Herbal pointed finally with his finger.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It smells of woman.”

“Very good, Herbal.”

And then he would draw the stump of birch towards him and breathe in deeply, half-closing his eyes. Woman bathed in the river.

Herbal takes the bicycle down from the wall. The handlebars and mudguards gleam like German silver. Underneath the bed is Nan’s box of tools, which he ties to the rack. He makes some coffee in the pot, like an infusion, the way Nan would. It is dawn outside and he starts pedalling along the road that follows the river, bordered by birch trees. A strange figure is coming the other way. It is wearing a robe and is so made up it looks like a mask. It gestures to him to stop. Herbal tries to pedal harder but the chain comes off the sprocket.

“Hello,
Herbal, dear. I am Death. Do you know where a smiling young accordionist and that slut, Life, might be?”

But then Herbal, searching for a weapon, something with which to defend himself, grabs hold of the pencil behind his ear. It grows to the length of a red spear. The graphite at the end glitters like polished metal. Death opens her eyes in horror. She vanishes. All that is left is a petrol stain in a puddle on the road. Herbal repairs the bike and pedals along, happily whistling a goldfinch’s paso doble, with the red pencil behind his ear. He arrives at Marisa Mallo’s house in the country and greets her cheerfully, looking up at the sky. “Lovely day!” “Beautiful,” she agrees. “Right,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “what’ll it be today?” “A trough, Herbal. A kneading trough.”

“Fashioned out of walnut, my lady. With the legs nicely turned and an escutcheon on the keyhole.”

“And a cabinet, Herbal. Will you make me a cabinet as well?”

“With a baluster of scrolls.”

He woke up to the Iron Man’s orders. He had fallen asleep on top of the bed, fully clothed. In the kitchen he could hear his sister’s docile screams. He recalled what Sergeant Landesa had told him. “Give him a kick in the balls from me.” “That’s enough,” he murmured. “The bastard.”

“Did you catch that? I want a hot plate of food waiting for me on the table. And I don’t care what time it is!”

His sister
was in a nightdress, her hair dishevelled, carrying a bowl of soup in her hands. Herbal’s presence seemed to startle her further because she spilled part of the bowl. The husband was wearing uniform. The blue shirt. The leather straps. The pistol in its shoulder holster. He stared at him. Through stretch-marked eyes. Drunk. He gave the hint of a cynical smile. Then he wiped his tongue over his teeth.

“Can you not sleep, Herbal?”

He took out the pistol and placed it on the table. Next to the cutlery and piece of bread, the Star resembled some absurd, helpless tool. Zalo Puga filled two glasses with wine.

“Hey, come and sit down. Have a drink with your brother-in-law. You,” he addressed his wife, “can put that away.”

He winked at Herbal and began to slurp straight from the bowl. He was always like this. He would swing from aggressive arrogance to drunken camaraderie. Beatriz attempted to hide the marks of ill-treatment, but sometimes, when they were alone, she would break down and cry in her brother’s arms. Now, having untied the sack her husband had brought home with him, Herbal saw how she was taken aback and shuddered, as if she might fall.

“Well, what do you think? A good day’s hunting! Go on then, get it out.”

“I’d rather do it tomorrow.”

“Come on, woman. It won’t bite. Let your brother see.”

Overcoming her disgust, she put her hands in and finally pulled out a pig’s head. She turned it around to face the men, holding it as far away as possible. Grains of salt in the oblique hollows of its eyes.

“Poor
thing!”

Herbal’s brother-in-law laughed at his own joke. “It’s all there, the tail and everything!” Then he added, “The stupid old woman didn’t want to let it go. She said she’d already given a son for Franco. Ha, ha, ha!”

Zalo Puga had put on a lot of weight since the start of the war. He worked in Supplies. He would go around the different villages in the company of others, confiscating foodstuffs. And keep a part of the booty for himself. “She didn’t want to let it go,” he said again in a sordid tone. “She clung on to the hams like relics. I had to shake her loose.”

When Beatriz dragged the sack out to the pantry, he produced two cigars from his shirt pocket and offered one to Herbal. The first wisps of smoke crossed and ascended, locked in a struggle, towards the lamp. Zalo Puga stared at him through the stretch marks in his eyes.

“You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you? But you don’t have the balls.”

And he burst out laughing for a second time.

IN BETWEEN THE
PRISON AND THE FIRST HOUSES
of the city were some high cliffs. Sometimes, when the men were taking their break in the courtyard, women would appear on the cliffs’ summit, seemingly sculpted but for the sea breeze that ruffled their skirts and long hair. In the sunny corner of the courtyard, some of the men would shield their eyes from the sun and gaze at them. They made no gesture. Only once in a while would the women slowly wave their arms, as with a flag code that grows more agitated the moment it is recognized.

From the sentry box in a corner of the prison wall, with the carpenter’s pencil behind his ear, Herbal listened to what the painter was telling him.

He was telling him that beings and things are clothed in light. That even the Gospels talk of men as “the children of light”. Between the prisoners in the courtyard and the women on the cliffs, there had to be threads of light running over the wall, invisible threads that would however transmit the colour of clothing
and the trousseau of memory. And not just that, a gangway of luminous and sensory ropes. The guard imagined that, still as they were, the prisoners and the women on the cliffs were making love and it was the gale of their fingers tossing their skirts and long hair.

One day he saw her among the other women wearing shabby clothes. Her long, russet hair stirred by the breeze, laying threads to the doctor in the prison courtyard. Silk threads, invisible threads. Not even an accurate marksman would know how to tear them.

Today there were no women. A group of children with shaved heads, making them look like small men, were playing soldiers with sticks instead of swords. They were fighting for the top of the cliffs like the towers of a fort. They tired of fencing, and started using the same sticks as rifles. They would fall down dead and roll over, like extras in a film, and then stand up laughing and again roll down the hillside until they were close to the prison wall. One of them, having fallen, raised his eyes and met the guard’s gaze. He picked up the stick, rested it against his shoulder, with one foot forward in a marksman’s stance, and aimed at him. “Brat,” said the guard. And he decided to give him a fright. He picked up his rifle and aimed in turn in the kid’s direction. The others were stunned and shouted out to him from behind. “Run, Chip! Run!” The boy slowly lowered his stick weapon. He had a freckled face and a bold, toothless grin. Suddenly, in one swift movement, he placed the stick back against his shoulder, shot – bang, bang! – and took to his heels, pulling himself up
the hillside in his patchwork trousers. The guard followed him with the front sight of his rifle. Herbal could feel his cheeks burning. When the boy disappeared behind the cliffs, he laid down the weapon and breathed deeply. He was short of breath. The sweat was pouring off him. He heard the echo of a guffaw. The Iron Man had caused the painter to dismount. The Iron Man was laughing at him.

“What’s that you’re carrying behind your ear?”

“A pencil. A carpenter’s pencil. It’s a way of remembering someone I killed.”

“That’s quite some booty!”

On I April 1939, Franco signed the victory dispatch.

“Today we are celebrating the victory of God,” said the chaplain in his homily during the High Mass held in the courtyard. He did not say it with any great haughtiness, rather as someone who is stating the law of gravity. That day, guards had been placed in between the rows of prisoners. Authorities were in attendance and the governor did not want unpleasant surprises, insurrections of laughter or coughing, as had happened on previous occasions when some preacher had rubbed salt into the wound, blessed the war he called a Crusade and urged them to repent, fallen angels of the band of Beelzebub, and to ask for divine protection for General Franco. The chaplain, however, was different, his fanaticism less prosaic. It had a certain theological framework, which he had worked on in discussions with the inmates, most of whom were fanatical readers. They would read anything they could lay their hands on, be it
Bibliotheca Sanctorum
or
Wonders of Insect Life
. The Curia would have envied them such knowledge! They knew Latin, God, they knew Greek. Like that Doctor Da Barca fellow, who one day embroiled him in a spider’s web of soma, psyche and pneuma.

“
Pneuma tes
aletheias
. The Spirit of Truth. You know? That is what the Holy Spirit means. Of Truth, Father.”

“God does not go into battle against men for the sake of it,” the chaplain said. “No creature is an enemy in God’s eyes. It is sin, the manifestation of Satan, that angers God. Besides, who are we from his heights? Small pinheads. What God does is guide the waters of history, in the same way that the miller governs the river’s course. God wages war against sin, not against venial sins, which we are left to handle by means of confession, repentance and forgiveness. First of all there is original sin,
peccatum originale
, the stigma we bear for having been born. Then there are the venial sins (or veritable sins!) of the person per se,
peccatum personale
, those slip-ups along the way. But the worst of them all, the one that hovers over us and possessed a part of Spain in recent years, betraying her essential being, is the Sin of History. Sin with a capital S. This terribly pernicious caste of Sin takes root above all in the vanity of intellect, in the ignorance of simpler folk, who are swept along by temptations in the form of revolutions and ludicrous social Utopias. Against this Sin of History, God will wage war. And, as the Scriptures clearly tell us, the wrath of God exists, a wrath that is just and implacable. God chooses the instruments of his victory. God’s chosen ones.”