The Carpenter's Pencil (13 page)

Snowflakes covered
the doctor’s hair, which had curled. One of the guards stepped forward to give explanations, “He told us it was a matter of life or death, sir, and that you had authorized it.” In front of the commander, in the station whipped by the blizzard, Lieutenant Goyanes felt obliged to offer a show of authority. He snatched the guard’s rifle and with the butt knocked Da Barca down.

“He did not have my permission!”

On the ground, the doctor strokes the wound with the back of his hand. It is bleeding where the blow has landed, on his cheek. Unhurriedly, he takes a handful of snow and applies it like a balm. “An oil painting with blood and snow,” says the painter inside Herbal’s head. “The ointment of history. Why don’t you help him to stand up?”

“You’re mad,” mutters the guard.

“Help him, can’t you see the reason he’s doing all this is to get us back on the blasted move?”

Corporal Herbal hesitates. Suddenly, he steps forward and lends the wounded man a hand so that he can get to his feet.

“He reacted with complete surprise,” he told Maria da Visitação. “He may have been remembering the day he was arrested, when I knocked him about. But then he returned the lieutenant’s blow with a piercing look. He had that about him. He made the other feel smaller.”

Coughing. The signalman turned to the sick man on the stretcher as if the bell on the crank telephone were ringing.

The commander
moves the lieutenant to one side,

“Now what the hell is going on?”

“This man is not far off a final haemoptysis,” Doctor Da Barca tells him. “Any moment now he’ll drown in his own blood. We’ve lost three already.”

“And what’s the point of bringing him here? I know what tuberculosis is. If he’s going to die, well, he’ll have to die. The nearest hospital is miles away.”

“There’s only one thing to do. We mustn’t lose any more time. I need a room with plenty of light, a table and boiled water.”

The signalman’s table had a pane of glass on the wood. The glass covered a map of the Spanish railways. They threw a blanket on top and laid the sick man down. In the small saucepan on the stove, the water with the syringe needle began to boil. The bubbling sound was similar to the patient’s breathing. Witnessing the preparations for that crude operation, Herbal attempted to listen to his own chest. The sea’s tickling on the spongy sand. He rolled a ball of spit against his palate to see if he could detect the sweet taste of blood. Only the painter was aware of his anguish, the secret of his hidden illness. He kept watch on the others’ symptoms. He pretended not to care, but made a mental note whenever a medical comment referred to TB. He learnt from every sign of his body.

“The Ailing Generation! The best Galician artists died very young, of tuberculosis,” the painter had told him. “The scythe in Galicia has an artistic streak, Herbal. If you’ve got it, yours is a famous disease. They were very attractive too, with a melancholy beauty. Women were crazy about them.”

“Well, thank
you. That’s some consolation.”

“Not about you, Herbal.”

He looked at the sick man before him, lying on the signalman’s table. He was only a boy, young and fresh-faced. But in the expression of his eyes there was an ancient lichen. He knew his story. His name was Seán. A deserter. He had spent three years on the run on Mount Pindo, living like a rock-animal. There were dozens of men in those caves. When they scoured the area, the Civil Guard could never find them. Until they broke the code of signals. The washerwomen were accomplices, writing messages over the thickets with the colours of their clothes.

“What are you going to do?” the commander asked him.

“A pneumothorax,” Doctor Da Barca said, “an artificial pneumothorax. The idea is for air to enter the chest, compressing the lungs and stopping the haemorrhage.”

And then he assembled the syringe, looked at Seán calmly and winked at him in encouragement.

“Let’s to it, eh, my friend? It’s only a prick in between the ribs.”

Just so. Only a prick. A bee’s sting in the wolf’s chest.

But then the doctor is quiet, so absorbed he seems to X-ray the chest with his eyes. He slowly finds a place for the needle and punctures very quickly. Herbal helps to hold the patient down by the wrist. The boy clenches his fists, digs his nails into his own palm. The doctor stands still, the needle sticking into the boy’s chest, attentive to the bag of air. On the signalman’s table, in the caverns of man, the sound of running water, the organ of the wind.

“The train
left the very same afternoon,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “At all the stations it passed straight through. The train lost in the snow was now a phantom train. When it did stop, it was briefly, and no-one came near. A couple of us would alight in order to sort out the food supplies. We returned empty-handed. All the stations smelt of hunger,” said Herbal, looking at the air freshener on the table. “And yet, in spite of everything, I remember one detail. In Medina del Campo a man banged on the window and greeted Da Barca. Then he disappeared. The train was already leaving when he returned with a sack of chestnuts. I caught it almost in midair, at the door to the carriage. He shouted, ‘They’re for the doctor!’ He was a big bloke, with laboured breathing. Genghis Khan. Among the chestnuts, a wallet. ‘He must have swiped it right here, in the station,’ I thought. I was going to keep it. In the end, I took half the notes and handed the sack to the doctor.”

“And what happened to that boy, the deserter?” Maria da Visitação asked anxiously.

“He died in Porta Coeli. Yes, he died in that hospital which was known as the Doorway to Heaven.”

DOCTOR DA
BARCA WAS WRITING A LOVE LETTER.
That is why he kept crossing out. He thought that language was extremely poor for such a task, and he was sorry not to have a poet’s lack of shame. He did have when it came to the other prisoners. Part of his therapy consisted in encouraging them to recall their loves and to put a few words in the post. He lent his hand good-humouredly to writing some of those letters. “Her name’s Eileen, doctor.” “Eileen?” “Eileen …” “
The scent of unripe lemons and tangerine
. What do you think?”

“She’ll like it, doctor. She’s very natural.”

But when it came to him, he felt that, in effect, all love letters were ridiculous. At times he was amazed at the things a sick man could say without affectation. “Doctor, write down that she’s not to worry. As long as she’s alive, I shan’t die ever. When I’m short of air, I breathe through her mouth.”

And another, “Write down that I’ll be back. I’ll be back to seal all the leaks in the roof.”

He crossed out the opening again. Today’s had to be a special letter.
Finally, he wrote, “Wife.” It was then he heard a knock at the door of his room. It was late for the prison hospital, after eleven o’clock at night. Perhaps it was an emergency. He opened the door, prepared to disguise his displeasure. Mother Izarne. On another occasion he would have joked about her Mercedarian order’s white habit, “Ah, I thought you were an ectoplasmic crumb!” but this time he noticed an air of unreality that disturbed him in his modesty. The nun had a woman’s saucy smile. Suddenly, with no other greeting, she produced a bottle of brandy from underneath her skirt.

“For you, doctor. For your wedding night!”

And she scuttled off down the corridor, like someone fleeing cheerful audacity, leaving behind an aura of blazing eyes.

Bluish-greyish-green. Eyes slightly torn, with a fold of skin in the shape of a half-moon on her eyelids.

Like Marisa’s. “God did not exist,” thought Da Barca, “but providence does.”

It had been Mother Izarne in person who had come to him that evening in high spirits with the telegram confirming the celebration of the wedding ceremony. That same morning, Marisa had said “I do” in the church in Fronteira. He knew the time. In Porta Coeli, seven hundred miles away, the doctor was accompanying his patients on their morning walk. He wore a white shirt and his old festive suit. Between pines and olive trees, he closed his eyes and said, “I do, of course I do.”

“Hey, everyone! The doctor’s daydreaming.”

“My friends, I have some news. I have just got married!”

“The others
had an inkling,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação, “because they surrounded him shouting, ‘Congratulations, Da Barca!’ They each had a handful of broom flowers in their pockets, which they had picked up along the way, and they showered him with that mountain gold. The two of them had got married by proxy. Do you know how that works? Her brother, Fernando, took the bridegroom’s place in the church, and the doctor had to complete a document before a notary. In all of this he was helped a great deal by the Mother Superior, Mother Izarne, who even signed as a witness. She took as much interest as if she were the one getting married.”

“I think you were jealous!” Maria da Visitação remarked, smiling.

“She was a very pretty nun,” said Herbal. “And very clever. She did look a bit like Marisa. There was a kind of resemblance. But she was a nun, of course. She hated me. I don’t know why she hated me so much. When it came to it, I was a guard and she was the Mother Superior of the nuns who worked in the prison hospital. We were, at least I thought we were, on the same side.”

Herbal looked out of the open window, as if searching for the distant, flickering light of memory. It was dusk, the time the headlights of the cars began to appear on the Fronteira road.

“One day she caught me opening the prisoners’ correspondence. I was interested most of all in the letters addressed to Doctor Da Barca, of course. I read them very closely.”

“For your report?” Maria da Visitação asked him.

“If I
spotted something strange, that’s right. I had to fill out a report. My attention was drawn particularly to his correspondence with a friend, by the name of Souto, in which he only ever spoke about football. His idol was Chacho, a Deportivo da Coruña player. I found it strange, this passion for football in Doctor Da Barca, whom I’d never heard enthuse about the game. But in his letters – because I read them as well, the control went both ways – he would say things as pertinent as that you should pass the ball hanging by a thread, or that the ball should do the running and not the player, that is why it was round. I liked Chacho as well, so I let them go and didn’t give them another thought. In reality, the ones that interested me most were Marisa’s. I discussed them with the dead painter. He was particularly fond of one that had a love poem that spoke of blackbirds. I held it back for a week. I carried it in my pocket to re-read it. There was no-one who wrote to me …

“But what happened was that one day Mother Izarne came into the porters’ lodge and caught me brimming with confidence, with a pile of opened envelopes scattered across the desk. I carried on as normal. I assumed she knew all about the control of correspondence. But she worked herself up into a fury. I said to her a bit nervously, ‘It’s OK, Mother, it’s official procedure. And don’t shout so much, absolutely everybody’s going to hear you.’ At which point she got even more enraged and said, ‘Take your dirty hands off that letter!’ She snatched it from me, with the unfortunate result that it tore in two.

“She looked
at the opening. It was Marisa Mallo’s letter to Doctor Da Barca, the one with the love poem that talked about blackbirds.

“The pieces trembled in her hands. But she carried on reading.

“I said to her,

“‘It’s of no interest, Mother. There’s no mention of politics.’

“She said to me,

“‘Pig.

“‘Pig in a tricorne hat.’

“Since arriving, I had been feeling well. Compared to the climate in Galicia, Porta Coeli’s was one long spring. But, during that unexpected altercation with the nun, I again felt the damned bubbling in my chest, the sense of breathlessness arriving.

“She must have noticed the terror coming into my eyes. Every one of those nuns was worth a mutual insurance company. She said,

“‘You are ill.’

“‘Heavens above, Mother, don’t say that. It’s nerves, that’s all. Nerves getting inside my head.’

“‘That is an ailment as well,’ she said. ‘It is cured by prayer.’

“‘I already pray. But it doesn’t get any better.’

“‘Then go to hell!’

“She was very clever. And had a fearful temper. She left with the letter torn in two.

“I discussed what had happened with a police inspector, by the name of Arias, who used to come up from time to time from
Valencia, without referring, needless to say, to the matter of my health. ‘Never get between a nun and where she wants to go,’ he exclaimed laughing, ‘or you can be certain you’ll end up in hell.’

“Inspector Arias, with his trimmed moustache, was a great theoretician. He said,

“‘Spain will never have a perfect dictatorship that runs like clockwork, to match Hitler’s. And do you know why, corporal? Because of women. Half the women in Spain are whores and the other half are nuns. I am sorry for you. I got the first half.

“‘Ha, ha, ha!’

“An old barracks joke.

“‘I can tell the odd story, but I’m terrible at jokes,’ I said to him.

“‘There once was a dog named Joke. The dog died and that was the end of the Joke.’

“‘Ha, ha, ha! That’s ridiculous, my Galician friend!’”

Hell. Never get between a nun and where she wants to go. Herbal took the opportunity to tell the inspector it would be better for him to stop dealing with the correspondence.

“Absolutely,” the other said. “We’ll have it sent via the police station.”

“Do you think she liked him?” Maria da Visitação asked, getting to the point that interested her.

“He had a certain something, as I told you. To women he was like a pied piper.”

No-one was quite sure when Doctor Da Barca slept. His vigils were always with a book in his hand. There were times he would
collapse from exhaustion in the patients’ block or on the ground outside, the open book keeping his chest warm. She began to lend him works that they would then discuss. Their conversations continued in the fine weather, into the night, when the patients went outside for a breath of fresh air.