The Carpenter's Pencil Read Online Free PDF Page A

there’s nothing personal, information is all that is required.”
    “There’s nothing personal, sergeant,” Herbal lied. “I shall be invisible. I’m not much good at writing, but you’ll have a novel on the man.”
    “I am led to believe he’s quite a preacher.”
    “He’s a bomb waiting to go off, sergeant.”
    “Good. In which case go ahead.”
    From that meeting that never existed, some time later Herbal would remember – once more the sound of memory like the murmur of the fountain where the guts are washed – the moment when someone referred to the painter. “He’s not a house painter,” Sergeant Landesa informed the agent finally put in charge of his surveillance. “This one paints ideas. Lives round at the Madame’s.” Everyone had laughed. Everyone but Herbal, who did not know the reason and did not ask. Years later he would find out from the deceased. A madame was the old whore who taught the young girls their trade. She taught them above all how to carry the weight of the man on their bodies for as little time as possible and the golden rule, which was to charge before offering their services. “From time to time,” the dead man told him, “people would still knock at the door. Fathers and mothers with a young girlasking for the madame. My wife would bite her tongue, tell them there was no madame living there any more. And then she would cry. She would cry for each and every one of them. And she was right. Very near there, in Pombal Street, they would find the madame they were looking for.”
    Four months after the meeting, at the end of June, Herbal handed in his report on Doctor Da Barca. The sergeant weighed it in his hand. “Why, it does seem like a novel.” There was a folder with a pile of notes, written by hand in a tortuous script. The ink smudges everywhere, which blotting paper had sealed and turned into scars, looked like traces of a tiresome fight. Had they not been blue, you would have thought they were drops of blood fallen from the scribe’s brow. In a single paragraph, the letters above the line leaned over in different directions, to the left and to the right, like ideograms of a fleet bowed by the wind.
    Sergeant Landesa started reading from a page at random. “What does this say? Lesson in
autonomy
with a corpse!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Anatomy, Herbal, anatomy.”
    “I’ve already told you I wasn’t very good at writing,” the guard cut in, somewhat offended.
    “Another note, ‘Lesson in death throes. Clapping.’ And what’s this?”
    “That was a professor, sir, Da Barca’s boss. He lay down on a table and showed how the dead breathed before dying, in dual time. He talked about this thing some people get when they’re dying, a sort of hallucination that helps them to pass away in peace. He said that the body was very wise.
    And pretended to be dead as in the theatre. The applause went on for quite a while.”
    “Well,I’ll have to go and see him,” remarked the sergeant sarcastically. And then he asked in some surprise, “And what does it say here?” He read with difficulty, “Corrump … corruptive beauty?”
    “Let me see,” said Herbal, moving closer to read over his shoulder. His voice trembled as he recognized the words he himself had written. “Consumptive beauty, sir.
    “He – I mean the doctor – examined a sick young girl from Local Welfare in front of the students. First of all he asked her questions. What her name was, where she was from. Lucinda, from Valdemar. And he would tell her what a lovely name, what a lovely spot. Then he took her by the wrist and looked into her eyes. He told the students that the eyes were the windows of the mind. Then he did that thing they do, tapping here and there with his fingers.”
    Herbal fell silent for a moment and stared into space. He was again recreating that scene that had both disturbed and astonished him. The girl in the thin nightdress. The sensation that he had seen her before,