The Carpenter's Pencil Read Online Free PDF

combing her hair in a window. The doctor delicately placing two fingers of his left hand and percussing with his right middle finger. “The elbow should not move. Appreciate the purity of sound. Like this.” Tock. Tock. Hmm. Not a tock or a drum. And then with that instrument, the one for the ears, on the same parts of the body. On the lungs. Hmm. “Thank you, Lucinda, you can get dressed now. It’s a bit cold. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.” When she hasgone, he tells the students, “It is the sound of a chipped pot. Though really none of this would be necessary. Her pale, drawn face. A slight colour in her cheeks. The varnish of sweat in this cold hall. The melancholy gaze. That consumptive beauty.”
    “Tuberculosis, doctor!” shouted a student in the first row.
    “Exactly.” And he added in a bitter tone, “Koch’s bacillus sowing tubercles in the rosy garden.”
    Herbal felt the stethoscope’s cold tentacle on his chest. A voice shouted, “It has the sound of a chipped pot!”
    “Consumptive beauty. The phrase attracted my attention, sergeant. So I copied it down.”
    “Wasn’t it a bit rash to go to the faculty?”
    “I went in with a group of Portuguese students on a visit. I wanted to find out if he indoctrinated in class.”
    The sergeant did not look up again from the papers until he had finished reading. He seemed enchanted by the story unfolding and would murmur from time to time as he went along. “So he’s Cuban, is he?” “That’s right, sir, the son of returned emigrants.” “He likes to dress up?” “Cuts a dashing figure. Though he can’t have more than one suit, sergeant, and a couple of bow ties. He never wears an overcoat or a hat.” “He’s only twenty-four?” “He looks older, sir. He sometimes grows a beard.” “It says here the maimed raise their stumps like fists. The man must speak well.” “He’s better than a priest, sir.” “What about this young Miss Marisa Mallo? She sounds interesting.” Herbal was silent.
    “Is she something to look at?”
    “She’s verypretty, yes, but she’s not involved.”
    “In what?”
    “In his business, sir.”
    The sergeant flicked through some newspaper cuttings which Herbal had included in his report: “The soul’s substratum and intelligent reality.” “Children’s coffins in the time of Charles Dickens.” “Millet’s painting, washerwomen’s hands and a woman’s invisibility.” “Hell in Dante, the painting
Mad Kate
and the asylum at Conxo.” “The problem of State, basic confidence and Rosalía de Castro’s poem ‘Justice by the Hand’ 1 .” “The landscape’s
engram
and the feeling of homesickness.” “The horror to come: genetic biology, the fanatical desire to be healthy and the concept of
ballast lives
.” The sergeant viewed with circumspection the same signature under each article: Dr Barkowsky.
    “So it’s Barkowsky, is it? It would seem,” he said, “your man never stops. Doctor for Local Welfare. Assistant in the Faculty of Medicine. Delivers pamphlets, conferences and meetings. Goes from the Hospital to the Republican Centre and still has time to take his girlfriend to the cinema in the Teatro Principal. He’s a close friend of the pro-Galician painter who does the posters. He meets with Republicans, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists … what the hell is this guy?”
    “I think he’s a bit of everything, my sergeant.”
    “Anarchists and Communists are constantly at each other’s throats. The other day, at the tobacco factory in Coruña, they almost came to blows. A strange creature, this Da Barca fellow!”
    “He seemsto act on his own. As a link.”
    “Well, don’t take your eye off him. He’s clearly up to no good!”
    There, in clumsy, handcrafted terms that made it more useful and reliable, was everything there would be to know about a man. The friendships he had, the routes he took, the brand of tobacco he smoked.
    The guard Herbal knew the doctor very