The Carpenter's Pencil Read Online Free PDF Page B

well, though he never could have imagined it. He had tracked him for some time, not under orders but through need. You could say he had followed him like a sick dog, sniffing out his footsteps. He hated Doctor Da Barca. It was not long since he had graduated and already he had a reputation for being a great medical talent. That and a revolutionary. At meetings in different towns he spoke Galician with a Cuban accent, having been born there of an emigrant family, and he had that special way of preaching, like a bomb waiting to go off, that made cripples stand up and even the maimed raise their fists. He would say that the battle to be waged was against melancholy.
    A lot of people did not understand the doctrines of politicians, but melancholy was something people did understand. Herbal had been taken ill as a child. He had turned green, an ugly green colour like fiddle-dock, and swelled, so that he waddled like a duck. He was led from one healer to another, until one of them told his father to immerse him in water sprinkled with tobacco.And this is what he did. He was convinced, on account of previous occurrences that are not worth going into here, that his father was capable of drowning him. He spun around and bit him on the hand. And then his father got even more annoyed. “You son of a whore!” he cursed, and dropped him full into the cask with the brew. He kept him there under the water right up until he saw that his arms had stopped flailing.
    “As soon as I came out, I went this tobacco colour and shot up, all skin, like a razor-shell, the way I am today.”
    Yes, he understood very well what was discussed at those meetings of the Frente Popular. The first time he had really left the village was to do military service. That for him had been like a breath of fresh air. Aside from the odd short leave, the only time he had gone back was to bury his parents. As a serving soldier he had formed part of the troops led by General Franco when he stifled – this was the word everyone used – the miners’ revolt in Asturias of 1934. A woman, kneeling before the body of her husband, had shouted with tears in her eyes, “Soldier, you’re one of the people as well!” “Yes,” he thought, “that’s true.” Damn people, damn misery. From now on he would try to earn a wage for his services. He became a guard.
    Doctor Da Barca was right. His melancholy would not be long coming. Herbal was one of those who arrested him, who in fact overpowered him, bringing down the butt of his rifle on the back of his neck. Daniel Da Barca was tall, he had a fire burning in his chest. Everything about him was assertive: his forehead,his Jewish nose, his mouth, its fleshy lips. When he expressed himself, he would spread his arms like wings and his fingers seemed to speak for the dumb.
    During the first days of the Rising, he had stayed away. It was only a matter of waiting until he grew confident and thought that the hunt had eased up. When he did finally return to his mother’s house, the five of them in the patrol jumped on top of him and he resisted like a wild boar. His mother shouted like a madwoman from the window. But what riled the soldiers most of all was when the seamstresses came out of a shop opposite. They cursed them, they spat on them, and one or two of those little seamstresses actually dared to pull at their trench coats and scratch their necks. Doctor Da Barca was bleeding from the nose, the mouth, the ears, but he would not give up. Until he, the guard Herbal, caught him on the head and knocked him to the ground.
    “And then I turned round to face the seamstresses and aimed at their stomachs. And had it not been for Sergeant Landesa, I don’t know what I would have done, because if there was one thing that got me it was those girls shouting for him like a chorus of mourners. The bit about the mother I could understand, but with them I saw red. And that is when I let go of what was gnawing at me, ‘What the fuck is it