The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas Read Free Book Online Page B

They don’t care how it’s done, they want him out of the picture. Incidentally, he has a girlfriend, quite lovely to look at. A real beauty, believe me. Still. The dead who don’t die are difficult to deal with.”
    “The man’s alive,” said Doctor Soláns with strange resolve. “I took an oath and I plan to keep it. His health now depends on me.”
    During the days it took for him to recover, Doctor Soláns remained on duty in the infirmary. At night, he would lock the door from the inside. When Doctor Da Barca was able to speak, they discovered some common ground: Doctor Nóvoa Santos’s
General Pathology
.
    “By the way, Father,” the governor said, now that they were on more familiar terms, “what do the two of you think about Dombodán, the one they call The Kid?”
    “Think,why?” said the priest.
    “He’s been sentenced to death. But we all know he’s just a bit retarded. The village idiot.”

10

    IN PRISON, THEBEST SIGN OF FRIENDSHIP WAS HELPING someone to delouse. As a mother would help her child.
    Soap was impossible to get hold of and clothes were washed using only water, in very short supply. It took a patient hand to remove the parasites and nits. The second most abundant fauna in jail were rats. Tame rats. At night, they scoured the bulges of dreams on the ground. What on earth did they eat? “Dreams,” Doctor Da Barca would say. “They nibble at our dreams. Rats feed equally off the underworld and the overworld.”
    The prison also had a cricket, which Dombodán had found in the courtyard. He had made a small house for it out of cardboard, with the door always open. It would sing day and night on the table in the infirmary.
    When he got better, Doctor Da Barca was court-martialled and sentenced to death. He was considered to be one of the leaders of the Frente Popular, a political coalition that was “anti-Spain”, part of the propaganda apparatus that favoured the Statute of Autonomy for Galicia, of “separatist” tendency, and one of the brains behind the “revolutionary committee” that organized the resistance to the “glorious Movement” of 1936.
    For months,those who had recently come to power were deadlocked. News of Doctor Da Barca’s case had spread abroad and an international campaign was under way for him to be granted a reprieve. The insurgents were by no means sensitive to such appeals, but in this case there was a factor that made it difficult to carry out the sentence. Since the defendant had been born in Cuba, he had dual nationality. The Cuban government was an ally of Franco, but the press there were asking for clemency in conspicuous headlines. Even the more conservative sectors were moved by the story of that man who had escaped the clutches of death with miraculous stubbornness. In the long wait, as if secret radio waves were crossing the Atlantic, the news reports peeled off details from the trial, underlining the elegance of the young physician as against a tribunal of men in arms. The version most frequently given claimed he had ended his speech with verses that had shaken the courtroom.
    This is Spain! She is stunned and badly treated
    under the brutal weight of her misfortune.
    In a well-intentioned but probably apocryphal brush stroke, given the colourful propensity for which the author of the report was famous, the doctor was even credited with a fitting invocation to José Martí to complement his plea.
    No thistleor nettle grows
    for the cruel man who would wrest
    the heart from inside my chest:
    For him I grow a white rose.
    “It was said later on he’d recited some verses and been interrupted sabre in hand, but I was there and it wasn’t like that,” Herbal told Maria da Visitação. “Doctor Da Barca didn’t recite any verses. Standing up, he spoke the whole time in a slow, deliberate tone of voice, as if restraining an eager child, which made the tribunal feel awkward right from the start. He’d only been given permission to speak as a