Free The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas

melancholy time such as twilight, nor in order to settle himself like a carpenter’s pencil on the saddle behind his ear, but first thing in the morning, in the mirror, when he was shaving. Herbal did not find waking up easy. He spent the whole night panting, like someone climbing up and down mountains pulling at a mule laden with corpses. So the Iron Man found him more than receptive to pieces of advice that were really commands. “Learn to hold your gaze and use it to dominate. That is why you should clench your teeth. Open your mouth as little as possible. Words, however imperious and rude, always represent an open door to dilettantes, and the weakest grab on to them as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a mast. Silence, accompanied by martial, categorical gestures, has the effect of intimidation. Human relationships, do not forget, are always established in terms of power. As with wolves, exploratory contact leads to a new order: dominance or submission. And button up that trench coat, soldier! You’re a winner. Let them know it.”
    In the room his sister had given him, there was a bicycle hanging on thewall. It was a bicycle that no-one used, the tyres so clean they looked as if they had never been placed on the ground. The tin mudguards gleamed like sheets of German silver. Before going to sleep, he would sit on the bed in front of the bicycle. As a child he had dreamt of something similar. Or had he? Perhaps it was a dream he dreamt he had dreamed. Suddenly, he felt cheated. All he could remember having dreamt, the dream that displaced all his dreams, was that girl, that young woman, that woman, called Marisa Mallo. There she was, on the wall, like a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the altar.
    Grazing the cattle, he would often run off with his uncle the trapper. But he had another uncle. Another loner. Nan, his carpenter uncle.
    When he returned with the cows, he would stop off at Nan’s workshop, a shed that gave on to the road, made of planks coated with pitch, like a grounded ark at the entrance to the village. To Herbal, Nan was a strange creature. There was in the orchard an apple tree covered with moss, the blackbirds’ favourite. It was the same, in his family, with that carpenter great-uncle. Old age was on the lookout in the village. Suddenly, it would fling teeth into a dark corner, cloak the women in mourning in a misty side street, change voices with a swig of firewater, and wrinkle skin in the stepping stone of a winter. But old age had not pierced Nan. It had fallen over him, covered him in white hair, tufts that curled on his chest and clothed his arms the way the moss clothed the apple tree’s branches, but his skin shone yellow like theheart of a local pine, his teeth sparkled with good humour, and then he always carried that red plume behind his ear. The carpenter’s pencil. It was never cold in Nan’s workshop. The ground was a soft bed of shavings. The aroma of sawdust soaked up the humidity. “Where’ve you been?” he would ask, knowing full well. “A kid like you should be at school.” And then he would murmur with a disapproving gesture, “They cut the wood too soon. Come here, Herbal. Close your eyes. Now tell me, just by the smell, as I taught you, which is chestnut and which is birch?” The child sniffed in the air, bringing his nose closer until the tip was brushing the pieces of wood. “Not like that. Do it without touching. Just by using the smell.”
    “This one’s birch,” Herbal pointed finally with his finger.
    “Are you sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “It smells of woman.”
    “Very good, Herbal.”
    And then he would draw the stump of birch towards him and breathe in deeply, half-closing his eyes. Woman bathed in the river.
    Herbal takes the bicycle down from the wall. The handlebars and mudguards gleam like German silver. Underneath the bed is Nan’s box of tools, which he ties to the rack. He makes some coffee in the pot, like an