Free The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas Page B

dragged the sack out to the pantry, he produced two cigars from his shirt pocket and offered one to Herbal. The first wisps of smoke crossed and ascended, locked in a struggle, towards the lamp. Zalo Puga stared at him through the stretch marks in his eyes.
    “You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you? But you don’t have the balls.”
    And he burst out laughing for a second time.

14

    IN BETWEEN THEPRISON AND THE FIRST HOUSES of the city were some high cliffs. Sometimes, when the men were taking their break in the courtyard, women would appear on the cliffs’ summit, seemingly sculpted but for the sea breeze that ruffled their skirts and long hair. In the sunny corner of the courtyard, some of the men would shield their eyes from the sun and gaze at them. They made no gesture. Only once in a while would the women slowly wave their arms, as with a flag code that grows more agitated the moment it is recognized.
    From the sentry box in a corner of the prison wall, with the carpenter’s pencil behind his ear, Herbal listened to what the painter was telling him.
    He was telling him that beings and things are clothed in light. That even the Gospels talk of men as “the children of light”. Between the prisoners in the courtyard and the women on the cliffs, there had to be threads of light running over the wall, invisible threads that would however transmit the colour of clothingand the trousseau of memory. And not just that, a gangway of luminous and sensory ropes. The guard imagined that, still as they were, the prisoners and the women on the cliffs were making love and it was the gale of their fingers tossing their skirts and long hair.
    One day he saw her among the other women wearing shabby clothes. Her long, russet hair stirred by the breeze, laying threads to the doctor in the prison courtyard. Silk threads, invisible threads. Not even an accurate marksman would know how to tear them.
    Today there were no women. A group of children with shaved heads, making them look like small men, were playing soldiers with sticks instead of swords. They were fighting for the top of the cliffs like the towers of a fort. They tired of fencing, and started using the same sticks as rifles. They would fall down dead and roll over, like extras in a film, and then stand up laughing and again roll down the hillside until they were close to the prison wall. One of them, having fallen, raised his eyes and met the guard’s gaze. He picked up the stick, rested it against his shoulder, with one foot forward in a marksman’s stance, and aimed at him. “Brat,” said the guard. And he decided to give him a fright. He picked up his rifle and aimed in turn in the kid’s direction. The others were stunned and shouted out to him from behind. “Run, Chip! Run!” The boy slowly lowered his stick weapon. He had a freckled face and a bold, toothless grin. Suddenly, in one swift movement, he placed the stick back against his shoulder, shot – bang, bang! – and took to his heels, pulling himself upthe hillside in his patchwork trousers. The guard followed him with the front sight of his rifle. Herbal could feel his cheeks burning. When the boy disappeared behind the cliffs, he laid down the weapon and breathed deeply. He was short of breath. The sweat was pouring off him. He heard the echo of a guffaw. The Iron Man had caused the painter to dismount. The Iron Man was laughing at him.
    “What’s that you’re carrying behind your ear?”
    “A pencil. A carpenter’s pencil. It’s a way of remembering someone I killed.”
    “That’s quite some booty!”
    On I April 1939, Franco signed the victory dispatch.
    “Today we are celebrating the victory of God,” said the chaplain in his homily during the High Mass held in the courtyard. He did not say it with any great haughtiness, rather as someone who is stating the law of gravity. That day, guards had been placed in between the rows of prisoners. Authorities were in attendance and the governor did