The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel RivasRobert Buckeye
Manuel Rivas. The Carpenter’s Pencil. Overlook, 2001. 166 pp. $24.95.
This is the story of Dr. Daniel Da Barca, a Republican doctor in the Civil War, who fought against Franco and survived his prisons. It is begun by a journalist who has been assigned by his paper to write about Da Barca, who has returned from exile in Mexico after Franco’s death. It is continued by Herbal, a prison guard during the Civil War assigned to shadow Da Barca while he is in prison. In a bordello he now manages, Herbal tells his memories of Da Barca to Maria da Visitacao, a prostitute from an island off the Atlantic coast of Africa. The journalist’s story does not get told, but by framing his story with Herbal’s, Rivas underlines how stories should be written and who they are for. For the journalist, the story has nothing to do with himself. For Herbal, it is, in some way, recognition, if not validation, of his own life. One permits poetic license. The other cannot escape what has happened, no matter the poetic license. One is news, information, that one may use, but is not part of one’s life. The other is how the tribe makes sense of itself. With Rivas we are in the presence of a storyteller who tells his stories around the fire, rather than that of a novelist, whose books are read in solitude in studies or bedrooms. Call it testimonio, oral history, coffee klatch, or the talk of a family reunion or neighborhood bar, but it is the purest form of keeping the past alive and bringing people together. The Carpenter’s pencil (which Herbal takes after he shoots him to put him out of his misery) is both a tangible artifact of that past and also a concrete metaphor of how it may be kept alive. [Robert Buckeye]