Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel

by Victor del Arbol

  She went into the house. The fireplace was smoking, and it was cold. She went down into the basement to look for dry firewood. She opened the trap door and felt blindly along the wall until she found the switch. The wooden staircase creaked as she went down the steps, pushing aside dusty spiderwebs.

  The cut trunks were piled up neatly against a wall, five feet high. María grabbed some from the top. When she removed them from the pile, she discovered a door frame. She didn’t remember ever having seen it before. She wondered what use a door buried behind a woodpile could possibly have. One by one, she removed the thickest logs until she had created a path. She pushed the door open with one hand, and it opened without resistance.

  Inside it wasn’t much larger than a henhouse. The ceiling was low, and the floor was of well-trodden dirt. The only light that entered came from a small barred window. It smelled musty. María saw a couple of rats scampering in surprise; they hid behind a suitcase sitting by one wall. It was an old, wooden suitcase with leather straps and dinged clasps.

  María opened it carefully, as if she were lifting the lid of a sarcophagus, with a strange sense of unease. She searched for her lighter in a pocket and shed some light inside the case.

  It was filled with old newspaper clippings, almost all of them from the period of the civil war and soon after. That didn’t surprise her. Her father had fought on the front of both wars on the Communist side, even though he never talked about it. She carefully sifted through the clippings. They were like the leaves of a dead tree, brown and consumed, ready to vanish with the first breath of fresh air. Beneath she found some cartridge clips and some worn belts filled with holes. There was also a shabby militiaman’s uniform and some boots without laces. At the bottom of the suitcase there was a small box. She lifted it up and heard a metallic sound. When she opened it she found a perfectly oiled pistol and a clip with ten bullets. María didn’t know much about weapons, but she was used to seeing them around the house. Lorenzo usually kept his standard-issue gun in the drawer on the nightstand, beside the bed’s headboard. But this one seemed much older.

  “It’s a semiautomatic Luger from the German army,” explained her father’s deep voice.

  María was startled, and she turned. Gabriel was in the threshold with his legs apart and his arms crossed over his chest. He was looking at his daughter severely. Had she still been a child, he surely would have given her a good thrashing. María felt the redness coming to her cheeks. She put the pistol back in its place and stood up slowly.

  “I saw the door and I was curious … I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you.”

  Gabriel walked toward the suitcase. He closed it and turned toward his daughter seriously.

  “We all have doors that are best left closed. I think you should go back home tomorrow morning early, before your husband starts to wonder where you are.”

  * * *

  That night María heard her father pacing around the house, until well past dawn. She hadn’t been able to sleep either, and she went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

  Then she saw her father on the porch, in his pajamas, smoking his pipe. His gaze grew sad, and he sat in his chair on the terrace with fallen eyelids. He was so quiet that he seemed to have died. And suddenly, in a worn-out voice that didn’t sound like his, he started mumbling unintelligible things, things about the past.

  María didn’t dare interrupt his sad trance. She just stood leaning on the window frame, watching him and listening to his voice slowly fading out, until it was just a sigh.

  She stubbed out the cigarette against the railing and went back to her room.

  She woke up before dawn and dressed slowly. She felt a sharp, intense pain at the nape of her neck, and she searched for her migraine pills. They were just placebos, but she needed to believe that she was doing something to stop that paralyzing pain. She wrote a short note with her address and left it on the pillow for her father to find. There was no light in the windows. Gabriel must have been sleeping. She went out to the street, and a gust of wind froze her face.

  * * *

  When the bus left her at the bus stop in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, the town barely seemed to be stretching awake. In the distance were the lights of the deserted boardwalk, with its restaurants and nightclubs closed. It was sad to see the umbrellas imprinted with Coca-Cola and Cervezas Damm logos frayed and covered with pigeon shit, and around them plastic chairs and tables piled up any which way. Winter Sundays were depressing in a coastal town geared toward the summer trade.

  María wondered how she had gotten there, to the shore of that sea, to that town, to that life, how she had become this woman. It was strange. She had the sensation that she had simply let herself be pulled along by the tide when it came over the fence around her house in a town in the Pyrenees of Lleida, never to return.

  As she walked toward her house along the deserted streets, she remembered her excitement the first time she saw that town. She felt like a champion; the entire coast, the whole Mediterranean, seemed to be bowing down before her. She was barely nineteen years old. She had just started studying law, and she was thrilled by the effervescent atmosphere of the lecture halls, the graffiti on the walls of the university buildings, the police raids, the secret meetings in the café on the Gran Vía in Barcelona, the excursions to the dog track on the Meridiana, the nocturnal trips to the Barrio Chino to provide hot coffee and fritters to the prostitutes and secretly give them condoms … It was all vigor, strength, excitement, and newness: before her hungry eyes she discovered a world filled with nuances, open and supposedly cosmopolitan, so different from the blinkered attitude of her village. There were the first parties in the hostel, the first drunken nights, the first joints, the first kisses; she fell in love. And she discovered the sea.

  Really the sea belonged to Lorenzo; it was his element. She hated it. Lorenzo loved making long trips into the coves. Excited as cabin boys, he and his friends from the barracks separated out the tackles, bait, buckets, and stocked up on water, made omelet sandwiches, and filled the canvas bags with fruit. They spent hours sitting in front of a map of the Costa Brava explaining how many miles they could get if the weather was on their side, what shoals of fish they’d find, what a beautiful dawn they’d have the privilege of watching unfold.

  When María saw him so enthusiastic she smiled, pretending to be just as excited, but really she was preparing herself for the worst. The sea frightened her. She knew that her stomach would start churning as soon as they left the coast, that she would be nervously watching the water line from the prow, but she always struggled to hold back that panic. Ever since she was a girl, a very young girl, she knew that there are some things that shouldn’t float.

  Later all that changed, and her father’s premonitions turned out to be painfully on target. It had been quite some time since Lorenzo had gone out sailing. In fact, since the miscarriage, her husband hadn’t done anything else besides work, drink, and come home in a bad mood, always ready to start a fight. Compared to what she was living through now, María recalled the sound of the barge’s old diesel engine and the trail of foam the propeller left behind with surprising fondness.

  And above all the stillness. That calm that she had never experienced since, anywhere. At a certain point in that desert without corners that is the still sea they would throw out buoys and the anchor. The boat stopped completely, rocked softly by a current that seemed like golden oil. Then she lay down faceup on the boat’s skeleton and let herself go in the late afternoon dusk. She never got over her fear of the depths of the open sea, and she never dared to go with Lorenzo when he jumped off the stern for a dip. But she was able to close her eyes and caress the water with her fingers, as if carefully, but also curiously, touching a sleeping monster that she found both scary and seductive. Then she watched Lorenzo’s breathing beneath his swimsuit, his damp skin shining in the sun, his perfect face, serene, in a state of absolute silence, until the bells on the poles rang out, announcing that some fish h
ad taken the bait. And then she felt like the luckiest woman on Earth.

  Before long she married Lorenzo. It was inevitable that she succumbed to his intelligence and charisma, in spite of Gabriel’s fierce opposition. Lorenzo was a leader; everyone followed him and admired him. Looking back now, she could easily spot the authoritarian tics and repressed violence in his gestures, in his vehement defenses of his positions. She didn’t see an intractable man, but rather a man convinced and sure of himself, strong as a rock, given that the mission he had chosen—saving the world from Franco’s fascist regime—didn’t leave room for lukewarm attitudes or weakness of character.

  When Lorenzo finished college he made a decision that dismayed all his friends, including her. He decided to take the exam for minister of defense. He insisted that it was as effective a way as any to fight against the system, from within, from the very bowels of the beast. The five months he had spent in La Modelo had changed him; he was no longer so impetuous, he had become more taciturn, and he had started to drink more than he should, but he was still able to convince María, as he managed with everything he set out to do. For some strange reason, his record wasn’t taken into account, and he passed the exam with flying colors.

  That was when they decided to buy the fishing house with a dock. It was in ruins, but they worked hard at turning it into a home. They spent every day of their new marriage making love all the time and in the most surprising places. They wanted to have three children—although really, when she thought about it carefully, María realized that it was Lorenzo who wanted to have them, two girls and a boy—and they devoted themselves enthusiastically to their dream of being a happy family.

  Now it seemed like all that had never happened. María had lost the baby, and the butchers that treated her in the maternity ward had destroyed her ovaries. Lorenzo began to show that other face that all moons have, the face María had refused to see before. His work in the ministry absorbed him completely; he spent many days away from home. His rank was infantry lieutenant, but only on very few occasions did he take his uniform out of the closet, and the colleagues he sometimes brought home at ungodly hours looked more like federal agents than military men.

  María began to ask questions, but he always answered with silence or with an avoidance that insulted his wife’s intelligence. If she insisted, he got furious, breaking things and leaving the house with a slam of the door.

  He had even slapped her for the first time. The second slap was accompanied by some kicks to the stomach. The third broke her arm. The fourth attempt was thwarted because María held a knife to his balls. She hadn’t screwed up enough courage to cut them off, but she now knew how short the path to disappointment was.

  After each beating, when she saw her husband enter the bedroom at night, she watched him with a raised eyebrow, as if surprised to see him there again. Lorenzo remained at the foot of the mattress, staring at her, feeling that his close watch on the slight movements of María’s feet, or her murmurings as she feigned sleep, brought him closer to the truth.

  “Do you forgive me, María?”

  But she didn’t respond. Then Lorenzo tensed his knuckles and raised a fist into the air. Yet he stopped himself before hitting her. In silence, María tightened like a conch and scratched at the palms of her hands. Lorenzo tore away the sheet that covered her body. He pulled down his pants and masturbated over his wife’s back until he ejaculated with an obscene groan. He wiped up the semen with a corner of the sheet and threw it at her face.

  Like a coin-operated machine, María opened her eyes every morning and sat up in bed with her arms fallen and her hair clumsy on her shoulders, looking at her small feet run through with blue veins that rested on the cold floor. All of the world’s everyday sounds seized her heart. The falling of wastewater through the pipes. And the absurd, completely illogical music of Antonio Machín that played on the old gramophone and which Lorenzo found so thrilling:

  Dos gardenias para ti, con ellas quiero decir te quiero, te adoro, mi vida …

  A slow death, unhurried but sure. That was what María aspired to after ten years of marriage. It was strange how men thought. She learned to take refuge in anonymous sex when the opportunity presented itself. None of the lovers meant anything, but each of them had interpreted her apathy against their own experiences. For some she was a raped nun, for others mentally retarded, for some a mystic, and for some others a common cynic. But all of them, every last one, had tried to force her to renounce her indifference, as if that were the real challenge they faced.

  No one knew her real situation, except Greta, to whom she sometimes vented. Her friend kept insisting that she leave him. She had even offered to let María stay at her house, but María was reluctant. She told herself that she was sticking it out because she loved him, but deep down she realized that wasn’t the truth. What weighed more in her decision was habit, fear of the uncertainty of a life without clear horizons, economic hardship, and, above all, having to recognize her failure. Perhaps she was hoping for a miracle, hoping that the man she had fallen in love with was going to return.

  If only something different happened in her life, María kept thinking, something that opened her eyes, something that offered her a new fate … but nothing changed for the better: her work was routine, and poorly paid. She hadn’t even had the opportunity to show her worth as a criminal lawyer; her time was entirely taken up with causes that clients couldn’t pay for, in an old basement that she shared with other former classmates from the university, who were as tired and frustrated as she was. The only exception was Greta, but not even her radiance eclipsed the ruins of María’s life.

  * * *

  After ten minutes, she went around the potter’s house and headed for S’Agaró Boulevard. Shortly after, on a curve, she caught sight of the stone fence that surrounded her house.

  She didn’t dare go in. She knew that Lorenzo would ask her where she had been, and that he would get furious when she told him. There was one thing her husband had never forgotten, and that was those five months he had spent in prison because of Gabriel. She instinctively searched in her pocket for another cigarette, forgetting that she’d already smoked her last one. Instead of the pack, her cold hands found the hospital’s letter with her father’s diagnosis.

  She was tired; her arms and legs weighed heavily on her as if she had been wrestling in mud. She took a deep breath and went into the house.

  Lorenzo was dozing on the living room couch. In the background she heard bolero music from the record player. It was the perfect musical accompaniment to his binges. And he had been drinking for quite a while before falling asleep, judging by the remains scattered on the glass coffee table. María took off her shoes and approached him without making any noise. She observed him, stroking the air around him without actually touching him for fear of waking him, sad and relieved at the same time to be able to put off the conversation about her father.

  The dark skin and curly hair on Lorenzo’s chest peeked out of his pajamas. He was sleeping like a child, with an expression both provocative and naive. He was the perfect oxymoron. He was gorgeous, but there were starting to be signs that his beauty would fade. María liked to look at him in those brief moments of peace his sleeping afforded her. It seemed like he was always going to be there, the man who slept on the right side of the bed, hogging the covers. She missed the days when she fell asleep glued to his thighs and tight against his back; she could feel his ribs and the vertebrae of his spine. She listened to his breathing. She ran her hand over his waist, and her fingers sought out his chest, tangling in its hair.

  She went to find a blanket, and she covered him up. Then she went up to the office.

  She turned on the night-light and unwrapped a new pack of cigarettes. She slid slightly open the glass door that led to the terrace, and lit a cigarette. Lorenzo hated that she smoked. The first mouthful of smoke escaped through the crack. She sat with her elbows leaning on the desk and her head resting on her fingers. The
n she saw the handwritten note leaned against the vase. She recognized her husband’s handwriting, quick and with strong strokes.

  That lesbian friend of yours called. She says you should call her first thing in the morning about something very important. I guess it’s just some excuse to get into your panties, but that’s your business.

  María was hurt by the note’s crude tone.

  “Son of a bitch…,” she murmured, angry with herself for stubbornly continuing to remain by the side of a man like that. But she soon found herself intrigued about what important thing Greta wanted to tell her.

  4

  When she got to the office the only sound was the buzzing of the floor polisher pushed by the janitor in the hallway. All the desks were still empty, the metal file cabinets closed, the telephones on the desks silent, the lights turned off, and the law books lined up in perfect order along the length of the entire wall. María had spent a good part of the last few years there, and she had devoted absolutely all her talent and energy to making that firm grow. And suddenly, now she saw it for what it really was: a cold, inhospitable, sterile place, a place imbued with the indifference of a great god who didn’t value the sacrifices of the tiny worshippers who served him.

  There was light behind Greta’s door.

  María knocked and opened without waiting for her to respond. The window blinds were half lowered, and a pleasant dim light illuminated the bookcase and desk with three chairs placed in a semicircle around it. In one corner, a small low table had two glasses, a thermos of coffee, and a bottle of water on it.