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

by Victor del Arbol

  Greta was standing, talking to a woman in her fifties who was a bundle of nerves.

  “What’s this important news?” asked María, leaving her coat on the rack.

  Greta’s expression was serious.

  “Let me introduce you to Pura. I think you’ll be interested in what she has to say.”

  Purificación was a tiny woman who seemed in over her head, with no aspirations beyond paying her rent. There wasn’t anything interesting about her. She didn’t even consider herself a woman. She simply saw herself as a beast of burden, carrying on her back five dirty kids and a cramped house, who bore life’s blows by cowering and looking at the tips of her holey espadrilles. She sat on the edge of a chair with her hands on her lap, squeezing a dirty handkerchief. Greta served her some coffee.

  “Why don’t you tell my colleague what you told me?”

  The woman started to talk about her husband. His name was Jesús Ramoneda.

  “He works as an informant for the police. Everyone knows it, so I don’t think I’m revealing much by telling you.”

  “That’s not a very common job,” interjected María, intrigued.

  Pura looked at her with a slight sternness in her eyes.

  “My husband is not a common man.”

  She explained that her husband was incapable of running his own life. He beat her and the kids, and he drank too much. He often disappeared for days, sometimes even weeks. Purificación figured that he was cheating on her or going with whores, or that maybe he had run afoul of the law. That was his world, the underworld. But she said nothing, what could she say? Her world spanned a junk-filled living room, a filthy kitchen, and five constantly crying kids. She even wanted, with all her heart and soul, for him to leave her. At least, when he was gone, she could breathe freely.

  María listened and took notes. It sounded like the typical abuse case; the woman’s husband was a real son of a bitch, like so many others … And suddenly she felt ashamed and confused: like so many others. Was there really that much difference between what that poor woman was going through and what Lorenzo did to her? She picked up a cup of coffee and hid her gaze in it, as if that confluence of fates made her uncomfortable. She knew that Greta was watching her closely, but she pretended she hadn’t realized.

  “I think I get the idea,” she said, “but I don’t think we can do much to help you. Divorce is not legal here, and a woman leaving home is committing a crime. However, I can give you the address of a secret shelter where we send women in your situation.”

  She started to jot down the address, when Pura asked her to stop writing and looked at her very seriously.

  “A few days ago a plainclothes policeman came asking for him. He wasn’t one of the regulars; I’d never seen him before. He seemed very angry. He showed me a photograph of a girl that must have been about twelve and asked me if I had seen her around or if Ramoneda had ever mentioned her. I told him no, and he left angrily … Three days later two other agents came to see me. I did know them, they were from the Verneda station, and they often came by the house so that Ramoneda would give them information about the goings-on in the neighborhood. But they weren’t there to see him; they came to see me. They told me that something terrible had happened and that my husband was in the hospital. That he might die. Those men explained that they could take care of things. They offered me ten thousand pesetas in exchange for not reporting it. They would take care of everything.”

  María turned in her chair, shocked.

  “But why did they offer you money not to report it?”

  “It seems that the guy who tried to kill my husband is that first cop who came a few days earlier with the photo of the girl. I think he is a chief inspector of the information squad. He had my husband in a basement for several days, doing all sorts of nasty things to him.”

  In that moment María felt afraid. It was as if up to that point in the conversation she had been playing with a cylinder that seemed harmless and she had suddenly discovered that it was filled with nitroglycerine. She cautiously shifted her gaze toward Greta, who remained silent with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “And I guess you came to see me because you want to report that policeman?” asked María guardedly.

  Purificación looked at both lawyers with her little dead eyes, which suddenly took on an intense gleam.

  “What I want is to know if I can get more money out of them.”

  María and Greta exchanged a look somewhere between perplexed and embarrassed. Nonetheless, María immediately realized the importance of what was to come. Her reservations didn’t matter; who cares if what the woman was looking for was money or justice?

  “If we can put that chief inspector in prison, you’ll have all the money and fame you could ever want.”

  María accepted the case without thinking, thrilled. It was what she had been waiting for since she finished law school. Good-bye clerking, half-assed cases, crumbs. She had hit the mother lode, and she planned on taking full advantage of the opportunity.

  “I’ll need to talk to your husband.”

  “He’s in a coma.”

  María’s expression soured. That was the first obstacle. The victim couldn’t identify his aggressor.

  “I want to see him anyway.”

  * * *

  The only thing that María saw of that battered man was his swollen body on a stretcher in the emergency ward of the Francisco Franco Residence. She was taken aback by the deformity of his face, completely raw and ruined. And she was sure it would also impress the district attorney and the judge. As for his character, the way he thought and behaved, she only had Purificación’s story, and most of that information she would keep hidden to win the case.

  There were months of intense work. Looking for incriminating evidence, witnesses, the motive behind the aggression … It turned out to be surprisingly easy to find witnesses who would testify to the brutality of that inspector, whom María never saw until the trial started. When the hearing date had been set, she already had enough evidence to prove that Inspector César Alcalá was a corrupt cop who ran a ring of drugs and prostitution. Ramoneda, who worked as an informant for the inspector, was thinking of turning him in, so César Alcalá decided to murder him, but not before cruelly torturing him to find out what Ramoneda knew.

  “A clear-cut case,” said María, before her final summation.

  Greta, who had worked on the case as much as María had, frowned. Suddenly, there seemed to be too much incriminating evidence, too much testimony against him. And Ramoneda was still in a coma, unable to explain himself. Besides, there was something that no one had mentioned in the case.

  “Pura says that that policeman showed her a photo of a twelve-year-old girl. We haven’t even tried to find out who she is and why the inspector was looking for her.”

  “That’s not important to our case,” said María uncomfortably, settling the subject.

  * * *

  The whole country was watching her in a case that had gained importance and media attention as the months of the hearing went on, until it had become a real acid test for the justice system. In the bars, in the university classrooms, even in the workshops, people made their predictions: Had the regime really changed enough that an important police officer could be sent to prison? Would there be a soft sentence imposed against all the evidence presented in the trial, declaring the policeman innocent?

  Toward the end of 1977 the case was ready for sentencing. That was the moment of glory that María had been wanting for years. The packed courtroom listening to her impassioned final speech, the camera flashes, the journalists taking notes, the radio transmitting live. There was even an RTVE television camera filming her speech. Not even María was sure of a sentence in her favor. But she didn’t care too much. The case had already catapulted her to the front pages of the newspapers, and several prestigious law firms had shown interest in hiring her.

  In those months her life changed forever. The arguments with Lo
renzo grew more and more heated, until finally she decided to leave home. The fact that she had finally succumbed to Greta’s charms was a big help in her decision.

  As for her father, Gabriel, he hadn’t budged about leaving San Lorenzo, but it didn’t matter much anymore. With what María was earning giving lectures, she could pay for a nurse to take care of him twenty-four hours a day. Besides, her client volume had grown spectacularly, as had her billing. So much so that she was able to buy out Lorenzo’s half of the house and move there with Greta, which made her husband want to crawl under a rock, and he asked to be transferred to Madrid.

  Of course it wasn’t all successes. As the months passed, the pressure on her became unbearable. One morning some strangers attacked the firm, hurting some lawyers who were working on the case against Inspector Alcalá, destroying furniture and files and covering the walls with threats. Luckily, María wasn’t there that day.

  Nor was Greta, but when they began receiving death threats by phone at their house, she started to be upset. She asked María to be discreet, but her partner refused to step out of the limelight. She was euphoric and blind, unable to understand that she was putting them both in danger, until one day Greta was attacked in the street by a group of ultra-right-wingers who humiliated her, throwing eggs at her and putting a sign on her that read FUCKING COMMIE DYKE.

  * * *

  And finally, before the Christmas of 1977, the verdict was served: against all odds, the judge accepted María’s incriminating arguments and ruled for a life sentence. That was much more than María and her colleagues could have hoped for. It even seemed to be too harsh of a sentence. As if someone had decided to teach the inspector a lesson. There hadn’t even been time for any appeals. Alcalá was immediately sent to Barcelona’s Modelo prison.

  Ramoneda was still in a coma a year later. His wife was more than satisfied with the compensation, and with the money she received for her exclusive interview with the magazine Interviú.

  * * *

  “Everything worked out,” said María, on the night she and Greta went out to celebrate their victory. It was the first time they could allow themselves to eat in a restaurant uptown and toast with a Grand Reserve wine.

  As María held up her glass, Greta watched in silence from an armchair and took a long sip. Then she put down the glass and dried her lips with an embroidered napkin. A branch of small red veins invaded her pupil. She no longer had the same joy she once had.

  “What’s going on?” asked María.

  Greta felt a stab somewhere vague, but deep inside.

  “I have the feeling that we have paid a very high price for all this … It’s as if we sold our souls.”

  María frowned, suddenly in a bad mood.

  “Stop being dramatic. You love clichés. Besides, what’s a soul?”

  Greta looked at her, surprised, as if she was suspicious of where the question came from.

  “What we carry inside, or better yet, what carries us from the inside,” she said, discouraged by María’s skeptical expression.

  “If I imagine my own hand going into my body through my stomach, I can feel kidneys, liver, lungs. I can even feel my heart blindly among my entrails, cells, corpuscles, and nerves. I can weigh it up in the palm of my open hand, feel the movement of its rhythmic contraction and expansion. But not my soul. I can’t find it anywhere. We did what we had to, justice. You should be happy for having beaten the windmills.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. There is nothing quixotic in all this; it has nothing to do with justice. We both know what kind of man Ramoneda is, and you’ve already seen his wife, spending the indemnity money in Galerías Preciados. And I can’t get that inspector out of my head. Did you see his resignation, his disheartened expression?”

  “They sentenced him to life in prison; he’s not likely to be jumping for joy.”

  “It wasn’t prison that was weighing on his eyes; it was the feeling of injustice. I heard about his daughter. She was the girl in the photo, right?”

  María threw her napkin on the table angrily.

  “That’s enough, Greta, please. Yes, I heard about the daughter’s kidnapping, too. But it’s all a myth; there’s no proof, nothing. On the other hand, there is a ton of evidence that he is a corrupt, brutal police officer.”

  “But what if it’s true? And what if that informer had something to do with the girl’s disappearance?”

  “Let the police figure it out. That’s not our job.”

  Greta smiled sadly. She looked toward the lights of the city, which spread before her like an illusory haven of peace.

  “You’re right; our work is finished. Now, we simply have to forget. But I wonder if we’ll be able to.”

  * * *

  The guards who moved César Alcalá came in through a side door of the prison.

  The old prison’s innards were rotten. They were like catacombs filled with closed doors, boarded-up windows, labyrinthine waste pipes, and corners that had never seen the light of day. A pipe of wastewater had burst, flooding everything with shit. Some men, naked to the waist, splashed about barefoot with their hands in the filth. Handkerchiefs minimally protected their mouths, and it was obvious the liquids were making them gag. They were people without name or face who lived in the basement like rats: sometimes they could be heard scampering beneath the wood, but they were never seen.

  César Alcalá tried to keep his composure, but his legs were giving out under him at the devastating sight before his eyes. The guards forced him into a small room where he could barely stand up without his head hitting the damp, dripping ceiling.

  “Take off your clothes,” one of the guards ordered, without even blinking his inexpressive eyes.

  César Alcalá had to shower with freezing cold water and barely had time to dry himself off before they had him walk to a cracked line of paint on the floor. That line was the meridian between two worlds. Behind was life. In front was nothing.

  They took his fingerprints on some yellow cards and photographed him. Then they handed him his toiletries and had him stick his personal objects into a box and sign a receipt.

  “Everything will be given back to you when you get out…,” said the functionary who had searched him, as if he wanted to add, “If you ever do get out.”

  César Alcalá asked if he could hold on to the photographs of his daughter and his father that he kept in his wallet. The functionary examined them both, scrutinizing the photo of the girl more carefully.

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen,” murmured the inspector sadly.

  The functionary licked his lips like a hungry cat.

  “Well, she’s got a good set of tits on her,” he said cruelly.

  César Alcalá clenched his jaw, but he held back his desire to smash in the head of that worm.

  “Can I keep them, please?”

  The functionary shrugged his shoulders. He tore the photographs with maniacal attention to detail into the tiniest pieces and let them fly over the table. His gaze fell on César Alcalá like a lead weight.

  “Of course, Inspector. You can keep them.”

  César Alcalá swallowed hard and picked up the pieces.

  “What do you say?” asked the functionary, pretending to be mad.

  César Alcalá kept his boiling gaze glued to the dirty floor.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  The guards took him to a corridor with cells on either side and turned him over to another guard.

  The maddening silence was like a vise grip around his neck. The only sound he heard was the rhythmic banging of a lock being opened and closed mechanically. The dull, deep echo of that sound was like the pealing of church bells on All Soul’s Day. The guard who was escorting him stopped in front of each lock, and at each he repeated the inspector’s name out loud, so the prisoners would know he was there. They were siccing the dogs on him, and César Alcalá knew that as soon as he stepped foot in one of the common areas he was a dead man.
/>   “Rumor has it that someone is willing to pay a fortune for your head, so watch your back.”

  César Alcalá shook his head incredulously. He was already dead long before walking into that prison. Dead since the day his daughter had disappeared without a trace; dead since his wife, Andrea, unable to bear the pain, had shot herself and left him all alone.

  His cell was a small space, with thick cement walls and floor, and two bunks beside a small barred window. Some light from the courtyard entered through the bars, almost as if it were asking permission. A sink with no mirror and a noxious toilet with no lid completed the picture.

  César Alcalá looked around for a few moments with a dejected air at the bleak and worrisome landscape he was going to have to get used to. In a weary gesture, he dropped onto the lower bunk.

  The guard smiled mockingly and closed the door.

  The spotlights in the courtyard partially illuminated the inspector’s face. Their harsh force hypnotized him, his eyes motionless in the gleaming artificial light. Along with the drying underwear and T-shirts that hung behind the obstructed windows, abstract faces pressed against the bars watching an invisible horizon as night fell. In those moments the loneliness grew more acute, and nostalgia filled the hearts of even the toughest men. It was as if as the day ended, each of those men took stock of where they were and felt miserable and lost. Every man locked up there embraced his memories, cloaked himself in them: a name, a photograph, a song, anything to cling to in order to feel alive.

  But Alcalá banged his head against the wall to try to erase everything that had existed before that night, because feeling alive was much more painful to him than the threat of a death that loomed near. He returned to the darkness of the cell. His own fate no longer worried him. He sat on the bed and patiently reconstructed the remains of the photographs of his daughter and his father, who had been locked up in that same prison almost forty years earlier—maybe even in that very cell—and he laughed at himself, at the absurd circular path of his destiny.