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

by Victor del Arbol

  In spite of that polite distance, César felt a certain affection for that fifty-something guard of sloppy appearance. He was good to him, and when he needed something from the commissary or the library Ernesto got it for him or got him easy access. So they had a cordial, careful relationship, in spite of the deep distance that separated them. The reason behind it was that the guard had a daughter who was about the age that Alcalá’s daughter, Marta, would have been by then.

  The guard knew César’s story and felt sorry for him. He would proudly show César the photograph of his daughter that he kept in his wallet. She was a stewardess for Iberia Airlines. Very pretty, which seemed to worry her father.

  “All those flights to Mexico, I don’t like it. Any day now some flight attendant is going to have his way with her,” he would complain.

  This kind of casual banter, so common in everyday life, was dangerous inside. It could denote preferential treatment that neither the other prisoners nor the guards would have accepted. And César already had enough problems with the other inmates. So when the guards opened the cells he tried to maintain a distant attitude with Don Ernesto, as he did with the others, employing the abstruse slang that he had mastered, which was used to classify the guards as: pigs, dogs, or sons of bitches, depending on how they treated the prisoners.

  But at that moment they were alone and could treat each other like human beings.

  “What do you think about what’s going on out there?” the guard asked César, sticking his head out the window that overlooked the yard.

  Below, the activity was constant, but it wasn’t an ordinary movement of prisoners forming little groups, couples strolling up and down, loners looking at the high walls. That morning everything revolved around the enormous Christmas tree that the Penitentiary Institution had brought in a tow truck.

  “It’s paradoxical” was all that César said, leaning his face against the cold bars of the window while he watched the inmates’ eagerness as they climbed ladders, placing on the tree shiny paper garlands, brightly painted paper balls, little plastic bells, and Christmas figurines.

  “What’s paradoxical?” asked Ernesto, who wasn’t quite sure what the word meant.

  “That in spite of everything, Christmas comes here too.”

  The exultation was impressive. The prisoners shouted to each other, giving contradictory instructions, arguing, but there seemed to be a soothing effect on them, a little bit of happiness that the fir tree gave off every time they shook its branches and it gently dropped some needles.

  “Something’s always better than nothing,” said Ernesto, aware that it was only a short-lived truce. When a starved-looking inmate climbed up to the top of the tree and placed, crookedly, the Annunciation star, the prisoners in the yard broke out into applause and shouts, as if they had all been granted pardons.

  César moved away from the window. Unconsciously he touched his right leg. Today it was hurting him more than usual. Maybe because of the cold and dampness of his new cell.

  “How’s that leg?” asked the guard, somewhat worried.

  César Alcalá pulled up his pant leg a bit, revealing the ugly scar the stitches had left him as a reminder.

  “The doctor says that I might never walk well again. But I’m lucky; I could have lost the foot.”

  The guard shook his head. After three years, César was still alive, in spite of the beatings and stabbings he’d gotten. Not only that, but he had gotten harder, like an iguana in the sun, those reptiles that flinch at almost nothing.

  César Alcalá was different. When he walked or did anything that required strength, his muscles tensed and he moved nimbly, which made him seem young. But, other times, especially when he let his gaze wander as he sat on some improvised stool, he seemed much older, like some sort of ancient wise man whom people looked to as a messiah. He drew attention because of the way he walked with his legs spread, taking big strides. He radiated something powerful, a strength that attracted and frightened in equal measure. Sometimes he stood up, on a bale of planks, and contemplated the height of the walls of the yard, as if weighing the possibility of flying over them. The other prisoners watched him and held their breath: Everyone dreamed of escaping, of leaping over those walls, but only that loner cop seemed capable of achieving it if he really tried.

  Even the guards tried to steer clear of him. César Alcalá barely had any dealings with them, and even though his behavior was discreet and distant, they had all gotten the idea that he was a rebel, an agitator. An agitator is someone who stirs things up, disturbs thoughts, and awakens sleeping consciousnesses. And César, without doing or saying anything, incited the others with his determined gaze.

  However, the last aggression that Alcalá had suffered at the hands of some inmates had been so brutal that nobody understood how he was still in one piece. Inside the prison there was another prison even more gloomy, with unwritten laws that marked the day-to-day and were dictated by the cellblock bosses, dangerous prisoners who surrounded themselves with a pack of rabid dogs to impose their capricious will. César was a marked man. That was why they’d beaten his right knee and ankle until they were destroyed.

  “The guards on duty should have been there,” said Ernesto, as if he were responsible for what had happened to César. “There is always one in the showers. And besides, I don’t understand how the prisoners that attacked you managed to get that mallet out of the tool workshop.”

  César Alcalá’s response was casual: “Someone must have paid them to disappear.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Alcalá. They’re my colleagues,” said Ernesto, showing a corporatism that he didn’t actually feel very proud of. He knew that they went too far, and that because of a few bad apples, they were all spoiled. But still, as fond as he was of Alcalá, he couldn’t let him speak lightly about his coworkers.

  “You’re right, Don Ernesto, sorry,” answered César, not wanting to argue over something so obvious. He looked at the Christmas tree in the yard sadly. He turned toward the guard, and even though he already knew the answer he asked the same question he’d been asking for months. “When are they going to let me out of solitary confinement?”

  The guard shifted his gaze onto the wall, as if something there had drawn his attention. Actually, he only wanted to avoid those inquisitive eyes.

  “Soon, Alcalá … soon.”

  César Alcalá didn’t have his hopes up. In there, soon meant never.

  Behind a rusty gate extended the rundown yard of the prison. A squad of trusted inmates, the least difficult, was digging a ditch. They had just broken the layer of ice with rocks and picks. They were pleased. The work kept their bodies warm, and for a few hours a day they could escape the cockroaches and rats in their cells. Sometimes the fog lifted, and out of the corner of their eyes they could spy the wall crowned with barbed wire. Their wives and families came by when they could and waved or sent tennis balls flying over the razor-sharp concertina wire. Many missed their mark, but some fell into the yard and the lucky quickly hid the pack of cigarettes, money, or drugs that were inside.

  César envied that work. At least those men could exchange looks, smiles, and common gestures with other human beings. Working elbow-to-elbow with someone, feeling their arm there, helped to keep them from going crazy. He watched them from his cell and envied them, considered them privileged, in spite of the fact that those men worked until their hands bled and their frozen toenails fell off. That wasn’t worse than sitting all day in front of a concrete wall, barely speaking to anybody, unable to quiet the inner voice that day after day was destroying him.

  “If I don’t get out of this cell soon, if I don’t get something to do, I’m going to go crazy.”

  Ernesto’s face lit up with a wide smile.

  “Maybe you still can’t go into the common areas, but I have gotten you a cellmate. At least you’ll be able to talk to something more than your shadow reflected on the wall.”

  César Alcalá received the news li
ke a breath of fresh air.

  “A cellmate?”

  The guard’s smile faded a little.

  “Yes. Justo Romero.”

  César Alcalá’s expression froze.

  “Justo Romero?”

  * * *

  Justo Romero was not just any prisoner. His gaunt, slight appearance, as if his clothes were suspended in the air, hid a fierce determination and cruelty that went beyond all the other bosses in the prison. It was because of his coldness, his fairness, and his inflexibility that he inspired much more fear than the rest. He set the rules, crystal-clear rules. If you respected them, Romero could be friendly, stable, and a good conversationalist. If you broke his rules, he lifted a hand like a Roman emperor, and in full view of everyone, he turned his thumb down, marking the unyielding fate of whoever had betrayed him. Invariably, the condemned man showed up dead within a few days.

  On the other hand, his business was atypical. Romero hated junkies, but he hated dealers even more; rumor had it that one of his sons had died from a heroin overdose. He tolerated drug dealers outside of his block, but from the gate in, not a single needle could pass.

  He managed to achieve the impossible.

  “I don’t traffic in pain. I’m a seller of dreams, and in a place like this, dreams are very necessary. Don’t you think?”

  That was how he introduced himself to César Alcalá the day he moved into his new cell.

  “I asked to be moved in with you, but don’t get the wrong idea: I’m no fag, and I don’t plan on protecting you. That would hurt my business; you’re a marked man, and sooner or later you’ll leave here stretched out.”

  César studied that small man with a face almost like a child’s, harmless as those microscopic bacteria that can give any cut gangrene.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Romero jumped down from the bunk bed—he had the top one—and approached the inspector.

  “I know your story, and I’m curious. I also lost a child.”

  César Alcalá put his sheets and pillowcase on the bunk that remained.

  “I didn’t lose my daughter” was all he said, lying down with his face toward the wall.

  Romero didn’t insist. He was a patient man; that was the only way he could have withstood the twelve years he had served for nobody knew what crime.

  As the weeks passed, César Alcalá understood what his new cellmate meant when he called himself a seller of dreams. The cell was like some sort of window onto the outer world. Every day prisoners swarmed in search of the strangest things: a specific medication, a special book, a whore, a medical certificate to ask for furlough, UNED degrees, a scapulary of the Virgin of Montserrat … anything you could ask for. Romero knew everyone, from the prisoners who worked the commissary to the head of the prison, and including the social workers, outside staff, guards, civil servants; he even had preferential treatment from the chaplain. Everyone asked him for favors, and when the time came he asked for them in return.

  “What about you, Alcalá? Aren’t you ever going to ask me for anything?”

  César Alcalá showed himself unwilling. He sensed that falling into Romero’s clutches could be worse than any other prison.

  Twice a day, they let César out into a small yard, no bigger than sixty-five square feet of open sky, for short periods of twenty minutes in which he could see the sun, when the other inmates were in the blocks.

  On one unforgettable morning, it was cold and a thick fog hid the walls, as if they weren’t there. As if César was completely free. On the other side of one wall, surprisingly, he heard the notes of a violin cutting through the pained silence. His heart leaped. That was unexpected. A violin scratching through the fog of a prison. Maybe it was an inmate playing, perhaps someone on the street. Maybe it was only his imagination. What did it matter? He went toward the sound, dragging his right leg, which was definitively atrophied, to the security limits.

  The guard who was escorting him ordered him to return to the safe zone, an area denoted by a line painted on the ground. The rules were absurd, but they had to be followed. He didn’t obey. He would rather die than move from there. The only thing he wanted was to sit on the ground for a minute and listen to that music. A minute of humanity.

  The guard tried to drag him away, and he defended himself. Without realizing, he swiped his hand, hitting the guard in the mouth. No one could take this tiny pleasure away from him. It meant nothing to the guard, but to him it was everything in that moment. Two more guards arrived, alerted by their colleague.

  “I just want to hear the music.”

  They didn’t understand him.

  They gave him an awful beating and dragged him unconscious to his cell. They said he had tried to escape. Escape to where? There were only four walls, sixteen and a half feet high and crowned with barbs that trapped even the breeze.

  They moved him to an isolation cell. They didn’t take him out the next morning, or the next, or the next. For more than a week he didn’t see the light, and he had to bang against the stone walls and hit himself really hard to keep from freezing or falling asleep, something the voracious rats he was competing with for space and food were impatiently awaiting.

  Finally, they came to find him when he thought he had already lost his mind.

  “Well, it looks like your vacation didn’t do you much good,” said Romero when he greeted him. His voice sounded mocking. Yet there was a feeling of sadness and compassion in the depths of his eyes.

  César Alcalá dragged himself to his bunk. He lay down and closed his eyes. He only wanted to sleep.

  Gradually a sort of relationship evolved between the two prisoners. It wasn’t friendship, but it could be considered cordial. They started to exchange memories, as if trying not to forget that there was still something left of what they each were before coming through those gates.

  One day, without asking for anything in return, Romero got him a small reel-to-reel tape recorder and a tape.

  “They told me that you love classical music,” said Romero sarcastically, recalling the episode with the violin in the yard.

  “Manuel de Falla?”

  Romero shrugged his shoulders.

  “This isn’t the Vienna Opera. It’s what I was able to get.”

  At night, when the lights went out, César Alcalá used a flashlight to read beneath the blanket. Romero knew that the inspector wasn’t reading books or magazines. They were small handwritten notes, hundreds of them that Alcalá kept hidden in a shoebox beneath the bunk. After reading those few short sentences, César Alcalá spent a long time pondering the taped-together photographs of his daughter and his father, which hung on the headboard. Sometimes Romero heard him crying.

  “Who are those notes from?”

  “What notes? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Whatever…”

  Time passed in a strange way, as if it didn’t exist. It was all continuity, the same instant repeating itself over and over again. The same routines, the same gestures, the same tedium. Without his realizing it, or being able to avoid it, Alcalá’s hope gradually got diluted, like every other man who lived in those walls. Little by little he forgot the past, his life before, the smells of reality. Only those notes that came every once in a while seemed to reanimate him, like a drop of water falling on thirsty soil. But that reviving effect didn’t last long, and the inspector was again immersed in his regular lethargy.

  Until one morning when that routine was broken, when he came back into his cell and found a guy sitting on his bed dressed in an elegant black suit, like a bank director.

  César Alcalá peeked his head out into the hallway. There was no trace of Romero. Then he carefully examined his visitor. He deduced that it was useless to ask him how he had managed to be let into the block and into his cell.

  “You are sitting on my bunk. What is it you want?”

  The man dismissed what he saw around him with a wave of his long fingers.

  “Th
is hotel isn’t very comfortable, and, judging by your appearance, you are coming from a worse one. Aren’t you tired of being here, fighting for a miserable space with second-rate thieves?”

  César Alcalá wondered how long a guy like that would last among those second-rate thieves. Surely not three years.

  “Did Publio send you? If that’s the case, tell that son of a bitch that I haven’t said anything, and I won’t as long as he keeps his word.”

  “Are you talking about this?” The man pulled out of an inner pocket a rice paper envelope with no postmark and tossed it to the foot of the bed.

  César Alcalá rushed to tear open the envelope and read the note inside, concentrating with bright shining eyes.

  All of a sudden he was overcome by uneasiness.

  “How do I know they’re from her?”

  The man smiled.

  “You don’t, and you have no way of knowing. But it’s all you have, right? And you’ll cling to that belief as long as you’re here.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anybody,” the inspector said tersely, greedily putting the note under his shirt.

  “That’s good. Balance is the key to harmony. If we all carry out our parts, no one suffers.”

  César Alcalá looked at that man with hate in his eyes. It wasn’t enough that they had taken his daughter away from him, and his wife; they weren’t satisfied with locking him up for life, with trying to kill him again and again in prison. He had been putting up with it all for three years, three long years without opening his mouth, but still, they sent bait to test him.

  “Tell your boss that it’s useless to keep trying to kill me in here.”

  The man pretended not to know what the inspector was talking about.

  “There is something we have to ask you for. In a few days, someone is probably going to come visit you. She’ll want to know some things. Don’t refuse to help her; win her trust. But don’t even think about mentioning Publio or the business we have together. I’ll get in touch with you periodically, and you’ll give me a full report on what this person tells you.”