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

by Victor del Arbol

The congressman encountered some people walking apprehensively, their posture like beaten, frightened dogs, people whose eyes nervously searched each corner. Two men argued, screaming at the top of their lungs right there in the street. A woman sitting on a frayed wicker chair offered a cracked, dark nipple to an anxious baby. On the corners languished prostitutes haggard from heroin and hepatitis. Their dignity in flouncy panties and caked-on makeup was pathetic; mute clowns of caustic wit who offered up their spectacle with their heads held high, ignoring the crassness that surrounded them, proud in their bouffant wigs and high heels, wearing dresses and stockings that revealed their unwaxed legs and arms.

  Some of them tried to attract the old man’s attention, but he ignored them. Misery formed part of the staging of that place, and men like Publio enjoyed the spectacle devoid of subtleties, entering that underworld with a light touch: playing at common vulgarity while taking care not to fall prey to it.

  There, in what appeared to be an underground madhouse, in that city of butterflies with their wings on fire, everything was allowed, any vice was satisfied, no matter how crude or amoral, if you had the money. And he had more than enough.

  “Common scum!” grumbled Publio, spitting on the ground.

  He had been there two weeks earlier, for the inauguration of a school. And he hadn’t hesitated to shake hands with and kiss that amalgam of misery. But now, far from the cameras and the journalists, he could show his repugnance plainly.

  In a certain sense, Publio was like a sculptor in iron who works with his ugly material until he converts it into art, and when he sees his work completed he smiles and leaves, not caring what happens next. During the school inauguration, he had placed the first stone in the little cement square and had declared that he’d invest millions. Then he disappeared, and the millions never materialized.

  This time, he was there for something very different. Something there would be no witnesses to.

  He went into a dark alley of low shacks. In the distance the brick towers of an abandoned factory stuck out. He looked at the hostile atmosphere of the complex in ruins, the buildings shored up with iron braces, the dirty puddles in the muddy street, the electric cable sagging between one facade and the next.

  After hesitating for a moment, he headed toward a house that had wooden windows painted green and a boarded-up door. On the upper level, some clotheslines bulged, threatening to break under the weight of the wet things hanging on them. A woman with flaccid arms sang softly on a balcony with several clothespins in her mouth.

  Publio struggled with the planks of a door. From inside came a pestilent stench of urine and excrement. The light inside barely revealed the darkness. He could make out a ladder that led to a false roof. He went in with shaky steps.

  He felt along the vague edges of the ladder and looked up. He saw a piece of sky through the holes in the roof. He went up little by little, making sure of each step before placing his foot, until he reached an attic that was too low to stand up in.

  With his head bowed he explored the space. Thick cobwebs caught in his hair as he advanced.

  The furnishings were scarce: a wooden table, two chairs, a straw mattress on the floor, and a low, squat larder. In that monastic cell there was also a wooden closet and a desk warped by the dampness.

  Leaning on the desk, facing away from Publio, a man concentrated on writing and smoking with his brow furrowed. He was so absorbed that he looked like a taxidermied iguana.

  “You are getting careless, Ramoneda. You didn’t even hear me come in,” said Publio.

  Ramoneda turned, his face partially illuminated by the scant light that entered through the holes in the roof. He hid his surprise and softly put down the gun he had grabbed from the desk.

  “What brings you to my house, Congressman?”

  Publio looked around him with disgust.

  “I come to offer you a job.”

  Ramoneda repressed a smug smile. He hadn’t had work for the last few years. He wandered from one place to another, selling his blood or his body to survive. Occasionally he had done something for some second-rate gangster, but working for Don Publio was different. It was synonymous with good pay.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve come looking for my services.”

  Publio scrutinized Ramoneda severely. He was skinnier than Publio remembered him being the last time he saw him, which was right after Ramoneda disappeared after killing his wife and the nurse who was screwing her. Publio knew that after that, Ramoneda had taken up strangling prostitutes and killing people whom nobody would ever ask any questions about. His nomadic life allowed him to leave behind anonymous corpses without being linked to them.

  “I guess you’re not too well off these days,” Publio said, approaching and putting a nice wad of thousand-peseta bills on the desk.

  Ramoneda checked the contents. Then he ran his tongue over his cracked lip.

  “What do you want…?”

  “Do you know anyone in the Modelo?”

  Ramoneda didn’t have to think too hard.

  “No one I’d trust my mother with. But yeah, I know people there.”

  Publio cut right to the chase.

  “I want you to find someone who can deal with César Alcalá. Money is no object … But I want it done fast.”

  Ramoneda seemed disappointed. He was hoping for something more exciting. After all, he and the inspector were old friends.

  “And don’t you think it would be better to send him a little message? Beat it into him. You know, the way we did a few years ago … I often wonder what happened to his daughter. Does that trained monster of yours still have her?”

  Publio gritted his teeth, which were somewhat yellow from the cigars he smoked between sessions of congress.

  “It’s not good to have such a long memory, Ramoneda. And it’s not smart for you to try to bite the hand that has come to feed you.”

  Ramoneda scratched his inner thigh, giving Publio a sidelong glance.

  “You don’t scare me, Congressman.”

  Publio ran the tip of his index finger over a dust-covered surface.

  “Then perhaps it will scare you if tomorrow I send someone over to rip out your eyes and cut off your tongue,” he said calmly, as if he was mentioning something insignificant.

  Ramoneda put the money away.

  “I was just joking, Congressman. You know that you can always count on me … As long as envelopes like this keep coming in.”

  Publio smiled. Someday not far from now, he’d have to get rid of rats like Ramoneda. But for the moment he was useful to him.

  “There’s something else. It’s about María Bengoechea. I suppose you remember her.”

  Ramoneda settled into the chair. This was getting interesting.

  “I’m listening, Congressman.”

  * * *

  That Christmas Eve was the best in a long time for Ramoneda. After buying new clothes and dining in a nice restaurant, he bought the company of an uptown prostitute. She wasn’t like those gray hookers from around the port. This one smelled clean, her lingerie was lace, and she smiled with all her perfectly straight teeth.

  He paid for a good room, with a round bathtub and a large bed. It took him a while to have an orgasm, and even when he did it was no great shakes. But he felt satisfied.

  He breathed deeply when he finished. He separated himself from the girl’s body and lay down in the bed faceup, while the growing light revealed his face through the drawn curtain. His heart beat wildly beneath his ribs, and his chest barely controlled its expansion. Drops of sweat ran toward the sides of the tangled forest of hairs in his armpits, which the prostitute was stroking with feigned affection.

  “I have to go,” said Ramoneda irritably.

  The young woman rolled around in the sheets. The beds of love hotels smelled in a particular way after making love. A rented scent, unpleasantly aseptic. Ramoneda watched with displeasure as the girl stretched like a cat, coating herself in that odor. Someti
mes, very rarely, he missed a real bed, and a woman who slept with him without him having to pay for the luxury.

  He sat naked in a chair, as he slowly smoked a cigarette whose filter he had ripped off and thrown to the ground.

  The world seemed so mysterious to him. A world much vaster than he could have ever imagined. He had spent his meager energies on reaching the next hill, the horizon that followed, convinced that from up high he would be able to make out his destiny. But as long as his strides were, as much as he wore out his body until his feet bled, a new obstacle always appeared. His life kept flowing downward, spilling miserably with the shady dealings that never managed to lift him out of poverty. He was tired of running and hiding in places where not even rats wanted to live. He barely managed to survive, avoiding contact with people. The passage of time, the road, and the filth had transformed him into a stray dog, one of those skinny, grimy transient animals that every once in a while go through a town with their tails held high, their backs up, and their teeth showing.

  Sometimes he tried to remember César Alcalá and those days locked in a basement. He struggled to relive the policemen’s beatings, the pain of the wires on his testicles, the kicks to his head, the dunkings in a bucket of freezing water. He clearly saw the policeman’s shaken face before him, sweating, spitting as he beat him, and how, as the days passed, Alcalá’s mood moved toward an increasingly obvious weakness, which eventually turned into begging.

  Ramoneda felt proud of having been able to break the inspector’s will with his silence. The day he saw him cry and plead with him to reveal where they’d hidden his daughter, he felt like the most powerful being on Earth, and he knew that the inspector was a coward, a desperate common father. The pain transformed into an enduring victory.

  From that moment on, Ramoneda discovered something new inside himself. A being that others didn’t know how to appreciate, like his wife and that nurse who fucked her in his bed, while they thought he wasn’t listening to them moan with pleasure. The man he was before couldn’t have tolerated that humiliation, but the new Ramoneda knew how to wait for his moment, gathering his reasons, day after day, each time that damn nurse ejaculated onto his face, laughing as he shouted, “This is from your wife,” Ramoneda didn’t bat an eyelash; he let the semen run down his apparently sleeping face. He waited for his moment, and when it arrived, he discovered with pleasure that he had been born for that: killing without niceties, without any fuss.

  Killing Pura and the nurse was not an act of revenge. Venting his anger on them before taking their lives was not an act of pent-up rage. It was the confirmation that his hands didn’t shake, that their screams of agony didn’t throw him off, that their begging didn’t make him go soft. He discovered with glee that killing wasn’t a problem for him. What was most important to him was the act of looking into the eyes of his victim before closing them forever. He had known others who bragged of being real professionals, but he laughed at those killers who shot from a distance, without the executioner’s gaze meeting his victim’s. He wasn’t one of those; he liked to give his victims a chance to look up and make out the face of the devil before finishing them off.

  He got up and went over to the chair where his clothes were hanging. The butt of his pistol emerged from beneath his suit jacket. He dressed calmly, gathered his things into a small travel bag, and fit his gun into the back of his pants. Before leaving he ran a bored gaze over the room that landed on the cellulite on the prostitute’s ass.

  He felt light. That mood, almost mystical, was what allowed him to enjoy what he was doing. Under the new silk shirt he had bought, his heart beat strongly. He was no longer a mere informant or an apprentice. Now he was a real professional, and he charged what he was worth. He could go into a tailor’s shop and have a suit made to order, eat in a nice restaurant, and pay for all night long with an expensive whore. What more did he need? The leather shoes did pinch his toes, which were unused to being enclosed, and the matching gloves weren’t comfortable … But when he stopped for a second in front of a display window, he saw a winner reflected back at him.

  He sighed maliciously before continuing along his way. His upcoming meeting with María gave him a strange restlessness. Almost joy.

  He stopped in front of a homeless person begging on the sidewalk. His face had been bitten by rats, and his hands were wrapped in rags.

  “A few hours ago, I was like you. So don’t give up hope; your luck could change.” He leaned over the bum’s can. He stole the few coins that were in it, put them in his pocket, and headed off, wishing him a merry Christmas.

  * * *

  The church was packed. As in medieval cathedrals, the floor of coffee-colored marble was carpeted with the tombstones of prominent men. There was an altarpiece where cherubs held up an open Bible written in gold.

  The priest, with his perfectly ironed suit, was stroking the linen cloth that covered the altar with the back of his hand. Tall candelabra stood watch over the gold chalice. Dozens of fresh roses decorated the still-empty nativity scene. Their sickly sweet scent mixed with the candle wax and the dampness of the old cloth of the priest’s chasuble.

  A few benches away, María looked at her father out of the corner of her eye. Gabriel held his hat in his restless hands, uncomfortable in his tie and suit jacket.

  The church organ began to play a funereal melody. There was a noisy rustling of clothes when everyone turned toward one of the side doors to the vestry in which an old military man and a woman appeared, carrying the figure of the baby Jesus.

  “Look, here comes the baby. The most beautiful part of Christmas.”

  María found it surprising that her father still thought about Christmas Eve with such romantic, eternal innocence. She was tempted to ask him why they were there, at Midnight Mass, what they had to do with those people who filled the church. But she held back her curiosity. Her father seemed truly moved, and his expression was one of devotion.

  There was an admiring murmur. The woman who carried the baby Jesus wore perfect mourning attire, a sober black dress. Her footsteps echoed on the marble slabs like a requiem. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and the stark whiteness of her skin transformed her into a walking shroud. She progressed toward the altar solemnly. She looked like a serene middle-aged Madonna.

  Behind her on the main aisle came the ridiculously haughty old military man, with his dress uniform, his tense jaw, and his erect head. He looked from side to side of the aisle with his fierce yellowish eyes like a cautious dog, ready to leap and bite. In spite of his showy attire, he couldn’t hide his decrepitude. You almost felt sorry for him. The sheath of his saber dragged along the floor. The metal clanking against the marble stones where his glorious putrid ancestors slept was like his beseeching call for them to come rescue him.

  When it was time to take communion, those in attendance stood up to make a line in front of the priest, who lifted the host in his hands. He himself dipped it in the chalice wine and placed it on the tongues of the communicants.

  María didn’t get up. She had not grown up in a religious household, at least not religious in the traditional sense. There was a certain religiousness, sure. In her father’s library there was a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi that she took an interest in as a girl, especially for its engravings of animals and the lovely passage that began, “Brother wolf…” But nothing more. God didn’t really have any place in their lives, nor did all that Christian symbolism of the bread and wine transmuting into the body and blood of Christ.

  Nonetheless, to María’s surprise, her father leaned on his cane and stood up laboriously.

  “I want to take communion.”

  They had almost reached the nativity scene. Beside it, the priest held out the small, almost transparent, host.

  “The body and blood of Christ…”

  “Amen.”

  With María’s help, Gabriel kissed the tip of the baby Jesus’s plaster foot. The figure was ugly, waxen, and fat. Someone had combed its h
air and dressed it in an elegant white nightshirt embroidered in blue. In its crossed hands someone had placed a thornless rose.

  When she returned to her seat, María’s gaze stopped beside one of the columns in the back. Leaning somewhat defiantly against the basin of holy water was a man who gave her a smile with an ironic tinge that she found frightening. She recognized in him the homeless person she’d passed on the street a few weeks back who had followed her and Greta through the streets of the Raval. Although now he was dressed in an expensively cut suit. Those weeks earlier she’d told herself she was being paranoid. But now she was sure that it was him again, and that he was looking right at her.

  Exiting the church’s suffocating atmosphere, people breathed in relief at being freed from that climate of sadness exacerbated by the long, monotonous sermon. Gradually the churchgoers scattered into small groups that chatted to relieve the emotional tension of the previous minutes, when toward the end of the ceremony, the old military man—María knew he was a retired lieutenant of the civil guard—had gone up to the pulpit to remember those in the force who had been killed that year in fierce terrorist attacks, speaking of them in simple words filled with righteousness.

  Some people came over to ask after Gabriel’s health with self-censored, sycophantic, stupid smiles. María silently received the clichés they felt compelled to say, both immersed in that farce and outside of it.

  Then she saw that man again. To one side, he observed her cynically. Then he headed casually off toward one of the galleries of the nearby cloister, pretending to be interested in the lovely collection of classical sculptures along the way.

  María left her father with some neighbors and went after the stranger.

  The man slowed his pace, until finally stopping completely when he was sure that María was following him. Far from prying eyes, he showed his true face. His mouth grew rigid, almost arthritic, and the depth of his pupils became cloudy, like the bottom of a recently stepped-in puddle.

  María approached him cautiously.

  “Do I know you?”