“I didn’t kill her. You know I didn’t do it.”
“That’s true, I know,” said Publio sincerely, “but that, in reality, is the least of it. A mere detail.”
“A mere detail?”
“In four days they are transferring Guillermo Mola to Barcelona; it is a very important promotion in his career; they are even talking about naming him a minister. A minister can’t allow certain scandals or leave loose ends. And I’m the man who ties up loose ends, you understand? And we are not leaving this room until this is resolved.”
“A signed statement without guarantees has no value in a trial.”
Publio smiled. Really, Marcelo’s faith was touching.
“You don’t understand. You are already sentenced, with a trial or without. Someone has chosen you as the scapegoat, and that is irrevocable. With a little bit of luck, you might escape the garrote or the gallows and everything will be over more quickly in front of a firing squad. You could even believe the judge and think that they’ll be generous with your life. It’s a dirty trick, I know. But that’s how things are.”
Marcelo started to retch. He looked at Publio incredulously, as if he couldn’t conceive of such injustice.
“And the truth doesn’t matter?”
Publio put out his cigarette, stepping on it with his shoe.
“The truth is what I just told you. I’m no cynic, I’m being sincere. And while I’m at it, I will tell you that I’m convinced you really were in love with Isabel. We all were in one way or another. In the end, you would have ended up killing her too. I know that you were part of the group that prepared the plot against her husband, and that you were planning to help her escape to Lisbon with Andrés. And if she had asked you to pull the trigger against Guillermo, you would have done it yourself. Isn’t that true? In the end, you are guilty.”
Marcelo looked at Publio with hatred. He had the feeling that he was like a mouse trapped in a box, a scared mouse that many eyes observed with scientific interest. He never could have imagined an ending like that for his sad, dull life. Now they were going to kill him for something he hadn’t done, and the only thing he could do was resign himself to his fate, or fight. It was a useless and absurd gesture, he knew it. Defending his innocence to the final consequences was only going to bring him more pain, more suffering. Publio had just said it: he was already sentenced. But in that last gesture of resistance, Marcelo found a bit of the dignity he had always wanted. So he didn’t confess.
In the following days the interrogations came one after the other, without pause. Publio even had someone brought expressly from Madrid. The interrogator was a discreet-looking guy, who looked like he had a family and went to Mass on Sundays. He arrived early, with a small rigid leather briefcase. He greeted everyone with a timid smile. His name was Valiente, and he smoked very thin French cigarettes whose scent floated in the air for hours in the interrogation room. He worked calmly, never getting ruffled. His was a job subject to strict method, with detailed instructions to obtain the desired result as fast as possible.
“This is a boring job. From the time of the Inquisition, torture has been so perfected that there is no room for imagination or improvisation,” he would lament.
He started by opening the briefcase in front of Marcelo, spreading out over the table a series of branding irons and tools with strange, sinister shapes. He placed them in order, from minor to major, as he didactically explained what they were for and how they were used, the consequences they provoked, and the degree of pain that each could inflict. When he finished his display, he rolled up his sleeve and turned with a saintly expression toward his agitated victim, who was conveniently tied to a chair, and asked him, “Do you have any questions? No? Okay, then let’s get started with the practical lesson.”
Valiente was a true professional. He didn’t experience any morbid excitement at the blood or suffering. He wasn’t a sadist. He could provoke horrible torment in his victims, paying no attention to their screams, crying, and begging, but he never went too far. He had never had a prisoner die on him during an interrogation. Experience had trained his hand; he knew at all times the weakest points in the human anatomy, but above all in the human spirit, which he decimated. He wasn’t fooled by shrieks or fainting. He knew exactly the degree of suffering that each human being could withstand. He didn’t stop until that glass was filled to the brim, and while generous in his application, he made sure that it never overflowed.
Yet a week later, Valiente went to see Publio. His face was distraught, and that harmonious, serene air that made him seem so harmless had disappeared. Publio feared that Marcelo had died before signing the confession. But that wasn’t it.
“That son of a bitch won’t give in. This is the first time this has happened to me,” said the torturer, his words filled with a hatred that had become personal, because that fragile-looking poet was putting his fame and abilities in doubt. Valiente was losing it, crossing dangerously close to the limit of the permissible. Marcelo lay half dead in the cell, but he had not said a word. With perplexed resignation, Valiente looked at Publio and said what he was thinking.
“Maybe he’s telling the truth, and he’s innocent after all.”
Publio didn’t bat at an eyelash at that possibility.
“They don’t pay you to discover the truth, just to get the confession out of him.”
The torturer resigned himself. He cleaned his instruments with alcohol, erasing the traces of blood and remains of guts and hairs; he picked up his briefcase and said good-bye with an annoyed gesture.
“You’d be better off killing him, then. He’s not going to confess.”
* * *
Marcelo couldn’t feel his body, or his surroundings, or the room he was in. He was aware of wanting to open his mouth, but something inside him stole his words and forced him to drift off, carried away by the true longing of his sadness, his pain, and the deep roots of that desperation that clouded his eyes over. Sleep. That was the only thing he wanted to do. Sleep and not wake up. His ghost, his shadow, left his body and hung around the head of his bed with a patient smile. That vision of himself watching over his own corpse had become some sort of virus, an infection in the blood, of the hope of living. Sometimes he had such a high fever that he could feel his brain boiling and the blood bubbling in his veins like lava. In other moments, he was like a block of ice, like a petrified fossil in a glacier.
When they came to find him, he felt himself lifted up by strong arms. Someone covered him with a blanket. Nervous, urgent voices. They dragged him out. He couldn’t stand up. Valiente had broken him everywhere. He imagined they were going to kill him.
The cold outside was clean, different from the sick dampness of the cell. A strange luminosity entered into the darkness of his closed eyes. He tried to open them. He wanted to fill his eyes before closing them forever. Smudges of sky, a building. The bars of one of the gates of the fence and, on the other side, in the street, freedom.
When they went up to the gallows, he heard Publio’s voice as they covered his eyes.
“I have to admit you’re a brave guy. But it’s too late. They are going to hang you.”
Marcelo felt the noose tightening around his throat. Then nothing. An interminable wait. The snap of a lever. A trapdoor opening and the feeling that his stomach was going up into his mouth as he fell.
But instead of hanging, his feet fell onto a pile of sandbags. Laughter, mocking. Back to the cell.
Publio let him collapse onto the dirty floor, watching him the way one watches a dog whose leg has been amputated.
“We have to end this, Marcelo. There’s no more time. Tomorrow they are going to hang you. And this time it’ll be for real. I understand what you’ve done, what you wanted to prove to yourself, and believe me, I admire it. But there is no point in continuing to resist. Now you have to think of your son. César is a good boy; the nuns say he is very spirited, with a great future. But in the company of troublemakers and killers, th
e only thing he can expect is going from orphanage to orphanage until he ends up in jail, a common delinquent. You can keep that from happening. If you sign, you have my word that I will take care of him, I will give him a better future. If you don’t, I’ll leave him to his fate.”
Marcelo looked at Publio with red eyes.
“You’ll tell him the truth? You’ll tell him that his father was no murderer?”
Publio lit a cigarette and put it between Marcelo’s swollen lips.
“No, my friend. That I can’t do, I’m sorry.”
Marcelo smoked the cigarette with trembling fingers. He coughed and spat blood.
“Then call your executioner. I won’t sign.”
Marcelo Alcalá was not executed the next morning. He had to wait without knowing how or when it would happen, with his senses atrophied and his nerves wrecked every time he heard the sound of the gate opening. Publio ordered him sent to Barcelona with other prisoners in a military train. There he was interrogated again and tortured ad nauseam. But he didn’t give in.
And one morning, the sister and son of the prisoner Marcelo Alcalá had to witness the cruel dance of the teacher hanging from a noose. They had to listen to the guards’ mocking and the humiliation of the body of their loved one.
César Alcalá would never forget that scene or the man named Publio who leaned on the railing of the gallows enjoying the spectacle, smoking a cigarette like someone spending an afternoon at the bullring.
16
Former estate of the Mola family (Mérida), January 10, 1981
The dawn emerged laden with fog, as if in its gray color it carried the memory of forgotten places. In the remote houses of the laborers, dirty dogs barked for no reason, the paths were covered in leafless trees, and the cawing of some circling birds was unsettling. Publio watched from the balustrade of the balcony the old fig tree beside which he had given Andrés The Sadness of the Samurai forty years earlier. A lot of things had changed since then, but the fig tree was still there, twisted, fragile, ailing. Like Publio himself, it refused to abandon this earth.
A paved path ran through a turf of well-maintained grass. At the end it opened into a rotunda with a stone fountain and beyond that the imposing presence of a colonial building with dozens of windows covered by vines and two marble staircases that ascended along each flank of the facade up to the porch, on which a large mastiff with a shiny dark coat dozed. The enormous dog barely lifted his ears when Congressman Publio went out for his morning walk.
He usually went to sit at an outside table at the bar. He sat toward the back, in the shade, and from there observed the world with the perspective of a discreet, timid man. He hid from the world behind his hat with its brim fallen over his right eye and a cruel, ironic smile. In the pocket of his overcoat he always carried a wrinkled piece of paper with some thought that he would never dare to speak; he left the thoughts there, trapped on paper; he wrote them down constantly, whenever inspiration struck him.
“It must be this constant crappy weather that’s bringing back all these memories,” he said in a soft voice, half closing his eyes.
It was raining. The lights on the highway and the tiny mullein flowers that skirted the hill could be made out through the curtain of water that swept the horizon. The humbler houses descended almost to the edge of the gully. Publio had gone down those hillsides more than sixty years ago, promising never to return. And an entire life later, he had barely managed to get farther than a few miles.
To his old neighbors, those who used to disdainfully call him the shepherd’s son when he was a boy, Publio—Don Publio as they now respectfully called him—had triumphed where most failed. He was a congressman, president of several congressional committees, and his businesses were the envy of everyone. Which was why they couldn’t fully understand why he chose to buy the Molas’ old villa, when he could have his pick of country homes.
On the face of it, Publio was pleased with his luck, but he sometimes felt the burden of that exhausting, demoralizing, and useless work, and he would be filled with a desire to quit. Then he’d wonder what would have become of him if he’d set up a business selling roast chickens from a truck or some other thing. Of course, those thoughts were fleeting. But lately they were coming back too often.
He ran a hand over his head. Drops slid from it, hanging off his eyebrows and the tip of his nose. Not even he himself understood why he felt that way. But he knew that this mood had been incubating for a long time and had accentuated since that lawyer, María Bengoechea, had come back into Inspector Alcalá’s life. Just now, at the moment when Publio was thinking of making the last great undertaking of his life.
Toward midmorning it stopped raining. Soon a troupe of kids appeared, filling the sky with kites of different shapes and colors, trying their skill with the strings among the lines of drying laundry and the roofs of the houses. Publio spent a long time watching that dance in the still air, with an expression of sad perplexity. His father had never made him a kite, and he spent the afternoons sitting on a rock watching the pirouettes of those pieces of paper and cloth interlaced with reeds.
Suddenly, the children stopped their races and were very still, observing that old man who watched them as if they’d done something naughty. Publio straightened his nose and cursed that nostalgia which was taking over his brain.
“You are getting old, and you already live more in the past than in the future,” he told himself in a whisper, as if his subconscious was escaping through his mouth, only to plunge him into a strange lethargy.
* * *
That day he wasn’t brilliant at the social club gathering, although in the literal sense of the word, Publio had never been a good orator. He knew how to speak and defend his theories with clear arguments, but he lacked conviction. His voice was not one of those that filtered into the auditorium and set passions aflame. He was too technical, excessively stoic.
“And what do you think, Don Publio, of this farce that Suárez has set up? Will it be something provisional, or do you believe the king will force things in favor of Calvo Sotelo?” someone asked him at one point in the conversation.
Baited, Publio walked over to the man who was asking.
“Politicians amuse me,” he said. “They always wait for something to happen, some happenstance or miracle that will change things. But I’m an atheist, thank God. I don’t wait for somebody else to change what I want changed.”
Those present received the joke with a silent reproach and a look that seemed to say, “Rome does not reward traitors.”
“That’s just what some military men are rumored to be saying. And the government, meanwhile, looks the other way,” said someone.
Publio looked at the group with disdain. He knew that he was accepted for his money and his influence. But he wasn’t one of them; he wasn’t part of the blood circle. They were just social climbers, who had those cowards and spineless wimps by the balls. Most all of them owed him favors; some flattered him, others criticized. But they all feared him. And he smiled cynically, convinced that nothing had changed since 1936. All the effort and all the bloodshed in that conflict had been of no use. Franco had barely been dead for five years, and bad habits, like weeds, were sprouting again. Spain was once again a dry land tending toward desert, populated by poor nihilistic beasts. Only animals tamed over decades were able to allow themselves to be led so docilely to the slaughterhouse, able to believe, even wanting to swallow, anything that those anointed in power told them. Anything, as long as it gave a bit of hope to their languid existences, unable as they were to grab the bull by the horns.
But all that was going to change.
“It’s different now. There are other things at stake. Haven’t you read the editorial today in El Alcázar? ETA, GRAPO, FRAP … More than a hundred and twenty dead this year so far, the last one the law professor Juan de Dios Doral.”
“I read it,” interjected someone. “Invoking the spirit of the battle cry For Saint James and strike for S
pain, they are calling for the resignation of the vice president, Fernando Abril Martorell, and, paraphrasing Tarradellas, a cryptic change in course.”
Publio feigned a certain uneasiness.
“We politicians deliberate the respect toward law, and our obligation is to oppose any transgression of law and order, no matter where it comes from.”
One of the men let out a loud, cutting laugh.
“Do you really believe that? Or do you feel the need to stand in front of microphones and television cameras to save us, Congressman? That’s what’s being said in conversations all over the country.”
Publio clenched his jaw. Suddenly, his eyes clouded over with pent-up rage. But he managed to contain himself, although he wouldn’t forget the face of that impertinent man or his words.
“I am against terrorist violence, and those who commit abuses in the name of the State only hope to divide this nation. If all I did, like the others, was keep my mouth shut and nod, it would mean letting everything collapse, letting the violence of the terrorists destroy us.”
The man who had spoken was undaunted. Actually, the warmth of the wine, and the approving gestures of some of those present, raised his voice. Publio knew him well. He was a general auditor named García Escudero.
“There is violence everywhere: los Guerreros de Cristo Rey, el Batallón Vasco Español. Aren’t those skinheads that stroll through Retiro Park at night with baseball bats terrorists? I remember that young coed, Yolanda García Marín, who was beaten to death by those right-wing extremists Hellín and Abad, just because she was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. I bet that you don’t approve of the arrest of the two extreme right-wingers of the Fuerza Nueva party who got caught with five thousand pen guns … On the other hand, surely our congressman would be able to find the necessary justification for exonerating the policemen who killed the ETA member Gurupegui in the State Security Directorate building, or the two guards that tortured the anarchist Agustín Rueda to death in the Carabanchel prison. Not to mention the five labor lawyers that the right-wingers killed in Atocha…”
Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel Page 20