“Wait here.”
That wasn’t the usual procedure for visitors. Gabriel peeked his head into the room. It was large and sunny. The vaulted ceiling was low, with two arches crossed and a large stone where they met. Against the walls were piled up dozens of undistinguished paintings. At the back there was a plank held up by two sawhorses, and jars with brushes. It smelled of paint and turpentine. It looked like a painter’s studio.
“This is the visiting room?”
The young man blushed. He was visibly uncomfortable.
“I just follow orders. Wait here,” he repeated.
Gabriel looked at the piled-up paintings while he waited. When he picked up the first one, hundreds of dust particles were sent into the air, as if the painting had coughed. It was a country landscape, with a formalism that would have made anyone who knew anything about art shake with laughter. The others were similar: hunting scenes, fields, rivers, and forests. All snowed in, beneath leaden skies. Well painted, but without any potency. Yet there was something odd that they all had in common: the landscapes were populated by blurred people with hazy contours. They were like gray, black, or white stains that wandered among the livelier colors in the painting, like penitents or ghosts. Their faces were disconcerting to Gabriel, and to anyone who took the time to look carefully at them.
After a few minutes the door opened. A man appeared. You could tell, from both his attire and his severe attitude, that he wasn’t just some retiree who spent his time making paper boats or painting worthless pictures. He looked at Gabriel the way someone does when they’ve just caught somebody rummaging through their things. Then he shifted his attention to the paintings on the floor. His pupils flickered like the reflection in a glass of water.
“It’s hard to paint from memory,” he said, articulating the words with difficulty. “Memories get stripped away like the layers of an onion. And in the end only sensations are left: cold, fear, hunger…” He lifted his head and faced Gabriel. “Hatred … it’s hard to paint the memory of a sensation.”
Gabriel held his gaze without saying anything.
The man moved away a little bit and turned his back to him as he lit a cigarette. He turned with the cigarette in his hand and brought it to his trembling lips.
“So you finally remember who I am.” He coughed hard as he took a drag on the cigarette, flicking the ash onto his pajamas. He sharpened his gaze like a pointy needle that wanted to pierce Gabriel’s pupils.
“I know who you are. I knew from the moment you showed up. The question is: Why now, after forty years? What do you want from me, Fernando?” said Gabriel, holding that burning, electrifying gaze.
Fernando Mola went over to the window. Beneath the light that filtered in, his image was pathetically weak, like a lump of dust about to disintegrate. He peered through the window. It overlooked a patio that was not well taken care of, filled with brambles and bushes and a brick wall. Beyond that could be seen the tops of some ailing pine trees. He contemplated that bleak view for a little while. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“It’s a victory just hearing my name on your lips.”
Gabriel clenched his knuckles until they cracked.
“It seems you go to great lengths to keep it a secret. The receptionist denied that there was a Fernando Mola in this home.”
“I have to take precautions. There are people who wouldn’t be happy to find out that I’m still alive.”
“I thought you were dead, like your father, like your brother. That’s what Publio told me. That you were all dead.”
“And maybe the old bastard Publio is right: maybe all the Molas are dead, and I’m just a ghost, something your conscience can’t forget. The logical thing would have been to die in those fields of Leningrad, run over by the tanks like most of my men, and not surviving a shot to the face,” murmured Fernando. When he opened his mouth you could see his destroyed teeth. “But the worst of it all is that I’m real, which means Publio lied to you. And that you didn’t manage to get me killed by Bolsheviks, or their tanks, or their deserts of ice, or their Siberian prison camps. Yes, I could be a pretty thick-skinned ghost, one that’s hard to get rid of.”
Fernando’s onslaught was devastating. His words got into Gabriel’s entrails and hit again and again with devastating and systematic precision.
“What do you want from me?”
Fernando let his gaze wander over the paintings he had spent years making. Those formally beautiful paintings populated by something destructive and horrible. What did he want from Gabriel? What, after forty years?
“Did you know that Pedro Recasens died?” Fernando felt a knot of rage when he realized that name meant nothing to Gabriel. Yet he contained himself. He had spent many years, too many, preparing for that moment. And he wasn’t going to let his emotions betray him. “Well, you should remember his name. Recasens was a CESID colonel.”
“I’m not in that line of work anymore” was Gabriel’s laconic reply.
Fernando nodded. Gabriel was now a retiree who grew flowers beside a grave in a town in the Pyrenees. The past didn’t seem to mean much to him; it was as if he’d erased it from his memory. Yet there was something broken, a crack, in Gabriel’s shifty gaze. Through it escaped what he was trying to hide. He was lying.
“Maybe you aren’t a spy working for Publio anymore. Times change, right? Even those we were indispensable to end up ostracizing us. It must be hard for you to pretend that none of what happened matters to you. But I’m sure you remember Pedro Recasens. He was a good man whose life you cut short. He was a simple soldier watching over a quarry. If you’d arrived with Isabel ten minutes later, he would have already finished his shift, and none of what happened later would have occurred: the false declaration against Marcelo Alcalá, the war on the Soviet front … It’s strange how a man’s fate is decided by a question of minutes. That war and the years following in the prison camp changed us into something we never thought we were capable of being. Recasens was a simple, honest, direct man. But you twisted his standards.”
Fernando breathed deeply to keep from crying. But his eyes sparkled when he remembered the hardships they’d experienced in that Siberian gulag, without food, without clothes, without hope. He wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for Recasens’s faith, his strength to overcome pain and suffering. Pushed forward by a hatred that grew and grew, there where only hatred could keep them alive. Recasens learned to navigate in the wastewater of that field; he constructed a made-up character; he knew how to penetrate the heart of a system that he hated to the point of nausea. And one fine day they were liberated. Recasens prospered; they covered him with medals when he returned to a homeland he no longer felt was his own. He forged a military career, he who spurned uniforms. And he became a spy. The best. And all of that with a single objective: searching out those who had been behind his downfall, finding a way to destroy their lives like they destroyed his.
“It didn’t take him long to find you. But you were Publio’s protégé, and he was a friend of Minister Mola. Untouchable. But Recasens knew how to wait for years. Waiting is the only thing you have left when you are unwilling to give up. Hatred needs patience to become a useful emotion. And believe me: ten years in a Russian camp trains you well in that sense.”
Gabriel breathed deeply. He was breathing without feeling the air; he felt he was as invisible to others as they were to him. He sat on the floor like a broken marionette. It was the second time that he had experienced this. The first, about thirty years earlier, was when his wife found Isabel’s diary in the trunk. The diary was the noose that his wife used to hang herself from a beam. The diary that he had never wanted to get rid of. A part of him died with his wife, who had also hanged from that lintel. But the most important part of him kept breathing; he overcame that ultimate despair. And he did it for María, for his daughter. He stupidly believed that the remorse and nightmares all his life were payment enough. He’d been naive. It was all back; it was happenin
g again. And the truth of what he had done would follow him again and again, always, never giving up until the day he died.
“I did all those things,” he murmured, nodding. “I did everything you accuse me of. And I did much more, things you can’t even imagine. And nothing can be changed, or erased, or relived. Nothing that I can do matters … so I don’t understand what you are looking for. Revenge? For God’s sake, I have cancer. I should have been dead years ago, and I’m tired of waiting. And if what you want is to inflict pain or shame on me, don’t bother. Nothing you can do will be worse than what I’ve already felt before. I’m as dried up inside as you are, Fernando.”
Fernando sketched a sad smile. Was that man a cynic, a hypocrite, a monster…? Or simply a decrepit old man, sick, and consumed with remorse? What could his mother have seen in him?
“I want to hear it from your mouth. I want to hear you say that it was you who first seduced and then murdered my mother.”
Gabriel trembled, inside and out. He felt something he had never felt before with such vividness. Defeat. Tiredness. Old age. Impending death. There they were, head to head, like two old toothless dogs, laden with past bitterness, ready to kill each other even though it meant they’d have no time or strength for anything else. Consummating their hatred was all that they hoped for now. What could he say? That he had really fallen in love with Isabel? That he had thought of her every day of his life? That he, too, had paid the price of his actions? Or perhaps he could tell Fernando that forty years earlier he was another man, that he had other ideas, that he had trusted that government and what it did. None of that made sense anymore. It just sounded like excuses. And he was tired of justifying himself, of trying to forgive himself without ever being able to.
“I killed your mother.” He wasn’t looking for pity. He didn’t need it. And Fernando realized that.
Gabriel was too old to maintain hope. Fernando could tell just by looking at the broken blood vessels blooming on his skin, the wrinkles that broke his expression, his fallen, lifeless skin. He had the purple color of those about to be buried. But there was still something in him that could be hurt, a crack that could be rummaged around in to make him suffer.
“Did you confess that to your daughter? Have you told her what kind of a man you are?”
Gabriel shivered inside.
“I am not that man anymore.”
Fernando responded with a curt guffaw.
“What you were you are forever. Men like you don’t change. Maybe you’ve repressed your true nature, and you make everyone believe that you’re an old retiree whiling away the time you have left. But I don’t believe you. I know that you haven’t changed. I bet that your daughter doesn’t even suspect that her father is a fraud, a monster disguised as a failure.”
Gabriel didn’t say anything. He just listened. When Fernando was silent, they both remained there, one in front of the other, like two old dogs growling without any teeth.
“You plotted the assassination attempt on my father to cover up my mother’s death and turn it into a political springboard for his career. It was my father who ordered my mother’s death. And you were his executioner. You let an innocent, Marcelo, pay for your guilt with his life. And maybe your daughter doesn’t even know that her mother committed suicide because she discovered everything you had done … Gabriel Bengoechea … the weapons maker of San Lorenzo … you are scum. Isn’t that what your daughter would think?”
Gabriel didn’t kid himself about his daughter’s feelings toward him. He was well aware of her almost constantly disapproving looks.
“She wouldn’t be that surprised. It would even be a confirmation of what she’s always suspected: that I’m not a good father, that I never knew how to show her that I love her … it would be her definitive reason to hate me,” he said with a sadness that wasn’t new. He didn’t really care. Soon cancer would take him out of the picture, and he would stop bothering María with his presence. But he at least wanted to take his secrets with him. He wanted to leave his daughter the tiniest bit of doubt, the possibility of inventing a memory that she could miss. Perhaps, if his daughter remained ignorant, she would love him a little more when he was dead than she had loved him in life.
Gabriel realized that he would have to negotiate that silence with Fernando. But he couldn’t imagine what he’d want in exchange. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to allow María to find out about those things in his past.
Fernando didn’t seem to be in any rush. He ran his gaze over that room he used as a painting studio. He liked the monastic silence and the smell of turpentine and paint. It was a good place to take refuge in. A good place to forget. Because much to his regret, he realized that even his hatred toward Gabriel, toward Publio, and toward his own father was something he had to make an effort to maintain. He was tired. If he looked back, all he saw was anguish and rage. Not a tiny corner of peace, not a moment of calm. His life had been consumed, and he didn’t know to what end. The only thing he had left, the only reason to keep going forward, was that man who sat before him, also withered and dry inside from the same hatred that he had nourished all those years. It was hard for him to admit, but he almost saw himself reflected in Gabriel. And that irritated him.
He noticed the package wrapped in thick paper that Gabriel held between his legs vertically, resting his hands on it as if it were a walking stick.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, pointing to the wrapped package.
Gabriel nodded. He got up from the chair and placed the package delicately on a table. He tore the wrapping and stepped back two paces. Both men examined the package with identical admiration. For a few seconds, without them realizing, something lovely united them.
Fernando stepped forward. His fingers brushed along the long, polished surface of the sheath, made of leather and wood dyed black.
“It’s a beautiful sword, though I never understood why you gave it such a poetic name. The Sadness of the Samurai.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. The katana wasn’t actually a sword; it was a saber.
“It’s much more deadly and much easier to handle than a sword. Swords hit. Sabers cut,” he said in a professional tone, emotionless. “As for the name, I didn’t choose it. It was the name of the original model I used as the basis for the replica. The real one belonged to Toshi Yamato, a samurai warrior from the seventeenth century. He was one of the bloodiest heroes of his time, revered for his energy and cruelty in battle. But Yamato was actually a man who hated war; it turned his stomach to brandish his katana and face his enemies. He was terrified of death. He managed to live a good part of his life constraining his true nature, but in the end, unable to keep up the farce, defeated by himself in his battle to become something he couldn’t be, he opted for ritual suicide. That ritual, seppuku, is very painful: it consists in several cuts to the abdomen, and the suicide victim can spend hours dying with his intestines out of his body. Luckily for Yamato, one of those loyal to him found him dying, took pity on him, and decapitated him with his own katana. That is where the name The Sadness of the Samurai comes from. This weapon represents the best values of the warrior: bravery, loyalty, fierceness, elegance, precision, and power, but at the same time the worst as well: death, pain, suffering, murderous insanity. Yamato spent his entire life fighting, and he never won out over those irreconcilable versions of himself.”
Fernando listened to the story with interest. He knew little of samurai culture. That was always Andrés’s thing. He never did understand why his brother was so fascinated by a world that had nothing to do with his own and of which he would never be a part. He vaguely remembered the stories his mother used to read, stories of a medieval warrior in the Far East. They were short, illustrated with drawings of Japanese warriors with their armor, their bows, and their katanas. Stories of honor, battle, victory. Now, after all that had happened, it all seemed distant and ridiculous.
“It seems strange that a man like my father would commission a repl
ica of a saber with so much history.”
“I don’t think your father had any interest in the samurai or their codes of conduct. He probably didn’t know the story of the katana. He asked me for a present for your brother, Andrés. ‘Something different,’ he said, ‘expensive and pretty. Original. One of those Japanese weapons.’ But your brother, Andrés, was instantly captivated by it. I remember the admiration with which he touched the blade, his confidence when he wielded it even though he was just a boy. He was never parted from it until … until he died … I suppose you remember the fire.”
Fernando closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered flames, screams, people jumping from the windows of the upper floor, others crying out, trapped by the barred windows. The smell of burning flesh, the rubble falling on the shaved heads of the patients at the sanatorium who trampled one another in their haste to escape. Yes, he remembered the fire perfectly. It was November 6, 1955. The fire started at three in the morning in one of the rooms on the top floor. The firemen couldn’t put it out until four hours later. By then more than twenty people had died, trapped in the ashes of the building. Smoking, atrophied cadavers, petrified in expressions of horror.
“I thought you would want to have it. When Publio told me that Andrés had died in the fire at the sanatorium, I asked him to sell it to me. It is the finest blade I’ve ever forged.”
Fernando remained pensive. Now that he was about to fulfill all his plans, he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. And yet he felt his mouth open in a cynical smile, a smile that transformed into a cackle against his will.
“Are you trying to buy my silence with this sword? You think that the memory of my brother will make me soft? You don’t know me, Gabriel. You have no idea.”
Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel Page 26