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

by Victor del Arbol

  He felt empty. None of his lovers had ever filled him beyond the infinitesimal instant of orgasm, and afterward, right away, the ice appeared in their eyes. In their souls. Sex was no different than any other physiological act, eating, excreting, sleeping …

  “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” the whore asked him. He smiled. He took off his trench coat. “What’s that?” the young woman asked with surprise. “A sword?”

  “A katana,” he clarified, before cutting off her head with a sure stroke. He still remembered well that confused mix of pleasure and remorse that he felt: the prostitute’s bloody head in his hands; her lifeless body bleeding in spurts from the carotid artery, fallen to one side on the rug. On the bed, the katana with its blade stained with blood and traces of scalp. It had been easy, he told himself; much easier than he had thought.

  * * *

  He had never again felt the same sensation, in spite of searching time and time again in so many deaths. Only Marta gave him a similar feeling. Keeping her alive, playing each day with the possibility of killing her, made him feel good. Allowing her to live was something that transported him to a state of demigod. Something that he wanted to prolong indefinitely. He closed his eyes, shivering with a gentle pleasure, nothing ostentatious, until he lost the notion of what was and what wasn’t. His mind stopped shouting at him and slipped into a lethargic silence, experiencing the numerous sensations that allowed him distance from his emptiness.

  He forced Marta to turn her back to him, and he penetrated her from behind. And as he did it he felt the presence of the woman in the portrait in the room next door, looking at him in silent reproach.

  “You never understood me, Mother,” he moaned, trying to get the dead gaze off of the back of his neck.

  22

  Barcelona, August 1955

  He was still there. Lining up in front of the barracks hut that held the Germans and the Spanish prisoners from the Blue Division. How many were left? Barely a few dozen of the thousands who had arrived in the prison camp in 1945. Yet they survived, unnaturally, incomprehensibly; they kept lining up beneath the snow, every morning, one after the other, surrounded by the Siberian desert. There weren’t even bars or walls or barbed-wire fences. There were barely soldiers. The entire steppe was his prison. What time was it? Maybe the morning, he wasn’t sure. The sun in those latitudes is like a reflection of the moon. It never moves. The cold, the steamy breath, the thud of bare feet against the snow. The hunger. That he remembered. Why had the guards made them line up? Pedro was optimistic. They are going to let us go, he said every time they forced them out of the barracks unexpectedly. But Fernando was suspicious. He feared the worst. He had seen groups of Chechen, Georgian, and Ukrainian prisoners working on the nearby train tracks. The guards treated them worse than dogs. They didn’t eat; they worked in rags, with bare hands. They slept wrapped in threadbare blankets, and they died by the hundreds. It was obvious that the guards’ intent was to decimate them. Fernando and the other prisoners at least had a roof with holes in it, water they could boil, some potatoes they could steal. If the guards decided to use them to fill the losses in the forced work brigades, they weren’t going to survive.

  But that time Pedro Recasens was right. The guard looked at them with his gaze filled with vodka and tundra. He pointed to them with his gloved finger and, without emotion, said the words: You are free. Go back to Spain. Thank Comrade Stalin for his generosity with your General Franco.

  * * *

  “Excuse me, sir, we are closing up the cafeteria.”

  The waiter’s voice pulled him from that tunnel of flashes in his memory. Surprised, he found himself once again sitting in front of a plate of cold soup, before two tired-looking waiters who held a mop near his feet. They seemed annoyed. Fernando apologized, as if he had to ask for forgiveness for his insolence and feared being punished with a beating. But those weren’t drunken soldiers with sticks; they weren’t going to force him to fight another prisoner, to bite to the death while they placed their bets. They were real waiters. Their uniforms had bow ties and neat vests. Unconsciously, he touched the bullet scar he had on his right cheek. He let out a laugh that frightened the waiters. He was free. He was home.

  Home. That was saying a lot. He went out into the street and watched the rush that headed toward the Ramblas with some confusion. It was a beautiful day. The trees were green, the flower stands bursting with color. The people went up and down in summer clothes. The heat. The heat surprised him. He touched his forehead. He was sweating. In the sky a burning sun shone. Suddenly, he felt sad, lost. He didn’t know where to go; he didn’t know what to do, how to act. He was free, and he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. In his pocket he still had a few rubles that were useless to him. He was thirty-three years old. And he had to start a new life. He threw down the rubles and headed toward the Ramblas. If he had withstood everything in the past, he should be able to face what was ahead. He looked again at the smoking chimneys of the boat that had brought him back.

  * * *

  It had taken him months to feel able to face his father.

  Finally, he bought a suit, cheap but immaculate, a secondhand suit, and he asked to see Minister Guillermo Mola. The response to his request took several weeks to arrive at the hostel where Fernando and Recasens were living.

  The letter, on official letterhead, was brief.

  The Minister regrets to inform you that his schedule does not allow him, nor will it allow him in the future, to meet with you. Likewise, he asks that you do not try to communicate with him, or he will be forced to turn you in to the police. As regarding the person you ask about, Mr. Andrés Mola, the Minister expressly forbids you to try to visit him.

  Signed,

  Publio O. R., Personal Secretary

  “You shouldn’t be surprised. We were expecting something like this,” said Recasens, looking up for a moment from the forms he was filling out. He had decided to present his war honors to apply for an official exam for the School of Defense. “I’ve become a real professional in killing and surviving, and what makes the most sense is for me to use those skills,” he had said ironically when he made the decision.

  Fernando put the letter into a drawer. He knew that his father didn’t want to see him. He didn’t care. The only thing he wanted, going against advice from Recasens—who hadn’t forgotten Publio—was to let him know that he was back. As far as the ban on visiting his brother, he had no intention of obeying it. He put on his coat and scarf. It had been six long months since his return.

  “Where are you going?” asked Recasens, even though he knew.

  Fernando stood beneath a tree on the edge of the plaza as he lit a cigarette. He held the match for a moment between his fingers, observing the wavering flame. He had a hard time getting used to being able to do such simple things. Light up a smoke, lean on a tree …

  He shook his fingers and dropped the smoking match into a puddle. On the opposite sidewalk there was a dense stream of new and old cars; on the streets groups of pedestrians shook off the sleepiness of the morning. The sound of construction on the sidewalk was enervating. Life pushed hard, without stopping, on that man who looked old but wasn’t, dressed in a discreet gray suit that made him invisible. Sometimes, a passerby looked at him suspiciously. It didn’t make Fernando uncomfortable; he was used to it. Recasens had explained to him why certain people seemed to be afraid of men like them. “We have that look,” Pedro had said. That look. Yes, their eyes were filled with things that they hadn’t wanted to see, but that they hadn’t been able to look away from. That made them different, like specters moving among the living, pretending to be one of them but not really being the same. Fernando didn’t mind the people. He watched the hustle and bustle of the pedestrians with some scorn, tiredness, and an infinite distrust of human beings. They were like plaster figures that ran from one side to the other with their stupidity on their back. They couldn’t even imagine what men like him and Recasens had bee
n through. They couldn’t know, and they didn’t want to hear it. That was why they could stop to chat about parents, kids, grandkids, trips, landscapes … That was why they could laugh. He never laughed. In the gulag no one was allowed to laugh. He remembered a Mongolian prisoner who broke the rule and laughed because someone secretly told him a joke. The guards broke his teeth with a shovel. But the Mongolian kept laughing, an absurd, toothless laugh, until the guards beat him to death, and they left him spread out on the bloodstained snow with his frozen smile.

  Fernando checked his watch. It was almost time. He approached the building on the other side of the street, not feeling well, with the demoralizing feeling you have when opening a dark, jam-packed, chaotic closet that you don’t know where to begin to organize.

  Through the fence he saw the garden that the sun was turning ocher. Fountains and cypress trees surrounded the building, imbuing it with calm. Some of the patients strolled and watched the shivering water; others contemplated the immense clean sky from a bench. Nothing seemed more placid than that place and that morning. And yet all those souls were rotted inside.

  A few minutes later a nurse appeared, leaving a patient in a wheelchair in a corner. He was dozing, in a drugged daze.

  Fernando swallowed hard. It was his brother, Andrés. Recasens had done his job well. There was his brother, just as Pedro had discovered. And yet he had nothing in common with the boy Fernando had left behind more than thirteen years ago. Andrés was now a young man with long, straight hair and an almost red beard that grew unchecked from right below his eyes. His body had grown unguided, like an anarchic, scattered tree. Fernando could make out whitish skin run through with blue veins beneath the robe that barely covered Andrés’s knees. He obliquely received the sunlight with his eyes half closed. Fernando watched him for a long time. Perhaps Andrés no longer wanted to awaken from that state of abandon he had slipped into, protected by his illness. But Fernando couldn’t allow that.

  He waited for the nurse to go back inside the building, and he climbed over the fence. Some patients saw him crossing with resolute steps the space that separated him from his brother, but nobody got in his way.

  “Hello, Andrés. It’s me, Fernando.”

  Andrés barely looked at him. The drugs had made his eyes turn inward, as if he could no longer see the outside world, only his dark, broken interior. A string of saliva had dried in his beard. He smelled bad. Fernando clenched his jaw, incredulous and filled with rage. What had they done to him? He barely had any time before the nurse returned or an orderly showed up. If they found him there, they’d move his brother somewhere else and he would never see him again.

  “I’m going to get you out of here, Little Brother … Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Andrés tilted his head a little more toward the sun’s rays, as if he wanted to run away from his brother’s question. Fernando quickly sized up the situation. Andrés was tied to the chair with canvas straps around his trunk and legs. And he was drugged. Fernando would have to carry him over to the gate, lift him over it, and jump down to the street. All that in broad daylight on a street packed with people. It was suicide. Exasperated, he knelt in front of his brother and started to cut at the straps with a knife he took from his pocket.

  “Listen! You have to react. Come on, get up. I need you to help me.” He cut the belt straps and grabbed Andrés by the shoulders, who twisted, moaning something incomprehensible.

  “Come on, Andrés. Get up.”

  But instead of getting up, Andrés let his weight fall to one side, tipping over the wheelchair. There was something pitiful in the desperate gaze of that man who was trying to escape but was trapped by the straps that tied him to the wheelchair; it was like a dog dragging himself with amputated legs, shouting and moaning. Fernando understood that he would never get him out of there that easily.

  Andrés’s screams attracted the attention of some patients who approached curiously, not understanding what it was that was breaking their regular drowsy routine. Someone else started to scream, and, like a tide, the scream spread, mixing with groans, hysterical laughter, and blows. All was lost. He had to leave. But his feet refused to go. He sat Andrés up in the chair with difficulty.

  “Look at me, Andrés.”

  Andrés had bruised his face, and he clenched his teeth and tightly shut his eyes, rigid as an iron bar.

  “I’ll be back for you, Brother. I won’t leave you again.”

  He barely made it out to the street a few seconds before the orderlies, alerted by the racket in the yard, appeared from inside the building.

  * * *

  A few hours later, despite the feelings that were crushing Fernando’s spirit, the forest of San Lorenzo gave him a certain calmness. When he got to the hostel and Recasens saw how desperate his friend was over his failure to rescue Andrés, he decided to try to cheer him up with some good news.

  “I found your mother’s murderer. He lives in a town in the Pyrenees, a few hours away by car.”

  Now, somewhat calmer, Fernando was grateful that Recasens had taken him, almost dragged him, out of the hostel. That forest was like the ones in fairy tales: hundreds of trees let their red leaves fall in unison, carpeting the paths with a ruby color, and a stone bridge passed over the riverbed transformed into a layer of mossy stones. Except it wasn’t a prince who lived there; it was a monster.

  Sitting on a large rock, Fernando played with a twig between his fingers, and he asked the silence, “Why?” But the silence didn’t answer him, it didn’t diminish his fear; it only laughed at how false and frightened humans can be.

  He had tried to confess to Recasens, tell him everything he thought. But Recasens had refused to listen to him. All he had to do was say Gabriel’s name.

  “What sense does this make? Why are we here, spying on a house from the forest like criminals? My mother died a long time ago, my father is a minister who refuses to see me, Publio is his secretary, and my brother is a hopeless madman who didn’t even recognize me.”

  “We still have him,” said Pedro, pointing among the tall brush at the roof of Gabriel’s house. “He is a mercenary, a murderer, a traitor who destroyed both of our lives. Why? So much damage, so many lies, all those years … Why?” he wondered, contemplating the rotted fallen leaves where earthworms nested. But once more, the trees looked on silently like majestic giants, like beautiful indifferent gods.

  Fernando looked at the ruins of the house. They had done their research. Gabriel Bengoechea, the skillful, humble smith of San Lorenzo, had been an agent in the service of Publio almost his entire life. But his wife’s suicide had changed everything. Gabriel had a young daughter, María. They had seen her running near the gates to the field, looking for frogs in the riverbed. She was a pretty girl, but Fernando had noticed she had the sad air of an adult. Now the forge was abandoned, the leaves grew moldy on the walls, the bellows were flat, and the furnace was a vessel for frozen ash. And Gabriel was nothing more than a split trunk in front of the window, a tormented being with a daughter who inspired pity.

  But it wasn’t pity that Recasens was feeling, not even disgust or sadness. Just emptiness: an enormous black hole that divided the past and the present.

  “Gabriel allowed an innocent, Marcelo Alcalá, to assume the guilt of his crime, so he is a murderer twice over. And his boss, Publio, forced me to declare against that innocent man, making me guilty as well.”

  Yes. Fernando knew that. The depressing state he’d found Andrés in had reawakened his hatred like a dying fire is revived by a fresh log. He hid behind an apparently idiotic phrase, twisting his mouth repulsively and stammering out a terrible sentence: “Nobody is completely innocent.”

  With bitter shame, Fernando realized how true those words were. Fate was strange, forming circles that link apparently senseless events until suddenly everything is explained. He now understood that he was trapped in that circle and that somehow children pay for the crimes of their fathers. Wasn’t Fernando himsel
f guilty of his cowardly silences when his father mistreated his mother? He did nothing to stop him. Nor did he keep his brother, Andrés, from losing his sanity. He knew what his brother had been doing all those years; he had investigated his crimes, the atrocities that were hidden only to avoid sullying the image of his father, the minister. And in the war, even in the gulag, how many gratituitous acts of violence had Recasens, and he himself, committed?

  He stood up and contemplated the walkway that surrounded Gabriel’s house. The metalworker’s daughter was calmly heading up the slope that led from the river. Like a useless redemption that came too late, fate or God or maybe pure chance had given Fernando that key that opened the basement where all the secrets were hidden, and now he also knew all the horrors.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Pedro. You and I are no better than Publio, than my father or Gabriel. The only difference between us and them is that we have nothing to cling to anymore, except our hatred … The most important thing is rescuing Andrés, getting him out of the sanatorium.”

  Pedro Recasens seemed unwilling.

  “It won’t be easy, and we will put your father and Publio on the alert.”

  But Fernando was inflexible.

  “I have to get him out of there, no matter what. Later we’ll take care of Publio, my father, and Gabriel.”

  Recasens reluctantly elaborated a plan in the following weeks. It was risky, but it was the only possibility.

  * * *

  Fernando saw someone smoking in the shadows, lit by the yellowish beam of a streetlight, and his face, covered in shadow, smiled like an animal ready to pounce. Fernando moved slowly toward him. His footsteps echoed in the deserted alley. The man tossed his cigarette and headed off leisurely. Fernando followed him. The bells of a nearby church struck the half hour, their ringing floating in that naked, bluish night.