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

by Victor del Arbol

  “So you already know…”

  María turned, frightened, with Isabel’s diary in her hands. In the doorway stood her father. She hadn’t heard him approaching.

  He didn’t seem surprised or irritated. Quite the contrary. Gabriel leaned in the doorjamb with his gaze buried among the things in that room. He seemed relieved, finally free of a burden he’d carried for too many years.

  “It’s true … Everything Lorenzo told me about you is true. You, you’re a murderer, a liar, a traitor … All those years of lies. Why?” She spat out the words, hitting him with them. She took a step forward. She grabbed her father’s face and forced him to look at her, to face her.

  Then Gabriel stammered out something unintelligible, like the moan of an animal, like a soul tearing, like a dike breaking. His overexcited tongue searched for the space between his teeth and his palate in order to articulate a logical sound, but it was useless. He broke out into tears, avoiding his daughter’s eyes.

  María let go of his face. She was tempted to stroke her father’s sparse hair. But she repressed any gesture of affection. She took Isabel’s diary and left it on Gabriel’s lap; he moved his tense hands aside.

  “How could you do this to that woman?”

  Gabriel clenched his jaw. The veins on his neck tensed. Suddenly, he stopped crying and whining. He filled his sternum with air and let it out in a very slow phrase, “I had my punishment. I loved your mother … She found Isabel’s diary. And that’s why she committed suicide. She hated me. She died hating me.”

  María looked at her father in surprise. It was strange that Gabriel only felt remorse over that death, and not the many others that he had directly or indirectly caused throughout his life.

  “And you think that’s enough punishment? And what about me? Haven’t I loved you? You tried to keep my affection with your silence, and the only thing you’ve done is gradually distance me from you. What difference is there?”

  “You would have hated me. You can’t understand what those times were like, the things that happened, how we were then. Love, loyalty, feelings, they didn’t exist. We were at war, a war that we couldn’t lose. And I was a soldier. I used others, and others used me. At the time I believed that what I was doing was necessary. Your mother wouldn’t have understood. But that’s all history now. The past doesn’t interest those who live in the present. That’s why I buried that life. I didn’t want you to judge me.”

  Judging, using others. Isn’t that what she’d done all her life as well? How many people had she judged before accusing or defending them? In the end, maybe Lorenzo was right. She, the irreproachable lawyer, had allowed herself to resolve guilt from her moral high ground, without caring about the causes, without worrying about the consequences. A cold, professional, scientific job. That’s what her law practice had become. And using others was another thing she was good at. Just ask Greta. How had she felt being the can that held all her garbage? Being there when María needed sex, security, or just to vent as she had done that very morning? When you looked closely, hadn’t she used her relationship with Lorenzo to justify her victim status? Even her father, the dying man standing in front of her, didn’t she use her hatred of him as an excuse to avoid her responsibilities as a daughter? What did she hate about him? Was it what he had done, those crimes, that double life, or the mere fact of having felt betrayed? She was no better than him. She wasn’t. She knew that César Alcalá committed a crime because he wanted to find his daughter, she knew that Ramoneda was a soulless psychopath, but none of that mattered to her. She got the inspector sent away because it gave her fame, prestige, and a boost to her career. And she silenced her conscience by telling herself, as the Romans did, that the law is harsh, but it is the law. Hypocrite.

  She looked at her father scornfully. Because scorn was what she felt when she saw herself reflected in him.

  “You weren’t going to tell me anything. Not even knowing that César Alcalá was the son of the man who paid for your crime with his life.”

  “I tried to get you to give up that case. I tried every way possible, but you didn’t listen to me. I think that even if I had told you the truth then, even if I had told you about Marcelo Alcalá and Isabel and Publio, about Recasens, about them all, even then you wouldn’t have desisted. The men that chose you to accuse César gauged your ambition well. Don’t you understand? It wasn’t your choice. Fernando Mola and Recasens pushed you to accept that case; they sent Ramoneda’s wife to your office. They knew that you would accept, and they knew that in doing so they would destroy me. It’s a strange way of understanding justice, I’ll admit. But it makes sense: the errors of the fathers are perpetuated in the children. Just like the guilt. We, María, you and I, have destroyed that family’s life: I destroyed Marcelo; you finished off César by keeping him from finding his daughter. But we can still change something; we can do something to close the circle. You have to help that man find Marta. You have to do it.”

  María had already made her decision long before going to her father’s house. Still, Gabriel’s Good Samaritan attitude deeply irritated her.

  “You are asking me to help you atone for a forty-year-old guilt.”

  Gabriel denied it vehemently. What he was asking was for his daughter to help herself, to not allow herself to get dragged into the well he had fallen into.

  “Fernando is Isabel’s older son. He has more reasons than anyone to hate me. I killed his mother, and in a way, because of me, they killed Recasens, his best friend. This is his way of getting revenge. When I visited him he forced me to tell you the truth, although you had already figured it out for yourself. Killing me no longer has any point after so long. He knows that I have cancer and will soon die. He’s satisfied with knowing that you’ll hate me for being a monster. But besides me, if there’s anyone Fernando hates it’s Publio. He is the one who holds all of our strings, the director of this farce. Until now he’s been untouchable. But César’s showing up changed everything. That cop has information that will destroy the congressman. And Fernando wants it. In exchange, he is willing to tell Alcalá where his daughter is. That is the deal you should offer César. And you should do it quickly.”

  “How can Fernando know where Marta is?”

  “I don’t know. But I believe him. And I know that he will keep his word.”

  María was silent. She took a slow walk around that suffocating, moldy room.

  “Should I trust you?”

  “I’m no longer important in this. And I’m tired. Very tired.”

  * * *

  When María left, Gabriel was lonelier than ever. He looked for something in his old trunk and went upstairs. He went to the bathroom and sat in front of the mirror. His gaze grew tense. His face smiled at him, somewhat maliciously. He no longer felt repulsion looking at himself. Seeing his face was like greeting an old friend, unpleasant, deformed, but familiar. His skin withdrew beneath his lifeless eyes. Only a pair of enormous dark pupils had survived the disappointments.

  Slowly he slid a razor over his sunken cheeks, cutting the sparse halo of beard growth. When he finished, he started getting dressed. Putting on a suit and tie after so long was absolute torture for him. The shirt’s cotton weighed on his skin like a coat of mail; he had to clench his teeth to squeeze into the pleated pants, and when he tied the shoes they pinched his feet. His body objected to the sudden imprisonment.

  When he was done, he looked at himself wearily. Through the window he could make out the light of a radiantly sunny day. For a moment, Gabriel imagined himself strolling among people like just another retiree; strolling down the street when he was not yet a monster who looked like a monster, just a monster like the other mortals, walking hand in hand with his daughter and his wife.

  Without further ado, he removed the cloth that covered the Luger taken from the trunk. He remembered how he had seized it from Fernando in Russia. The war pulsed in the narrow barrel and greased slide of that pistol. The screams of the dead, the flashes of s
hots in the back of the neck, the smell of the blood of so many strangers splattering his fingers. He stuck the pistol in his mouth, pointed it upward, and then closed his eyes. And pulled the trigger.

  25

  Modelo prison (Barcelona), February 11, 1981

  “What time is it? My watch stopped.”

  César Alcalá didn’t understand his cellmate’s obsession with time. Really, every watch was stopped in there, even though the hands continued to glide around the face on his wrist.

  “It’s eight.”

  Romero jumped out of his bunk in his underwear. That morning, like every other morning, the first thing he did was light a cigarette and look out the window through the bars.

  “You should get dressed, Alcalá.”

  César Alcalá turned in bed to face the wall. He touched the yellowing cement surface, as if his hand wanted to confirm the consistency of things. He had barely slept.

  “Why? So I can pace around this cell like a caged beast?”

  Romero stubbed out his cigarette on one of the bars. He smiled grudgingly. He looked at Alcalá and shrugged his shoulders. He leaned forward and lifted the mattress on his bunk. From beneath it stuck out the shiny handle of a machete. He grabbed it with his right hand and planted himself in the middle of the cell with his legs spread.

  “You’d better get up. I wouldn’t want to have to do this to you from behind.”

  “What are you supposedly going to do?” asked César Alcalá, alarmed.

  Romero smiled sinisterly, brandishing the machete.

  “Cut your throat. They’ve paid me a lot of money to do it.”

  César Alcalá sat up slowly without taking his eyes off the machete.

  “You can’t do it; not you, Romero.”

  “Oh no? And why would you think that?”

  “We’re friends,” said the inspector with a simplicity that would have made a child blush. He couldn’t come up with any other reason. They were alone. Romero was wielding a machete. He was unarmed.

  “If I remember correctly, Julius Caesar said something like that to Brutus as he was being stabbed in the back.”

  “You aren’t like that. You aren’t like the others.”

  Romero relaxed the hand that held the machete, although he didn’t let his guard down. It was obvious that he didn’t like the situation. He was fond of Alcalá. But the inspector had no fucking clue about what he was like or what he had been like.

  “Let me tell you something about me, Alcalá. Many years ago, the city had the idea of setting up a library bus for the poor outlying neighborhoods. There was a boy who went there because it was a place to get out of the rain and it was more or less warm inside. Besides, that library on wheels, badly stocked and worse lit, was run by a young woman that the boy was in love with. It was inevitable. At twelve years old, what he knew about sex was limited to the jerk-off contests he had with his friends in the bathrooms of a cheap whorehouse in the Plaza Real. They hid on the balcony and masturbated watching the whores take off their long bathrobes and mount their clients with thick white flesh. Sex was those drops of semen between your fingers, those ejaculations brutal and sudden as a bolt of lightning, and that mix of fear of being discovered, shame, and pleasure.

  “But the librarian was a real woman, not a distant vision. She came so close to him that the boy could feel her breasts against his shoulder, smell her cologne, and brush against her hair. He couldn’t get anything more from her than smiles and the occasional friendly caress, but in exchange he learned to read. Thanks to her he discovered the power of words, of ideas, of writing. The boy discovered the incentive to refine his survivor’s intelligence. She taught him to exploit his street smarts in order to thrive.

  “One day, the boy’s friends, drawn by the wonderful things he told them about the librarian, went to the bus. She was putting away some books. The boy thought that she’d be happy that he had brought her more readers. But they didn’t want to know anything about Don Quixote, or The Odyssey, or Atlantis. They surrounded her like hungry wolves, they held her down by the legs and arms, they ripped off her panties, and they raped her, one after the other, while they forced that boy to watch them do it, holding him down so he could do nothing to stop them.

  “And that boy never forgot the librarian’s face, her imploring gaze while they humiliated her. Or his own impotence. When they finished, they burned the bus with the woman inside. They were his friends. He had brought them there. It was his fault.

  “The boy grew up, and one by one, for years, he searched for those who had done it, and he eliminated them. But not even finishing off the last of them cleared his conscience.”

  César Alcalá had managed to sit up in bed. He tensed his muscles, prepared to fight for his life, and shot a fleeting glance toward the hallway of the cellblock. He had the terrible certainty that even if he screamed, no one would come to his aid.

  “Why are you telling me that story now?”

  Romero looked at the machete’s thick blade.

  “Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s my way of saying that you shouldn’t trust anyone, that you shouldn’t expect anything good out of anybody, much less of someone who says they’re your friend. Or maybe I just needed to get it off my chest … Do you think I’m a bloodthirsty son of a bitch? Well, that’s what everyone thinks. And I’ve worked hard to build that image. Although I could have grown up, married that girl, read all the books in the bus, and become a tenured literature professor. We can’t always choose what we want.”

  César Alcalá didn’t take his eyes off the machete. He had to react, get up, fight. He couldn’t let it all end in such a ridiculous way: stabbed by a guy who was only wearing flesh-colored underwear. He had spent his entire life fighting, one way or another. His work was violent; he always ended up in some sewer where he had to struggle to breathe. And his survival in jail hadn’t been much different. Perhaps the violence here wasn’t as euphemistic or governed by rules. Here everything was much more primitive, authentic. More bitter. He had survived several attacks and other attempts to kill him, defending himself tooth and nail, remaining always tense, alert, and willing to be the roughest of the rough, the most decided of them all. But suddenly he found himself unable to react to Romero. He forced his muscles to tense up, but it was an unnatural effort; his body simply didn’t want to defend itself. He was fed up, tired, exhausted.

  “I don’t believe you want to kill me for money,” he said. “You have more than you can spend. And you won’t get out of here with enough life ahead of you to enjoy it all … So, why?”

  Romero arched his eyebrows, his expression somewhere between amused and confused. That inspector had some nerve. And he was right. Suddenly, his expression turned mischievous, almost ashamed. Like that of a boy who had been caught lying. He put the machete down on the bed, near César’s indecisive hands.

  “It’s true. What they don’t understand is that inside here money is worthless, especially if you can’t enjoy it. I’m gonna rot in here before getting furlough. But if I don’t kill you, I’ll lose a good chunk of the reputation I’ve earned. And then it will be my life that’s worthless. You already know how this bubble we’re in works. Here appearances are as important as anywhere else. Maybe even more.”

  César Alcalá breathed somewhat easier. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the machete in his reach. But he had no intention of grabbing it and using it against Romero. The man he was before wouldn’t have thought twice; he’d have leaped on him and skewered him. But that man no longer existed. Prison had swallowed him up. Besides, he understood that Romero didn’t want to do it. But he needed an out, a worthy offer to justify his scruples.

  “You don’t need to kill me. Besides, you don’t want to. You could have cut my throat in my sleep, in the shower, anytime, and you haven’t.”

  “But there are others who won’t think twice. One day or another, someone will manage to do it, and I’m not always going to be around to protect you, my friend. So y
ou’d better think of something. You can’t keep pretending that Publio, that son of a bitch, is going to be satisfied with your silence or with keeping you locked up here … You have to escape.”

  César Alcalá would have laughed had the solution not seemed so obvious. And so impossible to realize.

  “Not that impossible,” said Romero, reading his thoughts. He picked up the machete, although this time with a less threatening attitude. “Do you trust that lawyer who comes to visit you?”

  Did he trust her? He didn’t trust anybody or anything. But at least María had been with him those weeks, she’d given him hope. And he felt something for her, a feeling similar to trust, yes. He respected her.

  “In any case,” said Romero, bringing the machete close to Alcalá’s bare chest. “You are going to have to trust her and cross your fingers. It’s the only solution I’ve come up with; and now you’d better grab your pillow and cover your mouth. This is going to hurt.”

  * * *

  María looked at her wristwatch. It was the third time she’d checked it in less than twenty minutes. But as hard as she pushed, time refused to move any faster.

  She stirred her now-cold coffee with a spoon, her gaze lost somewhere on the street she could see through the window. She reviewed what she had done in the last few hours minute by minute and traced a dazed smile. She almost couldn’t believe what the neurologist had just told her. She slowly chewed on the word: tumor. It was an ugly word, unpleasant on her palate. The neurologist had showed her the X-rays and the scanner images, but she had had a hard time associating those blotches on her lobe, nebulous slivers that looked harmless, with such a thick, definitive word.