* * *
María felt cold, as she had when she’d passed that guy smoking on a bench and looking out at the beach. She wrapped her neck up with her coat collar and buttoned the top button. She was in no rush to get back to the hotel. In fact, she didn’t want to arrive too early. She asked herself why she had been so cold with Greta. She could have gone home; the work she had to get done that night was just an excuse. Really she hadn’t wanted to get into the car with her because she didn’t want to cling to anything. She was so afraid to love something, to expect or desire anything, that she preferred not to have anything. She wondered why she was that way, why she had always been afraid to be happy, to take what was offered to her. It was a question that made no sense at this point. She had no use for constructive or Freudian answers.
She couldn’t blame her father or Lorenzo. They weren’t the ones who had destroyed her life. It was her fault; it was in her own nature to be unable to enjoy things, feelings, or the company of a loved one. That didn’t make her a dispassionate woman; quite the opposite: she now felt, with a tremendous effervescence, her fear that she might not survive the operation, the whirlwind of guilt and satisfaction at having been able to reunite César with his daughter. But none of that filled her completely. She felt like something static around which things happened, barely brushing her surface.
She no longer had many personal pleasures, like that nighttime stroll. She enjoyed the solitude and harmony of the silence, the conjunction between the night and her mood. She didn’t need to convince herself everything would go fine, or show disheartenment or fear in front of Greta or anyone else. She only needed to walk, lose Marchán’s bloodhounds, go up the street to the hotel, smoke a cigarette, and listen to the sound of her heels.
She stopped at a streetlight. The Vía Laietana looked unusually beautiful. The lighting of the tall buildings contrasted with the silence of lanes devoid of traffic and streetlights going through the motions of red, yellow, green. Only the block where the enormous post office building stood was dark. Right where she was headed.
Ramoneda noted with satisfaction that María was heading exactly toward him. He got so excited in anticipation of what was going to happen that he got an erection. He pulled out his revolver and cocked it. It was easy to shoot from his hiding spot, among planks and piles of bricks. At his distance from the target he couldn’t miss. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. He waited patiently, clenching the butt of the revolver. He glued himself to the wall until María passed him, so close he could smell her perfume. Then he went out to meet her.
María stopped, startled.
“Hello, lawyer lady … We meet again. Don’t you remember me? I’m Ramoneda. Your favorite client.” Before she could react, he hit her on the forehead with the revolver, leaving a gash and making her fall. He hit her again hard on the head until she lost consciousness. Then, making sure that nobody had seen him, he dragged her to cover in the construction site. He tied her up and gagged her.
He had no plan to just kill her. He needed to sate his pride as much as his body. He wasn’t a rapist, but it wasn’t about raping her; it was about possessing her. Rapists, like regular people, underestimate the power of sex and the lack of it. There was no mystery in penetration and ejaculation. He wasn’t a horny dog. What he wanted was to unleash terror in his victim. Make her understand that she was completely in his hands, that he could stick the barrel of his revolver in every orifice of her body before letting off a bullet into her face. And the sexual tension, the desire to dominate her until snuffing her out, was part of that ritual.
He dragged her to a doorway and waited for the policemen to pass as they came by searching for her, cursing their ineptitude.
When he felt safe, he smacked her violently to bring her back to consciousness. María returned slowly, and her eyes were slow to focus on the image of the man who was stroking her chin with the revolver barrel. She tried to get loose, but Ramoneda punched her in the stomach.
“You’re stubborn, María. And you struggle, which is fine. It makes it more fun, even if it’s more uncomfortable. I guess you already know why we’re here. You haven’t heeded the warnings I’ve been sending you, and you learned nothing from Recasens’s death. Now the same thing is in store for you. You should have let it be; you don’t know Publio. He’s one of those people that stop at nothing when they want something. You’ve already seen what he did to your friend the inspector, who, by the way, has an outstanding debt with me. As for Lorenzo, I’ve taken care of him. Although it would be more exact to say that his wife did it for me. That blonde had guts. I saw her bruised body and face. I’m not surprised she hated him. But you never stood up to him; you ran away. That’s what you’ve always done, run … Where you gonna run to now?”
It was clear that Ramoneda wasn’t hoping to strike a deal. He hadn’t even taken the gag off María’s mouth. He knew that as soon as he did she would start screaming, and then the fun would be over. It was simply a speech he had practiced in front of the mirror; he wanted to hear himself say it, feel himself the actor in his own movie. He was born for this, he thought. For living moments like this one.
He sank his knee hard into María’s pelvis and forced her to open her legs. With an anxious hand he searched beneath her skirt for her panty hose, tore them, and then violently ripped away her underwear. María stamped at the floor, muffled sounds coming from her gag, and Ramoneda’s hand silenced her.
“I always thought you were one of those frigid, stuck-up snobs. I’ll bring you down to earth, princess.”
Suddenly, María stopped fighting.
A sharp detonation was heard. Ramoneda was very still. He stiffened with disbelief, touching his back. Another shot was heard. Ramoneda fell to the floor, bouncing against some planks. He was dead.
A shadow lengthened before María, who pulled her knees back, retreating with her hands tied. Right before the shadow entered into the faint circle given off by a streetlight, it stopped and observed her from the darkness. It seemed to hesitate. For an interminable minute nothing happened. Then the shadow showed itself. It leaned over María and took off her gag.
“You?”
César looked with a mix of disdain and sadness at Ramoneda’s body. Then he looked at María.
“Yes, me.” Alcalá had been following María those last two days. He knew the way Publio and his henchman thought. He knew that sooner or later they would try to kill her. All he had to do was wait. He touched Ramoneda’s jugular. He wasn’t breathing. Dead, he was a defenseless being, just like any other. He inspired pity with his knees folded inward like a broken doll. It hadn’t been the way he’d imagined it; César hadn’t felt any emotion when he killed him. Only the certainty of having finished something he’d left half done five years earlier.
María put her wrist in her mouth to quiet her crying. Why was she sobbing? She didn’t know. Maybe because she ended up killing everything she touched.
César didn’t try to console her. It was useless to try to find consolation in words. He didn’t even expect her to show gratitude, although he had saved her life. He hadn’t done it for her, but for himself and for his daughter. Ramoneda was nothing, a rabid dog felled by a shot. But Publio, the real culprit, was still out of his reach. And he wouldn’t stop until he had gotten him.
The officers who had been on her trail didn’t take long to appear. They must have heard the shots.
“Stay here. I’ll take care of this.” He dragged Ramoneda’s body by the feet, loaded him like a sack over his shoulder, and disappeared into the night.
Two days later, Ramoneda’s corpse was found by some city police in one of the gardens at the feet of Montjuïc. It was a spot frequented by heroin addicts who offered sexual favors in exchange for small amounts of money or drugs. Thefts and crimes were common in the area. Nobody was surprised to find that the body showed up with its pants at its knees and its face destroyed by a big rock.
31
Barcelona, February 2
2–23, 1981
María waited in the lobby of the Military Court. The decoration didn’t look very military. The tones of the walls were welcoming, there were paintings of landscapes and seascapes, and a vase of flowers on a small table. Every once in a while, someone opened the door, asked her something. She answered succinctly, and the person asking left again.
Late in the day, Marchán emerged from the judge’s office. He was responsive but hadn’t awarded any concessions.
“The judge refused to open proceedings against Publio,” he said, his large eyes focusing on her. The policeman waited for María to digest the news, watching her stuporous reaction and gauging the credibility of the tears that sprang up compulsively in her eyes.
María couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“You have to get César to turn himself in. Without his testimony, the judge won’t accept the evidence.”
“I can testify; there’s the evidence you’ve gathered; ask him to examine the documents in Lorenzo’s files.”
Marchán was obviously saddened.
“We did, but someone emptied out his apartment. I guess it was Ramoneda. As far as you testifying, the judge doesn’t think you will be a reliable witness.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“You aren’t being accused of anything, for the moment. But he knows the history of your marriage. You were battered, and your relationship with Lorenzo wasn’t a good one. Besides, directly or indirectly, you were involved in the deaths of Pedro Recasens and Ramoneda, and in the fire that killed the Mola brothers, besides being assumed to be implicated in César Alcalá’s escape. As much good faith as I may have in you right now, it will be very difficult for me to convince him that all this is a coincidence.
“I’m not going to give up, María. I have the feeling that someone is trying to stop the judge, and that he’s waiting to see what unfolds before making his decision. It’s as if everyone was waiting for something to happen, as if nobody wanted to stop it, so it can all finally blow up. But I won’t rest until that congressman is in prison somewhere.”
María checked her wristwatch. She was running out of time. That very evening she had to check into the hospital for her operation.
“Will you tell me where Alcalá is hiding?”
María looked at Marchán incredulously.
“Why are you so anxious to catch him?”
“I want to help him. And I can’t do that if he becomes a fugitive from justice. It has to be done legally. You know that it’s the only way.”
María smiled sadly.
“No, Inspector. I don’t know anything anymore.”
* * *
On Monday, February 23, at 6:00 PM, a large group of people started to gather in front of the Vanguardia newspaper building on Pelayo Street in Barcelona. A few minutes later there were so many people that one of the staff writers had to go out to the street with a megaphone in his hand and shout out the news as it arrived from the various agencies. At the same time, the crowd milled around those who were listening to the news come in on transistor radios.
Half an hour earlier, as the congressmen voted on the investment of the new prime minister, a group of two hundred armed civil guards had burst into the congress, ordering the head of the group of congressmen down to the ground, pistols in hand and taking the speaker’s platform. Bursts of machine-gun fire had been heard in the chamber, and a massacre was feared. There had just been a coup d’état.
* * *
“Look, this is your brain.”
The doctor showed her the tomography, pointing to an area in the right lobe where a small stain could be seen.
“The problem is that it’s grown. That’s what’s causing the agnosias you are suffering: it perceives objects it doesn’t associate with its regular function; and for that same reason you are having trouble speaking. The dizziness and loss of vision are partly due to a hypertension that you can make out in this area.”
María listened carefully. She was trying to concentrate on anything but the sound of the electric razor that a nurse was using to shave her head. And she was pretending not to care as she saw the locks of her hair fall to the floor like a cascade of autumn leaves.
“Does that mean things aren’t looking good?”
The doctor adjusted his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose.
“We’ll know more once we’ve taken out the tumor and analyzed it.”
After she washed up, they took her on a gurney to the operating room. In the elevator the hospital staff commented frantically on the news events the radios were dosing out with an eyedropper. María could hear that the military men had taken over the TVE television stations in Madrid and that tanks occupied the streets in Valencia.
She felt deeply disheartened. After so many deaths, nothing had kept Publio from getting his way. She imagined what the world would be like when she woke up. What faces would she see on the television news? Those of a military junta? A new dictator? How could this have happened? Nobody did anything to stop it now, and those who had tried had failed. The unthinkable, traveling back in time, was about to happen in front of everyone’s astonished eyes. Publio was going to be victorious. Maybe he would be named a minister, maybe even prime minister …
The orderly pushing her gurney stopped talking and stared at her.
“Why are you crying? Don’t be afraid. You’ll see, you’ll be fine.”
María nodded. She wasn’t crying for herself. For that she had no tears. Her sobs were of incomprehension, of mute desperation in a world whose rules she would never understand. Men died, killed, betrayed their ideals, led an entire people into fratricidal war, and she didn’t understand why. For power, that’s the only motive that moves men: power, as her father sometimes would say to her. But power was something absurd, abstract, something tiny and useless.
An enormous spherical lamp hung on a mechanical arm shot out sparks of very intense light through dozens of eyes. It looked like a flying saucer. To the right of the operating table instruments were spread out on a green cloth beside a metal tray. Everything was white—the walls, the light, the floor, the faces—except for the interns’ uniforms and the sheets, which were a worn green color. It smelled of liniments, disinfecting alcohol, and gauze impregnated with sterile medicines.
They placed her like a bundle on the operating table and put some clamps onto her head that held it down, forcing her to look to the left. They put something in the IV that went into her arm; then she felt cold on her bare skull. They were spraying it with a freezing agent. The doctors were talking, their masks not yet on. They pointed to her head as if it were a foreign object. They ignored her completely. Someone used a felt-tipped pen to mark the route they would follow to her brain. María was glad she wasn’t in the Middle Ages, when skulls were trepanned with a carpenter’s brace.
“The anesthesia will take a little while to take effect. You may feel some slight discomfort. That’s normal.”
Why had her fear vanished suddenly? Through the curtains that enclosed the operating room she could make out an outer room. All the staff there had their backs to her, glued to a television hung on the wall. It seemed like a good metaphor. Even the surgeon who was going to operate on her asked nervously how things were going in the congress as the nurse put blue gloves on him.
She felt alone but not sad. She partly regretted having told Greta that she didn’t want her to come to the hospital. She didn’t want anyone to see her that way, exhausted, at the mercy of others. Curiously, the last person she saw before everything went fuzzy was Inspector Marchán, who was waiting to send her to jail if she survived the operation. The policeman smiled at her from the other side. It was a sincere smile. A smile that wished her a good journey into the darkness.
* * *
María Bengoechea died in the Sagrada Familia hospital on May 10, 1981. Her agony in the final days was not poetic or romantic. She barely had moments of lucidity, and she couldn’t enjoy even a few minutes
alone with Greta. She would have liked to say good-bye to her in private, kiss her on the lips, and feel her fingers running through her hair. But that room was like a prison of tubes and machines, of doctors, of cops, of journalists. She slowly faded until going out with a final death rattle, something monstrous and comical at the same time, an enormous belch that expelled the last bits of air from her lungs, and with them her last particles of life.
Then came the hustle and bustle of the funeral preparations. María didn’t have anything prepared; until the last moment she must have convinced herself that the cancer wasn’t going to get the best of her. Greta emotionlessly carried out the ritual of choosing the flowers and coffin. It was all so common, so mundane, that it became unbearable. It was an intimate act. Death always is. But when the burial is for family only, and family was just her and the shell that was left of Gabriel, it’s all lighter, less liturgical. In deference, Inspector Antonio Marchán had come to the cemetery. The notes that María had left had been very helpful in clearing her name in the deaths of Recasens, Ramoneda, Lorenzo, and the Mola brothers. However, the policeman was convinced that María had taken to her grave the whereabouts of César Alcalá and his daughter, who were still at large.
There was no religious ceremony. María wouldn’t have allowed it. They were the only three witnesses as the cemetery workers stuck her coffin in the niche, placed the stone, and sealed it with mortar. With Inspector Marchán’s help, Greta added a small crown of lilies, with no banner or note. She said nothing; her face showed nothing. She turned and left from whence she had come, without looking back, unhurriedly, leaving a path of her footsteps.
EPILOGUE
In 1982 the trials that were called the Juicios de Campamento began. In them a good part of those implicated in the coup of February 23, 1981, were sentenced. Tejero, Milans, Armada … those are the best-known names in that plot. In total no less than thirty military men were condemned to prison sentences of between two and thirty years.
Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel Page 39