Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (18 page)

The guard said no. He forced César Alcalá to sit in a chair, and then he moved into the shadows as if he wanted to distance himself from the situation, but reminding them that although invisible he would remain vigilant.

“Do you have a cigarette?” said César Alcalá, fixing his eyes on María.

She sat in front of him. Between them was a metal table with a polished surface that intensely reflected the ceiling light.

“No. They took them away from me when I came in.”

César nodded, as if he had been there all his life, in front of the woman who had put him in jail.

“They don’t let us smoke in isolation,” he said. “They’re afraid we could cut our veins with the hardened butt or set the mattresses on fire to burn ourselves alive. They let us die bit by bit in these underground cells, but they’re afraid of us committing suicide. It’s because of all the paperwork, did you know? The guards are terrified of bureaucracy.”

María made a sympathetic face.

The inspector scrutinized her for several minutes.

“You’ve changed,” he said, with a sarcastic expression, as if that disappointed him.

“You don’t look too good yourself, Inspector,” she replied boldly. It was true. On Alcalá’s shaved skull lumps of poorly scarred wounds and bruised bumps stuck out. He had his skin tattooed with the pale, weak luminescence of the prison.

He smiled, nodding.

“When I first got here I tried to take care of myself. That was when I thought that my appeal would be successful and I would someday get out, at least with a pardon. But then the days started to pile up, one on top of the other, and I let myself go, like everybody does. In a place like this it makes no sense to nurse hopes. The only thing that gets you is more hurt.” He grew silent, observing the surface of the table as if contemplating the depths of a lake. Then he sat up, straightening his arms and showing the handcuffs. “It’s ironic. But in a way I should be grateful to you for locking me up in here. At least now I can feel sorry for myself.”

María felt embarrassed. It was the inspector’s absolute calm as he spoke to her, his lack of emotion, that embarrassed her.

“I guess you hate me.”

“You guess right. But don’t fool yourself. Here hate is something that gestates slowly, that turns rational and turns ingrown, like a persistent brain tumor … It’s hard to understand.”

María looked at the clock on the wall. Her allotted time was slipping away quickly.

“Does the name Isabel Mola mean anything to you?”

She noticed a flash of surprise in the inspector, and then his gaze darkened. It was only an instant. Alcalá quickly recomposed his expression, as if drawing a heavy curtain over his soul.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here after everything that’s happened,” said the inspector with apparent indifference. And yet there was something inside him that seemed to stir against his will.

The guard came out of the shadows. He sighed and looked at the clock out of the corner of his eye. Time was running out.

“You haven’t answered my question,” insisted María.

The inspector stood up. “That’s right, I haven’t. First I want to know why you are asking it.”

María knit her brows.

“A man came to see me. He said that you and I have in common a link with that woman.”

César Alcalá’s eyes lit up with incredulity. He examined the lawyer meticulously, trying to find out something about her.

“That’s absurd.”

“Maybe not,” she said. She took out of her pocket the photograph of Isabel Mola that Recasens had given her, and showed it to him. “It’s her, right? This is the woman that your father killed in 1941. I know the story. I’ve done my research. What you perhaps don’t know is that my father, Gabriel Bengoechea, was a blacksmith at that time, and he worked for the Molas. He made a lovely katana for the younger son, Andrés. Perhaps your father told you about the Sadness of the Samurai.”

César Alcalá slowly shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe what that woman was telling him, as if that revelation was too much for him. He gradually lifted his glassy eyes.

“And that’s what links our pasts?”

“I don’t know” was María’s honest reply.

The inspector looked to one side, searching in his memory for something. Then he straightened his shoulders, as if he wanted to lift himself out of his deterioration and decline.

From that moment on, visiting César Alcalá became a routine for María. Every morning she went to the prison confused, not knowing what she would find. César Alcalá was not an easy man. He didn’t trust her. At first they just sat in front of each other in silence, letting the twenty minutes of the visit run out as they looked at each other suspiciously. Little by little, María began to understand what prison can do to a man: quash all his eagerness, convert silence into the best way of getting to know someone. The lawyer learned not to pressure the inspector with silly questions; she just sat in front of him, waiting, without knowing exactly what she was waiting for.

It was César Alcalá who spoke first. He started with trivial things, describing the prison routine, commenting on some news in the papers, asking things about the world outside. Until one morning, as the sun hid behind the walls and the disturbing sounds of the prison grew louder, the inspector asked María what her real motive for visiting him every day was.

María could have given any answer. Telling him that she came because Lorenzo and Colonel Recasens had asked her to; assuring the inspector that her only intention was to help him. But none of that fully explained the reasons that brought her there each morning. And the question that had been burning a hole in her throat for some time came bubbling up.

“How could you do what you did to Ramoneda?”

The inspector looked away. He didn’t like talking about that. But María discovered disturbing things in those silences, things that the inspector didn’t want to reveal, and that he sensed had something, directly or indirectly, to do with her.

When his daughter, Marta, disappeared, César Alcalá went crazy. Every morning he went to the plaza where Marta was last seen. It was the only thing he could do: search through the garbage cans, scrutinize every paving tile, every window of the adjoining buildings, the faces of the passersby, looking for any trace, any sign that would indicate the path to finding her.

After a week without any news, without knowing what had happened to his daughter, where she was, without anyone seeming to take her disappearance seriously, he saw a homeless man appear among the gusts of air. The man went past him dragging his cart of garbage with his head bowed, leaving tracks in the snow. He walked like a beast of burden, pushing his chin forward, compelling himself with his entire body without letting go of the brownish-gray filter that hung from his lips. He shifted his gaze for barely a second, his eyes red from wine and cold, to look at the inspector and smile mockingly at him. Or perhaps it was just a fleeting weary expression.

At first glance he was like the other homeless people who roamed through the city center. Of an unidentifiable age. His face was covered with scabs. A thick dirty beard toughened his face. He was wrapped in various sweaters, and a coat that was too big for him dragged on the ground. The crotch of his polyester pants was stained with dried urine. His thick hairy fingers ended in black, bitten-down fingernails filled with hangnails.

“But all of a sudden I recognized that bum’s face, his gaze: it was Ramoneda, an occasional police informant in exchange for favors. ‘What are you looking for around here?’ I asked him. Ramoneda shrugged. He took the slobbery butt out of his mouth and opened his arms. Then he took off the dirty wool cap that covered his bald spot in a show of respect and held it tightly against his chest. ‘I only wanted to offer my condolences,’ he said. Then he squinted his eyes, which grew damp, and took something wrinkled out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was the hair ribbon that Marta was wearing the day she disappeared. ‘Someone asked me to tell you that your silence is the price for your daughter’s life.’”

The inspector didn’t let him say anything more. Without realizing what he was doing, blinded by hate, he took out his pistol and rammed it into Ramoneda’s mouth, sending one of his teeth flying.

“Where is my daughter?!”

Ramoneda’s reply was a sharp, short cry. Bleeding, he stumbled and fell at the feet of the inspector, who started to kick him like a sack of potatoes, shouting the same question over and over. The nearly empty plaza served as a speaker, amplifying the shouts and blows, and soon some neighbors were peering from the windows of the adjacent buildings.

“Tell me what you know right now, or I’ll blow your head off,” warned the inspector, paying no mind to the people who were gathering around them.

Ramoneda spat out pieces of split lip. He could see in the inspector’s eyes that he was beside himself, and he believed he would follow through on his threat.

“I’m just the messenger, Inspector. I don’t know anything more.”

“Who gave you that hair ribbon?”

Ramoneda stuttered. César Alcalá bashed his head brutally against the pavement.

“A couple of thugs. I think they work for Don Publio,” sobbed Ramoneda.

All of a sudden, César Alcalá’s gaze froze. He lifted his head and saw the crowd that was forming. It wouldn’t be long before a uniformed patrol unit arrived, and as soon as the name Publio came to light, that piece of shit would slip through his hands like a fish. He thought quickly.

He took out his handcuffs and put them on Ramoneda, forcing him to stand up.

“I’m a policeman,” he shouted at the people who crowded around them. He waved his credential as if it were a crucifix to scare off vampires. The people made a path for him with hateful looks, while the inspector dragged Ramoneda to the car parked fifty yards away. Suddenly, the homeless man turned to the crowd.

“He’s going to kill me! Help me!”

The people started to get riled up, and someone began to shout, “That’s enough. You cops are torturers, fucking fascists. You can’t treat people like that. Franco’s dead, asshole…”

That was followed by more shouting, and the people grew braver. Someone threw a stone that hit the inspector in the shoulder, but he didn’t let go of Ramoneda. Bottles and cans fell around him. The inspector forced Ramoneda into the car by hitting him in the ribs.

He managed to get behind the wheel, but the crowd surrounded his car and started to rock it. And they would have lynched him right there if the inspector hadn’t stuck his gun out the window, aiming it into the mob, who opened up enough for him to get out of there, accelerating with a screech of the wheels.

César Alcalá would have liked to forget what happened after that. He was repulsed with himself very time he looked at his hands, every time he remembered Ramoneda’s screams of pain in that basement where he kept him locked up during that week of insanity. He did terrible things to him, things he hadn’t thought he was capable of doing to any human being. But César Alcalá wasn’t human in those moments; he was like a rabid dog that bit and tore without being conscious of the pain he caused, only the pain he felt.

The beatings were of no use. Ramoneda would have let himself be killed, or maybe he simply didn’t know any more than he had said: that men linked to Publio had taken the inspector’s daughter.

The last night he went home with his knuckles broken and raw from all the punching, with his soul a black hole through which gurgled out the man he used to be. He knew the authorities wouldn’t be long in coming to arrest him. He didn’t care. He had lost his daughter; he thought he had beaten a man to death. He was no longer César Alcalá; he was a stranger.

He found his wife, Andrea, in Marta’s bedroom. Sitting on the bed, playing with her daughter’s dolls lined up on a shelf along the wall, softly singing lullabies, as if those rag dolls could bring Marta back to her.

César Alcalá told her what he had done.

For a long time Andrea looked at the torn flesh of her husband’s hands without a shred of compassion; she seemed not to understand what César was telling her.

“Did you hear me, Andrea? I killed that man.”

She nodded with an absent gaze, her hair messy and her expression like one of the lifeless rag dolls.

“What will happen now?” she managed to say, as if suddenly recovering her sanity.

César Alcalá dropped against the wall and sank to the floor. He buried his head between his legs.

“Tomorrow I’ll turn myself in, if they don’t come for me first. They’ll send me to jail.”

The next morning, César Alcalá found his wife dead.

She had shot herself in the face and was lying in her daughter’s bed. Remembering it, Inspector Alcalá couldn’t erase the image of that lumpy stain on the pink wallpaper of Marta’s bedroom.

*   *   *

César Alcalá was silent, as if the words were sucked out by the images projected through his memory.

“Why did she choose that room, and not the bathroom, the kitchen, our bedroom?” he wondered aloud, remembering the girl’s room, the little bedspread with lace flounces spattered with blood, the bloody stupor on the faces of her dolls piled on the shelf.

María didn’t know how to answer. She thought of her mother, hanging from a beam. She thought of her father’s silences. How he pretended not to know what had really happened.

11

Mola estate (Mérida), January 1942

Andrés looked with squinted eyes through the window at the gardener lining up pots of flowers, and at the end of his gaze loomed a slight cloud. The sons of the laborers were fighting, pulling up clumps of dirt from the ground. In one corner, the domestic help was loading up the furniture into two moving trucks parked in front of the house. It all had an incredible synchronicity, something came in, and something else went out, without any friction, creating a floating, surreal atmosphere.

His mother didn’t like those gray afternoons, and neither did he. He missed her. He liked to sneak into her bedroom.