Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (2 page)

“It’s not worth worrying yourself over, don’t you think?” said María.

Her father leaned his head back slightly and looked at her with bloodshot eyes. He stuttered something that María didn’t want to hear.

She changed the channel. An ETA attack in Madrid. A car burning on the Castellana, smoke. People shouting, filled with hate and impotence. Victims of the rapeseed oil poisoning show their deformities at the door to a courtroom, reminding her of those beggars with polio who sit by the doors of churches. Politicians raising the crucifix against the divorce law, others lifting the Republican flag. The world was spinning quickly; people were protecting themselves with standards and signs. She turned off the television, and all the noise vanished.

Stillness returned to the cream-colored room. The IV drip bag, the footsteps of the nurses behind the closed door. She imagined that the policeman was still there on watch, bored and drowsy in a chair, wondering what point there was in guarding a dying woman.

Two nurses came in to wash her. María was friendly, and even though she knew they wouldn’t give her one, she asked them for a cigarette.

“Smoking is bad for your health,” they answered. María smiled, and they blushed at the obvious stupidity of the comment.

It should be the other way around. It should be her blushing as they sponge-bathed her like a child. But she did nothing; she let herself be flipped like a piece of meat by one of them. The other took her father’s chair and pushed him out of the room; María appreciated the respite. The nurse washed her underarms, her feet; she changed her bag of serum, and all the while she kept talking about her children, about her husband, and her life. María listened with closed eyes, wanting it to end.

They changed the sheets. They had no scent. That was unsettling. There were no smells in the room. The doctors said that it was because of the operation. It had affected that part of her brain. A world without odors was a surreal world. Not even the lilies that Greta had sent her that morning gave off any scent. She saw them, beside the headrest. María looked at them for hours. They seemed fresh, with drops of dampness suspended on the stem and petals. They leaned into the light that entered through the window, wanting to flee, get outside. Like María. Like everyone who had lain dying in this bed before her. That’s why there were bars on the window. To avoid the temptation. Although she didn’t need them. Suicide required bravery. When life is no longer an option, you can’t let random fate snatch away the last dignified act left to you. She had learned that from the Mola family; but María would never jump.

Sometimes the hospital priest came to see her. It was a routine visit like the ones the doctors did, first thing in the morning with their clipboards, followed by their young interns. That priest had the same manner. María imagined that each day he carried under his arm a list of those on their last legs, or maybe he marked with a small
x
the rooms where people were on their way out. He must think that during that final passage the patients were weaker, more fickle, and vulnerable to his reasoning about God and fate. He wasn’t, otherwise, an unpleasant man. María even liked listening to him, really only because she wondered what could have brought such a young man to devote his entire life to an illusion. He wore a cassock and clerical collar. A clean, discreet cassock with covered buttons that concealed even his shoes. That conservative young priest didn’t seem to feel guilty about anything, much less María’s impending early death. Quite the contrary; when she confessed that she did not believe in God, he looked at her with sincere pity, with an understanding of the fear that left María dry as a bone inside.

“That doesn’t matter. Whether you believe it or not, you are only a step away from divine grace, from immortality beside him.”

María scrutinized him with a puzzled expression. The priest, without hesitation or a trace of cynicism or hypocrisy, asked her to repent for her sins.

“They say I killed, Father. And that I did it with my own hands. Do you believe that?”

“I know the story, María, everyone knows it. It will all weigh in the balance, and God is merciful.”

“Why do you talk that way? Do you really believe we are judged from up on high?”

“Yes, I truly do believe it. That is my faith.”

“And why doesn’t your judge roll up his sleeves and come down to lend a hand instead of allowing the good and evil to happen down here, while he sits up on his throne?”

“We are not children that have to be told what to do. We are free beings, and, as such, we face the consequences of what we have done.”

“Honestly, Father. I don’t believe that anyone gave your God permission to ask me to justify my actions.”

“What you believe, and what I believe, don’t change the certainty of things. You will soon have eternal life, and everything will make sense” was the priest’s deliberate response.

María asked him what man wanted with immortal life.

“Why eat? Why keep breathing? Why keep drinking from this little plastic cup? Why keep taking those colored pills? Why not give up? I’d like to end it all. Close the book on it all. Who wants immortality? A constant cycle of being born and dying, repeating the same agony over and over again with no meaning behind it. Death is something that happens to everything that’s alive. It’s the price to be paid. God has nothing to do with it. We should leave God out of it. It’s the fault of the fluids, of the chemistry, of human fragility. There are no gods or heroes. Only miasmas. I should just accept it, and everything would be a lot easier for me. But I can’t.”

“You can’t resign yourself because inside of you there is something divine, a part of God. Think about your life, take stock of your conscience, and you will see that not everything was so bad,” the priest said to her. Then he patted her hands as if to say
see you later
, and he left, leaving behind his words, like his old church smell.

*   *   *

As the days passed, María’s health worsened. She spent most of her time drugged to bear the pain, and when she sometimes regained her lucidity, she only wanted to close her eyes and keep sleeping, anesthetize the memories that jumbled up in her mind.

It was in one of those states halfway between the dream world and the real world when she received, or thought she received, a strange visitor. She felt a hand with long, cold fingers reach out to hers, which burned with fever. Its touch was rough and uneven, and its large veins seemed to want to escape the skin. A far-off voice, calm and warm, asked her to wake up. That voice made its way into her dreams and forced her to open her eyelids.

There was no one there. She was alone in the room. A draft of cold air came in through a slightly open window. She thought that it had only been a dream, a hallucination caused by the fever. She turned over to go back to sleep, but then she saw, on the bedside table, a small sealed envelope with her name on it. She opened it with trembling hands. Inside was a short note: “Remember the samurai’s mandate. There is no honor or dishonor in the sword, only in the hand that wields it. Go in peace, María.”

She immediately recognized the tiny, cramped handwriting. It was the writing of a ghost.

She opened the drawer on the bedside table and took out an old sepia photograph.

It was a portrait of an almost perfect woman. So perfect she didn’t seem real. Perhaps it was an effect of the photograph, of the moment that it captured. She looked like an actress from the forties. Smoke flowed from her mouth, creating gray and white corkscrew curls that partially covered her eyes, giving her a mysterious halo. She held the cigarette with a delicate nonchalance, in her right hand resting on her cheek, between her index and ring fingers, with a holder trapped between two rings. She smoked with pleasure, but without indulgence, as if it were an art. She smoked with deliberate gestures. Her smile was curious. As if it had slipped out of her mouth against her will. María couldn’t tell whether it was a smile of sadness or of happiness. Really, everything about her was evanescent, probable, but unsure, like the smoke that surrounded her.

As she looked at the photograph, María wondered what air that mysterious woman was breathing, the woman who was the driving force behind everything that had happened; what her skin smelled like, the drops of perfume behind her earlobes. She imagined a soft fragrance, something that remained floating in the atmosphere, like the trace of her presence when she was no longer there. Something vague, evocative. She imposed the law of her own desire, a mild but absolute tyranny, and at the same time she was a prisoner of her beauty, of her silence. A wide-brimmed picture hat strove to conceal the rebellious ringlet on her forehead, and her beige jacket with padded shoulders concealed her lovely, turgid breasts.

Slowly, María tore that photograph she had carried with her for months into tiny pieces. She went over to the open window and threw the pieces out. They scattered into the misty air of that morning in 1981.

1

Mérida, December 10, 1941

It was cold, and a blanket of hard snow covered the train tracks. Dirty snow, stained with soot. Brandishing his wooden sword in the air, a child contemplated the knot of rails, hypnotized.

The track split into two. One of the branch lines led west, and the other went east. A locomotive was stopped in the middle of the switch junction. It seemed disoriented, unable to choose between the two paths set out before it. The engineer stuck his head out of the narrow window. His gaze met the boy’s, as if he were asking him which direction to take. Or that was how it seemed to the small child, who lifted his sword and pointed to the west. For no real reason. Just because it was one of the possible options. Because it was there.

When the station chief lifted the green flag, the engineer threw the cigarette he was smoking out the window and disappeared into the locomotive. A shrill whistle scared off the crows resting on the posts of the power cable overhead. The locomotive started up, spitting lumps of dirty snow from the rails. It slowly took the western route.

The boy smiled, convinced that his hand had decided its course. At ten years old, he knew, without yet having the words to explain it, that he could achieve anything he set out to do.

“Come on, Andrés. Let’s go.”

It was his mother’s voice. A soft voice, filled with nuances you could only hear if you were paying attention. Her name was Isabel.

“Mamá, when can I get a real sword?”

“You don’t need any sword.”

“A samurai needs a real katana, not a wooden stick,” protested the boy, offended.

“What a samurai needs is to keep warm so he doesn’t catch the flu,” replied his mother, adjusting his scarf around his neck.

Up on impossible heels, Isabel made her way through the bodies and gazes of the passengers on the platform. She moved with the naturalness of a tightrope walker up on the wire. She dodged a small puddle in which two cigarette butts floated, and veered to avoid a dying pigeon that spun around blindly.

A young man with a seminarian’s haircut, who was sitting on a bench in the shelter, made room beside him for mother and son. Isabel sat, crossing her legs naturally, keeping her leather gloves on, marking each gesture with the subtle haughtiness assumed by someone who feels observed and who’s accustomed to being admired.

Even the most common gesture acquired the dimensions of a perfect, discreet dance in that woman with long, lovely legs peeking out from beneath her skirt at the knee. Tilting her hips to the right, she raised her foot just enough to clean off a drop of mud that was marring the tip of her shoe.

Beside his mother, squeezing tightly up against her body to underscore that she was his, Andrés looked defiantly at the rest of the passengers waiting for the train, ready to impale with his sword the first to come near.

“Be very careful with that; you or somebody else is going to get hurt,” said Isabel. She thought it was crazy that Guillermo encouraged their son’s strange fantasy life. Andrés wasn’t like other boys his age; for him there was no distinction between his imagination and the real world, but her husband enjoyed buying him all kinds of dangerous toys. He had even promised to give him a real sword! Before leaving the house she had tried to take away his soldier trading cards, but Andrés had started screaming hysterically. She was frightened that he’d wake everyone up and reveal her hasty escape, so she’d allowed him to bring them along. Anyway, she wasn’t taking her eyes off him. As soon as she had a chance she’d get rid of them, just as she planned to do with everything that had anything to do with her husband and her life until then.

On that postwar morning, a different winter entered through the train station’s large windows. Men walked with their heads bowed, tense, their gazes fixed on the horizon so as to avoid meeting eyes with strangers. The war had ended, but it was hard to get used to the new silence and that sky with no planes, devoid of whistling bombs that fell like streamers. There was still doubt in people’s eyes; they looked at the clouds out of the corners of their eyes, afraid of reliving the horror of the explosions, the racing to take shelter in a basement as an alarm siren sounded, emitting short moos that gave you gooseflesh. Each side slowly adjusted to defeat or victory, to not rushing their steps, to sleeping through the night with few frightened starts. Gradually the dust settled on the streets, the ruins and the rubble disappeared, but another, quieter war had begun, of police sirens, of new fears, in spite of the fact that the bugle no longer sounded on National Radio with war news.

In that war which followed the battle, Isabel had lost everything.

An oily stain that smelled of lice, chicory, ration cards, toothless mouths, and filthy fingernails spread rapidly among the passengers at the edge of the tracks, tinting their existences in weak gray tones. Only a very few were spread out on the platform benches, off to one side, taking in the soft sunlight that filtered through the snow with closed eyes and trusting expressions.