Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (20 page)

Marcelo tightened his fists.

“It’s already too late,” he mused, although his sister couldn’t hear him because she’d left again, slamming the door.

For more than an hour Marcelo Alcalá stayed there, sitting in front of his plate of cold soup, as his shadow grew longer against the walls and the night burst in through the windows. Seated, the candle on the table his only source of light, he remained absent and immersed in dark thoughts that tensed his features. Suddenly, he heard the door creak.

His son, César, appeared in the doorway. His enormous eyes were opened wide, eyelashes arched.

“Father, there is a man at the door who wants to talk to you.”

Behind César’s slight figure appeared Publio’s sinister form, tracing a threatening smile. Marcelo stiffened when he saw Guillermo Mola’s lackey.

“Hello, Master Marcelo. It’s a beautiful night, and I thought we could go for a ride in my car.”

Marcelo swallowed hard. There were many rumors about Publio. Everyone feared the rage of that man with an almost ascetic appearance. He had installed a reign of terror based on his unbreakable faith in the purifying power of violence.

“It’s very late, Don Publio…”

Publio put a threatening hand on the shoulder of the tutor’s son, César.

“You have nothing to fear, Master. I only want us to have a friendly chat about Isabel Mola.”

Marcelo shrunk in his chair. Nobody knew what crime they’d be accused of in those times; nobody could feel safe. Many were arrested at night, taken by surprise, leaving a hot plate of soup untouched on the table, wives jumping out of bed disconcerted and running to hold their babies that cried as Publio’s men destroyed the house, rummaging through drawers, closets, ripping mattresses, stealing the silverware, the jewelry, money, and making dirty comments about the underwear they found in the dresser.

“Let’s take a walk, Teacher.”

Marcelo knew how those walks ended. With a defeated air, he grabbed his jacket.

“Go upstairs, César. And tell your aunt that I might not be here for breakfast tomorrow.” Marcelo leaned toward his son and gave him a cold hug, sneaking fleeting glances through the door, as if he were afraid of something. When they separated, his eyes had a melancholy gaze, tinted with a sweet irony.

“As you wish,” he said, looking at Publio.

César noticed his father’s nervous hands and his body shrinking as he headed toward the car parked on the street.

Publio turned back in the doorway and addressed the boy with a compassionate look.

“Don’t cry for your father, boy. Heroes don’t exist. Least of all, childhood ones.”

12

Barcelona, Christmas Eve 1980

He was an old man. The years no longer hid themselves; they were boldly displayed in his wrinkles, age spots, and loose hips. Yet Congressman Publio accepted his age resolutely. He was completely self-possessed and had buried the French-cut suits with silk handkerchiefs, wide-brimmed hats, and buttoned ankle boots of his youth, opting now for the strictest mourning attire whenever he appeared in public, giving him an ascetic air.

Now his eyes shone as if they were painted with nickel, their light was wan, and his mussed hair further lightened his ghostly face with rings under the eyes. On his mouth hung a martyr’s stiff smile, very different from the arrogance of the younger Publio, who was a capricious and elitist man.

Seeing a man like that walk through the outskirts of the city made an impression.

The official car stopped at a corner. Publio lowered the window and observed with some disgust the gray mass of buildings and antennae that extended a bit beyond the avenue.

“Are you sure you want me to leave you here, sir? If you’d like, I can escort you. This neighborhood is dangerous.”

Publio slowly raised the tinted glass of his car window. He didn’t have to do it, but he wanted to personally take care of the matter that had brought him there.

“This neighborhood is no worse than the place I grew up in,” he said to the driver as he buttoned his coat and left the car.

The poor area was the large intestine through which the city’s excrement was expelled. But even inside that microworld there were worse places; places that one discovered when cutting through concentric circles to reach the very heart of misery. Places the literature and romanticism of poverty didn’t reach, places no one could enter without emerging contaminated by the miasma of the most absolute degradation.

That afternoon, as he uselessly searched for signs on what were euphemistically called streets, Publio crossed one of those invisible borders without hesitating.

The congressman encountered some people walking apprehensively, their posture like beaten, frightened dogs, people whose eyes nervously searched each corner. Two men argued, screaming at the top of their lungs right there in the street. A woman sitting on a frayed wicker chair offered a cracked, dark nipple to an anxious baby. On the corners languished prostitutes haggard from heroin and hepatitis. Their dignity in flouncy panties and caked-on makeup was pathetic; mute clowns of caustic wit who offered up their spectacle with their heads held high, ignoring the crassness that surrounded them, proud in their bouffant wigs and high heels, wearing dresses and stockings that revealed their unwaxed legs and arms.

Some of them tried to attract the old man’s attention, but he ignored them. Misery formed part of the staging of that place, and men like Publio enjoyed the spectacle devoid of subtleties, entering that underworld with a light touch: playing at common vulgarity while taking care not to fall prey to it.

There, in what appeared to be an underground madhouse, in that city of butterflies with their wings on fire, everything was allowed, any vice was satisfied, no matter how crude or amoral, if you had the money. And he had more than enough.

“Common scum!” grumbled Publio, spitting on the ground.

He had been there two weeks earlier, for the inauguration of a school. And he hadn’t hesitated to shake hands with and kiss that amalgam of misery. But now, far from the cameras and the journalists, he could show his repugnance plainly.

In a certain sense, Publio was like a sculptor in iron who works with his ugly material until he converts it into art, and when he sees his work completed he smiles and leaves, not caring what happens next. During the school inauguration, he had placed the first stone in the little cement square and had declared that he’d invest millions. Then he disappeared, and the millions never materialized.

This time, he was there for something very different. Something there would be no witnesses to.

He went into a dark alley of low shacks. In the distance the brick towers of an abandoned factory stuck out. He looked at the hostile atmosphere of the complex in ruins, the buildings shored up with iron braces, the dirty puddles in the muddy street, the electric cable sagging between one facade and the next.

After hesitating for a moment, he headed toward a house that had wooden windows painted green and a boarded-up door. On the upper level, some clotheslines bulged, threatening to break under the weight of the wet things hanging on them. A woman with flaccid arms sang softly on a balcony with several clothespins in her mouth.

Publio struggled with the planks of a door. From inside came a pestilent stench of urine and excrement. The light inside barely revealed the darkness. He could make out a ladder that led to a false roof. He went in with shaky steps.

He felt along the vague edges of the ladder and looked up. He saw a piece of sky through the holes in the roof. He went up little by little, making sure of each step before placing his foot, until he reached an attic that was too low to stand up in.

With his head bowed he explored the space. Thick cobwebs caught in his hair as he advanced.

The furnishings were scarce: a wooden table, two chairs, a straw mattress on the floor, and a low, squat larder. In that monastic cell there was also a wooden closet and a desk warped by the dampness.

Leaning on the desk, facing away from Publio, a man concentrated on writing and smoking with his brow furrowed. He was so absorbed that he looked like a taxidermied iguana.

“You are getting careless, Ramoneda. You didn’t even hear me come in,” said Publio.

Ramoneda turned, his face partially illuminated by the scant light that entered through the holes in the roof. He hid his surprise and softly put down the gun he had grabbed from the desk.

“What brings you to my house, Congressman?”

Publio looked around him with disgust.

“I come to offer you a job.”

Ramoneda repressed a smug smile. He hadn’t had work for the last few years. He wandered from one place to another, selling his blood or his body to survive. Occasionally he had done something for some second-rate gangster, but working for Don Publio was different. It was synonymous with good pay.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve come looking for my services.”

Publio scrutinized Ramoneda severely. He was skinnier than Publio remembered him being the last time he saw him, which was right after Ramoneda disappeared after killing his wife and the nurse who was screwing her. Publio knew that after that, Ramoneda had taken up strangling prostitutes and killing people whom nobody would ever ask any questions about. His nomadic life allowed him to leave behind anonymous corpses without being linked to them.

“I guess you’re not too well off these days,” Publio said, approaching and putting a nice wad of thousand-peseta bills on the desk.

Ramoneda checked the contents. Then he ran his tongue over his cracked lip.

“What do you want…?”

“Do you know anyone in the Modelo?”

Ramoneda didn’t have to think too hard.

“No one I’d trust my mother with. But yeah, I know people there.”

Publio cut right to the chase.

“I want you to find someone who can deal with César Alcalá. Money is no object … But I want it done fast.”

Ramoneda seemed disappointed. He was hoping for something more exciting. After all, he and the inspector were old
friends
.

“And don’t you think it would be better to send him a little message? Beat it into him. You know, the way we did a few years ago … I often wonder what happened to his daughter. Does that trained monster of yours still have her?”

Publio gritted his teeth, which were somewhat yellow from the cigars he smoked between sessions of congress.

“It’s not good to have such a long memory, Ramoneda. And it’s not smart for you to try to bite the hand that has come to feed you.”

Ramoneda scratched his inner thigh, giving Publio a sidelong glance.

“You don’t scare me, Congressman.”

Publio ran the tip of his index finger over a dust-covered surface.

“Then perhaps it will scare you if tomorrow I send someone over to rip out your eyes and cut off your tongue,” he said calmly, as if he was mentioning something insignificant.

Ramoneda put the money away.

“I was just joking, Congressman. You know that you can always count on me … As long as envelopes like this keep coming in.”

Publio smiled. Someday not far from now, he’d have to get rid of rats like Ramoneda. But for the moment he was useful to him.

“There’s something else. It’s about María Bengoechea. I suppose you remember her.”

Ramoneda settled into the chair. This was getting interesting.

“I’m listening, Congressman.”

*   *   *

That Christmas Eve was the best in a long time for Ramoneda. After buying new clothes and dining in a nice restaurant, he bought the company of an uptown prostitute. She wasn’t like those gray hookers from around the port. This one smelled clean, her lingerie was lace, and she smiled with all her perfectly straight teeth.

He paid for a good room, with a round bathtub and a large bed. It took him a while to have an orgasm, and even when he did it was no great shakes. But he felt satisfied.

He breathed deeply when he finished. He separated himself from the girl’s body and lay down in the bed faceup, while the growing light revealed his face through the drawn curtain. His heart beat wildly beneath his ribs, and his chest barely controlled its expansion. Drops of sweat ran toward the sides of the tangled forest of hairs in his armpits, which the prostitute was stroking with feigned affection.

“I have to go,” said Ramoneda irritably.

The young woman rolled around in the sheets. The beds of love hotels smelled in a particular way after making love. A rented scent, unpleasantly aseptic. Ramoneda watched with displeasure as the girl stretched like a cat, coating herself in that odor. Sometimes, very rarely, he missed a real bed, and a woman who slept with him without him having to pay for the luxury.

He sat naked in a chair, as he slowly smoked a cigarette whose filter he had ripped off and thrown to the ground.

The world seemed so mysterious to him. A world much vaster than he could have ever imagined. He had spent his meager energies on reaching the next hill, the horizon that followed, convinced that from up high he would be able to make out his destiny. But as long as his strides were, as much as he wore out his body until his feet bled, a new obstacle always appeared. His life kept flowing downward, spilling miserably with the shady dealings that never managed to lift him out of poverty. He was tired of running and hiding in places where not even rats wanted to live. He barely managed to survive, avoiding contact with people. The passage of time, the road, and the filth had transformed him into a stray dog, one of those skinny, grimy transient animals that every once in a while go through a town with their tails held high, their backs up, and their teeth showing.

Sometimes he tried to remember César Alcalá and those days locked in a basement. He struggled to relive the policemen’s beatings, the pain of the wires on his testicles, the kicks to his head, the dunkings in a bucket of freezing water. He clearly saw the policeman’s shaken face before him, sweating, spitting as he beat him, and how, as the days passed, Alcalá’s mood moved toward an increasingly obvious weakness, which eventually turned into begging.