Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (26 page)

But instead of hanging, his feet fell onto a pile of sandbags. Laughter, mocking. Back to the cell.

Publio let him collapse onto the dirty floor, watching him the way one watches a dog whose leg has been amputated.

“We have to end this, Marcelo. There’s no more time. Tomorrow they are going to hang you. And this time it’ll be for real. I understand what you’ve done, what you wanted to prove to yourself, and believe me, I admire it. But there is no point in continuing to resist. Now you have to think of your son. César is a good boy; the nuns say he is very spirited, with a great future. But in the company of troublemakers and killers, the only thing he can expect is going from orphanage to orphanage until he ends up in jail, a common delinquent. You can keep that from happening. If you sign, you have my word that I will take care of him, I will give him a better future. If you don’t, I’ll leave him to his fate.”

Marcelo looked at Publio with red eyes.

“You’ll tell him the truth? You’ll tell him that his father was no murderer?”

Publio lit a cigarette and put it between Marcelo’s swollen lips.

“No, my friend. That I can’t do, I’m sorry.”

Marcelo smoked the cigarette with trembling fingers. He coughed and spat blood.

“Then call your executioner. I won’t sign.”

Marcelo Alcalá was not executed the next morning. He had to wait without knowing how or when it would happen, with his senses atrophied and his nerves wrecked every time he heard the sound of the gate opening. Publio ordered him sent to Barcelona with other prisoners in a military train. There he was interrogated again and tortured ad nauseam. But he didn’t give in.

And one morning, the sister and son of the prisoner Marcelo Alcalá had to witness the cruel dance of the teacher hanging from a noose. They had to listen to the guards’ mocking and the humiliation of the body of their loved one.

César Alcalá would never forget that scene or the man named Publio who leaned on the railing of the gallows enjoying the spectacle, smoking a cigarette like someone spending an afternoon at the bullring.

16

Former estate of the Mola family (Mérida), January 10, 1981

The dawn emerged laden with fog, as if in its gray color it carried the memory of forgotten places. In the remote houses of the laborers, dirty dogs barked for no reason, the paths were covered in leafless trees, and the cawing of some circling birds was unsettling. Publio watched from the balustrade of the balcony the old fig tree beside which he had given Andrés The Sadness of the Samurai forty years earlier. A lot of things had changed since then, but the fig tree was still there, twisted, fragile, ailing. Like Publio himself, it refused to abandon this earth.

A paved path ran through a turf of well-maintained grass. At the end it opened into a rotunda with a stone fountain and beyond that the imposing presence of a colonial building with dozens of windows covered by vines and two marble staircases that ascended along each flank of the facade up to the porch, on which a large mastiff with a shiny dark coat dozed. The enormous dog barely lifted his ears when Congressman Publio went out for his morning walk.

He usually went to sit at an outside table at the bar. He sat toward the back, in the shade, and from there observed the world with the perspective of a discreet, timid man. He hid from the world behind his hat with its brim fallen over his right eye and a cruel, ironic smile. In the pocket of his overcoat he always carried a wrinkled piece of paper with some thought that he would never dare to speak; he left the thoughts there, trapped on paper; he wrote them down constantly, whenever inspiration struck him.

“It must be this constant crappy weather that’s bringing back all these memories,” he said in a soft voice, half closing his eyes.

It was raining. The lights on the highway and the tiny mullein flowers that skirted the hill could be made out through the curtain of water that swept the horizon. The humbler houses descended almost to the edge of the gully. Publio had gone down those hillsides more than sixty years ago, promising never to return. And an entire life later, he had barely managed to get farther than a few miles.

To his old neighbors, those who used to disdainfully call him
the shepherd’s son
when he was a boy, Publio—Don Publio as they now respectfully called him—had triumphed where most failed. He was a congressman, president of several congressional committees, and his businesses were the envy of everyone. Which was why they couldn’t fully understand why he chose to buy the Molas’ old villa, when he could have his pick of country homes.

On the face of it, Publio was pleased with his luck, but he sometimes felt the burden of that exhausting, demoralizing, and useless work, and he would be filled with a desire to quit. Then he’d wonder what would have become of him if he’d set up a business selling roast chickens from a truck or some other thing. Of course, those thoughts were fleeting. But lately they were coming back too often.

He ran a hand over his head. Drops slid from it, hanging off his eyebrows and the tip of his nose. Not even he himself understood why he felt that way. But he knew that this mood had been incubating for a long time and had accentuated since that lawyer, María Bengoechea, had come back into Inspector Alcalá’s life. Just now, at the moment when Publio was thinking of making the last great undertaking of his life.

Toward midmorning it stopped raining. Soon a troupe of kids appeared, filling the sky with kites of different shapes and colors, trying their skill with the strings among the lines of drying laundry and the roofs of the houses. Publio spent a long time watching that dance in the still air, with an expression of sad perplexity. His father had never made him a kite, and he spent the afternoons sitting on a rock watching the pirouettes of those pieces of paper and cloth interlaced with reeds.

Suddenly, the children stopped their races and were very still, observing that old man who watched them as if they’d done something naughty. Publio straightened his nose and cursed that nostalgia which was taking over his brain.

“You are getting old, and you already live more in the past than in the future,” he told himself in a whisper, as if his subconscious was escaping through his mouth, only to plunge him into a strange lethargy.

*   *   *

That day he wasn’t brilliant at the social club gathering, although in the literal sense of the word, Publio had never been a good orator. He knew how to speak and defend his theories with clear arguments, but he lacked conviction. His voice was not one of those that filtered into the auditorium and set passions aflame. He was too technical, excessively stoic.

“And what do you think, Don Publio, of this farce that Suárez has set up? Will it be something provisional, or do you believe the king will force things in favor of Calvo Sotelo?” someone asked him at one point in the conversation.

Baited, Publio walked over to the man who was asking.

“Politicians amuse me,” he said. “They always wait for something to happen, some happenstance or miracle that will change things. But I’m an atheist,
thank God
. I don’t wait for somebody else to change what I want changed.”

Those present received the joke with a silent reproach and a look that seemed to say, “Rome does not reward traitors.”

“That’s just what some military men are rumored to be saying. And the government, meanwhile, looks the other way,” said someone.

Publio looked at the group with disdain. He knew that he was accepted for his money and his influence. But he wasn’t one of them; he wasn’t part of the blood circle. They were just social climbers, who had those cowards and spineless wimps by the balls. Most all of them owed him favors; some flattered him, others criticized. But they all feared him. And he smiled cynically, convinced that nothing had changed since 1936. All the effort and all the bloodshed in that conflict had been of no use. Franco had barely been dead for five years, and bad habits, like weeds, were sprouting again. Spain was once again a dry land tending toward desert, populated by poor nihilistic beasts. Only animals tamed over decades were able to allow themselves to be led so docilely to the slaughterhouse, able to believe, even wanting to swallow, anything that those anointed in power told them. Anything, as long as it gave a bit of hope to their languid existences, unable as they were to grab the bull by the horns.

But all that was going to change.

“It’s different now. There are other things at stake. Haven’t you read the editorial today in
El Alcázar
? ETA, GRAPO, FRAP … More than a hundred and twenty dead this year so far, the last one the law professor Juan de Dios Doral.”

“I read it,” interjected someone. “Invoking the spirit of the battle cry
For Saint James and strike for Spain
, they are calling for the resignation of the vice president, Fernando Abril Martorell, and, paraphrasing Tarradellas, a cryptic
change in course.
”

Publio feigned a certain uneasiness.

“We politicians deliberate the respect toward law, and our obligation is to oppose any transgression of law and order, no matter where it comes from.”

One of the men let out a loud, cutting laugh.

“Do you really believe that? Or do you feel the need to stand in front of microphones and television cameras to save us, Congressman? That’s what’s being said in conversations all over the country.”

Publio clenched his jaw. Suddenly, his eyes clouded over with pent-up rage. But he managed to contain himself, although he wouldn’t forget the face of that impertinent man or his words.

“I am against terrorist violence, and those who commit abuses in the name of the State only hope to divide this nation. If all I did, like the others, was keep my mouth shut and nod, it would mean letting everything collapse, letting the violence of the terrorists destroy us.”

The man who had spoken was undaunted. Actually, the warmth of the wine, and the approving gestures of some of those present, raised his voice. Publio knew him well. He was a general auditor named García Escudero.

“There is violence everywhere: los Guerreros de Cristo Rey, el Batallón Vasco Español. Aren’t those skinheads that stroll through Retiro Park at night with baseball bats terrorists? I remember that young coed, Yolanda García Marín, who was beaten to death by those right-wing extremists Hellín and Abad, just because she was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. I bet that you don’t approve of the arrest of the two extreme right-wingers of the Fuerza Nueva party who got caught with five thousand pen guns … On the other hand, surely our congressman would be able to find the necessary justification for exonerating the policemen who killed the ETA member Gurupegui in the State Security Directorate building, or the two guards that tortured the anarchist Agustín Rueda to death in the Carabanchel prison. Not to mention the five labor lawyers that the right-wingers killed in Atocha…”

Publio smiled sarcastically. He drank two cups of red wine in quick succession. When he was looking for the third he realized that someone was carefully observing him from one side of the room.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” he grumbled through his teeth.

The man who was looking at him came over. He walked with his spine straight and taking long steps. His hands were somewhat tense. He must have been a few years younger than Publio, and he was attractive. At least that was how he must have seemed to a couple of ladies who watched him furtively as he passed.

“Good afternoon, Congressman,” he said, opening his mouth only slightly, as if the words wanted to run out but he was holding them back with his tongue.

Publio shifted his gaze slowly. He remained silent for a minute. Finally, he looked up and observed the man solemnly.

“You’ve aged a lot since we last saw each other, Recasens.”

“Yes, it’s been a long time,” Pedro Recasens replied haltingly.

Publio let out a soft groan, as if the other man’s calmness made him impatient.

“I understand you now work for the CESID.”

Recasens was silent for a moment, searching for the right words.

“Then you already know why I’m here, Congressman.”

Publio knew his place in the world well, and he held it unassumingly. He was vastly wealthy, and that, while perhaps not meaning much, said it all: at his side one had the vague, constant impression that something was going to happen. A mere slight movement of his bushy, gray eyebrows brought a solicitous waiter with a glass of whiskey wrapped in a paper napkin; with an offhand gesture of his ringed finger, the men around him headed off, giving them some privacy.

“Did you come here to ruin my weekend? We’ve known each other a long time, Recasens. You do your job and I do mine, which once in a while has caused some legal friction between us, but you have nothing against me; otherwise you’d already have asked the Supreme Court for an arrest order.”

Recasens observed him without saying anything. Publio was probably the man he had most hated over the course of his long life. He had him in arm’s reach; it was easy to grab him by the trachea and break it before anyone present could intervene. And yet he couldn’t touch him. Nobody could.

“I came to see you so it was clear that in the CESID we’re not stupid. I know what you’re doing, Publio. I know what you’re planning.”

Publio listened, taking small sips of whiskey and smacking his lips in satisfaction. His pale face looked like a laborious work in marble. With his clear forehead and scant hair, he had the air of a carefree, despotic king; with his impeccable attire of rigorous black, he languished in lovely and apparently leisurely retirement. But that theoretical docility was merely an appearance. He was no carefree fool.

“Are you referring to the rumors of a coup? Everybody knows what I think; I’m not in hiding. But I don’t have anything to do with that, and even if I did, you couldn’t prove it, which is the same thing in the end, isn’t it? On the other hand, you are harassing an elected official, and that could cost you your brand-new rank as colonel,” he said, making a cavalier gesture with his hand.