Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (34 page)

Gabriel didn’t kid himself about his daughter’s feelings toward him. He was well aware of her almost constantly disapproving looks.

“She wouldn’t be that surprised. It would even be a confirmation of what she’s always suspected: that I’m not a good father, that I never knew how to show her that I love her … it would be her definitive reason to hate me,” he said with a sadness that wasn’t new. He didn’t really care. Soon cancer would take him out of the picture, and he would stop bothering María with his presence. But he at least wanted to take his secrets with him. He wanted to leave his daughter the tiniest bit of doubt, the possibility of inventing a memory that she could miss. Perhaps, if his daughter remained ignorant, she would love him a little more when he was dead than she had loved him in life.

Gabriel realized that he would have to negotiate that silence with Fernando. But he couldn’t imagine what he’d want in exchange. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to allow María to find out about those things in his past.

Fernando didn’t seem to be in any rush. He ran his gaze over that room he used as a painting studio. He liked the monastic silence and the smell of turpentine and paint. It was a good place to take refuge in. A good place to forget. Because much to his regret, he realized that even his hatred toward Gabriel, toward Publio, and toward his own father was something he had to make an effort to maintain. He was tired. If he looked back, all he saw was anguish and rage. Not a tiny corner of peace, not a moment of calm. His life had been consumed, and he didn’t know to what end. The only thing he had left, the only reason to keep going forward, was that man who sat before him, also withered and dry inside from the same hatred that he had nourished all those years. It was hard for him to admit, but he almost saw himself reflected in Gabriel. And that irritated him.

He noticed the package wrapped in thick paper that Gabriel held between his legs vertically, resting his hands on it as if it were a walking stick.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, pointing to the wrapped package.

Gabriel nodded. He got up from the chair and placed the package delicately on a table. He tore the wrapping and stepped back two paces. Both men examined the package with identical admiration. For a few seconds, without them realizing, something lovely united them.

Fernando stepped forward. His fingers brushed along the long, polished surface of the sheath, made of leather and wood dyed black.

“It’s a beautiful sword, though I never understood why you gave it such a poetic name. The Sadness of the Samurai.”

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. The katana wasn’t actually a sword; it was a saber.

“It’s much more deadly and much easier to handle than a sword. Swords hit. Sabers cut,” he said in a professional tone, emotionless. “As for the name, I didn’t choose it. It was the name of the original model I used as the basis for the replica. The real one belonged to Toshi Yamato, a samurai warrior from the seventeenth century. He was one of the bloodiest heroes of his time, revered for his energy and cruelty in battle. But Yamato was actually a man who hated war; it turned his stomach to brandish his katana and face his enemies. He was terrified of death. He managed to live a good part of his life constraining his true nature, but in the end, unable to keep up the farce, defeated by himself in his battle to become something he couldn’t be, he opted for ritual suicide. That ritual,
seppuku
, is very painful: it consists in several cuts to the abdomen, and the suicide victim can spend hours dying with his intestines out of his body. Luckily for Yamato, one of those loyal to him found him dying, took pity on him, and decapitated him with his own katana. That is where the name The Sadness of the Samurai comes from. This weapon represents the best values of the warrior: bravery, loyalty, fierceness, elegance, precision, and power, but at the same time the worst as well: death, pain, suffering, murderous insanity. Yamato spent his entire life fighting, and he never won out over those irreconcilable versions of himself.”

Fernando listened to the story with interest. He knew little of samurai culture. That was always Andrés’s thing. He never did understand why his brother was so fascinated by a world that had nothing to do with his own and of which he would never be a part. He vaguely remembered the stories his mother used to read, stories of a medieval warrior in the Far East. They were short, illustrated with drawings of Japanese warriors with their armor, their bows, and their katanas. Stories of honor, battle, victory. Now, after all that had happened, it all seemed distant and ridiculous.

“It seems strange that a man like my father would commission a replica of a saber with so much history.”

“I don’t think your father had any interest in the samurai or their codes of conduct. He probably didn’t know the story of the katana. He asked me for a present for your brother, Andrés. ‘Something different,’ he said, ‘expensive and pretty. Original. One of those Japanese weapons.’ But your brother, Andrés, was instantly captivated by it. I remember the admiration with which he touched the blade, his confidence when he wielded it even though he was just a boy. He was never parted from it until … until he died … I suppose you remember the fire.”

Fernando closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered flames, screams, people jumping from the windows of the upper floor, others crying out, trapped by the barred windows. The smell of burning flesh, the rubble falling on the shaved heads of the patients at the sanatorium who trampled one another in their haste to escape. Yes, he remembered the fire perfectly. It was November 6, 1955. The fire started at three in the morning in one of the rooms on the top floor. The firemen couldn’t put it out until four hours later. By then more than twenty people had died, trapped in the ashes of the building. Smoking, atrophied cadavers, petrified in expressions of horror.

“I thought you would want to have it. When Publio told me that Andrés had died in the fire at the sanatorium, I asked him to sell it to me. It is the finest blade I’ve ever forged.”

Fernando remained pensive. Now that he was about to fulfill all his plans, he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. And yet he felt his mouth open in a cynical smile, a smile that transformed into a cackle against his will.

“Are you trying to buy my silence with this sword? You think that the memory of my brother will make me soft? You don’t know me, Gabriel. You have no idea.”

“This is all the past.”

“And I’m still in that past!” Fernando shouted suddenly, losing control. “For me it’s not so easy as pretending I’ve forgotten, devoting myself to bringing up a daughter, or retiring to a town in the Pyrenees to sharpen knives.” He felt in his pocket in search of something. With an agitated gesture he pulled out a photograph and put it right up to Gabriel’s face. “I’m still here, anchored to her, unable to do anything else except remember. Remember and hate you, and hate my father, and hate Publio … I hate myself for letting myself get trapped by her; I’m like a mad dog that bites its tail and devours itself. Do you recognize her? Take a good look; I want you to show her to your daughter so that she understands that the name Isabel isn’t just a forensic file in one of her legal summaries. I want her to see, to understand, to touch and feel my mother. Only then will she understand the enormity of your crime. Only then will the circle be closed.”

Gabriel squinted. He took the photograph, and when he touched it he felt all his memories taking shape. There was Isabel, with her little face framed by a picture hat that veiled her eyes, smoking with that natural expression that in her was pure elegance. He remembered in a painfully real way his nights with her, the smell of their sweaty bodies, the words said, and the broken promises. The mountains of lies. How could he explain to María that he came to truly love that woman? How could he explain to her that he then did what he did, renouncing that emotion for a different loyalty, that in his stupidity he thought was higher? How could she understand those dark years when he stained his hands with blood, thinking that his cause was just? She couldn’t. Simply because he no longer believed it. Nobody would forgive him. Nobody.

“I won’t allow you to involve my daughter in this.” Imperceptibly, his eyes shifted for a second toward the katana. He would do what he had to. What was necessary. One more time.

Fernando realized his intentions but was undaunted.

“What are you going to do? Kill me? With that katana? It would be poetic, after all. Even our cowardly and wasted lives would have a dramatic, almost histrionic, ending. But you aren’t going to do it … We aren’t my brother’s samurai. We don’t deserve an honorable end. We are dogs, and we’ll die biting each other. And the one left alive will retire to a corner filled with garbage and die alone, in the dark, licking his wounds. Yes, old dogs. That’s what we are.”

Gabriel lowered his gaze. He moved away from the table. Fernando was right. They were done for, whatever happened. But his daughter, María, was still young; she still had hopes.

“You can’t make her bear the burden of my guilt. She is innocent; she doesn’t know anything.”

Fernando shook his head vehemently.

“Ignorance doesn’t exempt guilt. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that she was the one to put César Alcalá in jail? There are no coincidences, Gabriel. It was me, with the help of Recasens, who planned it all. I made Ramoneda’s wife denounce the case to your daughter, to pay her to do it. And I was the one who convinced your daughter, through Recasens, to go back to see Alcalá to get the truth about Publio out of him. I was the one who pushed her to the point that you didn’t want to take her to. To being faced with the truth … Now she has the opportunity to redeem you.”

“And what opportunity is that?”

Fernando paused, licking his lips. He had weighed the words he was going to say and was aware of the meaning of each and every one of them. They were the most difficult words he was ever going to say in his entire life. But there was no turning back now.

“I can help her find Marta, César Alcalá’s daughter. But I have two conditions: the first is that César Alcalá hand over to me, and only to me, the evidence he has against Congressman Publio. I know that the inspector will not let himself be convinced. So the second condition is that you tell everything about my mother to your daughter. And that she explain it to César Alcalá. The decision will be left in the inspector’s hands.”

Fernando stepped back slowly. Suddenly he felt very tired. He had turned into a monster as well. He had sacrificed so many people in order to destroy that man and those around him. Recasens was dead, Andrés, Marta, Alcalá … Soon he would burn in hell for what he had done. But hell was already a place he knew well.

“Those are my conditions.”

Gabriel didn’t know all the details about his daughter’s work, but he knew enough to know that Fernando’s proposal would lead to tragedy.

“You know where that girl, Marta Alcalá, is?”

Fernando avoided answering directly.

“What I know is that Publio will end up ordering them to kill her, just as he did with Recasens. And if he doesn’t find out where the inspector is hiding the evidence, he’ll kill your daughter too. We both know him, and we know he is very capable of doing it.”

21

Collserola Mountain Range (Barcelona), February 3, 1981

From the other side of the house a slight moan was heard, like the groan of a dying dog. The man approached the turntable and put on a classical record to drown it out. He felt bad, like a father who has to punish his daughter, but it was necessary.

He started to dance to the rhythm of the music. His naked body swayed, synchronizing his motion to his breathing. Suddenly, his gaze hit the portrait that hung on the wall, and he stopped his dance. The woman seemed to be observing him with a benevolent reproach from the sepia frame, and her lips seemed to be speaking to him. The man closed his eyes for a second, remembering her burning whispers. When he opened them again the only murmur he heard was the dripping of the sink faucet.

He looked out the window and slightly pushed aside the thick blanket that kept the moon from entering. He did it carefully. The pearly light illuminated his peeled skin like a flashlight. He uneasily contemplated the cleared path that led to the house.

“When are they coming?” he wondered. “I’m ready.”

But as in the days before, the path was empty. He could only wait, wait and despair. The dryness of his pupils meant he had to use eye drops, and he always looked like he was crying. But it only looked that way. The fire had burned away his tears, along with his heart.

He put on the kimono and hugged himself. He was cold. His skin had no scent. It was like hugging a dead person. He touched his body in the semidarkness. He was awake, painfully awake. He felt his shaved head.

He listened to Marta dragging herself around in the other room. He didn’t kid himself about the possibility of her falling in love with him. That wouldn’t be very realistic. Besides, love was a weakness he found insufferable. The only thing he expected of her was obedience. Blind obedience, complete annihilation, majestic admiration. He wanted to become her god and achieve her absolute devotion.

When he first saw her, he thought she would be the perfect candidate. Her skin was so delicate, and she displayed a serenity so similar to the one he remembered in Isabel, that he could barely repress his desire to kidnap her right then and there. But he had to contain himself. A good strategist considers all the possible scenarios, looks for the best moment, has all his logistics prepared, and elaborates a plan for after the attack. He prepared himself conscientiously for months, risking more than necessary.

He trusted that she would put up a fight; it could be no other way. But he was also sure that he would know how to subjugate her. The stages of his relationship with her were predetermined: first terror, then incomprehension, defeat, abandonment, resignation, and finally giving in. Yet she wasn’t making progress. Cruelty, violence, and terror were not enough to convince her that outside of him she had no possible existence. In all that time she hadn’t given up fighting. At first violently, then plunged into a deathly silence, and later trying to seduce him to gain his trust. Stupidly, he had succumbed to her charms and had let himself be tricked.