Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (44 page)

He was so absorbed looking at the windows that he didn’t see a car approach until it stopped beside him. The door opened, and a woman’s legs emerged.

“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously when she saw Marchán. The inspector identified himself. Somewhat assuaged, and led by growing curiosity, she said that she was Gabriel’s nurse.

“I was until a month ago, to be more specific. Gabriel owes me my pay for the last few weeks. A couple of days ago we agreed that he should come by my house. But he hasn’t come, so I decided to stop by and get what he owes me. And what are you doing here, Officer?”

Marchán had a strange premonition. Those intuitions that are absurd and have no basis in anything rational, but that almost always end up being right.

“Do you have keys to the house?”

The nurse said yes, she still had a set. She searched through her bag somewhat nervously.

“Here they are.”

Marchán asked her to open the door but didn’t let her enter the house.

The smell that came from inside the house was confirmation of his suspicion. He went into the living room shrouded in shadow and stopped in front of the staircase that led to the second floor. Slowly he removed his wool gloves and unbuttoned his coat as he looked around. The silence was absolute. He perked up his ears. From some part of the upper floor came a slight moan, like that of a newborn kitten. He followed the intermittent, almost imperceptible, sound to the half-open bathroom door. The first thing he saw was a shoe and then a leg whose pants were stained with dried blood.

He had to push the door with his shoulder in order to be able to get in. Gabriel’s body was laid out on the floor with his head to one side, in a large puddle of coagulated blood. The walls, the mirror, and the shower curtain were all splattered with ruby-colored water. Marchán leaned over the cold body. Gabriel’s face was half destroyed. A bit beyond his right hand there was a pistol. Gabriel had shot himself. And yet he was still breathing. He wasn’t dead. Not completely. His lungs released air with a very weak whistle. His eyes were fixed on the wall, but when the inspector spoke to him they blinked. He had lost a lot of blood and the shot had ravaged his head, but he had survived. The inspector had seen other similar cases. Suicides who regretted their decision at the last fraction of a second and managed to imperceptibly shift the trajectory of the bullet.

“What have you done?” he murmured as he took his pulse.

Gabriel didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He could barely stay awake. His brain was like a lightbulb about to burn out; it had very brief flashes and then periods of darkness. He had spent two days and nights that way. Aware of being alive but unable to move, to articulate a single word, or to spit out the blood he was drowning in. He barely heard Marchán’s voice and then the screams of the nurse, the hands on him, the tubes, the stretcher the paramedics took him down on. The ambulance siren. The feeling of movement. It was like being in a display window, like being invisible, like touching the sleeping extremities of his own body.

He didn’t recognize his daughter in the hospital. He saw her crying without understanding exactly what that expression that contorted her pretty face was, or why that dampness from her eyes was falling onto him and she didn’t notice.

He had a blurred memory of the day he found his wife dead. He asked the cold cadaver why she had decided to hang herself, instead of punishing him. That was an anguished, pained, and enormous
why
. Now he understood. There had been no response. It was like asking God why things happened the way they happened, what designs He used to arbitrarily mark people’s fate.

27

Hospital Clínico, Barcelona, February 12, 1981

The doctor checked a graph beside the bed and shook his head, surprised.

“It’s incredible that the bullet didn’t kill him. It destroyed half of his brain, and yet, even with the cancer weakening his defenses, he’s still alive. Of course, your father is a fighter. He will recover, at least a part of him will.”

María observed her father, sedated into sleep and with his head bandaged. A tube in his nose helped him breathe. She examined that tormented man, almost with terror, wondered how much he had suffered, how deep and bare his hatred must be. A sterile and useless hatred that kept him from dying and resting.

It was too hot in the room, and she felt dazed, boxed into those four white walls. She decided to go down to the cafeteria and have a coffee. In the lobby she found Inspector Marchán talking to various uniformed officers. He wore a tie with the knot loosened, and his hair was messy. He looked tired. María felt obliged to thank him for having found her father still alive, but she did it unenthusiastically. The inspector also answered with sarcasm.

“That wasn’t my intention, and I don’t think your father will thank me for it when he regains consciousness. I have the feeling I stuck my nose into something personal. Suicide always is.”

“You don’t sound like a police officer, Inspector.”

“And you don’t sound like an afflicted daughter. But that’s not my business.”

María observed the movement of the uniformed officers beside the elevators. So much vigilance seemed excessive to her, and she said so. But Marchán corrected her.

“Those officers aren’t here to guard your father; they’re here to keep watch over César Alcalá. They are about to bring him upstairs.” The inspector maintained a calculated silence before adding, “It’s strange how sometimes people’s fates cross and get tangled up. Two men who have never met, united by the same death, find each other forty years later in the same hospital. Separated by a few walls. If I liked tragedy, I would say it’s not realistic. But here they are … And you between them.” He looked at the lawyer suspiciously, but she didn’t seem concerned.

“I have nothing to hide.”

“I know you’re plotting something, but I don’t know what it is. You already knew that Alcalá had been attacked in jail and that they were going to transfer him. For a lawyer you are very bad at hiding your own emotions. You’ve lied to me again, and I don’t know to what end. But I want to warn you: if you think that you are going to help César by facilitating his escape, forget about it. The only thing it will accomplish is hurting him and making the investigation more difficult. The only way is the legal one. Persuade him to talk, to tell where he’s hiding that damn file on Publio.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself? You used to be partners; you try to persuade him.”

“Inspector Alcalá and I have nothing to talk about. Be warned, María.” Even though Marchán’s voice didn’t reveal any emotion, his eyes reflected the severity of a detective interrogating a suspect.

María went into the cafeteria, filled at that hour with hospital staff and the family members of admitted patients. The hustle and bustle was more typical of a market than a place filled with convalescents. She had to wait with a plastic tray in the self-service line. She served herself a small sesame roll and a very strong coffee. As she was searching for coins in her pocket to pay, someone beat her to it.

“Let me get this one. You look tired; a long night at the bedside of a family member, I guess.”

It was an older man, polite and pleasant looking. But María wasn’t in the mood for conversation, much less flirting with a stranger who was probably twice her age. She thanked him with a forced smile and left the line. Even though she didn’t turn around, she felt the stranger’s gaze on the nape of her neck. She went to sit down at a table far from the entrance.

She barely touched her roll, playing with the breadcrumbs. She drank some coffee. She would have liked to go out for a smoke. Outside the cafeteria she saw an interior yard with skeletal palm trees and a lawn of poorly maintained grass. The light from outside was filtered through a skylight that rain rang out on. She focused on that senseless greenhouse. It seemed purely decorative, since the doors were closed with chains and no one could go in. She could only contemplate it, something lovely but useless.

Then, without any rational link, the reality of her disease rose up in front of her eyes again. The events of the last few hours had almost made her forget about it. Now, in the first moment when she’d had a little peace, that reality emerged again. María touched her temple with the tips of her fingers, as if she could touch the tumor that was developing in her brain.

She didn’t realize that the man who had paid for her sandwich had come over to her table with a tray in his hand.

“Do you mind if I sit beside you?” It was a rhetorical question. Without waiting for an answer, he sat down and meticulously removed the top of a small jar of peach marmalade. “The food here is disgusting, isn’t it?”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I would like to be alone,” said María, uncomfortable.

The man nodded pleasantly, but he kept spreading marmalade onto a piece of toast with the tip of a plastic knife.

“I understand. When we feel that death is near, we need to withdraw. It’s inevitable to think about what we’ve done and stopped doing. We see our inevitable end in the deaths of others. But the truth is it’s a completely useless exercise. You can’t intellectualize an entire life of emotions and sentiments, not even when we fear dying. My advice, María, is not to get dragged into melancholy or nostalgia. That will only bring you suffering and be a waste of your time.”

María made a brusque gesture with her hand, which was totally involuntary and turned over the steaming cup of coffee onto the Formica table.

“Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

The man meticulously began to wipe up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin.

“My name is Fernando. I believe your father has told you about me. I should say that I am sorry about what happened, but honestly, that’s not the case. I imagine you can understand why.”

María felt a momentary burst of rage and guilt. That old man had no right to be there, with his regal pose filled with cynicism, recriminating her with the double meaning of his words.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your mother, but what happened was not my fault.”

“Fault? No one said that. In the end, you may be as much of a victim as my mother, as Marcelo, or as poor Recasens. However, sometimes we feel the need to repair the damage others have done and find relief from a burden we unfairly carry on our shoulders. I have the feeling that you are one of those people, María.”

“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

Fernando smiled with an innocence that was repulsive in a man with deep wrinkles and white hair. He took out a small book of notes and photographs and opened it at random. He turned it toward María and leaned back in his chair smugly. There were personal photographs of the lawyer, photos that she didn’t even remember ever having: in her earliest school outing, her first communion, in high school, with her father fishing on the San Lorenzo bridge. There was also the photograph of the day she graduated from college and a photo of her wedding day. Each one of them was annotated with the date and place it was taken. Even more detailed was the list of cases she had taken on, the sentences she had won and lost, the names of her clients, the judges who had overseen the trials. And the dozens of newspaper clippings and personal annotations about the case against César Alcalá were particularly thorough.

“I know everything about you. For years I’ve done nothing but devote myself to knowing you,” said Fernando, deepening the feeling of perplexity that the book had produced in María.

María turned the pages with growing fear. What kind of a sick mind could dedicate that much effort to gathering such information, except a psychopath? She shut the book with a slam.

“This is nothing. Photographs and dates. The fact that you’ve spied on me doesn’t mean you know me.”

Fernando picked up the book and put it away under the table. He lifted his eyes. Now it was a gaze filled with affliction.

“I know what it is to want the night to come so you can sleep and not being able to because your mind is filled with nightmares and taking sleeping pills to find a deep sleep that still isn’t restorative. I know what it is to be abused by others, humiliated and beaten, and to have cowardice keep you from rebelling against it. And I know what it is to find a cause that justifies our miserable lives. A just cause. Something that allows us to forget. We focus our efforts and our sleepless nights on that cause to silence our monsters. But they are like bloodthirsty, voracious gods that aren’t satisfied with the sacrifices we offer them. They return to torment us time and time again, as soon as we relax our minds and remember who we really are: a prisoner mistreated for years in a Soviet concentration camp; a woman beaten by her husband again and again. We need to keep believing that the weak, sickly part is something tiny in us; better to be a spiteful son full of hate who decides to get rich again from zero to avenge his mother; better to be a prestigious lawyer, fair and inflexible, able to send a corrupt cop to jail. But none of that heals us, does it? We can’t escape what we are. Every time we look in a mirror, every time we feel personal or professional failure, that tide rises again, reminding us of our weaknesses, our cowardice, and our self-sacrifice. And we are left naked and without excuses. That is why we need someone to save or someone to condemn. Some object of our love or our hate. Someone who makes us forget.

“I’ve come to believe that the only reason I’ve stayed alive all these years was to see fall, one by one, those men who destroyed my life and killed my mother and condemned my brother to insanity. Publio and your father, Gabriel, have been my obsession for decades. But the truth is I saw my father die and I didn’t feel happy about it. Or sad. I simply realized that he was something that no longer concerned me. I knew that Gabriel had cancer, and the only thing I felt was fear. Can you understand that? The same fear as now: if he dies, what cause will be left for me? I never aspired to hear him apologize, or to kill him with my own hands. The same with Publio. Now I know that not even when I see that asshole fall will I feel anything more than slight relief.