Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (47 page)

*   *   *

“There’s a stranger downstairs. He’s looking up here.”

Lorenzo took his glassy gaze off his gin and lifted his head toward the window. Leaning on the wall, his wife pulled aside the Japanese panel curtain with her fingers and looked toward the street. She had bruises on her neck and shoulders that could be seen above her robe. She felt a shiver, a mix of contradictory feelings like fear and guilt.

“What does he look like?” he asked without daring to get up off the sofa, glancing at the loaded pistol on the television shelf.

His wife described the man she saw. There was no doubt that it was Ramoneda. Lorenzo tore at his hair. Everything was happening very quickly, he told himself, trying to calm the anxiety that was overwhelming him. He already knew that sooner or later Publio would send someone, as soon as he found out that María was still alive. Luckily he had gotten his son somewhere safe. He didn’t want him to be there when it happened. The intercom buzzed. A cold, brief tone announced the expected visit.

The woman turned. There was no anguish or anxiety in her gaze. Just infinite weariness, so fed up that the feeling had become a permanent state of confusion. Her right eye was swollen, and she smoked with a slight trembling on her lips. She knew that Lorenzo hated cigarettes, and in other circumstances that gesture of rebellion would have meant a little more torture. But now nothing mattered to him anymore.

“Do you want me to open the door?”

Lorenzo observed the loop of bluish smoke that partially covered his wife’s face. He felt a deep irritation in his throat at her gesture of abandonment that blamed him wordlessly. That rebellion of hers, smoking in the house, choked him with rage. But what most bothered him was her challenging him now that she knew he was weak.

The buzz came again, this time more insistently. Only now it was the upstairs doorbell. Some idiot neighbor or maybe that senile doorman had let him in downstairs.

Lorenzo let out an almost inaudible moan, as if something deep inside of him had broken. There was no escape, not now. He could have taken his savings and fake passport out of the safe and fled when there was still time. But he hadn’t done it, convinced that a final gesture could redeem him in the eyes of María, his wife, and his son, even in his own eyes. A gesture of stoic bravery. Waiting for death on his feet. But now that the moment had arrived, he felt the impulse to run and hide under the bed, to hug his wife’s bruise-covered legs and ask her to protect him. He could try to reason with that sadistic beast Ramoneda, ask Publio for forgiveness, beg him for another chance, but none of that would do him any good.

“Should I open the door?” his wife asked again, looking at him with contempt, tempered by a compassionate smile that sweetened something in her haggard face.

“I’ll open it,” said Lorenzo with a surprisingly confident voice. He got up calmly, and his steps involuntarily led him to the hallway. He was surprised to note that his legs weren’t shaking. Before opening the door, he turned to his wife and pointed to the television table. “Grab that gun and hide in the bathroom. It’s loaded. The only thing you need to do is wait for him to sit down. When I give you the signal, shoot him. It’s easy; remember what we practiced. All you have to do is press the trigger.”

His wife stubbed out her cigarette in a cut-crystal ashtray. She grabbed Lorenzo’s weapon and looked at it as if it were an object foreign to her and her life, as if that piece of cold metal summed up all the lies of an existence she had imagined very differently. She had shot cans and pieces of wood in a quarry. Lorenzo had said she was good at it, and she’d felt a stupid pride in that skill. Now she would have to shoot a man. But in her heart of hearts she knew that it wouldn’t be any different than shooting an inanimate object. She went to the bathroom and sat down to wait with the door ajar, just enough to see what was going on in the living room.

Lorenzo sighed heavily. He suddenly felt a strange calm, the almost absolute certainty that everything would turn out okay. His wife would be able to do her part of the plan. He opened the door, and in spite of knowing whom he was going to find there, he couldn’t help taking a step back with a contrite face.

Ramoneda advanced into that space that Lorenzo ceded to him, like a chess pawn that goes straight for its opponent. He explored the house’s limits, and his gaze stopped on the smoking butt in the ashtray. He knew that Lorenzo didn’t smoke.

“Who else is home?” he asked, not bothering to hide his intentions. They were all adults in this game; he didn’t have to make chitchat and waste time pretending.

Lorenzo stood firm in the middle of the living room. He avoided the reflex of shifting his gaze toward the bathroom, which was right behind Ramoneda’s back.

“My wife was here a minute ago. You might have passed each other in the elevator. I told her to leave. I don’t want her to see this.”

See this. What a strange way to refer to his own death, thought Ramoneda, convinced that what Lorenzo said was true. He wasn’t stammering, and he was curiously calm.

“María helped César escape from the hospital,” he said.

Lorenzo didn’t try to act surprised or pretend that he didn’t know. He had found out just a few hours earlier about the escape. He would have preferred that María had taken his advice and fled. But deep down he admired her for the stupid perseverance in saving that inspector and his daughter.

Ramoneda ran a hand over the living room’s polished marble table, admiring the quality of the furniture, the perfection of the paintings hung symmetrically on the walls, the smell of the lavender air freshener, the immaculate
porcellanato
tile floor whose surface reflected like a still sea. Soon he too would be able to rest in a place like this. He felt the temptation to ask Lorenzo how he did it, this being rich; what made a person respectable and tasteful? But instead he asked him where María was hiding with Inspector Alcalá. He wasn’t surprised that Lorenzo said he didn’t know. It could be true. It didn’t matter. That wasn’t why he had come.

He pulled out his semiautomatic pistol from his belt. It was a beautiful weapon, a 9 mm Walther that fit his hand like a glove. He felt good, complete, when he wielded it. He felt bad having to stain those nice linen curtains and the immaculate floor. It was a dirty image in such perfect order.

Just then a shot rang out. Both men looked at each other in surprise. Lorenzo stumbled and fell to the right, onto the table. A slow trail of blood started to spread across the marble. Ramoneda touched his face. Lorenzo’s blood had splattered onto him. And yet he hadn’t shot him. Ramoneda turned around and discovered a woman brandishing a weapon but not pointing it at him. She looked at Lorenzo’s lifeless body as if in a catatonic state. She dropped the gun to the ground and looked at Ramoneda with nothing in her eyes.

Ramoneda felt confused. Then he noticed the bruises on the woman’s body, her swollen eye. And he understood what had happened. She hadn’t missed her mark. That woman had killed her husband.

He didn’t blame her for it. She had the right to her revenge. And to her rest. He approached her slowly and caressed the woman’s defenseless face. He aimed at her head and blew her brains out.

29

On the outskirts of Barcelona, that same night

Inevitably it was one of those strange and marvelous nights. Looking up at the dome of stars, one felt neurotic, small, part of something so vast that it transcended the very limits of comprehension.

Sitting in the back of the car, Fernando tried to forget for a minute what he knew and who he was, lifting his head toward those tiny fires that twinkled in the vastness. Perhaps someone was looking toward Earth at this very moment when he was looking at the stars. And between the two gazes there were hundreds of thousands of miles of silence. For a moment, he imagined that was death. The end of thinking, suffering, and enjoying. Forgetting good and evil and wandering forever in that magma of elusive lights that floated above his head. Perhaps in that immense sea of stars and unexplored cosmic bodies existed that which they called God. How could he explain his voyage through this life to Him? Would he complain like a spoiled child about his luck? Would he tell Him of his father’s hatred, or the wars, or prisoners’ camps? Would he uselessly lament a wasted life? He imagined the face of the Great Being listening to him somewhat incredulously, surely with a touch of sarcasm. And he could also imagine his response. Among all the possible options of existence, he had chosen one. So the guilt, if one could call it guilt, was only his.

He then looked toward the house with the blue roof tiles that could be seen through the sycamores. He remembered that house dressed in spring tones, the ionic columns crowned with ferns, the Greek sculptures, the gardens with noisy fountains. For years he spied on Andrés’s walks along the estate’s paths crowded with leaves. He could have been happy there with his brother. They could have chosen another life, surely. And they didn’t. Neither of them. And now, that house was like a monument erected to its own ruin. Nothing was left of the old family glory or the moments lived in it. It was cracking everywhere and seemed to be waiting for a last push, a short burst of wind to collapse and bury the last vestiges of that accursed family beneath the rubble.

He didn’t see any movement or any lights anywhere in the house. But Fernando knew that Andrés was there, somewhere in the mansion, wandering around like the ghost of a king without a kingdom. And he knew that the girl was with him. He had known it for too long. And he had done nothing to stop him. How could he betray his brother, after causing the fire that had left him forever dead in life, after leaving him to his fate? But wasn’t that just what he was going to do this time? Beside him was the old katana that Gabriel had forged for Andrés when he was a boy. He got out of the car and walked with it toward the gate’s entrance. He wasn’t afraid of Publio’s men discovering him. He had seen them leave stealthily half an hour earlier. He knew what that meant. The congressman was abandoning his brother to his fate. But he wouldn’t. This time would be different.

He delicately stroked the katana’s single-edged blade. He sheathed it in a rotating movement, bringing the blade upward with both hands, in the traditional way. It was a magnificent, elegant weapon, intended to sever more than hit. He knew every detail of its anatomy: the temper of the blade, its length, and the groove that absorbed and distributed the tension of the impact. In the part of the blade that entered the hilt he could see Gabriel’s signature, a small dragon biting its tail, like the ornamental metal pieces on one side of the handle. Slowly, like the whistle of a snake, he introduced the blade into the magnolia wood and bamboo sheath.

During those years in hiding, he had studied and read about his brother’s interests. He needed to understand why Andrés felt that apparently absurd fascination for the world of the samurai. And without realizing, he too had gotten ensnared in the fascinating web of almost liturgical rites, oriental books, and strict rules for living. He ended up memorizing the code of the Bushido. It was true that the first of the seven principles of the
The Way of the Warrior
demanded honor and fairness. But not the fairness that derived from others, as he later understood when Recasens died, but his own. The world confused him with its sense of good and evil, with forgiveness and remorse, distorting its true nature. But there were no shades. There was only right and wrong.

He was no longer afraid to act, nor did he plan on hiding like a turtle in its shell. That wasn’t living. Life was what he felt running through his veins, the value of accepting his impulses and following them. His mother was dead. His best friend was dead. His life was a big wound, like Andrés’s tortured body and his sick monster’s mind. And he could only heal the wound by giving back pain for pain. An offense could be ignored, unknown, or forgiven. But it could never be forgotten. And Fernando had a good memory. And finally, he had come to understand what true vengeance is, how he could definitively close the circle opened forty years earlier.

A car advanced slowly along the path with its headlights off. It stopped beside Fernando’s vehicle.

*   *   *

María took out the key, and the engine quieted. The silence grew more intense.

“Is it him?” asked César Alcalá beside her. He was staring at the silhouette that stood in front of the gate to the house. He couldn’t see his face hidden beneath the shadows.

“Yes. It’s Fernando. But before meeting him, you should know something important.” She needed to talk to the inspector. She had needed to since she had picked him up at the parish church and Alcalá had handed her the evidence against Publio.

“What’s so important?”

“I feel the need for you to forgive me … I know it is difficult to understand now, but I need to know that you forgive me.”

César Alcalá listened seriously.

“I know how you feel.”

María shook her head.

“You don’t know, César,” she said with resignation. No one can ever understand things from outside. María had tried to put herself in her father’s shoes, understand why he had sold Isabel out, but she couldn’t do it. She tried to find reasons to justify what she herself had done to the inspector, and she pretended to do it, accepting arguments that were reasonable or convincing. But it was only a theoretical comprehension, never a full one.

But César Alcalá understood her, even though she didn’t believe it. Not even now, when he had his daughter in arm’s reach, was he able to forget the past. It would always be there. He had seen and suffered things that were unspeakable, that would always be there hiding in nightmares. None of them would ever be the same again.

“There are scars that never heal, María. But we have to keep going with what we are. You don’t have to ask for forgiveness; that’s of no use. You just have to keep going; that’s all there is to do.”