Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (5 page)

“It won’t be cheap.”

“That’s okay.”

He put on a dirty beret, gulped down his beer, and got moving.

“Let’s go, then.”

*   *   *

The snaking road, poorly paved and damp, was like a tunnel through time where a moment from the past had gotten trapped. Ancient trees were overgrown in every direction, allowing the daylight in only in the brief clearings. The car, an old Mercedes, climbed with difficulty through the rocky terrain. On the steepest slopes the engine groaned like an asthmatic at the limit of its capacity, burning gas and leaving behind a thick black cloud, but it kept climbing.

“Don’t worry, the Germans are good at what they do. In twelve years, this wreck has never left me stranded,” commented the cabbie, violently scraping through the gears without blinking.

As they gained altitude there was more deforestation, but the reward for such devastation was a lovely panoramic view of the entire valley.

In spite of the driver’s confidence in German machinery, the car broke down. When they got to an area of understory covered in ferns, smoke started coming out of the hood. The cabbie didn’t get nervous.

“It’s old, and it gets overheated. But it’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

María got out to smoke a cigarette. Evening was falling, and the cold of the mountains was starting to bite. She raised the collar of her coat and walked a few yards away. She had a headache. The trip filled with curves, her tiredness, and the smell of burned gas had turned her stomach. She sat on a stone overgrown with moss, and she hunched forward, pressing on her belly.

It had been more than ten years since she’d returned to that area, and in her memories everything was less hostile, more familiar: she remembered that as a girl she would dip her feet into the river’s crystalline waters, hunt salamanders and newts in the swamps, or watch in amazement how the blackbirds flew underwater to catch small insects. It was as if all that had disappeared. Now she was cold, she didn’t feel well, and she realized that the knot in her stomach wasn’t just from carsickness. She hadn’t even thought about what she was going to say to her father.

She imagined him as he had been ten years earlier, in his worn leather apron and wearing plastic goggles to protect his eyes from flying metal shards. He would probably be sitting on the stool beside the entrance to his metalworking shop, with the door open despite how cold it must already be in San Lorenzo.

As a girl, María hated the dirtiness of the forge, the smell of the tinctures he used to treat the metal, the suffocating heat of the furnace. She didn’t like her father to caress her because his hands were rough and full of cracks and cuts; she couldn’t stand him holding her against his firm, hard body because it was like hugging a granite wall that smelled of welding.

She wondered what would be left of that memory, and she was afraid of what she might find.

When the taxi driver said that they could continue, María was about to ask him to turn around, but she didn’t do it. She huddled into the backseat, lulled to sleep by the heat that steamed up the windows, while she tried not to think about anything.

Half an hour later, the cabbie woke her up.

“We’re here. Honestly, I don’t know what you are looking for here. This place is like a cemetery.”

María forced a smile. She was wondering the same thing herself. She got out of the taxi. A thick drop tangled into her eyelashes. Then another split her lips, and a few more struck the palms of her hands.

She stayed by the hard shoulder until the taxi disappeared behind a curve, on its way back to the valley.

She was in no hurry as she went up the slope toward the group of houses that rose around the church’s bell tower. As she passed a fence, the dogs that were indolently dozing awoke suddenly and lunged against the fence like a barking pack. They seemed to be accusing her of something. It was the way small towns marked her as an outsider.

She was no longer one of them. You could see it in the way she spoke, dressed, and behaved. Curiously, she hadn’t noticed that obvious fact before then. Perhaps in that instant she was realizing that it wasn’t places that fade in our memory, but what we carry inside us. It wasn’t San Lorenzo that had changed. It was she.

A bolt of lightning lit up the valley briefly and intensely, and in the distance the murmur of thunder was heard. It started to rain hard. It was quickly getting dark, and the path was increasingly muddy.

She got back on the road, and a few yards farther along, through the sheeting rain, a modest house appeared, much smaller than María had remembered it. Its roof was dotted with new tiles that stood out from the old ones because of the shine the rain gave them. The wooden fence had been mended, and the cherry trees looked neat, their branches pruned.

She opened the gate to the yard, hesitantly. The main door to the house was closed. The rain slipped down its wooden surface. She stood there for a minute holding the door handle, not sure if she should knock. She felt like an intruder. Then she heard footsteps dragging along the floor inside. She stepped away from the door, and it opened slightly with a grunt.

An impossible being appeared before her shocked eyes.

Gabriel was a man trapped in a prison of flesh, a deformed body twisted like the trunk of an old olive tree. He had a faraway look in his eyes; his head pitched forward like a long-beaked bird. His lower lip drooped, making him look a bit dumb, and the deep wrinkles in his flaccid skin divided into branches from his almost white eyes, white as the short hair on his head. He looked like a skeleton that held itself up, trembling, with a cane.

Tears sprang to María’s eyes.

“Hello, Papá.”

Gabriel looked his daughter up and down in silence for a moment that seemed to last a very long time. He gazed up slowly, as if going up a cliff, to meet her eyes. They were like small mounds of moss floating in milk. His lips trembled, and his face broke down in a helpless gesture.

María hugged him. It hurt her to the depths of her being to feel the ribs of a man she remembered as so strong and powerful. She felt his fragility and his confusion at not knowing how to react.

“It’s been a long time,” stammered Gabriel. He smiled stupidly, ashamed, not knowing what to say. He stroked his daughter’s soaked hair and gestured for her to come inside the house.

The house was small, messy, and dirty. It smelled of old age. In one corner burned a meager fire in the fireplace, before an armchair that held the shape of Gabriel’s body.

María smiled happily, her gaze traveling discreetly over the dust-covered old furniture that leaned against the irregular wall, which had been poorly whitewashed and painted many times. The floor was terrazzo with uneven tiles. Beside the window a clock on the wall counted down the seconds with an insufferable calmness.

Gabriel moved about, struggling to get over his surprise, and hide the fact that between them there was the obstacle of a distance that was impossible to overcome so quickly. He went over to the fireplace and stirred the logs to get the fire going.

María took off her soaked coat and sat on the edge of the armchair. The threadbare blanket that lay on the armrest smelled of Gabriel, a somewhat caustic scent, a mixture of pipe tobacco and many nights of solitude.

“Why did you come here?” asked Gabriel. His tone of voice was harsher than he would have liked.

María pulled out the envelope from the hospital. Gabriel frowned.

“I get it. I didn’t want to bother you, but in the hospital they asked me for a phone number and I didn’t have any other one to give them; you know I live off the grid up here.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself, Papá. I just wish you had come to me … maybe I could have done something.”

Gabriel stared at the envelope in María’s hand.

“If you came all this way, it can’t be good news, so there isn’t much you could have done.”

María saw her father’s eyes tear up. He was no longer the invincible, infallible hero of her childhood. He appeared before her now a simple, naked man, with wounds, bruises, weaknesses, hardships, and contradictions. Sometimes, inflexibility creates a callus, scarring over all the bitterness and disappointment improperly, and there is no honest way to break that silence or that infinite distance, not even in death, not even in memory. But, as Greta had told her, that man, or what was left of him, was her father. And that was enough. She knew that she had nothing to forgive him for, because he didn’t think he needed to be forgiven.

“You’re soaked. You should go up and have a bath. Afterward we’ll have some supper. We have a lot to talk about.”

*   *   *

María went upstairs with a bitter feeling. She undressed in the dark, threw her clothes onto the bed, and went into the bathroom. She rested her forehead on the tile, feeling the boiling stream of water on the middle of her skull, imagining she was in a hot spring, far from the actual trail of water that fell over her body. She moved the fingers of her right hand over the wall tiles like a lazy spider until her arm was fully extended. She turned off the tap, remaining still, with her eyes closed. She let the sadness pour into her very core, and she did nothing to stop the lonely, bitter, convulsive, inevitable weeping that came out of her.

She went back to the room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her wet hair dripped down her cheeks. Something on the dresser caught her eye: a photograph from her first year at college.

She didn’t remember having sent it to her father, but there it was, in a special spot, with a lovely carved wooden frame.

She barely recognized herself. She wore faded jeans, espadrilles, and a blue shirt with a Mao collar. Her hair was pulled back with a red and yellow floral handkerchief, and her neck and wrists were piled with thin chains and bracelets with Asian motifs. Her expression was firm, typical of the Marxist student she was then, attractive and implacable. Insufferable and vehement with the speeches she had learned from the magazines
Triunfo
and
Cuadernos para el Diálogo
. It was the period when she had met Lorenzo, a handsome young man with an edgy, somewhat anarchist air to him. She smiled at the memory of making love to him, without a condom, on the uncomfortable sofa bed in his apartment, after reciting passages from Sartre’s
Nausea
, smoking joints, and listening to Serrat, María del Mar Bonet, and Frank Zappa on the old record player.

It was awkward for her that those memories of hers also had a place in her father’s life. It was like trying to fit together two contradictory lives.

Her father had always opposed her relationship with Lorenzo; he said that Lorenzo wasn’t a good person, that there was something sick in his gaze. Maybe time had proven him right, but it was still hard for her to accept that her father had been capable of informing on Lorenzo to the police for his clandestine activities at the university. In that period they were just two children playing at being grown-ups, and it had cost her boyfriend five long months in Barcelona’s Modelo prison. And María had lost her father for ten years.

“I didn’t know you had that photo of me from college,” she said with feigned cheerfulness when she went back down to the living room.

Gabriel had stood up and was beside the window. He opened the curtain with a minimal gesture and looked outside. He was staring at something in the distance, perhaps a memory, with a highly focused expression on his face, momentarily forgetting about María. Then he sighed wearily, let the curtain drop, and was plunged once again into dimness. María had the feeling that her father was looking at her with more affection than before, as if something had shifted in his mind.

“It’s the only one I still have,” he said. In his words she sensed an old sadness, now almost indifferent and sterile. He sat on the armchair staring into the glassy depths of the fire. He ran his whitish tongue along his cracked lips and closed his eyes for a second. It was obvious that he was used to being alone, and that while his daughter’s sudden appearance pleased him, he found it strange and disquieting.

María felt the obligation to say something, but she couldn’t find the words. There aren’t words for everything.

“I’ll make some supper.”

They ate in the kitchen. María told anecdotes to fill the silences, she laughed with fake joy, and when she extended her hand along the tablecloth toward her father, she felt her hesitation in the tips of her fingers. She asked him about his metalworking shop. Gabriel’s eyes lit up.

“My swords and knives no longer interest the rich kids who used to collect them,” he admitted with a bit of nostalgia, as if he were trying to accept that his time had passed. “But that’s okay,” he insisted. He liked being isolated from the town. And besides, here he had no ghosts to live with.

Gabriel barely touched his soup. He drank a lot. A couple of times he tried to suppress the gesture of lifting the glass to his mouth, aware that his daughter was watching him. They finished their supper quickly, and the conversation flagged. They both were feeling the sadness of confirming that they were unable to reach each other.

Finally, María decided to get to the point.

“Papá, would you like to come live with us at the beach house? Here by yourself you won’t be well taken care of.”

Gabriel shook his head, clumsily looking for a napkin to wipe his chin. María didn’t help him. Her father wanted to show that he could take care of himself.

“I have your mother.”

María sighed.

“I know, and you could come see her whenever you wanted to, I promise.”

Gabriel shook his head.

“Lorenzo doesn’t want me. And I don’t want him.”

María’s lips tightened. She lied unconvincingly.

“The past is the past, it’s forgotten. Besides, now Lorenzo is more settled, hoping for a promotion, and they might transfer him to Madrid.”

Gabriel opened the palm of his hand and examined it carefully. It was difficult to know what he was thinking, as if his gaze went through the flesh and back to those years he had erased from his memory.