Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (51 page)

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María Bengoechea died in the Sagrada Familia hospital on May 10, 1981. Her agony in the final days was not poetic or romantic. She barely had moments of lucidity, and she couldn’t enjoy even a few minutes alone with Greta. She would have liked to say good-bye to her in private, kiss her on the lips, and feel her fingers running through her hair. But that room was like a prison of tubes and machines, of doctors, of cops, of journalists. She slowly faded until going out with a final death rattle, something monstrous and comical at the same time, an enormous belch that expelled the last bits of air from her lungs, and with them her last particles of life.

Then came the hustle and bustle of the funeral preparations. María didn’t have anything prepared; until the last moment she must have convinced herself that the cancer wasn’t going to get the best of her. Greta emotionlessly carried out the ritual of choosing the flowers and coffin. It was all so common, so mundane, that it became unbearable. It was an intimate act. Death always is. But when the burial is for family only, and family was just her and the shell that was left of Gabriel, it’s all lighter, less liturgical. In deference, Inspector Antonio Marchán had come to the cemetery. The notes that María had left had been very helpful in clearing her name in the deaths of Recasens, Ramoneda, Lorenzo, and the Mola brothers. However, the policeman was convinced that María had taken to her grave the whereabouts of César Alcalá and his daughter, who were still at large.

There was no religious ceremony. María wouldn’t have allowed it. They were the only three witnesses as the cemetery workers stuck her coffin in the niche, placed the stone, and sealed it with mortar. With Inspector Marchán’s help, Greta added a small crown of lilies, with no banner or note. She said nothing; her face showed nothing. She turned and left from whence she had come, without looking back, unhurriedly, leaving a path of her footsteps.

EPILOGUE

In 1982 the trials that were called the Juicios de Campamento began. In them a good part of those implicated in the coup of February 23, 1981, were sentenced. Tejero, Milans, Armada … those are the best-known names in that plot. In total no less than thirty military men were condemned to prison sentences of between two and thirty years.

Of all those convicted, there was only one civilian.

As for Congressman Publio, he was never formally charged. His name disappeared from all the reports, and there was never any trial against him. The newspapers of the period, the legal resolutions, the oral and written media, erased his name from the plot. He does not even appear in the history books or in the vast literature on the matter that was written later. So Publio, the congressman, appears to be a fictional character, as if he had never existed.

 … And yet, all you have to do is stroll past a small estate on the outskirts of Almendralejo, near San Marcos, to find an old man who languishes, bitter in his oblivion, and who will tell anyone who wants to listen that on the twenty-third of February of 1981, he almost changed the course of Spain’s history. He lives in fear behind wrought-iron gates and blocked-off windows, waiting for the visit of someone who, sooner or later, will come to settle an old score.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

V
ÍCTOR DEL
Á
RBOL
holds a degree in history from the University of Barcelona. He has worked for Catalonia’s police force since 1992. In 2006, he won the Tiflos de Novela Award for
The Weight of the Dead. The Sadness of the Samurai
is his first novel to be translated into English.

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Copyright © 2011 by Víctor del Árbol

Translation Copyright © 2012 by Mara Faye Lethem

All rights reserved.

Originally published in Spain in 2011 under the title
La Tristeza del Samurái
by Editorial Alrevés, Barcelona

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Árbol, Víctor del.

   [Tristeza del samurai. English]

   The sadness of the samurai / Víctor del Árbol ; [translated by Mara Faye Lethem].—1st ed.

           p. cm.

   ISBN 978-0-8050-9475-6

 1.  Spain—History—20th century—Fiction.   I.  Lethem, Mara.   II.  Title.

   PQ6701.R364T7513 2012

   863'.7—dc23                                         2011039114

eISBN 978-1-4299-5520-1

First U.S. Edition 2012

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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 Spring will laugh again,

   which we await by air, land and sea.

   Onwards, squadrons, to victory,

   that a new day dawns on Spain!

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“The day you marry, two things will happen at once: first your wedding, then my funeral.”