Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (6 page)

“This is my home, my place. You chose to live with that man, but I won’t,” he argued.

María felt the old anger return. If they allowed themselves to, they had a thousand reasons to start arguing again.

“We can talk about it some other time, don’t worry.”

Gabriel looked seriously at his daughter’s face.

“The past is never forgotten; it’s never wiped clean … I know that.”

3

The next morning, María got up early and went out toward the San Lorenzo cemetery.

Nothing had changed. If anything, the bushes grew wilder and the trees shrank even more over themselves, ashamed of their nudity. The graves were strewn randomly, as if each corpse had chosen the place it liked best for eternity. On the hill stood the ruins of a Roman fortress.

It was hard for her to remember where her mother’s stone was. Strange as it might seem, she had never wanted to know why one morning her mother decided to hang herself from a beam, when María was barely six years old.

She found her in an isolated spot, facing the sun that rose over the hills. Hers was the only grave on the cracked ground that had no weeds around it, no obscene graffiti, no bird shit. The only one whose name and date of death were perfectly legible. In spite of that, the place where her father still clung to grieve over her, almost thirty years later, seemed sterile to María.

What kind of mother was the woman buried there? María barely had any memories of her. Just the image of a person who was always taciturn, silent, sad-looking. A person who found life more painful, for some reason, than others did.

Her burial was like her always silent and solitary presence in the hallways of the house. A gray burial, beneath a sky filled with dark clouds and a freezing wind. She recalled a small dark room, illuminated only by two candleholders, the flames trembling in a yellowish circle around the bed in which her mother was laid out with her hands crossed over her chest, a crucifix. Her face was covered with gauze so flies wouldn’t get into her mouth or eyes. Curious, María approached her mother and, with her fingers, brushed the train of the black dress that was her mother’s shroud. A toothless old woman who was singing the rosary slapped her hand and gave her a stern look.

“We don’t touch the dead,” she reproached, and María ran outside, terrified, because maybe death was contagious.

*   *   *

She changed the dry flowers for fresh ones. She stayed there for a while, wrapped in intense silence. But she found no peace, no tranquillity. She brushed off her pants, lit a cigarette, and headed toward town without looking back.

*   *   *

“I went to see Mamá,” she said to her father.

Gabriel was sharpening an old serrated knife. For a second he stopped pedaling on the wheel, without looking up. Then, as if moved by an invisible spring, his foot returned to its pedaling, harder than before.

“That’s good” was all he said.

María grabbed a stool and sat near him. For a little while she watched the meticulous dance of her father’s fingers over the knife blade. The sound of the pulley’s straps and the screech of the metal filled the small workshop.

“It’s strange,” she said, trying to get her father’s attention. “It’s strange that you have that photograph of me from college and yet you don’t have any of Mamá. You didn’t even save her things. I remember you burning them in the yard not long after the burial, before we moved here. It’s as if you wanted to erase her from your life. And yet you keep going, every morning, to take care of her grave.”

Not a muscle moved on Gabriel’s circumspect face. Perhaps his eyes squinted a little more, and he focused hard on what he was doing.

“How come we never talk about what happened?” insisted María.

Gabriel stopped pedaling and raised one hand in an exasperated gesture.

“You haven’t shown up here in ten years … I don’t think you need to come now and start asking me about things that happened twenty-five years ago. You have no right, María.” There was no reproach in his voice, just a hint of pleading for her to stop insisting.

María nodded silently. She slapped her thigh in a controlled gesture and left the workshop. She needed some air. She had forgotten that feeling of breathlessness, of suffocation she sometimes felt around her father and his endless silences. It was like a house filled with closed rooms. She could barely crack a door before it slammed shut in her face, keeping all its secrets in the darkness.

She went into the house. The fireplace was smoking, and it was cold. She went down into the basement to look for dry firewood. She opened the trap door and felt blindly along the wall until she found the switch. The wooden staircase creaked as she went down the steps, pushing aside dusty spiderwebs.

The cut trunks were piled up neatly against a wall, five feet high. María grabbed some from the top. When she removed them from the pile, she discovered a door frame. She didn’t remember ever having seen it before. She wondered what use a door buried behind a woodpile could possibly have. One by one, she removed the thickest logs until she had created a path. She pushed the door open with one hand, and it opened without resistance.

Inside it wasn’t much larger than a henhouse. The ceiling was low, and the floor was of well-trodden dirt. The only light that entered came from a small barred window. It smelled musty. María saw a couple of rats scampering in surprise; they hid behind a suitcase sitting by one wall. It was an old, wooden suitcase with leather straps and dinged clasps.

María opened it carefully, as if she were lifting the lid of a sarcophagus, with a strange sense of unease. She searched for her lighter in a pocket and shed some light inside the case.

It was filled with old newspaper clippings, almost all of them from the period of the civil war and soon after. That didn’t surprise her. Her father had fought on the front of both wars on the Communist side, even though he never talked about it. She carefully sifted through the clippings. They were like the leaves of a dead tree, brown and consumed, ready to vanish with the first breath of fresh air. Beneath she found some cartridge clips and some worn belts filled with holes. There was also a shabby militiaman’s uniform and some boots without laces. At the bottom of the suitcase there was a small box. She lifted it up and heard a metallic sound. When she opened it she found a perfectly oiled pistol and a clip with ten bullets. María didn’t know much about weapons, but she was used to seeing them around the house. Lorenzo usually kept his standard-issue gun in the drawer on the nightstand, beside the bed’s headboard. But this one seemed much older.

“It’s a semiautomatic Luger from the German army,” explained her father’s deep voice.

María was startled, and she turned. Gabriel was in the threshold with his legs apart and his arms crossed over his chest. He was looking at his daughter severely. Had she still been a child, he surely would have given her a good thrashing. María felt the redness coming to her cheeks. She put the pistol back in its place and stood up slowly.

“I saw the door and I was curious … I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you.”

Gabriel walked toward the suitcase. He closed it and turned toward his daughter seriously.

“We all have doors that are best left closed. I think you should go back home tomorrow morning early, before your husband starts to wonder where you are.”

*   *   *

That night María heard her father pacing around the house, until well past dawn. She hadn’t been able to sleep either, and she went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

Then she saw her father on the porch, in his pajamas, smoking his pipe. His gaze grew sad, and he sat in his chair on the terrace with fallen eyelids. He was so quiet that he seemed to have died. And suddenly, in a worn-out voice that didn’t sound like his, he started mumbling unintelligible things, things about the past.

María didn’t dare interrupt his sad trance. She just stood leaning on the window frame, watching him and listening to his voice slowly fading out, until it was just a sigh.

She stubbed out the cigarette against the railing and went back to her room.

She woke up before dawn and dressed slowly. She felt a sharp, intense pain at the nape of her neck, and she searched for her migraine pills. They were just placebos, but she needed to believe that she was doing something to stop that paralyzing pain. She wrote a short note with her address and left it on the pillow for her father to find. There was no light in the windows. Gabriel must have been sleeping. She went out to the street, and a gust of wind froze her face.

*   *   *

When the bus left her at the bus stop in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, the town barely seemed to be stretching awake. In the distance were the lights of the deserted boardwalk, with its restaurants and nightclubs closed. It was sad to see the umbrellas imprinted with Coca-Cola and Cervezas Damm logos frayed and covered with pigeon shit, and around them plastic chairs and tables piled up any which way. Winter Sundays were depressing in a coastal town geared toward the summer trade.

María wondered how she had gotten there, to the shore of that sea, to that town, to that life, how she had become this woman. It was strange. She had the sensation that she had simply let herself be pulled along by the tide when it came over the fence around her house in a town in the Pyrenees of Lleida, never to return.

As she walked toward her house along the deserted streets, she remembered her excitement the first time she saw that town. She felt like a champion; the entire coast, the whole Mediterranean, seemed to be bowing down before her. She was barely nineteen years old. She had just started studying law, and she was thrilled by the effervescent atmosphere of the lecture halls, the graffiti on the walls of the university buildings, the police raids, the secret meetings in the café on the Gran Vía in Barcelona, the excursions to the dog track on the Meridiana, the nocturnal trips to the Barrio Chino to provide hot coffee and fritters to the prostitutes and secretly give them condoms … It was all vigor, strength, excitement, and newness: before her hungry eyes she discovered a world filled with nuances, open and supposedly cosmopolitan, so different from the blinkered attitude of her village. There were the first parties in the hostel, the first drunken nights, the first joints, the first kisses; she fell in love. And she discovered the sea.

Really the sea belonged to Lorenzo; it was his element. She hated it. Lorenzo loved making long trips into the coves. Excited as cabin boys, he and his friends from the barracks separated out the tackles, bait, buckets, and stocked up on water, made omelet sandwiches, and filled the canvas bags with fruit. They spent hours sitting in front of a map of the Costa Brava explaining how many miles they could get if the weather was on their side, what shoals of fish they’d find, what a beautiful dawn they’d have the privilege of watching unfold.

When María saw him so enthusiastic she smiled, pretending to be just as excited, but really she was preparing herself for the worst. The sea frightened her. She knew that her stomach would start churning as soon as they left the coast, that she would be nervously watching the water line from the prow, but she always struggled to hold back that panic. Ever since she was a girl, a very young girl, she knew that there are some things that shouldn’t float.

Later all that changed, and her father’s premonitions turned out to be painfully on target. It had been quite some time since Lorenzo had gone out sailing. In fact, since the miscarriage, her husband hadn’t done anything else besides work, drink, and come home in a bad mood, always ready to start a fight. Compared to what she was living through now, María recalled the sound of the barge’s old diesel engine and the trail of foam the propeller left behind with surprising fondness.

And above all the stillness. That calm that she had never experienced since, anywhere. At a certain point in that desert without corners that is the still sea they would throw out buoys and the anchor. The boat stopped completely, rocked softly by a current that seemed like golden oil. Then she lay down faceup on the boat’s skeleton and let herself go in the late afternoon dusk. She never got over her fear of the depths of the open sea, and she never dared to go with Lorenzo when he jumped off the stern for a dip. But she was able to close her eyes and caress the water with her fingers, as if carefully, but also curiously, touching a sleeping monster that she found both scary and seductive. Then she watched Lorenzo’s breathing beneath his swimsuit, his damp skin shining in the sun, his perfect face, serene, in a state of absolute silence, until the bells on the poles rang out, announcing that some fish had taken the bait. And then she felt like the luckiest woman on Earth.

Before long she married Lorenzo. It was inevitable that she succumbed to his intelligence and charisma, in spite of Gabriel’s fierce opposition. Lorenzo was a leader; everyone followed him and admired him. Looking back now, she could easily spot the authoritarian tics and repressed violence in his gestures, in his vehement defenses of his positions. She didn’t see an intractable man, but rather a man convinced and sure of himself, strong as a rock, given that the mission he had chosen—saving the world from Franco’s fascist regime—didn’t leave room for lukewarm attitudes or weakness of character.

When Lorenzo finished college he made a decision that dismayed all his friends, including her. He decided to take the exam for minister of defense. He insisted that it was as effective a way as any to fight against the system, from within, from the very bowels of the beast. The five months he had spent in La Modelo had changed him; he was no longer so impetuous, he had become more taciturn, and he had started to drink more than he should, but he was still able to convince María, as he managed with everything he set out to do. For some strange reason, his record wasn’t taken into account, and he passed the exam with flying colors.

That was when they decided to buy the fishing house with a dock. It was in ruins, but they worked hard at turning it into a home. They spent every day of their new marriage making love all the time and in the most surprising places. They wanted to have three children—although really, when she thought about it carefully, María realized that it was Lorenzo who wanted to have them, two girls and a boy—and they devoted themselves enthusiastically to their dream of being a happy family.