Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (9 page)

“I can take care of myself,” protested the boy when he found out.

Marcelo was combing his hair for the umpteenth time, parting it down the middle in front of the mirror, slicked down and reeking of lotion.

“No, you can’t. You’re only eight. Besides, your aunt needs us almost as much as we need her.” Marcelo looked at his son’s face and felt the anguish rising in his throat. He looked so sad, with his freckled face and cropped schoolboy’s hair. He felt for the first time in a long while that he hadn’t known how to give him a life that was appropriate for his age. For too long, since he had become a widower, he had dragged his son into a peddler’s life that wasn’t going to be of any help to him along the line. But all that was going to change. Now he had a steady job. Perhaps César wouldn’t accept it at first, but he would eventually get used to the routines of a normal boy.

“It’s not so bad sleeping in the same place every night, you’ll see. Besides, now you can be around kids your own age. Like the Mola boy. Andrés is about your age, and he looks like a really interesting boy.”

“I don’t like those people,” said the boy, frowning. He hated that kid. He thought a little harder and added, “Actually, I don’t like people at all.”

Marcelo was tempted to smile. He put the comb down on the bathroom sink and kneeled before his son, looking into his eyes. Those disturbing eyes that were like shooting stars.

“Well, that’s got to change, Son. We can’t live alone in the world, you understand? We need others, and others need us.”

César nodded, although he didn’t understand what his father was saying to him. His father stood up straight and put on a few drops of that lotion César hated. He adjusted his bow tie and looked at himself with satisfaction.

“Everything I’m doing, César, I’m doing for you. You’ll see, someday you’ll thank me for it.”

Then the boy knew that it was all a lie. He couldn’t comprehend the nature of what was happening to his father, but he sensed that he wasn’t doing it for him, that he was doing it all for that woman he never stopped talking about.

“Now, go on up to your room. Your aunt will call you for lunch. I have to go to the city.”

César looked at his father suspiciously.

“Are you going to see that woman?”

Marcelo turned to face the boy’s inquisitive look.

“Actually, I am going to see some friends who are meeting with Isabel, and yes, I suppose she’ll be there too.”

“I could go with you. I won’t get in the way.”

Marcelo refused, somewhat impatiently.

“These meetings are boring. You’d better go on up now.”

César ran upstairs and locked himself into his room. When he was sure that no one would come to bother him, he opened the small metal box where he kept the portrait of his mother. He touched it gently, as if he worried that it would eventually disappear. Because, incomprehensibly, his mother’s face had started to fade in his memory and merge with the face of that new woman that his father seemed to like.

He turned toward the uneven wall and covered himself with the rough blanket, closing his eyes. The tears came without asking permission first, and he began to sob with his face buried in the pillow so no one would hear his cries. He didn’t know why he was crying, but he was unable to hold back the tears.

He had a strange dream. He dreamed that he was sitting in a small kindergarten chair, like the one his father had once given him as a gift, except that this chair wasn’t blue but red, and its seat wasn’t wicker but a hole like the kind kids who aren’t yet toilet-trained use. He no longer needed it, but Andrés showed up and forced him to sit there with his pants down. Andrés was dressed strangely, in pajamas or something similar, and his hair was pulled back into a bun and his face painted as if with plaster, very white, and his lips very red, as if he had drunk blood. Isabel’s younger son was making fun of him, saying that he always pissed his pants, and hitting him over the head with a wooden sword. César Alcalá wanted to rise up, hit him back, but he couldn’t get up from the chair and he had a terrible urge to urinate. Finally, he felt a hot trail go down his inner thigh, as Andrés laughed like one of those toothless madmen that César had sometimes seen in the towns he’d traveled through with his father.

He woke up screaming. He was in his room. The late afternoon light tinged the walls with orange. From the floor below he heard his aunt humming a song. Then he looked at the soaked sheets and blushed.

*   *   *

Marcelo Alcalá stopped and checked the address he carried written on a wrinkled slip of paper. A cutting wind blew off the shores of the Guadiana. The night was completely dark, and the only lights that could be seen were those that illuminated the river walk. Beneath one of those wan lights he saw the shadow of a smoking man, leaning against a lamppost. The teacher could clearly make out the cigarette’s burning end and the smoke that emerged from his mouth.

Marcelo grew nervous. There was no one else on the street, it was an ungodly hour, and the setting was an apt one for a mugging. He knew what they said about those dark spots near the bridge. There, like elusive shadows, the gigolos met with their clients, risking arrest by the police or being left by a petty thief with a knife wound to the gut. But that was the place where Isabel had told him to meet her that night.

He didn’t know what Mrs. Mola had in mind. Something out of the ordinary, that was clear. That morning, as he was reviewing the alphabet with Andrés at the Mola home, Isabel had come in with the excuse of being interested in her son’s academic progress. However, she secretly slipped into Marcelo’s pocket the paper he now held in his hands.

“I think I can count on you. If you are truly fond of me, you will come tonight to this address. For all that you hold dear, be discreet.”

Now he regretted the somewhat naive enthusiasm that the woman’s dangerous gaze had provoked in him. For a moment he had thought that … perhaps … it was a date. He blushed at his obvious error.

Suddenly, the shadow beneath the streetlight tossed its cigarette. The butt traced an arc through the river’s fog as that shadow left the beam of light and walked toward him. Directly toward him. His footsteps echoing on the paving stones amplified his figure into something disturbing and frightening. Marcelo thought about running away. But his feet refused to obey him.

The shadow gradually became flesh. The heavy, corpulent flesh of a man stuffed into a long coat and wide hat, his hands in his pockets.

“Are you Marcelo?” he said, with a deep voice, looking at him with nothing behind his eyes.

Marcelo nodded. Only then did the man relax and hold out his gloved hand.

“Isabel told me that you would come. She says you are trustworthy. Come, I’ll take you to the meeting place.”

Without waiting for a reply, the man turned on his heels. Marcelo observed his wide-shouldered back that disappeared into the fog. He hesitated for a second, but then followed the stranger.

They crossed several labyrinthine streets near the ruins of the Roman amphitheater. Beneath the fog, the stones of the facade were ghostly, like the keel of a buccaneer’s boat breaking silently through the night. The man stopped in a doorway. He looked from right to left and rapped the door knocker several times. Marcelo was equally disturbed and intrigued by all that. He had the feeling he was getting himself into trouble, but it was too late to turn back now. The door was opening.

On the landing another man was waiting for them. Marcelo guessed he was a metalworker, judging by his work coveralls and his hands filled with shavings encrusted into the skin. He looked like a frightened little dog, but his gaze was just as distrusting as the teacher’s when their eyes met. Yet he effusively shook the hand of the man escorting him.

“Everyone’s already upstairs. They’re waiting for you.”

The man accompanying the teacher nodded, taking off his hat.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

In a small apartment of no more than four hundred square feet, a group of men and women, the teacher couldn’t tell exactly how many, were smoking, filling the place with smoke. They were talking among themselves in disparate little groups. Their voices weren’t raised; in fact the whispering conversations reminded him of students chatting in the cloister of a university library. When the man accompanying him entered, everyone turned to greet him. It was clear that they considered him some sort of leader. Gradually, they took the seats set in a circle in the parlor.

“Sit here, next to me,” said the man, taking off his coat and hanging it on the back of the chair.

Marcelo obeyed, searching for Isabel among those present.

“She won’t be coming. We must have this meeting without Mrs. Mola’s presence.”

Marcelo turned around in his chair.

“Then what am I doing here?”

The man’s expression twisted with a smile that hinted of cynicism, but he quickly recomposed himself.

“The same thing we all are. Trying to make a better world.”

What appeared to be a full session began. One by one those men and women—Marcelo was finally able to count ten, most of them very young, practically still teenagers—filled up the circle of chairs and began presenting information. It was information that exceedingly disturbed Marcelo, who, as he listened, began to understand the nature of that group.

“You’re communists?” he asked, alarmed, whispering into the ear of the man who presided over the meeting.

The man didn’t look directly at him. He leaned his face slightly toward the teacher and once again traced a complex smile.

“We are people who believe that things cannot continue the way they are, and that men like Guillermo Mola, the head of the Falange for the entire province of Badajoz, cannot continue terrorizing our women, our old folk, and our children.” He paused and looked intensely into the eyes of the shocked teacher. “Which is why we have decided to assassinate him. We are going to kill him.”

Marcelo had to hold himself back from springing out of the chair.

Killing Guillermo Mola? Those people were completely insane. That man was one of the most powerful in all of Extremadura. Nobody could touch even a hair on his head. And, besides, he was protected by Publio and his
camisas viejas
, the Falange’s old guard. Everyone knew how fierce Publio was. But at the forefront of his mind was a persistent question: What was he, a simple rural teacher, doing in the midst of those conspirators? Why had Isabel sent him there?

The man who had accompanied him to that lair seemed to read his thoughts.

“Isabel is the one who came up with the idea. She gave us the information we need to do it.” He said it without batting an eyelash. That stranger was trying to make him believe that Isabel was willing to murder her own husband.

“How do you expect me to believe such madness?”

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t be naive. How long have you worked in that house? Six months? Don’t tell me that in all that time you haven’t realized what a monster that man is. Do you know that Isabel married him so that her parents could get out of the country? Do you know that Guillermo Mola gave the order for Isabel’s older brother to be executed by firing squad in the Badajoz bullring? Yes, she has more reasons than any of us to hate him, and that’s without going into the daily humiliations he puts her through.”

Marcelo had heard some of those things, it was true. And he had also seen and heard others that he would have rather not seen or heard. He sensed that Isabel didn’t love her husband, and selfishly and stupidly, now that it was being confirmed, it fueled his secret desires that perhaps she could notice a little bookworm like him. But to plot to assassinate the father of her children … That was something very different. It was impossible for him to believe. Isabel was too beautiful, too sweet. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. It was impossible for her to drag them through the mud.

“Why am I here?” he asked, still stunned and perplexed.

“Isabel says that you have a special fondness for her younger son.”

Marcelo nodded. It was true: Andrés was a peculiar boy; he needed help reining in his vast imagination and that marvelous energy that would transform him any day now into either a genius or a monster. He trusted in his ability to guide that potential toward the first option. But he didn’t understand what the boy had to do with this shady business.

“I’ll explain it to you: If things get ugly, Isabel will have to flee. And she’ll take her younger son with her. Fernando’s case is different, since he’s older and can take care of himself. But Isabel wouldn’t leave Andrés with her husband, not under any circumstances. Guillermo Mola hates the little boy. He thinks he’s an aberration; he wouldn’t hesitate to lock him up in an asylum for life. So, if we fail, she will need somewhere to hide her son. That’s your role. You shouldn’t get involved; no one will know that you know anything about the whole thing. We only ask that, if necessary, you give Isabel an escape route. It seems that when you became a widower you inherited a house close to the Portuguese border. It’s a good spot. They’d barely be there for a few days, just enough time to get into Portugal, and from there to London. You don’t need to know any more. Meanwhile, keep up your regular routine.

*   *   *

Keep
up
your regular routine.
Those words echoed in Marcelo’s head, repeating over and over. He was unable to sleep in spite of the first light of morning already streaming in through the lacy curtain.

That morning, as he breakfasted on the fried breadcrumbs Josefa had prepared for him, he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off fleeing the city. Going to Madrid, or maybe to Barcelona. He should at least send César there with Josefa. Get them somewhere safe in case things got complicated. But that would raise suspicions. And he shouldn’t raise any. In fact, he told himself, he wasn’t exactly
implicated
. As soon as that man told him what he should do if the situation arose, Marcelo had left the meeting. He didn’t want to know details, dates, names. And he hadn’t even committed to doing his assigned part, should it even be necessary.