Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (12 page)

“I imagine that a lawyer such as yourself is up to date on the country’s political events.”

María said that politics didn’t interest her much. She read the newspapers, watched television. That was about it.

Recasens nodded. He took a sip of coffee and put the cup down on the little table, taking his time.

“Does the name Publio ring a bell?”

“I think he’s a member of congress, but I don’t even know for which party.”

Recasens smiled.

“Actually, nobody knows. Publio is only active in his own party.”

Lorenzo laughed at his boss’s joke, but the colonel shut him up with an icy look. María didn’t miss that detail. She was starting to like Recasens.

“I’m listening,” she conceded.

“I imagine you are familiar with the circumstances surrounding the case of César Alcalá. There was a photograph of a girl who at that time was twelve years old. Ramoneda’s wife talked to you about that photograph, although later you said nothing about it in the trial.”

María tightened her hands against her lap.

“I remember the defense’s allegations, but I didn’t go into details.”

“I’m not judging you, María. You were the lawyer for the prosecution. Your job was to show Inspector Alcalá’s guilt and not raise mitigating factors. You did well. But that’s over now. One thing is justice, and another, very different, thing is the truth.”

“And what is the truth, according to you?”

“You have the details here,” interjected Lorenzo. He took a bulky envelope out of a drawer and left it on the desk.

Colonel Recasens watched María intensely.

“I’d like you to study this material closely. Take your time. Then we can talk again. That’s all I’m asking…” The colonel checked his watch and stood up. “I have to catch a plane. We’ll be in touch, María. I trust you will do what your upstanding conscience dictates,” he said, extending his hand warmly.

He bid Lorenzo farewell with a cold gesture and headed toward the door. Before leaving he stopped for a second. He stuck his hands in his pockets and turned to look at María.

“Have you ever heard the name Isabel Mola?”

María thought about it for a moment. No, she had never heard that name. The colonel examined her face, as if trying to figure out if she was telling the truth. Finally, he seemed satisfied, and his eyes relaxed a bit.

“I understand. Read that information. I hope to see you soon.”

When they were left alone, Lorenzo and María were plunged into a meditative silence, as if each of them were going over the conversation in their heads.

After a few minutes, Lorenzo spoke up.

“The bad thing about cops is that they have too much memory. They don’t easily forget the name of someone who’s screwed them. I’d be careful with Alcalá, María. He might have a score to settle with you.”

María was surprised by the comment, and even more surprised by how gently Lorenzo had dropped it into the conversation, looking toward the window, as if it were idle chitchat.

“Why do you say that?”

Lorenzo slowly shifted his gaze toward her with a bitter expression.

“You always do what you have to, María. No matter what the consequences. That’s why we split up, right?”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Lorenzo. You know perfectly well why we split up, so don’t play innocent with me.”

Lorenzo looked at her sadly, with a sadness that almost seemed sincere. But before he pulled the trick off, he stood up.

“Sometimes I think about what we had, María. I know you hate me, and I don’t blame you. I’ve thought a lot about what happened, and I’ve forgiven myself. I’m not like that: I don’t hit women; it’s just that you … I don’t know, you made me lose it sometimes.”

“I’ve thought a lot about all that too, Lorenzo. And I wonder why I didn’t cut your balls off the first time you raised a hand to me.”

She went out into the street. It was pouring rain and pitch-black. More than ever she wanted to be at home, holding Greta, asking her partner to kiss her tenderly. Slowly she turned toward the window of Lorenzo’s office. There he was, leaning on the sill, observing her. She headed off thinking that the only thing that linked her to that figure blurred by the rain was a vague feeling of resentment and sadness.

7

San Lorenzo (the Pyrenees of Lleida), two days later

His hands could no longer hold any tools, and even though his mind still gave the correct instructions, Gabriel’s fingers refused to obey him, like the rest of his body. Yet against all prognoses, he was still fighting the cancer. Even though it was a fight he maintained without faith, out of pure inertia.

Sometimes Gabriel thought he could make out in the face of the new nurse his daughter had hired an expression of repulsion, when she had to lift his arms or put him in the bathtub. He didn’t blame her. He repulsed himself. He couldn’t even control his bowels anymore, and he usually woke up at night with a dirty diaper, liquid shit staining the sheets and his legs. He didn’t ring for the nurse on the intercom out of embarrassment. He stayed very still, tolerating his own filth all night long and holding down his nausea, unable to cry because his eyes refused to allow him that consolation.

It was in those moments that he felt most inclined to accept his daughter’s proposal.

“You’d be much better off in a clinic, and I could visit you more often.”

That would cost a lot of money. But she could pay for it. María had come a long way since that famous case, and she came up to see him every once in a while with a brand-new silver Ford Granada. She acted like the Three Kings every time she showed her face in San Lorenzo: she brought him books about swords, forging techniques, and tools for his workshop, as if any of that would still be useful to him.

She usually visited him with Greta. Gabriel wasn’t stupid, in spite of his appearance and his erratic language that suggested otherwise. He saw them hug and kiss each other when they thought no one was watching. It wasn’t his business, Gabriel told himself. And anyway, his daughter seemed happier since she’d gotten rid of that jerk Lorenzo.

Perhaps María was right. He no longer opened the forge, that mannish nurse who took care of him was very unpleasant, and he could barely do anything for himself and that only with the help of a walker.

But then, when he felt tempted to give in, he turned his head toward the room where he stored his wood, and the door hidden behind the woodpile, tightly shut. That reminded him why he could never leave that house.

Besides, he had to take care of his wife’s grave. That was his promise, and he would fulfill it until his final day.

He couldn’t get to the cemetery on his own anymore, but once a week the nurse took him there, and with her help he changed the flowers and weeded. That gesture of remembrance toward the dead was the only one that seemed to affect the nurse, who usually treated him more considerately during the days following.

The last time he visited the cemetery, in the afternoon, the clouds were stretched like little red filaments over the hill. In the distance, the silent stone ruins of the Roman fortress that overlooked the cemetery took on a coppery color. There was a sign with an inscription in Latin at the entrance to the fortress:
SIT TIBI TERRA LEVIS
, it read. May this earth rest lightly on you. You had to pass by it in order to get inside the ruins. Gabriel always closed his eyes to avoid seeing it, to avoid thinking about what it meant. But there it remained, as the years passed. An obstinate sentence.

Seated beside his wife’s grave, Gabriel looked in that direction, but his eyes didn’t stop there. They went much farther, to an unknown place in his memory, perhaps to those summers when he’d hiked there with his small daughter and his wife.

He smiled sadly as he remembered. During those years now long past, as he spread out the tablecloth for a snack among those ruins and listened to his daughter running among the centuries-old stones, and his wife singing softly to herself as her hair swayed in the soft breeze, he may have felt something close to peace, to the absence of regrets. But one fine day, that bubble burst. His wife found the suitcase hidden behind the woodpile, the letters, and the newspaper clippings. And the past, that past which he thought he’d forgotten forever, returned as if it had never left. It came back thirsty and took its revenge.

Why hadn’t he burned the pages from the diary? the Roman ruins seemed to be asking him. Why did he insist on saving something that he wanted to forget? Not even after his wife had found them and committed suicide had he been able to do so. Not even now, when his daughter had been about to find the things he had hidden, did he dare to destroy them. Why? Why not burn all the memories, turn them into ash, and scatter them to the wind? He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t able to do it. If he forgot, he would no longer be completing his penitence. He had no right to do that.

He listened to the nurse speak with someone close to the road, using her hand as a visor to protect herself from the afternoon sun. She was talking to a man, and they both pointed toward him. The man approached him. He walked slowly, his feet dragging the weight of the years along with them. Many years. He had lived almost as many as Gabriel.

“It’s a lovely afternoon,” said the newcomer in greeting. And as if reaffirming his opinion he inhaled, filling up his chest, his gaze out on the sloping horizon. A gust of wind curled the grass downhill. On his right cheek Gabriel could make out a small star-shaped mark, like an old wound that had scarred up long ago.

Gabriel stood up with difficulty. Next to him, that man seemed young. Yet he calculated that he was at least sixty. He examined him carefully. He didn’t live in the valley. He was too well dressed and shaved. He wasn’t even wearing boots, but rather tight, shiny shoes.

“You come up here just for the view?” he asked incredulously.

The man smiled a smile that parted his cracked lips.

“Actually, I came to say hello to you, Gabriel … I guess you don’t remember me.”

Gabriel sharpened his scrutiny. He didn’t remember ever having seen that face before.

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s okay; I sort of expected that you wouldn’t remember. I think we only saw each other once, long ago, almost forty years ago, to be precise, and in circumstances that were pretty … what’s the word?…
extreme
. Yes, that’s the right word.”

Gabriel didn’t like riddles or things that went unsaid.

“I’ve experienced several extreme situations in my life, so you’ll have to be more specific.”

The man seemed to not get the insinuation. He took off the hat that covered his balding pate, as if to let Gabriel get a better look at him and thus jog his memory. But since he didn’t respond, the man put his hat back on with an indulgent air.

“Actually, the important thing is that I remember you perfectly. To be honest, in these forty years not a single day has passed in which I didn’t think about you.”

Gabriel stiffened. He was starting to get anxious.

“And why is that?”

The man smiled enigmatically.

“You had a weapons forge in Mérida. On Guadiana Street. You made beautiful weapons. But I remember one in particular, a real work of art.” The man was silent for a few seconds, as if giving Gabriel time to remember. Then he took something out of his coat pocket. It was a small bronze object shaped like a dragon that had two settings. “This was one of the two pieces that adorned each part of the hilt.”

Gabriel took the piece the man offered him and examined it with a professional eye.

“It’s not an adornment, strictly speaking,” he said. “These protuberances here are used to hold the fingers in place so that the saber doesn’t slip.” He examined the object more carefully, and suddenly something caught his attention. His fingers immediately began to tremble. He looked up at the man, who was watching him with an expression somewhere between amused and shrewd. Gabriel tried to give it back to him. “Who are you?”

The man refused to take it.

“Keep it. It is the only piece missing from your masterpiece … What was the name of that saber? The Sadness of the Samurai. That was it. You made it for the younger son of the Mola family, Andrés.”

Gabriel began to have trouble breathing. He tried to make his way toward the road, but his feet barely budged.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I think you do, Gabriel.” The man’s voice turned suddenly accusatory. “Do you still have it? You probably do. It’s not easy to get rid of the past, is it? That’s why you save all the memories of that time in Mérida; I’m sure you also saved a German officer’s old Luger … For the same reason you keep coming up here every day your nurse agrees to take you. I imagine it’s the guilt that forces you to do it.”

Gabriel turned in fury.

“Listen, I don’t know who the hell you are, or what you want from me. But whatever it is, you’re not going to get it, so leave me alone.” He threw the small piece of bronze to the ground and headed off limping, calling for the nurse to bring the car around.

The man knelt and picked up the piece of metal. He caressed it as if it were a precious stone as he watched Gabriel walk off. Perhaps Gabriel refused to recognize him; or maybe he really didn’t remember him. Doesn’t matter, he told himself. Sooner or later, memories transform into reality again, and he would force Gabriel to drink them one after the other until he drowned in them. And it would be María, his daughter, who would burst that bubble of fake oblivion.

“Of course I’ll get what I want from you, Gabriel,” he murmured, as he put the piece of metal into his pocket. “That she pay for your sins. Yes, it’s only fair. It’s always the innocents who pay for the sinners.”

8

Somewhere in Badajoz, December 1941

The quarry had been closed for years. An abandoned cart was still filled with stones, as if waiting for someone to come unload it. The wind was heard among the shrubs that grew unchecked on the rails of the dead tracks.