Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (15 page)

“That’s not true. There must be a reason why she just disappeared without a word.”

“The only reason is that she’s a low-class concubine, willing to do anything to get what she wants. She’s resentful and treacherous.”

“I won’t let you speak that way of my mother, sir,” said Fernando, and he was surprised, almost as much as his father, at his words.

Guillermo went into a rage and was about to slap him again, but this time Fernando held his wrist, a reflexive act that he immediately regretted. He had never before disobeyed his father nor opposed his wishes. However, a strange rage boiled inside him. He wasn’t deaf, he wasn’t blind. He knew what the servants said about why his mother had been forced to run away. And for years, too many years, he had been witness to the contempt and beatings she had been subjected to.

“Don’t you dare put your hand on me again. I am not a boy. I am nineteen years old.”

Guillermo was so perplexed that for a few seconds he saw his son as a stranger who was intimidating him. But he recovered control and shoved him off with a brusque hand.

“I’ve asked Serrano to find you a post in the division they are creating. Your knowledge of German will be useful. Perhaps, when you are in Russia, you’ll get these stupid ideas out of your head.”

Fernando shrank inside, as if his heart had been kicked by a steel boot. His father was going to send him to Russia to get hardened up or killed, like the ancient Spartans did with their sons. But he didn’t care; actually he almost preferred it. He would never find his place in that house.

Guillermo bade him farewell with a gesture of his hand.

Fernando didn’t move. Since his fate had just been written, he had nothing to lose.

“What is going to happen to Andrés? Are you thinking of locking him away in a hospital? Mother would be against it.”

“That’s none of your business; get out of here.”

“Of course it’s my business. He is my little brother.”

Guillermo looked at his son, puzzled.

“And I am your father…”

“No. Not anymore. You just sent me to war.”

“Get out, get out of here, leave this house today, right now,” shouted Guillermo.

Fernando prepared to leave that house and that life forever, but first he turned toward his father and looked at him with hate in his eyes.

“I swear to God that I will pay you back a thousandfold for the damage you have done to us.”

9

Modelo prison (Barcelona), December 1980

“Happy birthday, Alcalá.”

César frowned. His birthday wasn’t for months. But he got the guard’s irony. Today made three years in prison.

“Thanks, Don Ernesto; you are always so thoughtful.” One of the paradoxical laws of the paradoxical world that was prison dictated that the inmates addressed the guards with formal respect and the guards addressed them familiarly. It was one of the systems that carefully marked the differences between them.

In spite of that polite distance, César felt a certain affection for that fifty-something guard of sloppy appearance. He was good to him, and when he needed something from the commissary or the library Ernesto got it for him or got him easy access. So they had a cordial, careful relationship, in spite of the deep distance that separated them. The reason behind it was that the guard had a daughter who was about the age that Alcalá’s daughter, Marta, would have been by then.

The guard knew César’s story and felt sorry for him. He would proudly show César the photograph of his daughter that he kept in his wallet. She was a stewardess for Iberia Airlines. Very pretty, which seemed to worry her father.

“All those flights to Mexico, I don’t like it. Any day now some flight attendant is going to have his way with her,” he would complain.

This kind of casual banter, so common in everyday life, was dangerous inside. It could denote preferential treatment that neither the other prisoners nor the guards would have accepted. And César already had enough problems with the other inmates. So when the guards opened the cells he tried to maintain a distant attitude with Don Ernesto, as he did with the others, employing the abstruse slang that he had mastered, which was used to classify the guards as: pigs, dogs, or sons of bitches, depending on how they treated the prisoners.

But at that moment they were alone and could treat each other like human beings.

“What do you think about what’s going on out there?” the guard asked César, sticking his head out the window that overlooked the yard.

Below, the activity was constant, but it wasn’t an ordinary movement of prisoners forming little groups, couples strolling up and down, loners looking at the high walls. That morning everything revolved around the enormous Christmas tree that the Penitentiary Institution had brought in a tow truck.

“It’s paradoxical” was all that César said, leaning his face against the cold bars of the window while he watched the inmates’ eagerness as they climbed ladders, placing on the tree shiny paper garlands, brightly painted paper balls, little plastic bells, and Christmas figurines.

“What’s paradoxical?” asked Ernesto, who wasn’t quite sure what the word meant.

“That in spite of everything, Christmas comes here too.”

The exultation was impressive. The prisoners shouted to each other, giving contradictory instructions, arguing, but there seemed to be a soothing effect on them, a little bit of happiness that the fir tree gave off every time they shook its branches and it gently dropped some needles.

“Something’s always better than nothing,” said Ernesto, aware that it was only a short-lived truce. When a starved-looking inmate climbed up to the top of the tree and placed, crookedly, the Annunciation star, the prisoners in the yard broke out into applause and shouts, as if they had all been granted pardons.

César moved away from the window. Unconsciously he touched his right leg. Today it was hurting him more than usual. Maybe because of the cold and dampness of his new cell.

“How’s that leg?” asked the guard, somewhat worried.

César Alcalá pulled up his pant leg a bit, revealing the ugly scar the stitches had left him as a reminder.

“The doctor says that I might never walk well again. But I’m lucky; I could have lost the foot.”

The guard shook his head. After three years, César was still alive, in spite of the beatings and stabbings he’d gotten. Not only that, but he had gotten harder, like an iguana in the sun, those reptiles that flinch at almost nothing.

César Alcalá was different. When he walked or did anything that required strength, his muscles tensed and he moved nimbly, which made him seem young. But, other times, especially when he let his gaze wander as he sat on some improvised stool, he seemed much older, like some sort of ancient wise man whom people looked to as a messiah. He drew attention because of the way he walked with his legs spread, taking big strides. He radiated something powerful, a strength that attracted and frightened in equal measure. Sometimes he stood up, on a bale of planks, and contemplated the height of the walls of the yard, as if weighing the possibility of flying over them. The other prisoners watched him and held their breath: Everyone dreamed of escaping, of leaping over those walls, but only that loner cop seemed capable of achieving it if he really tried.

Even the guards tried to steer clear of him. César Alcalá barely had any dealings with them, and even though his behavior was discreet and distant, they had all gotten the idea that he was a rebel, an agitator. An agitator is someone who stirs things up, disturbs thoughts, and awakens sleeping consciousnesses. And César, without doing or saying anything, incited the others with his determined gaze.

However, the last aggression that Alcalá had suffered at the hands of some inmates had been so brutal that nobody understood how he was still in one piece. Inside the prison there was another prison even more gloomy, with unwritten laws that marked the day-to-day and were dictated by the cellblock bosses, dangerous prisoners who surrounded themselves with a pack of rabid dogs to impose their capricious will. César was a marked man. That was why they’d beaten his right knee and ankle until they were destroyed.

“The guards on duty should have been there,” said Ernesto, as if he were responsible for what had happened to César. “There is always one in the showers. And besides, I don’t understand how the prisoners that attacked you managed to get that mallet out of the tool workshop.”

César Alcalá’s response was casual: “Someone must have paid them to disappear.”

“Don’t talk like that, Alcalá. They’re my colleagues,” said Ernesto, showing a corporatism that he didn’t actually feel very proud of. He knew that they went too far, and that because of a few bad apples, they were all spoiled. But still, as fond as he was of Alcalá, he couldn’t let him speak lightly about his coworkers.

“You’re right, Don Ernesto, sorry,” answered César, not wanting to argue over something so obvious. He looked at the Christmas tree in the yard sadly. He turned toward the guard, and even though he already knew the answer he asked the same question he’d been asking for months. “When are they going to let me out of solitary confinement?”

The guard shifted his gaze onto the wall, as if something there had drawn his attention. Actually, he only wanted to avoid those inquisitive eyes.

“Soon, Alcalá … soon.”

César Alcalá didn’t have his hopes up. In there,
soon
meant
never
.

Behind a rusty gate extended the rundown yard of the prison. A squad of trusted inmates, the least difficult, was digging a ditch. They had just broken the layer of ice with rocks and picks. They were pleased. The work kept their bodies warm, and for a few hours a day they could escape the cockroaches and rats in their cells. Sometimes the fog lifted, and out of the corner of their eyes they could spy the wall crowned with barbed wire. Their wives and families came by when they could and waved or sent tennis balls flying over the razor-sharp concertina wire. Many missed their mark, but some fell into the yard and the lucky quickly hid the pack of cigarettes, money, or drugs that were inside.

César envied that work. At least those men could exchange looks, smiles, and common gestures with other human beings. Working elbow-to-elbow with someone, feeling their arm there, helped to keep them from going crazy. He watched them from his cell and envied them, considered them privileged, in spite of the fact that those men worked until their hands bled and their frozen toenails fell off. That wasn’t worse than sitting all day in front of a concrete wall, barely speaking to anybody, unable to quiet the inner voice that day after day was destroying him.

“If I don’t get out of this cell soon, if I don’t get something to do, I’m going to go crazy.”

Ernesto’s face lit up with a wide smile.

“Maybe you still can’t go into the common areas, but I have gotten you a cellmate. At least you’ll be able to talk to something more than your shadow reflected on the wall.”

César Alcalá received the news like a breath of fresh air.

“A cellmate?”

The guard’s smile faded a little.

“Yes. Justo Romero.”

César Alcalá’s expression froze.

“Justo Romero?”

*   *   *

Justo Romero was not just any prisoner. His gaunt, slight appearance, as if his clothes were suspended in the air, hid a fierce determination and cruelty that went beyond all the other bosses in the prison. It was because of his coldness, his fairness, and his inflexibility that he inspired much more fear than the rest. He set the rules, crystal-clear rules. If you respected them, Romero could be friendly, stable, and a good conversationalist. If you broke his rules, he lifted a hand like a Roman emperor, and in full view of everyone, he turned his thumb down, marking the unyielding fate of whoever had betrayed him. Invariably, the condemned man showed up dead within a few days.

On the other hand, his
business
was atypical. Romero hated junkies, but he hated dealers even more; rumor had it that one of his sons had died from a heroin overdose. He tolerated drug dealers outside of his block, but from the gate in, not a single needle could pass.

He managed to achieve the impossible.

“I don’t traffic in pain. I’m a seller of dreams, and in a place like this, dreams are very necessary. Don’t you think?”

That was how he introduced himself to César Alcalá the day he moved into his new cell.

“I asked to be moved in with you, but don’t get the wrong idea: I’m no fag, and I don’t plan on protecting you. That would hurt my business; you’re a marked man, and sooner or later you’ll leave here stretched out.”

César studied that small man with a face almost like a child’s, harmless as those microscopic bacteria that can give any cut gangrene.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Romero jumped down from the bunk bed—he had the top one—and approached the inspector.

“I know your story, and I’m curious. I also lost a child.”

César Alcalá put his sheets and pillowcase on the bunk that remained.

“I didn’t lose my daughter” was all he said, lying down with his face toward the wall.

Romero didn’t insist. He was a patient man; that was the only way he could have withstood the twelve years he had served for nobody knew what crime.

As the weeks passed, César Alcalá understood what his new cellmate meant when he called himself a seller of dreams. The cell was like some sort of window onto the outer world. Every day prisoners swarmed in search of the strangest things: a specific medication, a special book, a whore, a medical certificate to ask for furlough, UNED degrees, a scapulary of the Virgin of Montserrat … anything you could ask for. Romero knew everyone, from the prisoners who worked the commissary to the head of the prison, and including the social workers, outside staff, guards, civil servants; he even had preferential treatment from the chaplain. Everyone asked him for favors, and when the time came he asked for them in return.