Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (16 page)

“What about you, Alcalá? Aren’t you ever going to ask me for anything?”

César Alcalá showed himself unwilling. He sensed that falling into Romero’s clutches could be worse than any other prison.

Twice a day, they let César out into a small yard, no bigger than sixty-five square feet of open sky, for short periods of twenty minutes in which he could see the sun, when the other inmates were in the blocks.

On one unforgettable morning, it was cold and a thick fog hid the walls, as if they weren’t there. As if César was completely free. On the other side of one wall, surprisingly, he heard the notes of a violin cutting through the pained silence. His heart leaped. That was unexpected. A violin scratching through the fog of a prison. Maybe it was an inmate playing, perhaps someone on the street. Maybe it was only his imagination. What did it matter? He went toward the sound, dragging his right leg, which was definitively atrophied, to the security limits.

The guard who was escorting him ordered him to return to the safe zone, an area denoted by a line painted on the ground. The rules were absurd, but they had to be followed. He didn’t obey. He would rather die than move from there. The only thing he wanted was to sit on the ground for a minute and listen to that music. A minute of humanity.

The guard tried to drag him away, and he defended himself. Without realizing, he swiped his hand, hitting the guard in the mouth. No one could take this tiny pleasure away from him. It meant nothing to the guard, but to him it was everything in that moment. Two more guards arrived, alerted by their colleague.

“I just want to hear the music.”

They didn’t understand him.

They gave him an awful beating and dragged him unconscious to his cell. They said he had tried to escape. Escape to where? There were only four walls, sixteen and a half feet high and crowned with barbs that trapped even the breeze.

They moved him to an isolation cell. They didn’t take him out the next morning, or the next, or the next. For more than a week he didn’t see the light, and he had to bang against the stone walls and hit himself really hard to keep from freezing or falling asleep, something the voracious rats he was competing with for space and food were impatiently awaiting.

Finally, they came to find him when he thought he had already lost his mind.

“Well, it looks like your vacation didn’t do you much good,” said Romero when he greeted him. His voice sounded mocking. Yet there was a feeling of sadness and compassion in the depths of his eyes.

César Alcalá dragged himself to his bunk. He lay down and closed his eyes. He only wanted to sleep.

Gradually a sort of relationship evolved between the two prisoners. It wasn’t friendship, but it could be considered cordial. They started to exchange memories, as if trying not to forget that there was still something left of what they each were before coming through those gates.

One day, without asking for anything in return, Romero got him a small reel-to-reel tape recorder and a tape.

“They told me that you love classical music,” said Romero sarcastically, recalling the episode with the violin in the yard.

“Manuel de Falla?”

Romero shrugged his shoulders.

“This isn’t the Vienna Opera. It’s what I was able to get.”

At night, when the lights went out, César Alcalá used a flashlight to read beneath the blanket. Romero knew that the inspector wasn’t reading books or magazines. They were small handwritten notes, hundreds of them that Alcalá kept hidden in a shoebox beneath the bunk. After reading those few short sentences, César Alcalá spent a long time pondering the taped-together photographs of his daughter and his father, which hung on the headboard. Sometimes Romero heard him crying.

“Who are those notes from?”

“What notes? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whatever…”

Time passed in a strange way, as if it didn’t exist. It was all continuity, the same instant repeating itself over and over again. The same routines, the same gestures, the same tedium. Without his realizing it, or being able to avoid it, Alcalá’s hope gradually got diluted, like every other man who lived in those walls. Little by little he forgot the past, his life before, the smells of reality. Only those notes that came every once in a while seemed to reanimate him, like a drop of water falling on thirsty soil. But that reviving effect didn’t last long, and the inspector was again immersed in his regular lethargy.

Until one morning when that routine was broken, when he came back into his cell and found a guy sitting on his bed dressed in an elegant black suit, like a bank director.

César Alcalá peeked his head out into the hallway. There was no trace of Romero. Then he carefully examined his visitor. He deduced that it was useless to ask him how he had managed to be let into the block and into his cell.

“You are sitting on my bunk. What is it you want?”

The man dismissed what he saw around him with a wave of his long fingers.

“This hotel isn’t very comfortable, and, judging by your appearance, you are coming from a worse one. Aren’t you tired of being here, fighting for a miserable space with second-rate thieves?”

César Alcalá wondered how long a guy like that would last among those second-rate thieves. Surely not three years.

“Did Publio send you? If that’s the case, tell that son of a bitch that I haven’t said anything, and I won’t as long as he keeps his word.”

“Are you talking about this?” The man pulled out of an inner pocket a rice paper envelope with no postmark and tossed it to the foot of the bed.

César Alcalá rushed to tear open the envelope and read the note inside, concentrating with bright shining eyes.

All of a sudden he was overcome by uneasiness.

“How do I know they’re from her?”

The man smiled.

“You don’t, and you have no way of knowing. But it’s all you have, right? And you’ll cling to that belief as long as you’re here.”

“I haven’t said anything to anybody,” the inspector said tersely, greedily putting the note under his shirt.

“That’s good. Balance is the key to harmony. If we all carry out our parts, no one suffers.”

César Alcalá looked at that man with hate in his eyes. It wasn’t enough that they had taken his daughter away from him, and his wife; they weren’t satisfied with locking him up for life, with trying to kill him again and again in prison. He had been putting up with it all for three years, three long years without opening his mouth, but still, they sent bait to test him.

“Tell your boss that it’s useless to keep trying to kill me in here.”

The man pretended not to know what the inspector was talking about.

“There is something we have to ask you for. In a few days, someone is probably going to come visit you. She’ll want to know some things. Don’t refuse to help her; win her trust. But don’t even think about mentioning Publio or the
business
we have together. I’ll get in touch with you periodically, and you’ll give me a full report on what this person tells you.”

“Who is this person?”

The man stood up. When he headed toward the door of the cell, he stopped and turned completely around, opening his arms.

“You’ll find out soon … I understand that here is where they hung your father, in this very jail. Isn’t destiny cruel and paradoxical? If you want, Inspector, I could cure all the wounds of the past and the present with one single thrust.”

“I don’t know what you are referring to.”

The man traced a canine smile.

“I think you do.”

*   *   *

When he was left alone, César Alcalá sat on his bed with his elbows resting on his knees and his head supported by tense hands. Beside the headboard, next to his daughter, his father looked at him seriously, with those eyes that had gone out without seeing everything the world had in store for him. He wondered what kind of man he could have become, had he lived longer. What would he have thought if he knew that his son became a policeman? How would he have gotten along with his granddaughter, Marta? And with his daughter-in-law, Andrea? Would he have been proud of him? None of those questions would get an answer. His father was dead. And even though in his youth that was a tragedy he thought he would never get over, the truth was that the world had kept turning all those years.

When a man dies, justly or unjustly, nothing special happens. Life continues around him. The landscape doesn’t even shift a fraction of an inch; there is no more space in the world, perhaps just a little more pain in those who experience that death personally. But even that pain is soon forgotten for the pressing need to keep on living, working, getting back on schedule. Those relatives of the corpse who have just witnessed the hanging in the prison yard don’t have much time to say good-bye beneath the watchful gaze of the soldiers guarding the gallows. The son, just a boy, barely has a chance to brush against the bare feet of his father hanging from a rope, watch the ground as the executioner cuts the knot and the body falls like a bundle of rags.

The soldiers’ laughter is heard, their cruel jokes. The family must pray an Our Father even though none of them believe in that God dressed in armor and the yoke and arrows invoked by those animals wearing blue shirts and high leather boots. But they pray good and loud, so the prison chaplain can hear them. They are afraid, and they are ashamed of their fear. Fear of also being accused, fear of a neighbor turning them in on any flimsy excuse, and they want to continue living, even though living is the hardest thing there is. They will move, emigrate to Barcelona or Madrid; they’ll hide among the silent, gray mass that moves in trembling confusion through the city streets in these tragic times.

Even those closest to the hanged man will someday speak badly of him. Why did he have to fall in love with the wife of a Falangist leader? What was he thinking? With a fascist, with the wife of a fascist, with the mother of a fascist. Nobody will be interested in the truth.

What truth? will say those who hide behind acronyms and flags, the same ones who never saw jail time because they fled to France with their pockets full when all was lost. They brought with them their heroes, their legends, and their mystifications. They will make accusations left and right. They will call themselves democrats, and they’ll put flowers on their dead.

But nobody will remember the young rural teacher who fell in love with a woman too big for his dreams. His name will be erased, lost in a police file. One of so many others.

While César Alcalá pondered all that, his cellmate Romero came in.

“What’s wrong?”

César Alcalá wiped his tears with his forearm.

“Nothing, Romero. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Well, lately it seems like you’re dissolving like a sugar cube in a hot cup of coffee,
my friend
.”

It was the first time he had used that word.
Friend
.

“By the way,” said Romero, jumping up onto the upper bunk. “Ernesto told me that they’re going to let you out into the yard again, but that you have to make sure to control your enthusiasm for classical music, if you don’t want to end up in Saint Ignatius’s cave for meditation again. He says it’s your Christmas present.”

César Alcalá lay down on his bunk. In that strange world he lived in, an honest guard could remind him of the meaning of Christmas, and a dangerous prisoner could be, yes, his best friend.

He took out the handwritten note that he had stuck in his shirt, and he read it one more time before hiding it with the others beneath his bunk. “I am fine. I hope you don’t forget me; I think of you and Mamá every day. I still have faith that you will get me out of here soon. I love you both. Your daughter, Marta. December 20, 1980.”

10

Barcelona, December 22, 1980

María ordered a coffee and lit her umpteenth cigarette of the morning. Inside the café some young people dipped
churros
into thick hot chocolate. Above their heads on the wall hung large black-and-white photographs from the turn of the century: the Gran Vía with the ground drilled and upturned to put in the metro, sallow men—serious even when they smiled beneath their wide mustaches and their white strolling hats—amid trolleybuses, streetcars, and horse-drawn carts.

She thought of her father’s collection of old photographs, but far from comforting her, the image of Gabriel provoked a vague unease in her. Two days earlier, the nurse who took care of him had called: she was quitting. There was no way to persuade her to change her mind.

“It’s not a question of more money, Miss Bengoechea,” the nurse had said over the phone. “I’m a professional, and your father has simply decided to throw in the towel. He won’t let me take care of him, and I can’t stand by watching him deteriorate day by day. It’s like he’s decided to commit suicide. My advice would be to have him admitted to a hospital.”

María took a sip of coffee as she recalled the conversation. She noticed that her lips were trembling on the rim of the cup. She focused on keeping the shaking from spreading to her fingers.

“What the hell is going on with me?” she muttered, closing her fist. That damn shaking again and her body turned upside down. She went to the bathroom feeling like she was about to vomit up her coffee.

For a few interminable minutes she buried her face into the dirty toilet. She didn’t puke up anything solid. Just the coffee and a little string of bitter saliva. She sat on the dirty tiled floor, folded her legs, and put her head between her knees, surrounding them with her arms. The light went out for a few seconds. That relaxed her. Then she washed her distraught face and looked at herself in the mirror stained with splatters and crude writing. She took a deep breath. Her temples beat hard, and she had to unbutton her jacket and hold on to the sink to keep her balance.

Slowly she started to feel better. The wave had already passed over her and there was only a distant murmur left, and it was heading away from her brain.