Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (33 page)

Gabriel ended up accepting that he had finally become some piece of furniture that could be moved from place to place and parked in a corner without a second thought. He couldn’t shake that feeling of abandonment, even though his daughter made sure to visit him often.

Maybe that was the reason he had decided to take the step he was about to take.

He stroked the package he carried under his arm, aware that as he went through the revolving door that opened before him nothing would ever be the same again. Still, he took a deep breath and went into the lobby of the nursing home with a determined step.

Behind a tall counter, a young man wearing metal-framed glasses was on the telephone. Gabriel stood waiting, flipping through some pamphlets that explained how to apply for a trip to Lanzarote with the Imserso, at special senior discounts. The piped-in music was classical. He saw a couple of old men passing with walkers and some nurses in white coats and caps. It was all clean, enfeebled, tranquil. An ascetic place where passions had no place.

“How can I help you?” the young man asked him when he hung up the phone. There was something effeminate about him; maybe it was his excessively sweet perfume or his voice or the way he moved his hands.

“I wanted to see Fernando Mola.”

The young man looked surprised.

“Excuse me, who?”

Gabriel repeated the name. The young man got nervous and looked over his shoulder, as if he feared someone had heard.

“I’m afraid that there is no one living here by that name.”

“I don’t know what name the jerk goes by these days. Maybe he’s changed it. But judging by your face, you know who I’m talking about. My name is Gabriel Bengoechea. Tell him I’m here to see him.”

The young man hesitated. He wiped the palm of his hand on the leg of his pants, as if it were sweaty.

“This is not how we usually do things,” he stuttered. “Visits have to be authorized by a supervisor. The man you are referring to doesn’t usually see visitors at this time of the day. He’s doing his water therapy.”

“Well, he’ll just have to do it later.”

The young man left the counter and headed down the corridor. He came back a few minutes later, his face white as plaster. “There was a slight problem, but it’s been taken care of. Come with me, please.”

Gabriel didn’t ask what kind of problem there was, but obviously someone had given him a good talking-to.

They went through a corridor with large exterior windows. On either side there were old people sunbathing, sitting on wicker chairs. They looked like statues stored in the basement of a museum. They barely looked up as the men passed. They crossed a series of whitewashed arches before reaching a shady area where the temperature was cooler. Along the ceiling ran pipes, and flowing water could be heard. The young man said that they were below the pool area. A few yards later he stopped. He pulled out a key and opened a door.

“Wait here.”

That wasn’t the usual procedure for visitors. Gabriel peeked his head into the room. It was large and sunny. The vaulted ceiling was low, with two arches crossed and a large stone where they met. Against the walls were piled up dozens of undistinguished paintings. At the back there was a plank held up by two sawhorses, and jars with brushes. It smelled of paint and turpentine. It looked like a painter’s studio.

“This is the visiting room?”

The young man blushed. He was visibly uncomfortable.

“I just follow orders. Wait here,” he repeated.

Gabriel looked at the piled-up paintings while he waited. When he picked up the first one, hundreds of dust particles were sent into the air, as if the painting had coughed. It was a country landscape, with a formalism that would have made anyone who knew anything about art shake with laughter. The others were similar: hunting scenes, fields, rivers, and forests. All snowed in, beneath leaden skies. Well painted, but without any potency. Yet there was something odd that they all had in common: the landscapes were populated by blurred people with hazy contours. They were like gray, black, or white stains that wandered among the livelier colors in the painting, like penitents or ghosts. Their faces were disconcerting to Gabriel, and to anyone who took the time to look carefully at them.

After a few minutes the door opened. A man appeared. You could tell, from both his attire and his severe attitude, that he wasn’t just some retiree who spent his time making paper boats or painting worthless pictures. He looked at Gabriel the way someone does when they’ve just caught somebody rummaging through their things. Then he shifted his attention to the paintings on the floor. His pupils flickered like the reflection in a glass of water.

“It’s hard to paint from memory,” he said, articulating the words with difficulty. “Memories get stripped away like the layers of an onion. And in the end only sensations are left: cold, fear, hunger…” He lifted his head and faced Gabriel. “Hatred … it’s hard to paint the memory of a sensation.”

Gabriel held his gaze without saying anything.

The man moved away a little bit and turned his back to him as he lit a cigarette. He turned with the cigarette in his hand and brought it to his trembling lips.

“So you finally remember who I am.” He coughed hard as he took a drag on the cigarette, flicking the ash onto his pajamas. He sharpened his gaze like a pointy needle that wanted to pierce Gabriel’s pupils.

“I know who you are. I knew from the moment you showed up. The question is: Why now, after forty years? What do you want from me, Fernando?” said Gabriel, holding that burning, electrifying gaze.

Fernando Mola went over to the window. Beneath the light that filtered in, his image was pathetically weak, like a lump of dust about to disintegrate. He peered through the window. It overlooked a patio that was not well taken care of, filled with brambles and bushes and a brick wall. Beyond that could be seen the tops of some ailing pine trees. He contemplated that bleak view for a little while. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“It’s a victory just hearing my name on your lips.”

Gabriel clenched his knuckles until they cracked.

“It seems you go to great lengths to keep it a secret. The receptionist denied that there was a Fernando Mola in this home.”

“I have to take precautions. There are people who wouldn’t be happy to find out that I’m still alive.”

“I thought you were dead, like your father, like your brother. That’s what Publio told me. That you were all dead.”

“And maybe the old bastard Publio is right: maybe all the Molas are dead, and I’m just a ghost, something your conscience can’t forget. The logical thing would have been to die in those fields of Leningrad, run over by the tanks like most of my men, and not surviving a shot to the face,” murmured Fernando. When he opened his mouth you could see his destroyed teeth. “But the worst of it all is that I’m real, which means Publio lied to you. And that you didn’t manage to get me killed by Bolsheviks, or their tanks, or their deserts of ice, or their Siberian prison camps. Yes, I could be a pretty thick-skinned ghost, one that’s hard to get rid of.”

Fernando’s onslaught was devastating. His words got into Gabriel’s entrails and hit again and again with devastating and systematic precision.

“What do you want from me?”

Fernando let his gaze wander over the paintings he had spent years making. Those formally beautiful paintings populated by something destructive and horrible. What did he want from Gabriel? What, after forty years?

“Did you know that Pedro Recasens died?” Fernando felt a knot of rage when he realized that name meant nothing to Gabriel. Yet he contained himself. He had spent many years, too many, preparing for that moment. And he wasn’t going to let his emotions betray him. “Well, you should remember his name. Recasens was a CESID colonel.”

“I’m not in that line of work anymore” was Gabriel’s laconic reply.

Fernando nodded. Gabriel was now a retiree who grew flowers beside a grave in a town in the Pyrenees. The past didn’t seem to mean much to him; it was as if he’d erased it from his memory. Yet there was something broken, a crack, in Gabriel’s shifty gaze. Through it escaped what he was trying to hide. He was lying.

“Maybe you aren’t a spy working for Publio anymore. Times change, right? Even those we were indispensable to end up ostracizing us. It must be hard for you to pretend that none of what happened matters to you. But I’m sure you remember Pedro Recasens. He was a good man whose life you cut short. He was a simple soldier watching over a quarry. If you’d arrived with Isabel ten minutes later, he would have already finished his shift, and none of what happened later would have occurred: the false declaration against Marcelo Alcalá, the war on the Soviet front … It’s strange how a man’s fate is decided by a question of minutes. That war and the years following in the prison camp changed us into something we never thought we were capable of being. Recasens was a simple, honest, direct man. But you twisted his standards.”

Fernando breathed deeply to keep from crying. But his eyes sparkled when he remembered the hardships they’d experienced in that Siberian gulag, without food, without clothes, without hope. He wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for Recasens’s faith, his strength to overcome pain and suffering. Pushed forward by a hatred that grew and grew, there where only hatred could keep them alive. Recasens learned to navigate in the wastewater of that field; he constructed a made-up character; he knew how to penetrate the heart of a system that he hated to the point of nausea. And one fine day they were liberated. Recasens prospered; they covered him with medals when he returned to a homeland he no longer felt was his own. He forged a military career, he who spurned uniforms. And he became a spy. The best. And all of that with a single objective: searching out those who had been behind his downfall, finding a way to destroy their lives like they destroyed his.

“It didn’t take him long to find you. But you were Publio’s protégé, and he was a friend of Minister Mola. Untouchable. But Recasens knew how to wait for years. Waiting is the only thing you have left when you are unwilling to give up. Hatred needs patience to become a useful emotion. And believe me: ten years in a Russian camp trains you well in that sense.”

Gabriel breathed deeply. He was breathing without feeling the air; he felt he was as invisible to others as they were to him. He sat on the floor like a broken marionette. It was the second time that he had experienced this. The first, about thirty years earlier, was when his wife found Isabel’s diary in the trunk. The diary was the noose that his wife used to hang herself from a beam. The diary that he had never wanted to get rid of. A part of him died with his wife, who had also hanged from that lintel. But the most important part of him kept breathing; he overcame that ultimate despair. And he did it for María, for his daughter. He stupidly believed that the remorse and nightmares all his life were payment enough. He’d been naive. It was all back; it was happening again. And the truth of what he had done would follow him again and again, always, never giving up until the day he died.

“I did all those things,” he murmured, nodding. “I did everything you accuse me of. And I did much more, things you can’t even imagine. And nothing can be changed, or erased, or relived. Nothing that I can do matters … so I don’t understand what you are looking for. Revenge? For God’s sake, I have cancer. I should have been dead years ago, and I’m tired of waiting. And if what you want is to inflict pain or shame on me, don’t bother. Nothing you can do will be worse than what I’ve already felt before. I’m as dried up inside as you are, Fernando.”

Fernando sketched a sad smile. Was that man a cynic, a hypocrite, a monster…? Or simply a decrepit old man, sick, and consumed with remorse? What could his mother have seen in him?

“I want to hear it from your mouth. I want to hear you say that it was you who first seduced and then murdered my mother.”

Gabriel trembled, inside and out. He felt something he had never felt before with such vividness. Defeat. Tiredness. Old age. Impending death. There they were, head to head, like two old toothless dogs, laden with past bitterness, ready to kill each other even though it meant they’d have no time or strength for anything else. Consummating their hatred was all that they hoped for now. What could he say? That he had really fallen in love with Isabel? That he had thought of her every day of his life? That he, too, had paid the price of his actions? Or perhaps he could tell Fernando that forty years earlier he was another man, that he had other ideas, that he had trusted that government and what it did. None of that made sense anymore. It just sounded like excuses. And he was tired of justifying himself, of trying to forgive himself without ever being able to.

“I killed your mother.” He wasn’t looking for pity. He didn’t need it. And Fernando realized that.

Gabriel was too old to maintain hope. Fernando could tell just by looking at the broken blood vessels blooming on his skin, the wrinkles that broke his expression, his fallen, lifeless skin. He had the purple color of those about to be buried. But there was still something in him that could be hurt, a crack that could be rummaged around in to make him suffer.

“Did you confess that to your daughter? Have you told her what kind of a man you are?”

Gabriel shivered inside.

“I am not that man anymore.”

Fernando responded with a curt guffaw.

“What you were you are forever. Men like you don’t change. Maybe you’ve repressed your true nature, and you make everyone believe that you’re an old retiree whiling away the time you have left. But I don’t believe you. I know that you haven’t changed. I bet that your daughter doesn’t even suspect that her father is a fraud, a monster disguised as a failure.”

Gabriel didn’t say anything. He just listened. When Fernando was silent, they both remained there, one in front of the other, like two old dogs growling without any teeth.

“You plotted the assassination attempt on my father to cover up my mother’s death and turn it into a political springboard for his career. It was my father who ordered my mother’s death. And you were his executioner. You let an innocent, Marcelo, pay for your guilt with his life. And maybe your daughter doesn’t even know that her mother committed suicide because she discovered everything you had done … Gabriel Bengoechea … the weapons maker of San Lorenzo … you are scum. Isn’t that what your daughter would think?”