Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (40 page)

“It’s ‘Für Elise,’ if I remember correctly.”

It took the woman leaning on the table a few seconds to react. Without even turning, she nodded her head.

“Beethoven composed it for a gifted girl who complained about how difficult it was to play his compositions. It’s easy to imagine the interminable hours Elise spent at the piano beside the master; twenty fingers in a simple, lovely melody, created and devised for a girl.” The woman turned slowly, as if while she did she was taking her time to think about what to do or what to say when she saw María’s face.

They both stood there, facing each other, as the repetitive, hypnotic melody by Beethoven cradled them.

“Hello, María. I thought I’d never see you again. Although I should have imagined that you’d know where I was hiding.”

María nodded. She felt the impulse to take a step forward and hug Greta. But she didn’t do it.

“I wasn’t planning on coming. But somehow my steps brought me here.”

Greta contemplated with unconditional, burdened love the half-empty bottle that María held lightly by the neck, about to fall. She was drunk, but beyond her inebriated state, Greta noted her absolute desperation. Only a few weeks had passed since they’d decided to separate, but she had trouble recognizing the person she had spent the last five years with. She searched for her diligently under those folds of stark, ashen skin, but couldn’t find her. María, her María, no longer existed. And the only thing that seemed to have survived was that pile of crazy flesh, a monument to delirium that examined her with anchorite pupils. For a moment she was afraid.

“I see that you’ve been having a ball.”

María let her smile come crashing down. Now her lower lip hung, and she gave Greta a sidelong glance.

“You could say that. That today’s been a really
fun
day.”

Greta weighed her words carefully.

“Why don’t you put down the bottle and sit on the sofa before you fall down?” she said, coming closer.

María turned with blind fury, pushing Greta.

“Did you know that my father was a murderer of women? Can you believe it? What a hypocritical pig; he never wanted me to marry Lorenzo because he said he could see the evil in his eyes! And he was right; except what he saw in Lorenzo was also his own reflection; he was seeing himself.”

“Why are you saying such things about your father, I don’t understand…”

María tottered over to the record player, then picked up and dropped the needle, which screeched like nails on a chalkboard as it scratched the record.

“You understand it perfectly, Greta. How many times did we talk about my father’s strange behavior since he found out I was going to defend César Alcalá? Do you remember how you once asked me why my mother killed herself? And I told you I didn’t know, that I didn’t want to know. I lied to you. I knew, I knew that it was because of something my father did to her. Something terrible that I never wanted to discover. Now I know. That damn trunk he hides behind the woodpile. So much silence and mystery…”

María looked for a place to grab hold of, a refuge or a place to flee, but she found nothing. She remained suspended in the air for a moment, as if floating. Then she felt that the world was spinning very quickly, and everything went blurry. She barely felt Greta’s hands that rescued her just before she hit her head on the edge of the table.

“It would be better if you got into bed.”

María saw the cracked ceiling of the room and Greta’s face in the foreground somewhat blurry, but familiar and protective. She heard her voice as if she were underwater in a swimming pool.

“I was forgetting … I was forgetting my mother’s face. I thought that she was weak, a coward for taking her own life…”

“We’ll talk about that in the morning. Now you need to get up off the floor.”

María let herself be dragged to the bed. Suddenly, she felt a deep sadness, something that broke her into a thousand pieces inside, a glass that shattered and stuck sharp pins inside of her. She hugged Greta the way she used to, with a love laden with grief.

“They are going to kill me; they’re going to kill me for what my father did forty years ago.”

Greta put a cold hand on María’s forehead, trying to calm her down.

“Nobody is going to kill you. This is our hideout, remember? You showed it to me. Nobody else knows about it. You are safe. Now sleep a little bit. I’ll stay here with you.”

*   *   *

María woke up with her body frozen. The morning trembled with cold in a cloudless sky with snippets of light that barely penetrated the room. Beside her slept Greta, crowded against the wall. The bed was too narrow for them both, and Greta had shrunk as much as she could so as not to bother her. María looked at her tenderly. She hadn’t thought about coming to her. It wasn’t fair under the circumstances. Nevertheless, she was glad she had. Greta was the only person she could trust. The only person who never asked anything of her, who never expected anything, except love. Did she love her? She delicately pushed aside the messy hair on Greta’s furrowed brow. She must have been having a nightmare because she was murmuring with clenched teeth. Yes, in that moment María loved her intensely. She bent over her lips and kissed her softly. Slowly Greta opened her eyes, blinked a couple of times, and looked at her with surprise. Then she remembered the previous night.

“Wow, you’re still here.”

“I can leave, if you want me to. I shouldn’t have showed up here in such a pathetic state, but I needed to be with you.”

“Last night you said terrible things. You were furious.”

“They were all true. Everything I told you.”

Like a chaotic torrent that pushes downhill everything it comes in contact with, María explained in detail everything that she had found out in the last few hours. She told Greta about her fear of being murdered by Publio; she told her her regrets about César Alcalá, and about the terrible truth her father had kept hidden. She talked and talked but couldn’t get it all out, until she exploded in a short intense sobbing that completely altered her face.

“All my life I wanted to be honest. I thought that if I armed myself with principles, if I made an effort and put order into my actions, I would manage to live a good life. But everything that forms the basis of my existence is false. It’s like finding out that you yourself are a lie. I failed, and I don’t even know who I am, or who I wanted to be. I feel lost, filled with confusion and pain. And I have no answers.”

Greta let her cry and vent without interrupting. Leaning on the head of the bed, she just received all those words of pain and those tears, which hurt her as well. She lit a cigarette and passed it to María, who refused it. Her head was hurting horribly.

“You haven’t been to the neurologist, have you?”

María dried her face with the sheet. She felt somewhat relieved. She let her bare shoulders drop forward, sitting with her legs crossed amid the disheveled sheets, in front of Greta. She said that it was because of the gin. How could she have drunk half a bottle straight? The hangover would pass with an aspirin and a strong cup of coffee. But she knew that pinch behind her right ear well enough to know that the headache and dizziness were something more serious. A few weeks earlier she had decided to finally go to the hospital and have a series of tests done. She didn’t have the results yet, and that uncertainty, she couldn’t deny it, was keeping her on edge. Still, she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. She had things to do, and she needed Greta’s help.

“There is a police officer named Marchán. He was César’s partner. I think he can help me.”

“You just said that you don’t trust the police.”

“This one is different. I think he owes Alcalá. He gave me that feeling when he came to see me. In any case, I don’t have anyone else. I need you to go see him. Tell him that I am willing to tell him everything I know about Recasens’s death and his investigation of the congressman. Tell him I’ll testify in front of a judge if necessary.”

“And what are you going to do in the meantime?”

María clenched her fists.

“Something I should have done a long time ago.”

*   *   *

She pushed the door, and it creaked as only forgotten memories can creak.

She turned on the light. The enigmas of the past rose up before her. The order was excessive, a sign of inhuman coldness. Stored on shelves were hundreds of files with names, facts, and dates. In cardboard boxes were stored photographs and personal belongings, but whose belongings were they? Who were all those people trapped in files and statistics? The room smelled musty, as if embalmed with mothballs. That smell went into María’s throat and squeezed her stomach, compressing it into constant nausea. She examined all those things carefully, as if afraid to unveil them but compelled to. The room was filled with whispering corners; it was a mysterious geography of closed boxes, furniture covered with sheets, and dusty books. There the false hero who was her father kept his armor, his medal, the dreams of his youth, like the elixir of life. There was his mortarboard, his high boots, his records of war songs that he used to listen to on the old gramophone; she even found an empty casing inside one of the canvas supply pouches. María imagined the fate of that bullet. Why had he kept the casing? Whose life had he taken with it? A legionnaire, a North African, a German artillery colonel, an Italian division soldier?

A dark, confused memory came to her, an image from the past. In that fragment of a memory she saw her father, conversing with other men; María must have been a very young girl or the memory was too damaged, because she could barely see the faces of the men around him, or hear their voices, but she did remember their military uniforms. Her father must have been somebody of some importance for those soldiers because they searched him out enthusiastically and listened to what he said with the veneration given to veterans sharing experiences only they can understand. That night, after the meeting, when his comrades-in-arms had left, María found him crying. She didn’t focus on his tears, but on the empty bottle that rolled by his feet and a Danish cookie tin where he stored some souvenirs. “Why are you crying?” she asked him. Her father smiled sadly. That smile wordlessly encompassed a pain that was beyond limits, as if he were hugging a tree of bitter sap. “Because the crying can’t fit inside me anymore,” he said, wiping away his tears and placing that cylindrical blue metal box on his lap.

María’s stunned gaze now landed on the small trunk, like an old suitcase, with leather straps and gold-tipped nails at the corners. The inside was lined. The mauve fabric of the quilted lining had lost its luster but was still lovely. She searched diligently for that cookie tin she remembered. It had to be somewhere. She found it buried beneath a thick layer of dust. She opened it unceremoniously, convinced that inside she would still find her father’s embalmed tears. There was nothing exceptional. Two writing quills, a notebook with the pages stuck together, and a small photograph, yellowing and stuck together with tape.

First she looked at the photograph. It was a first communion portrait of a young boy dressed in a sailor suit. The boy must have been about ten or twelve years old. His face was small and withdrawn. But his eyes were disturbing. Too big for his face, too intense and perverse for his age. In his hand he held some sort of walking stick on which he rested his weight, like a little tyrant. María scrutinized that object keenly. What the boy held was some kind of sword with oriental ornaments. Behind the boy was a young man dressed in the uniform of the German mechanized divisions. His hand lay firmly on the younger boy’s right shoulder. His expression was distant, as if that young soldier hadn’t really returned from the front.

María shivered as if a draft was blowing through her brain.

“This is insane,” she said, dropping against the wall, depressed.

Then she picked up the notebook and flipped through it. The compact handwriting was Isabel’s. It was a diary. She began to read it.

The pages were brimming with sweet words, with feelings that overflowed the ink with which they were written. Words of love, desires that would have filled the heart of anyone receiving them. But they were addressed to none other than Gabriel. María imagined sadly the woman’s sleepless nights, her desperate attempts to make her lover understand the enormity of what she felt for him: happy, intimately devoted to the light of a gas lamp, to the writing of that diary as if she were tattooing each word on the skin of her beloved. María wondered if Isabel had ever told those things to her father, or if Gabriel only read about them in her note book, which he made off with after killing her. For a moment she clung to the idea that her father perhaps never knew what Isabel really felt for him until after she was dead. If he had known before, she reasoned, he wouldn’t have killed her. No one would be capable of such betrayal. But then María stopped kidding herself. It wasn’t possible that Isabel hadn’t shown him the love that she was expressing on those stuck-together pages. Even if she had tried to conceal it for her children’s sake or out of fear of her husband, the passion oozed through the seams of such camouflage. There must have been a current of secret looks, of blushing, of half smiles, of honeyed silences; their bodies must have trembled as they brushed past each other, fingers searching the other out with the flimsiest excuse.

“So you already know…”

María turned, frightened, with Isabel’s diary in her hands. In the doorway stood her father. She hadn’t heard him approaching.

He didn’t seem surprised or irritated. Quite the contrary. Gabriel leaned in the doorjamb with his gaze buried among the things in that room. He seemed relieved, finally free of a burden he’d carried for too many years.

“It’s true … Everything Lorenzo told me about you is true. You, you’re a murderer, a liar, a traitor … All those years of lies. Why?” She spat out the words, hitting him with them. She took a step forward. She grabbed her father’s face and forced him to look at her, to face her.