Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (7 page)

Now it seemed like all that had never happened. María had lost the baby, and the butchers that treated her in the maternity ward had destroyed her ovaries. Lorenzo began to show that other face that all moons have, the face María had refused to see before. His work in the ministry absorbed him completely; he spent many days away from home. His rank was infantry lieutenant, but only on very few occasions did he take his uniform out of the closet, and the colleagues he sometimes brought home at ungodly hours looked more like federal agents than military men.

María began to ask questions, but he always answered with silence or with an avoidance that insulted his wife’s intelligence. If she insisted, he got furious, breaking things and leaving the house with a slam of the door.

He had even slapped her for the first time. The second slap was accompanied by some kicks to the stomach. The third broke her arm. The fourth attempt was thwarted because María held a knife to his balls. She hadn’t screwed up enough courage to cut them off, but she now knew how short the path to disappointment was.

After each beating, when she saw her husband enter the bedroom at night, she watched him with a raised eyebrow, as if surprised to see him there again. Lorenzo remained at the foot of the mattress, staring at her, feeling that his close watch on the slight movements of María’s feet, or her murmurings as she feigned sleep, brought him closer to the truth.

“Do you forgive me, María?”

But she didn’t respond. Then Lorenzo tensed his knuckles and raised a fist into the air. Yet he stopped himself before hitting her. In silence, María tightened like a conch and scratched at the palms of her hands. Lorenzo tore away the sheet that covered her body. He pulled down his pants and masturbated over his wife’s back until he ejaculated with an obscene groan. He wiped up the semen with a corner of the sheet and threw it at her face.

Like a coin-operated machine, María opened her eyes every morning and sat up in bed with her arms fallen and her hair clumsy on her shoulders, looking at her small feet run through with blue veins that rested on the cold floor. All of the world’s everyday sounds seized her heart. The falling of wastewater through the pipes. And the absurd, completely illogical music of Antonio Machín that played on the old gramophone and which Lorenzo found so thrilling:

Dos gardenias para ti, con ellas quiero decir te quiero, te adoro, mi vida …

A slow death, unhurried but sure. That was what María aspired to after ten years of marriage. It was strange how men thought. She learned to take refuge in anonymous sex when the opportunity presented itself. None of the lovers meant anything, but each of them had interpreted her apathy against their own experiences. For some she was a raped nun, for others mentally retarded, for some a mystic, and for some others a common cynic. But all of them, every last one, had tried to force her to renounce her indifference, as if that were the real challenge they faced.

No one knew her real situation, except Greta, to whom she sometimes vented. Her friend kept insisting that she leave him. She had even offered to let María stay at her house, but María was reluctant. She told herself that she was sticking it out because she loved him, but deep down she realized that wasn’t the truth. What weighed more in her decision was habit, fear of the uncertainty of a life without clear horizons, economic hardship, and, above all, having to recognize her failure. Perhaps she was hoping for a miracle, hoping that the man she had fallen in love with was going to return.

If only something different happened in her life, María kept thinking, something that opened her eyes, something that offered her a new fate … but nothing changed for the better: her work was routine, and poorly paid. She hadn’t even had the opportunity to show her worth as a criminal lawyer; her time was entirely taken up with causes that clients couldn’t pay for, in an old basement that she shared with other former classmates from the university, who were as tired and frustrated as she was. The only exception was Greta, but not even her radiance eclipsed the ruins of María’s life.

*   *   *

After ten minutes, she went around the potter’s house and headed for S’Agaró Boulevard. Shortly after, on a curve, she caught sight of the stone fence that surrounded her house.

She didn’t dare go in. She knew that Lorenzo would ask her where she had been, and that he would get furious when she told him. There was one thing her husband had never forgotten, and that was those five months he had spent in prison because of Gabriel. She instinctively searched in her pocket for another cigarette, forgetting that she’d already smoked her last one. Instead of the pack, her cold hands found the hospital’s letter with her father’s diagnosis.

She was tired; her arms and legs weighed heavily on her as if she had been wrestling in mud. She took a deep breath and went into the house.

Lorenzo was dozing on the living room couch. In the background she heard bolero music from the record player. It was the perfect musical accompaniment to his binges. And he had been drinking for quite a while before falling asleep, judging by the remains scattered on the glass coffee table. María took off her shoes and approached him without making any noise. She observed him, stroking the air around him without actually touching him for fear of waking him, sad and relieved at the same time to be able to put off the conversation about her father.

The dark skin and curly hair on Lorenzo’s chest peeked out of his pajamas. He was sleeping like a child, with an expression both provocative and naive. He was the perfect oxymoron. He was gorgeous, but there were starting to be signs that his beauty would fade. María liked to look at him in those brief moments of peace his sleeping afforded her. It seemed like he was always going to be there, the man who slept on the right side of the bed, hogging the covers. She missed the days when she fell asleep glued to his thighs and tight against his back; she could feel his ribs and the vertebrae of his spine. She listened to his breathing. She ran her hand over his waist, and her fingers sought out his chest, tangling in its hair.

She went to find a blanket, and she covered him up. Then she went up to the office.

She turned on the night-light and unwrapped a new pack of cigarettes. She slid slightly open the glass door that led to the terrace, and lit a cigarette. Lorenzo hated that she smoked. The first mouthful of smoke escaped through the crack. She sat with her elbows leaning on the desk and her head resting on her fingers. Then she saw the handwritten note leaned against the vase. She recognized her husband’s handwriting, quick and with strong strokes.

That lesbian friend of yours called. She says you should call her first thing in the morning about something very important. I guess it’s just some excuse to get into your panties, but that’s your business.

María was hurt by the note’s crude tone.

“Son of a bitch…,” she murmured, angry with herself for stubbornly continuing to remain by the side of a man like that. But she soon found herself intrigued about what important thing Greta wanted to tell her.

4

When she got to the office the only sound was the buzzing of the floor polisher pushed by the janitor in the hallway. All the desks were still empty, the metal file cabinets closed, the telephones on the desks silent, the lights turned off, and the law books lined up in perfect order along the length of the entire wall. María had spent a good part of the last few years there, and she had devoted absolutely all her talent and energy to making that firm grow. And suddenly, now she saw it for what it really was: a cold, inhospitable, sterile place, a place imbued with the indifference of a great god who didn’t value the sacrifices of the tiny worshippers who served him.

There was light behind Greta’s door.

María knocked and opened without waiting for her to respond. The window blinds were half lowered, and a pleasant dim light illuminated the bookcase and desk with three chairs placed in a semicircle around it. In one corner, a small low table had two glasses, a thermos of coffee, and a bottle of water on it.

Greta was standing, talking to a woman in her fifties who was a bundle of nerves.

“What’s this important news?” asked María, leaving her coat on the rack.

Greta’s expression was serious.

“Let me introduce you to Pura. I think you’ll be interested in what she has to say.”

Purificación was a tiny woman who seemed in over her head, with no aspirations beyond paying her rent. There wasn’t anything interesting about her. She didn’t even consider herself a woman. She simply saw herself as a beast of burden, carrying on her back five dirty kids and a cramped house, who bore life’s blows by cowering and looking at the tips of her holey espadrilles. She sat on the edge of a chair with her hands on her lap, squeezing a dirty handkerchief. Greta served her some coffee.

“Why don’t you tell my colleague what you told me?”

The woman started to talk about her husband. His name was Jesús Ramoneda.

“He works as an informant for the police. Everyone knows it, so I don’t think I’m revealing much by telling you.”

“That’s not a very common
job
,” interjected María, intrigued.

Pura looked at her with a slight sternness in her eyes.

“My husband is not a common man.”

She explained that her husband was incapable of running his own life. He beat her and the kids, and he drank too much. He often disappeared for days, sometimes even weeks. Purificación figured that he was cheating on her or going with whores, or that maybe he had run afoul of the law. That was his world, the underworld. But she said nothing, what could she say? Her world spanned a junk-filled living room, a filthy kitchen, and five constantly crying kids. She even wanted, with all her heart and soul, for him to leave her. At least, when he was gone, she could breathe freely.

María listened and took notes. It sounded like the typical abuse case; the woman’s husband was a real son of a bitch, like so many others … And suddenly she felt ashamed and confused: like so many others. Was there really that much difference between what that poor woman was going through and what Lorenzo did to her? She picked up a cup of coffee and hid her gaze in it, as if that confluence of fates made her uncomfortable. She knew that Greta was watching her closely, but she pretended she hadn’t realized.

“I think I get the idea,” she said, “but I don’t think we can do much to help you. Divorce is not legal here, and a woman leaving home is committing a crime. However, I can give you the address of a secret shelter where we send women in your situation.”

She started to jot down the address, when Pura asked her to stop writing and looked at her very seriously.

“A few days ago a plainclothes policeman came asking for him. He wasn’t one of the regulars; I’d never seen him before. He seemed very angry. He showed me a photograph of a girl that must have been about twelve and asked me if I had seen her around or if Ramoneda had ever mentioned her. I told him no, and he left angrily … Three days later two other agents came to see me. I did know them, they were from the Verneda station, and they often came by the house so that Ramoneda would give them information about the goings-on in the neighborhood. But they weren’t there to see him; they came to see me. They told me that something terrible had happened and that my husband was in the hospital. That he might die. Those men explained that they could take care of things. They offered me ten thousand pesetas in exchange for not reporting it. They would take care of everything.”

María turned in her chair, shocked.

“But why did they offer you money not to report it?”

“It seems that the guy who tried to kill my husband is that first cop who came a few days earlier with the photo of the girl. I think he is a chief inspector of the information squad. He had my husband in a basement for several days, doing all sorts of nasty things to him.”

In that moment María felt afraid. It was as if up to that point in the conversation she had been playing with a cylinder that seemed harmless and she had suddenly discovered that it was filled with nitroglycerine. She cautiously shifted her gaze toward Greta, who remained silent with her arms crossed over her chest.

“And I guess you came to see me because you want to report that policeman?” asked María guardedly.

Purificación looked at both lawyers with her little dead eyes, which suddenly took on an intense gleam.

“What I want is to know if I can get more money out of them.”

María and Greta exchanged a look somewhere between perplexed and embarrassed. Nonetheless, María immediately realized the importance of what was to come. Her reservations didn’t matter; who cares if what the woman was looking for was money or justice?

“If we can put that chief inspector in prison, you’ll have all the money and fame you could ever want.”

María accepted the case without thinking, thrilled. It was what she had been waiting for since she finished law school. Good-bye clerking, half-assed cases, crumbs. She had hit the mother lode, and she planned on taking full advantage of the opportunity.

“I’ll need to talk to your husband.”

“He’s in a coma.”

María’s expression soured. That was the first obstacle. The victim couldn’t identify his aggressor.

“I want to see him anyway.”

*   *   *

The only thing that María saw of that battered man was his swollen body on a stretcher in the emergency ward of the Francisco Franco Residence. She was taken aback by the deformity of his face, completely raw and ruined. And she was sure it would also impress the district attorney and the judge. As for his character, the way he thought and behaved, she only had Purificación’s story, and most of that information she would keep hidden to win the case.

There were months of intense work. Looking for incriminating evidence, witnesses, the motive behind the aggression … It turned out to be surprisingly easy to find witnesses who would testify to the brutality of that inspector, whom María never saw until the trial started. When the hearing date had been set, she already had enough evidence to prove that Inspector César Alcalá was a corrupt cop who ran a ring of drugs and prostitution. Ramoneda, who worked as an informant for the inspector, was thinking of turning him in, so César Alcalá decided to murder him, but not before cruelly torturing him to find out what Ramoneda knew.