Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel Read online

  The great virtue of the art of the sword lies in its simplicity: Wounding your enemy just as he wounds you.

  GENJUTSU MOVEMENT

  (Saber Technique)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  Barcelona, May 1981

  There are people who eschew affection and take refuge in abandonment. María was one of those people. Maybe that was why she refused to see anyone, even now, there in that hospital room that was the station at the end of the line.

  She preferred to stare at the lily bouquets Greta sent her. Lilies were her favorite flower. They tried to survive in the vase of water, with that heroic gesture common to all hopeless tasks. Each day their fragile iridescent petals languished, but with discreet elegance.

  María liked to think she was also dying like that: discreetly, elegantly, and silently. However, there was her father seated at the foot of the bed like a stone ghost, day after day without saying or doing anything, except looking at her, to remind her that everything wasn’t going to be that easy, that just dying wasn’t going to be the end of it. You only had to open the door slightly to see the uniformed policeman stationed in the hallway watching over her room, and you’d understand that everything that had happened in the last few months wouldn’t just be erased, not even when the doctors pulled the plug on the machine that was keeping her alive.

  That morning the detective in charge of her case had come early. Marchán was a kind man, given the circumstances, but unyielding. If he pitied her situation, he didn’t let it show. María was suspected of several murders and of having helped a prisoner escape, and that was how the detective saw her, as a suspect.

  “Has our friend gotten in touch with you yet?” he asked her, with respectful aloofness. Marchán brought in the day’s newspapers and left them on the bedside table.

  María closed her eyes.

  “Why would he?”

  The policeman leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. His jacket was unbuttoned. He was pale and obviously tired.

  “Because it is the least he can do for you, considering your situation.”

  “My situation isn’t going to change, Detective. And I suppose that César knows that; only an idiot would risk everything to visit a dying woman.”

  Marchán shook his head, contemplating the severe, inscrutable old man.

  “How’s your father today?”

  María shrugged her shoulders. It was hard to know what a stone was feeling.

  “He hasn’t said. He just sits there, looking at me. Sometimes I think his eyes are going to dry out, and he’ll still be there, staring.”

  The policeman sighed deeply. He studied her, a woman who must have been attractive once, before her head was shaved and before all those cords were coming out of her, attaching her to a monitor filled with lights and graphs. Dealing with her made Marchán feel like a miner hacking away at a stone wall with every bit of his strength, but still only managing to chip off a few measly slivers.

  “Fine, as you wish … But what about the confession? Is your father going to make a statement?”

  María shifted her attention to her father. The old man was now looking out the window. The street’s light partially illuminated his elderly face. His bottom lip drooped, and a tiny string of drool stained his shirt. María felt a mix of rage and compassion. Why did he insist on staying by her side with his silent reproaches?

  “My father can’t help you, Detective. He can barely recognize anyone anymore.”

  “And what about you? Will you tell me what you know?”

  “Of course, but it’s not easy. I need to get my ideas organized.” María Bengoechea had promised the detective that she would be brief, stick to the facts, and avoid the filler, the evasiveness, and all those useless trappings of the bad novels that came with the newspapers.

  At first she thought it would be simple: she imagined it as just a memo; that was her specialty, conciseness, clear signals, proven facts; the rest was of no use to her. And yet it turned out to be more complicated than she had thought. She was talking about her life, about her own life, so she couldn’t help but be subjective and mix events with impressions, desires with realities. In the end, what should have been a simple, clinical essay had turned into a monologue on the psychiatrist’s couch.

  “Take your time,” said the policeman, spotting the notebook on her bedside table, with some writing at the top of the page. “I have to go, but I’ll be back to visit you.”

  María took up the notebook again when he left, making an effort to ignore her father’s ghostly presence. She began to write with a put-on air of serenity: she caught herself philosophizing two or three times on the meaning of life and the mystery of death. When she realized, she crossed out those paragraphs, blushing slightly. What embarrassed her wasn’t that it was going to be read by a policeman; that didn’t matter much at that point; what made her blush was the mere fact that she actually had such things in her.

  “Is that how I am? Is that how I felt until a few weeks ago?”

  Then she abandoned the world of conjecture and returned to the concrete. To the facts. She had to force that discipline on herself if she wanted to finish writing about what had happened in the last few months, before she ran out of time. The doctors were going to operate on her tumor again, but from the looks on their faces, she knew that they had already given up hope. Her illness was in some ways a path backward, a quick rewind of her adulthood and childhood. She would end her days incapable, not just of writing, but of even saying her own name; she would stammer like a child to make herself understood, and she would sleep with diapers on to keep from staining the sheets. She looked at the old man in his wheelchair and shivered.

  “It looks like in the end we’ll understand each other at last, Papá,” she murmured with a cynicism that only hurt her. She wondered if, at least, innocence would come along with that inevitable forgetting. She could imagine nothing worse than turning into her father: the mind of the woman she still was, stuck in the body of a child.

  She was surprised by how easily she forgot everything it had taken her so long to learn, everything that had brought her to that point in life we call adulthood: sensible, serene, married, responsible, and with children. María was none of that, never had been; she never became the type of woman that she was expected to. That impossibility hadn’t had anything to do with her illness; it was more something genetic. She was thirty-five years old, a prestigious lawyer, separated, and childless, who had been living with another woman, Greta. But Greta had left her, desperate in the face of María’s inability to truly love anyone. Now she was facing tria
ls for the murders of several people, trials that would never take place because God, or whoever was in charge of destiny, had already set down a guilty sentence that could not be appealed.

  Basically, those were all the biographical facts that could interest anyone. She could fill entire pages with data: her social security number, her driver’s license number, national ID number, telephone number, birth date, degrees, jobs held, even her favorite colors, lucky number, bra and shoe sizes; she could even include a passport photo, from which you could decide whether you personally found her pretty or ugly, dyed blonde or natural, underweight, short, et cetera. Those with a good eye, or the romantics, would say she had a melancholy air; they would deduce, groundlessly, that her love life had been a disaster … but in the end they still wouldn’t know anything about her.

  She went to the bathroom with the help of a walker. She turned on the light. It was a fluorescent that came on with long, insecure blinks, revealing the edges for an instant, only to plunge her back into darkness the next. The momentary glow allowed her to glimpse the silhouette of a naked body and a face filled with unsettling shadows.

  She was afraid of the stranger inside her. She barely recognized her. A pale body, with lax muscles, brittle extremities, and a chest scored with veins that converged in fallen nipples. She barely had any hair in her armpits or pubic region. Her sex lay pale, useless. Her fingers touched her thighs like jellyfish brushing a rock. She couldn’t feel them. And her face … my God, what had happened to her face? Her cheekbones stuck out like pointy mounds on her taut cheeks. Her skin was cracked like a barren field, filled with dark, haggard craters. Her nose stretched sharp, aquiline, with dry nostrils. There was no longer any trace of her lovely long hair. Just a shaved skull with fourteen stitches on the right lobe. But her eyes were the worst.

  “Where are they? What are they looking at? What do they see?” Dull, bluish bags with fallen lids. Infinitely exhausted, totally absent. The eyes of someone who had given up all hope, of someone on her way out, of a corpse. But in spite of everything, beneath the decrepitude and the disease, she was still the same woman. She could still recognize herself. She forced out a smile. A smile that was almost a whine, a gesture of impotence, of naïveté.

  She wasn’t dead yet, and she was still master of what remained of her.

  “It’s me. Still. María. I’m thirty-five years old,” she said aloud, as if she wanted to scare off the hesitant shadow of the ghost that peeked out from the other side. Few human beings can stand their own reflection because something strange happens in front of the mirror: You are looking at what you see, but if you dig a little deeper, beyond the surface, you are overcome by an uncomfortable feeling that it is the reflection that is looking at you insolently. You ask yourself who you are. As if you, and not the reflection, were the stranger.

  She returned to bed, dragging her slippers. Her body weighed heavily on her even though it floated inside the white hospital robe. She turned on the television. The news confused her. It was relentless, as if no one could stop the events from constantly unfolding. As if the events themselves were above the actors that starred in them. The journalist Pilar Urbano was reporting from the same congress that was the scene of the coup attempt in February. There were photos of Tejero, Milans del Bosch, Armada, and the other conspirators—all arrogant, sure of themselves.

  Publio wasn’t among them, not even his photo or his name. Nor was there any mention of the Mola family.

  She wasn’t surprised; she knew how these things worked. César Alcalá had already warned her not to get her hopes up: “This democracy of ours is like a little girl who has already learned how to hide her dirty laundry, before she’s even learned to walk.” But María couldn’t help feeling slightly bitter at seeing that all the suffering and deaths of the previous months hadn’t done any good.

  She realized that her father was also watching the news. She wasn’t sure if he understood anything, but she saw his eyes light up and his hands tightly grip the lever on his wheelchair.

  “It’s not worth worrying yourself over, don’t you think?” said María.

  Her father leaned his head back slightly and looked at her with bloodshot eyes. He stuttered something that María didn’t want to hear.

  She changed the channel. An ETA attack in Madrid. A car burning on the Castellana, smoke. People shouting, filled with hate and impotence. Victims of the rapeseed oil poisoning show their deformities at the door to a courtroom, reminding her of those beggars with polio who sit by the doors of churches. Politicians raising the crucifix against the divorce law, others lifting the Republican flag. The world was spinning quickly; people were protecting themselves with standards and signs. She turned off the television, and all the noise vanished.

  Stillness returned to the cream-colored room. The IV drip bag, the footsteps of the nurses behind the closed door. She imagined that the policeman was still there on watch, bored and drowsy in a chair, wondering what point there was in guarding a dying woman.

  Two nurses came in to wash her. María was friendly, and even though she knew they wouldn’t give her one, she asked them for a cigarette.

  “Smoking is bad for your health,” they answered. María smiled, and they blushed at the obvious stupidity of the comment.

  It should be the other way around. It should be her blushing as they sponge-bathed her like a child. But she did nothing; she let herself be flipped like a piece of meat by one of them. The other took her father’s chair and pushed him out of the room; María appreciated the respite. The nurse washed her underarms, her feet; she changed her bag of serum, and all the while she kept talking about her children, about her husband, and her life. María listened with closed eyes, wanting it to end.

  They changed the sheets. They had no scent. That was unsettling. There were no smells in the room. The doctors said that it was because of the operation. It had affected that part of her brain. A world without odors was a surreal world. Not even the lilies that Greta had sent her that morning gave off any scent. She saw them, beside the headrest. María looked at them for hours. They seemed fresh, with drops of dampness suspended on the stem and petals. They leaned into the light that entered through the window, wanting to flee, get outside. Like María. Like everyone who had lain dying in this bed before her. That’s why there were bars on the window. To avoid the temptation. Although she didn’t need them. Suicide required bravery. When life is no longer an option, you can’t let random fate snatch away the last dignified act left to you. She had learned that from the Mola family; but María would never jump.

  Sometimes the hospital priest came to see her. It was a routine visit like the ones the doctors did, first thing in the morning with their clipboards, followed by their young interns. That priest had the same manner. María imagined that each day he carried under his arm a list of those on their last legs, or maybe he marked with a small x the rooms where people were on their way out. He must think that during that final passage the patients were weaker, more fickle, and vulnerable to his reasoning about God and fate. He wasn’t, otherwise, an unpleasant man. María even liked listening to him, really only because she wondered what could have brought such a young man to devote his entire life to an illusion. He wore a cassock and clerical collar. A clean, discreet cassock with covered buttons that concealed even his shoes. That conservative young priest didn’t seem to feel guilty about anything, much less María’s impending early death. Quite the contrary; when she confessed that she did not believe in God, he looked at her with sincere pity, with an understanding of the fear that left María dry as a bone inside.

  “That doesn’t matter. Whether you believe it or not, you are only a step away from divine grace, from immortality beside him.”

  María scrutinized him with a puzzled expression. The priest, without hesitation or a trace of cynicism or hypocrisy, asked her to repent for her sins.

  “They say I killed, Father. And that I did it with my own hands. Do you believe that?”

&
nbsp; “I know the story, María, everyone knows it. It will all weigh in the balance, and God is merciful.”

  “Why do you talk that way? Do you really believe we are judged from up on high?”

  “Yes, I truly do believe it. That is my faith.”

  “And why doesn’t your judge roll up his sleeves and come down to lend a hand instead of allowing the good and evil to happen down here, while he sits up on his throne?”

  “We are not children that have to be told what to do. We are free beings, and, as such, we face the consequences of what we have done.”

  “Honestly, Father. I don’t believe that anyone gave your God permission to ask me to justify my actions.”

  “What you believe, and what I believe, don’t change the certainty of things. You will soon have eternal life, and everything will make sense” was the priest’s deliberate response.

  María asked him what man wanted with immortal life.

  “Why eat? Why keep breathing? Why keep drinking from this little plastic cup? Why keep taking those colored pills? Why not give up? I’d like to end it all. Close the book on it all. Who wants immortality? A constant cycle of being born and dying, repeating the same agony over and over again with no meaning behind it. Death is something that happens to everything that’s alive. It’s the price to be paid. God has nothing to do with it. We should leave God out of it. It’s the fault of the fluids, of the chemistry, of human fragility. There are no gods or heroes. Only miasmas. I should just accept it, and everything would be a lot easier for me. But I can’t.”

  “You can’t resign yourself because inside of you there is something divine, a part of God. Think about your life, take stock of your conscience, and you will see that not everything was so bad,” the priest said to her. Then he patted her hands as if to say see you later, and he left, leaving behind his words, like his old church smell.

  * * *

  As the days passed, María’s health worsened. She spent most of her time drugged to bear the pain, and when she sometimes regained her lucidity, she only wanted to close her eyes and keep sleeping, anesthetize the memories that jumbled up in her mind.