Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (8 page)

“A clear-cut case,” said María, before her final summation.

Greta, who had worked on the case as much as María had, frowned. Suddenly, there seemed to be too much incriminating evidence, too much testimony against him. And Ramoneda was still in a coma, unable to explain himself. Besides, there was something that no one had mentioned in the case.

“Pura says that that policeman showed her a photo of a twelve-year-old girl. We haven’t even tried to find out who she is and why the inspector was looking for her.”

“That’s not important to our case,” said María uncomfortably, settling the subject.

*   *   *

The whole country was watching her in a case that had gained importance and media attention as the months of the hearing went on, until it had become a real acid test for the justice system. In the bars, in the university classrooms, even in the workshops, people made their predictions: Had the regime really changed enough that an important police officer could be sent to prison? Would there be a soft sentence imposed against all the evidence presented in the trial, declaring the policeman innocent?

Toward the end of 1977 the case was ready for sentencing. That was the moment of glory that María had been wanting for years. The packed courtroom listening to her impassioned final speech, the camera flashes, the journalists taking notes, the radio transmitting live. There was even an RTVE television camera filming her speech. Not even María was sure of a sentence in her favor. But she didn’t care too much. The case had already catapulted her to the front pages of the newspapers, and several prestigious law firms had shown interest in hiring her.

In those months her life changed forever. The arguments with Lorenzo grew more and more heated, until finally she decided to leave home. The fact that she had finally succumbed to Greta’s charms was a big help in her decision.

As for her father, Gabriel, he hadn’t budged about leaving San Lorenzo, but it didn’t matter much anymore. With what María was earning giving lectures, she could pay for a nurse to take care of him twenty-four hours a day. Besides, her client volume had grown spectacularly, as had her billing. So much so that she was able to buy out Lorenzo’s half of the house and move there with Greta, which made her husband want to crawl under a rock, and he asked to be transferred to Madrid.

Of course it wasn’t all successes. As the months passed, the pressure on her became unbearable. One morning some strangers attacked the firm, hurting some lawyers who were working on the case against Inspector Alcalá, destroying furniture and files and covering the walls with threats. Luckily, María wasn’t there that day.

Nor was Greta, but when they began receiving death threats by phone at their house, she started to be upset. She asked María to be discreet, but her partner refused to step out of the limelight. She was euphoric and blind, unable to understand that she was putting them both in danger, until one day Greta was attacked in the street by a group of ultra-right-wingers who humiliated her, throwing eggs at her and putting a sign on her that read
FUCKING COMMIE DYKE
.

*   *   *

And finally, before the Christmas of 1977, the verdict was served: against all odds, the judge accepted María’s incriminating arguments and ruled for a life sentence. That was much more than María and her colleagues could have hoped for. It even seemed to be too harsh of a sentence. As if someone had decided to teach the inspector a lesson. There hadn’t even been time for any appeals. Alcalá was immediately sent to Barcelona’s Modelo prison.

Ramoneda was still in a coma a year later. His wife was more than satisfied with the compensation, and with the money she received for her exclusive interview with the magazine
Interviú.

*   *   *

“Everything worked out,” said María, on the night she and Greta went out to celebrate their victory. It was the first time they could allow themselves to eat in a restaurant uptown and toast with a Grand Reserve wine.

As María held up her glass, Greta watched in silence from an armchair and took a long sip. Then she put down the glass and dried her lips with an embroidered napkin. A branch of small red veins invaded her pupil. She no longer had the same joy she once had.

“What’s going on?” asked María.

Greta felt a stab somewhere vague, but deep inside.

“I have the feeling that we have paid a very high price for all this … It’s as if we sold our souls.”

María frowned, suddenly in a bad mood.

“Stop being dramatic. You love clichés. Besides, what’s a soul?”

Greta looked at her, surprised, as if she was suspicious of where the question came from.

“What we carry inside, or better yet, what carries us from the inside,” she said, discouraged by María’s skeptical expression.

“If I imagine my own hand going into my body through my stomach, I can feel kidneys, liver, lungs. I can even feel my heart blindly among my entrails, cells, corpuscles, and nerves. I can weigh it up in the palm of my open hand, feel the movement of its rhythmic contraction and expansion. But not my soul. I can’t find it anywhere. We did what we had to, justice. You should be happy for having beaten the windmills.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. There is nothing quixotic in all this; it has nothing to do with justice. We both know what kind of man Ramoneda is, and you’ve already seen his wife, spending the indemnity money in Galerías Preciados. And I can’t get that inspector out of my head. Did you see his resignation, his disheartened expression?”

“They sentenced him to life in prison; he’s not likely to be jumping for joy.”

“It wasn’t prison that was weighing on his eyes; it was the feeling of injustice. I heard about his daughter. She was the girl in the photo, right?”

María threw her napkin on the table angrily.

“That’s enough, Greta, please. Yes, I heard about the daughter’s kidnapping, too. But it’s all a myth; there’s no proof, nothing. On the other hand, there is a ton of evidence that he is a corrupt, brutal police officer.”

“But what if it’s true? And what if that informer had something to do with the girl’s disappearance?”

“Let the police figure it out. That’s not our job.”

Greta smiled sadly. She looked toward the lights of the city, which spread before her like an illusory haven of peace.

“You’re right; our work is finished. Now, we simply have to forget. But I wonder if we’ll be able to.”

*   *   *

The guards who moved César Alcalá came in through a side door of the prison.

The old prison’s innards were rotten. They were like catacombs filled with closed doors, boarded-up windows, labyrinthine waste pipes, and corners that had never seen the light of day. A pipe of wastewater had burst, flooding everything with shit. Some men, naked to the waist, splashed about barefoot with their hands in the filth. Handkerchiefs minimally protected their mouths, and it was obvious the liquids were making them gag. They were people without name or face who lived in the basement like rats: sometimes they could be heard scampering beneath the wood, but they were never seen.

César Alcalá tried to keep his composure, but his legs were giving out under him at the devastating sight before his eyes. The guards forced him into a small room where he could barely stand up without his head hitting the damp, dripping ceiling.

“Take off your clothes,” one of the guards ordered, without even blinking his inexpressive eyes.

César Alcalá had to shower with freezing cold water and barely had time to dry himself off before they had him walk to a cracked line of paint on the floor. That line was the meridian between two worlds. Behind was life. In front was nothing.

They took his fingerprints on some yellow cards and photographed him. Then they handed him his toiletries and had him stick his personal objects into a box and sign a receipt.

“Everything will be given back to you when you get out…,” said the functionary who had searched him, as if he wanted to add, “If you ever do get out.”

César Alcalá asked if he could hold on to the photographs of his daughter and his father that he kept in his wallet. The functionary examined them both, scrutinizing the photo of the girl more carefully.

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen,” murmured the inspector sadly.

The functionary licked his lips like a hungry cat.

“Well, she’s got a good set of tits on her,” he said cruelly.

César Alcalá clenched his jaw, but he held back his desire to smash in the head of that worm.

“Can I keep them, please?”

The functionary shrugged his shoulders. He tore the photographs with maniacal attention to detail into the tiniest pieces and let them fly over the table. His gaze fell on César Alcalá like a lead weight.

“Of course,
Inspector
. You can keep them.”

César Alcalá swallowed hard and picked up the pieces.

“What do you say?” asked the functionary, pretending to be mad.

César Alcalá kept his boiling gaze glued to the dirty floor.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The guards took him to a corridor with cells on either side and turned him over to another guard.

The maddening silence was like a vise grip around his neck. The only sound he heard was the rhythmic banging of a lock being opened and closed mechanically. The dull, deep echo of that sound was like the pealing of church bells on All Soul’s Day. The guard who was escorting him stopped in front of each lock, and at each he repeated the inspector’s name out loud, so the prisoners would know he was there. They were siccing the dogs on him, and César Alcalá knew that as soon as he stepped foot in one of the common areas he was a dead man.

“Rumor has it that someone is willing to pay a fortune for your head, so watch your back.”

César Alcalá shook his head incredulously. He was already dead long before walking into that prison. Dead since the day his daughter had disappeared without a trace; dead since his wife, Andrea, unable to bear the pain, had shot herself and left him all alone.

His cell was a small space, with thick cement walls and floor, and two bunks beside a small barred window. Some light from the courtyard entered through the bars, almost as if it were asking permission. A sink with no mirror and a noxious toilet with no lid completed the picture.

César Alcalá looked around for a few moments with a dejected air at the bleak and worrisome landscape he was going to have to get used to. In a weary gesture, he dropped onto the lower bunk.

The guard smiled mockingly and closed the door.

The spotlights in the courtyard partially illuminated the inspector’s face. Their harsh force hypnotized him, his eyes motionless in the gleaming artificial light. Along with the drying underwear and T-shirts that hung behind the obstructed windows, abstract faces pressed against the bars watching an invisible horizon as night fell. In those moments the loneliness grew more acute, and nostalgia filled the hearts of even the toughest men. It was as if as the day ended, each of those men took stock of where they were and felt miserable and lost. Every man locked up there embraced his memories, cloaked himself in them: a name, a photograph, a song, anything to cling to in order to feel alive.

But Alcalá banged his head against the wall to try to erase everything that had existed before that night, because feeling alive was much more painful to him than the threat of a death that loomed near. He returned to the darkness of the cell. His own fate no longer worried him. He sat on the bed and patiently reconstructed the remains of the photographs of his daughter and his father, who had been locked up in that same prison almost forty years earlier—maybe even in that very cell—and he laughed at himself, at the absurd circular path of his destiny.

5

Mérida, May 1941
Seven months before the disappearance of Isabel Mola

Master Marcelo was pleased. With his new job as tutor to little Andrés he thought that, once and for all, he was done with the hard, icy roads he’d had to travel as a rural teacher.

But his son, little César, seemed taciturn and irritable. He was used to the nomadic life; he missed going from one place to the next. Perhaps, he told himself, they didn’t have much before, but his father sang some fabulous songs, and they could walk from town to town and talk for hours without getting out of breath. Occasionally they’d find a shed, or a shepherd’s house and something to eat. Any old thing: hot water with some Swiss chard; two hard black potatoes. To them, those were things worth celebrating.

And then there were the great discoveries. His father was an encyclopedia: he could confidently point out every one of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, from Equuleus to Virgo, and he talked about the size of the planets as if he had lived on each one. Other days he whiled away the hours reciting Góngora and Quevedo, playing both parts as they argued. He knew about music, mathematics, natural sciences, but none of them satisfied him enough.

César was a happy child. He faced hardships and stormy weather with a joyful spirit, attentive to a world that, with his father’s guidance, opened before his eyes as something complex, hard, sometimes cruel, but always marvelous.

“What you’re feeling is freedom,” lectured Marcelo. “Your body shivers with the morning cold, appreciates the first ray of sun that warms it; your stomach gets excited over a hot bowl of soup because it’s known hunger. And your eyes enjoy the vastness of the landscapes that man was yanked from only to be locked up in filthy factories. If every worker, every peasant, were able to reencounter that feeling of humanity, who do you think would want to continue being a slave?”

But then that woman had appeared in their lives. Isabel Mola.

Since meeting her, his father had transformed completely. He was always changing his clothes, spending money on shoes that were too tight, imposing absurd rules like washing with freezing cold water every morning and scrubbing the grime from behind his ears until they turned red. To top it all off, he had made Aunt Josefa come from town to take care of him.