Free Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel by Víctor del Árbol Page B

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