The Fencing Master (25 page)

"Please do."

The watery eyes were looking at him hard. "There's something ... innocent about you, if you know what I mean. Your behavior could be compared, although this may be going too far, with that of a cloistered monk who suddenly finds himself caught in the maelstrom of the world. Do you follow? You float through this whole tragedy as if you were adrift in some private limbo, indifferent to the imperatives of common sense and allowing yourself to be carried along by an extremely personal sense of reality, a sense that, of course, has nothing to do with what is actually real. And it is probably that very unawareness, if you'll forgive the term, that, by some strange paradox, has meant that we can have this interview in my office and not in the morgue. To sum up, I believe that at no time, perhaps not even now, have you fully realized the perilous nature of the situation you have got yourself into."

Don Jaime put the coffee cup on the table and looked at Campillo, frowning. "I hope you're not implying that I'm a fool, Señor Campillo."

"No, no, of course not." The policeman raised his hands in the air, as if trying to fit his previous words into their proper place. "I see I haven't explained myself properly, Señor Astarloa. Forgive my clumsiness. You see ... when there are murderers about, especially murderers who behave in such a cold-blooded, professional manner, the matter should be dealt with by the the competent authorities, who should be as professional as the murderers are, if not more so. Do you follow? That's why it's so unusual for someone as removed from this as yourself to become embroiled with murderers and victims and emerge without even a scratch. That's what I call being born under a lucky star, sir, a. very lucky star. But one day or another, luck has a habit of running out. Do you know the game of Russian roulette? They play it with those modern revolvers, I believe. Well, each time you try your luck, you have to bear in mind that there is always one bullet in the cylinder. And if you go on squeezing the trigger, in the end the bullet comes out and bang, end of story. You understand?"

Don Jaime nodded silently.

Pleased with his own exposition, the policeman lounged back in his chair, the smoking cigar between his fingers. "My advice to you is that, in the nature, you avoid getting involved. To be doubly safe, it would be best if you temporarily vacated your home. Perhaps it would be a good idea to go on a little trip after all this excitement. Bear in mind that now the murderers know you had those documents, and they will be very keen to silence you for good."

"I'll think about it."

Campillo held out his open hand, palm up, as if to say that he had given Don Jaime all the reasonable advice he possibly could. "I'd like to offer you some kind of official protection, but I can't. The country is in crisis. The rebel troops under Serrano and Prim are advancing on Madrid; they're preparing for a battle that could prove decisive, and it may well be that the royal family won't come back to Madrid but remain in San Sebastián, ready to flee to France. As you can imagine, given my position here, I have more important matters to attend to."

"Are you telling me that you're not going to catch these murderers?"

The policeman made a vague gesture. "In order to catch someone, you have to know who he is, and I don't have that information. Almost no one has escaped unscathed: two corpses, a poor wretch tortured almost out of his wits and who may not even live, and that's it. Perhaps a detailed reading of those mysterious documents would have helped us, but thanks to your, to put it kindly, absurd negligence, those papers have now disappeared, probably forever. My one card now is your friend Cárceles; if he recovers, he might be able to tell us how the murderers knew that he had the folder in his possession, what was in it, and, perhaps, the name we're looking for. Do you really remember nothing?"

Don Jaime shook his head, discouraged. "I've told you everything I know," he muttered. "I only read the documents once, very quickly, and all I can remember are a lot of official notes and lists of names, among them various soldiers. Nothing that made any sense to me."

Campillo looked at him as one might look at an exotic curiosity. "I assure you, Señor Astarloa, that you amaze me, word of honor. You really have no place in a country where the national pastime consists in firing a blunderbuss at the first person to appear around the corner, a country where two people having an argument will be immediately joined by two hundred more, who just want to find out what the issue is and then take sides. I would like to know..."

Someone knocked at the door, and a plainclothes policeman came in. Campillo turned toward him, nodding, and the new arrival approached and whispered a few words in his superior's ear. The chief of police frowned and shook his head gravely. When the other saluted and left, Campillo looked at Don Jaime.

"Our last hope has just disappeared," he said in a lugubrious tone. "Your friend Cárceles's suffering is over."

Don Jaime dropped his hands to his knees and held his breath. His gray eyes, surrounded by deep lines, fixed on those of the policeman.

"You mean...?"

The policeman picked up a pencil from the table and broke it in two. He showed the two pieces to the fencing master. "Cárceles has just died in the hospital. My agents were unable to get a word out of him, because he never recovered his reason: he died mad with horror." The policeman's fish eyes held Don Jaime's gaze. "You, Señor Astarloa, are now the last link in the chain."

Campillo paused and used a piece of the broken pencil to reach beneath the wig and scratch his scalp.

"If I were in your shoes," he added coolly, ironically, "I wouldn't stray too far from that precious sword-stick of yours."

In a fight with bare blades the same considerations do not apply, and one should rule out nothing as a means of defense, as long as it does not go against the laws of honor.

It was almost four in the afternoon when he left the police station. The heat was suffocating, and he remained for a moment beneath the awning of a nearby bookshop, distractedly watching the carriages traveling back and forth across the heart of Madrid. A few feet away, a peddler selling
horchata
was crying his wares. Don Jaime went over to him and asked for a glass of the milky liquid, which cooled his throat and offered some temporary relief. Beneath the sun, a Gypsy with a barefoot child clinging to her black skirt was selling bunches of wilted carnations. The little boy suddenly ran off after a passing tram packed with sweating passengers; the conductor shooed him away with his whip, and the child returned, sniveling, to his mother's side.

The cobbles shimmered in the heat. Don Jaime removed his top hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. He stood for a while, not moving. He didn't really know where to go.

He thought of going to the café, but he didn't want to have to answer any of the questions his colleagues would be sure to ask him about Cárceles. He realized that he had missed appointments with his students, and this thought upset him more than anything else that had happened in recent days. He decided that the first thing he should do was write letters of apology.

Someone amid the knots of idle men chatting nearby seemed to be watching him. It was a young man, modestly dressed, who looked like a workman. When Don Jaime turned to look at him, the young man averted his gaze and resumed the conversation he was having with four other men who were standing on the corner of Carrera de San Jerónimo. Worried, Don Jaime examined the stranger distrustfully. Was he actually being watched? That initial fear gave way to a deep irritation with himself. The truth was, he saw everyone as a possible suspect; he saw a murderer in the face of every person he passed and who, for whatever reason, held his gaze for a moment.

Leave his home, leave Madrid. That had been Campillo's advice. Save himself. In a word, flee. He considered all this with growing unease. The only conclusion he was capable of reaching was this: To hell with them, to hell with the lot of them. He was too old to go scampering off into hiding like a rabbit. It was undignified even to think of it. His life had been long and eventful; he had stored up enough memories to justify his years. Why at the last minute besmirch with the dishonor of flight the image he had managed to preserve of himself? Besides, he didn't even know from whom or what he was supposed to flee. He wasn't prepared to spend what remained of his life jumping at the slightest noise, running away from every unfamiliar face. And he was too old to start a new life somewhere else.

Again he felt that sharp pang of sorrow when he remembered Adela de Otero's eyes, the Marqués de los Alumbres's frank laugh, Cárceles's fiery harangues. He decided to block all that from his mind, for if he did not, he risked being dragged down by melancholy and uncertainty, and behind those two feelings he could glimpse fear, an emotion that he refused to acknowledge on principle. He was neither the right age nor of the right character to feel afraid of anything, he told himself. Death was the worst thing that could happen to him, and he was prepared for that. Indeed, he thought with a sense of profound satisfaction, not only was he prepared, he had already faced it unflinchingly the previous night, engaged in a seemingly hopeless battle. The memory of how he had acquitted himself made him half-close his eyes, as if his pride had received a gentle caress. The solitary old wolf had shown that he still had a few teeth to bite with.

He wouldn't run away. On the contrary, he would wait to see what happened. He remembered his family motto, "To me," and that was precisely what he would do; he would wait for them to come to him. He smiled. He had always been of the opinion that every man should be given the opportunity to die standing up. Now, when the future offered only old age, a decaying body, a slow decline in some home for the aged, or a despairing pistol shot, Don Jaime Astarloa, a fencing master of the French Academy of Arms, had the chance to play a trick on Fate by voluntarily embracing what anyone else in his place would recoil from in horror. He couldn't go to look for the enemy, because he didn't know who they were or where they were; but Campillo had said that sooner or later they would come to him the last link in the chain. He remembered something that he had read a few days before in a French novel: "Even if the whole world turned against him, as long as his soul remained calm, he would feel not a moment's sadness." Those wretches would find out what an old fencing master was made of.

The direction his thoughts had taken made him feel better. He looked about him with the air of someone throwing down a challenge to the universe; he drew himself up and set off home, swinging his walking stick. In fact, for those who passed him at that moment, Don Jaime looked like any other scrawny, bad-tempered old man dressed in old-fashioned clothes, out for his daily constitutional to try to warm his weary bones. But had they stopped to look into his eyes, they would have been surprised to discover there a gray glint of remarkable resolve, tempered like the steel of his foils.

H
E
dined on a few cooked vegetables and put the coffeepot on to boil. While he was waiting, he took a book from the shelf and sat down on the battered sofa. It took him a little while to find a passage that he had carefully underlined in pencil ten or fifteen years before:

Any moral character is closely bound up with scenes of autumn: those leaves that fall like our years, those flowers that fade like our hours, those clouds that flee like our illusions, that light that grows ever feebler like our intelligence, that sun that grows colder like our loves, those rivers that freeze over like our life, all weave secret bonds with our fate...

He read those lines several times, silently moving his lips. Such a thought could easily serve as an epitaph, he said to himself. With an ironic gesture, which he imagined only he could appreciate, he left the book open at that page on the sofa. The smells coming from the kitchen told him that the coffee was ready; he went in and poured some. Then, cup in hand, he returned to the living room.

Night was falling. Venus shone all alone outside the window, in the infinite distance. He took a sip of coffee, standing beneath his father's portrait. "A handsome man," Adela de Otero had said. He went over to the framed insignia from his former regiment in the Royal Guard, which had symbolized both the beginning and the end of his brief military career. Beside it hung the diploma from the French Academy of Arms, now yellow with age; the parchment was stained with the mildew of many winters. He could remember, as if it were yesterday, the day he received it from the hands of a jury composed of the most respected fencing masters in all Europe. Old Lucien de Montespan, sitting on the other side of the table, had looked at his pupil with pride. "The pupil outstrips the teacher," he would say to him later.

With his fingertips Don Jaime stroked a small vase containing an open fan; it was the only thing that remained to him of the woman for whom he had abandoned Paris. Where was she now? Probably a venerable grandmother, still sweet-natured and distinguished, who would be watching her grandchildren grow up while she busied her once beautiful hands with some embroidery, silently caressing hidden, youthful memories. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten the fencing master.

A bit farther along, on the wall, hung a wooden rosary, its beads worn and blackened with use. Amelia Bescós de Astarloa, the widow of a hero in the war against the French, had held that rosary in her hands until the day she died, and a pious family member had later sent it to her son. Looking at it provoked a strange feeling in Don Jaime: the memory of his mother's face had grown dim with the years; he could now no longer visualize it. He knew only that she was beautiful, and his memory preserved the touch of the fine, gentle hands that used to stroke his hair when he was a child, and the pulse in the warm throat against which he would press his face when he believed himself unhappy. His mind also preserved a faded image, like an old painting: the foreshortened figure of a woman bending over to stir the embers of a great fireplace that filled the walls of a dark, somber living room with a flickering, reddish light.