Read Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel for Free Online Page A

headache. The trip filled with curves, her tiredness, and the smell of burned gas had turned her stomach. She sat on a stone overgrown with moss, and she hunched forward, pressing on her belly.
    It had been more than ten years since she’d returned to that area, and in her memories everything was less hostile, more familiar: she remembered that as a girl she would dip her feet into the river’s crystalline waters, hunt salamanders and newts in the swamps, or watch in amazement how the blackbirds flew underwater to catch small insects. It was as if all that had disappeared. Now she was cold, she didn’t feel well, and she realized that the knot in her stomach wasn’t just from carsickness. She hadn’t even thought about what she was going to say to her father.
    She imagined him as he had been ten years earlier, in his worn leather apron and wearing plastic goggles to protect his eyes from flying metal shards. He would probably be sitting on the stool beside the entrance to his metalworking shop, with the door open despite how cold it must already be in San Lorenzo.
    As a girl, María hated the dirtiness of the forge, the smell of the tinctures he used to treat the metal, the suffocating heat of the furnace. She didn’t like her father to caress her because his hands were rough and full of cracks and cuts; she couldn’t stand him holding her against his firm, hard body because it was like hugging a granite wall that smelled of welding.
    She wondered what would be left of that memory, and she was afraid of what she might find.
    When the taxi driver said that they could continue, María was about to ask him to turn around, but she didn’t do it. She huddled into the backseat, lulled to sleep by the heat that steamed up the windows, while she tried not to think about anything.
    Half an hour later, the cabbie woke her up.
    “We’re here. Honestly, I don’t know what you are looking for here. This place is like a cemetery.”
    María forced a smile. She was wondering the same thing herself. She got out of the taxi. A thick drop tangled into her eyelashes. Then another split her lips, and a few more struck the palms of her hands.
    She stayed by the hard shoulder until the taxi disappeared behind a curve, on its way back to the valley.
    She was in no hurry as she went up the slope toward the group of houses that rose around the church’s bell tower. As she passed a fence, the dogs that were indolently dozing awoke suddenly and lunged against the fence like a barking pack. They seemed to be accusing her of something. It was the way small towns marked her as an outsider.
    She was no longer one of them. You could see it in the way she spoke, dressed, and behaved. Curiously, she hadn’t noticed that obvious fact before then. Perhaps in that instant she was realizing that it wasn’t places that fade in our memory, but what we carry inside us. It wasn’t San Lorenzo that had changed. It was she.
    A bolt of lightning lit up the valley briefly and intensely, and in the distance the murmur of thunder was heard. It started to rain hard. It was quickly getting dark, and the path was increasingly muddy.
    She got back on the road, and a few yards farther along, through the sheeting rain, a modest house appeared, much smaller than María had remembered it. Its roof was dotted with new tiles that stood out from the old ones because of the shine the rain gave them. The wooden fence had been mended, and the cherry trees looked neat, their branches pruned.
    She opened the gate to the yard, hesitantly. The main door to the house was closed. The rain slipped down its wooden surface. She stood there for a minute holding the door handle, not sure if she should knock. She felt like an intruder. Then she heard footsteps dragging along the floor inside. She stepped away from the door, and it opened slightly with a grunt.
    An impossible being appeared before her shocked eyes.
    Gabriel was a man trapped in a prison of flesh, a deformed body