“How young you are!” she went on, taking my hand in a way that frightened me. If she could have, she would have ripped my youth right off me.
Her eyes, normally inexpressive, gave me a hard look. She knew what I had, something difficult to steal. I escaped as best I could from the contact of her hand on mine and hurried upstairs so nobody else would detain me.
I really wanted to bolt the door, but there was no bolt. Suddenly I realized that all the rooms had bolts except this one. I had a shower to banish Alice’s lips from my hair, then pulled out the nightdress from under the pillow and, as usual, threw it over the armchair. I put on my sleeping T-shirt, turned on the little lamp and, from the small bookcase, took out one of Karin’s romantic novels, in Norwegian, with well-worn covers. I could hear the racket downstairs, the music, the voices, the front door opening and closing when somebody left, the cars starting up. The indecipherable pages of the novel were sending me off to sleep. My vision was moving over a story that was happening right before my eyes without my understanding it. I turned off the light, covered myself up to my neck and the noises didn’t bother me. They were happening in another world, a distant world full of strange people.
I didn’t wake up till the light came in through the window, filtering through the curtains since there were no blinds anywhere in the house. It was a pensive awakening. I’d had strange, heavy dreams, had felt the faces of Fred and Karin observing me, and Alice’s too. And Alice’s was the one that had made me most jittery. This uneasiness was with me all day long.
I went downstairs at nine when they were still asleep. Frida was already there tidying up things after the party with her usual stealth. In fact, I didn’t see her but intuited her presence in the good smell and the shine that had started to appear on the furniture and floor. I was getting my breakfast when her voice made me jump.
“I won’t be able to clean your room today. I’ve got a lot of work down here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I’ll make the bed later.”
Frida was taking more and more wineglasses out of the dishwasher and, set out all together on the kitchen bench, they created an intensely luminous effect that almost hypnotized me.
I was cold. It had cooled down a lot and the sun wasn’t warm enough any more; I’d have to buy myself some winter boots, socks and an anorak too. In the hall, by the front door, there was a built-in wardrobe with raincoats hanging inside, along with umbrellas, jackets and everyday shoes for going out into the garden or walking along the beach. I put on some well-worn sneakers of Karin’s. They were a size too big but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to catch a cold in my state. I also took a woollen jacket with pockets that drooped from all the times that Karin had stuck her hands in them. I buttoned it up well and started the motorbike. The four-by-four was too unwieldy to park and, besides, I didn’t dare to take it without Karin’s permission, as I had the impression that something had changed overnight and that we weren’t on the same wavelength any more.
The wind sneaked up under the edges of the woollen jacket and chilled my bones. I thought the bloody winding road was never going to end. I parked near Julián’s hotel because I wanted to tell him about the dog and, more than anything else, I wanted to talk with somebody who wasn’t from the Brotherhood. Brotherhood: someone had pronounced this word and it was the most fitting one for this tribe into which I’d fallen without meaning to.
The receptionist, a man with quite a large freckle on his right cheek, told me that Julián had gone out for a walk. I thought about where I’d like to go for a walk at such an hour and headed for the port. As I walked, the jacket started to annoy me, so I took it off and slung it across my shoulders and then I began to shiver. I walked around the port seeking Julián with my gaze, until I spotted a white hat among the catamarans and sailing boats.
“Hello,” I said.
Julián wasn’t surprised to see me.
“I’m taking in some vitamin D. Do you want some?” he said, making space for me on the stone bench he was sitting on.
I sneezed and put the jacket on again.
Julián
I hadn’t slept well, despite the sedative I’d taken. I took it because I had a bad conscience and knew that, at some point in the night, either in dreams or in my waking thoughts, Raquel was going to appear with her reproaches. My wife wouldn’t have consented to my involving this girl, without her consent, in such a twisted affair. She would have forbidden me from using her. She would have told me that I’d become like them, that I’d been contaminated by their evil.
Fortunately, Sandra was here, sitting next to me, but my remorse prevented me from looking into her eyes. I asked her how she was, watching the slight rocking of the Estrella, Heim’s boat, in the distance.
“Fine,” she said, and then went on to tell me more or less what I’d imagined was going to happen with the damn dog.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “They’ve got so much garden and the house is so big that a dog couldn’t bother them. It would keep them company and protect them. Then there’s Frida, who could feed it. I was destroyed by Karin’s reaction.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling truly sorry, sincerely repenting but without confessing to her that dogs of this breed were what Fredrik and Karin used in the concentration camp to terrorize the prisoners (and this was one of their best-known and most clearly identifying features, so her reaction confirmed who they were beyond all doubt). They were animals that the two of them killed when the Allies came in and they had to flee. Six pedigreed dogs, as strong and murderous as their owners, were left lying on the ground each with a shot in its head, as if they were the shades of Fredrik and Karin. I didn’t tell Sandra because I needed a little more of her innocence.
I felt much more of a swine and really wretched when she told me she was nervous because they were going to do an ultrasound test to determine the sex of her baby. Her fingers were interlaced and she was wearing large rings on both middle fingers. The sun fell on her red streaks that were now longer than they’d been when I first met her at the little house, but cut in layers as was the fashion among young people. The small nose ring was shining. She was so beautiful and natural, despite what she wore and did to herself, that I thought I didn’t deserve to be sitting beside her, didn’t deserve to speak to her or to look into her greenish eyes. I didn’t deserve her smiling at me or considering me a fellow creature. Although we were here together, I belonged to another planet, had belonged by force of circumstances to an unpardonable past. I could also be sitting beside a rose of velvety red petals or next to a rock or under a radiant star, but that wouldn’t make us the same. She told me that, deep down inside, she had the feeling that she’d be betraying her mother if she let Karin share this moment with her. Sandra had moral dilemmas that were so beautifully ingenuous that she made you want to hug her and protect her in a glass bubble.
“I could come with you, if you like. I’m not a woman, and you won’t be betraying your mother. I know about these things. I have a daughter and you could be my granddaughter.”
I shouldn’t have said that. Would I have treated my own granddaughter as I’d treated her? Would I have exposed her like this?
“Yes, I think you’re the person I want to come with me,” she said.
Before her appointment we went to the street where all the shops were, because she wanted to buy some winter boots. She got some black rubber-soled ankle boots, six pairs of special-offer socks and a capacious waterproof anorak. She put on a pair of the socks, the boots and the anorak, and bundled the trainers and woollen jacket she’d been wearing into a bag. I bought myself a three-quarter-length coat, which Sandra liked.
“Now we can go and do the ultrasound,” she said.
In her boots, she was as tall as me. She walked through the streets like a queen and I liked being at her side. Sometimes she sneezed as if she’d caught a cold. The wind was coming in from the sea, bearing some chilly drops with it.
When w
e got to the clinic, we sat down in the waiting room until they called her. I didn’t get up at first, but told her I’d wait for her there. She asked me to go in with her. It’s not so much that I was feeling uncomfortable but I was aware that I was in a situation that wasn’t mine to be in, and I didn’t think I was capable of giving her the support she needed.
We went into a very small room into which we only just fitted, Sandra lying on the examination table, the woman doctor sitting on a revolving chair next to her, and me in a corner holding the bag with the trainers and woollen jacket, Sandra’s backpack and, on top of all that, my hat.
“It’s a little boy,” the doctor said.
After a silence Sandra asked, “A boy? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Look, that’s the heart.”
I poked my head forward to look at the screen, but it was all very hazy. It could have been a baby boy or anything else. I must recognize that, for the moment, I forgot about everything, even who I was and what I was doing in that place.
“Is he okay?” Sandra asked.
“Perfectly fine,” the doctor answered, rubbing some absorbent paper over Sandra’s belly and whipping off her gloves.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Are you her grandfather?” the doctor asked mechanically.
We didn’t answer as we both thought it unnecessary to lie to somebody who wasn’t remotely interested in us. I held out the anorak to Sandra together with the backpack and carried her other bag myself.
“A little boy,” Sandra murmured.
I thought the best thing was to smile.
“I don’t even know what name to give him. I can’t stand people who seem to have a baby just to give it the name they’ve wanted to use for a thousand years.”
“Something will occur to you. You’ve got time. How about celebrating this? Let me invite you to lunch. We’ll go and find a nice restaurant.”
I was being foolish. There was no way I should have let myself be seen with Sandra in town. I relaxed and decided to trust in luck, in the chance that nobody who recognized me would see us together. Poor girl, she’d gone from the viper’s nest to the poisonous snake.
I asked her where she’d parked the motorbike and suggested going in my car to some inland restaurant, somewhere less touristy, where they served local food and, along the way, we could have a look at any interesting place that captured our attention. I asked her to wait for me in a terrace bar while I went back to the hotel to get my pills.
Roberto waylaid me on my way in to tell me that a girl had been looking for me, a girl somewhere between redhead and brunette, almost a punk.
“She’s not a punk,” I protested. “Punks wear chains, leather, crests. Anyway, there are hardly any punks around these days.”
Judging from the expression on his face, I deduced he found my remark amusing. I’d noted an increasing respect from him as if, beneath the wrinkles, in the bag of bones, he was discovering a life.
“That’s fine then. It looks as if you know who I’m referring to.”
I waved goodbye to him on my way to the lifts and again on my way out with the pills in my shirt pocket.
When I got back to the terrace where I’d left Sandra, I found her with her face propped in one hand and immersed in the deepest reverie. Anyone might have thought that this girl was bored, that nothing in her surroundings interested her, but I knew that the exact opposite was the case, that Sandra had a lot to think about. Right now, life was totally hers and, if she’d wanted to, she would have left the rest of us with nothing. She needed to concentrate on this power, so I sat there for a few minutes without speaking.
I asked her to drive. She got into the car humming.
“When we get back, I’ll phone my parents from some bar. I can’t keep this to myself. It’s impossible.”
“My mobile doesn’t work here, so I never take it out of the hotel.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not urgent.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to the hotel. It’s not safe,” I told her.
Sandra shrugged.
We had a good time. We went to see a few small villages and, next to a narrow road, we found a restaurant where they served oven-toasted bread sprinkled with olive oil on which we could spread delicious home-made aïoli. We got stuck into the cured sausages and salted fish while Sandra told me that she’d never been much good at studying or holding down a job, that both things bored her hugely. With great difficulty she’d completed a vocational training course in Administration and her father had managed to get her into the offices of a construction company. Before a week had gone by she was filled with great sadness, by six months she’d lost six kilos and, after a year, she couldn’t even understand television newscasts properly. Santi helped her a lot. He was a mid-level manager and one day he asked her to go and see the company doctor, who gave her sick leave for depression. Santi was very good to her, was loving and always unflagging in finding qualities in Sandra that she didn’t know she had. He advised her to make the most of her time off with the depression and then, at the end of her sick leave, to get out of there because it wasn’t her thing. She had a more artistic spirit. Not everyone in the world was apt for being closed up in four walls for eight hours at a time. In a nutshell, she wasn’t suited for anything.
“When I found out I was pregnant, I thought about aborting. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing having this baby. I don’t know if I’ll know how to raise him. If I can give him everything he needs. I don’t know if…”
“Don’t worry, children raise themselves and are capable of living in conditions you couldn’t begin to imagine. All you have to do is love them and feed them. I don’t think your family’s going to let you both die of hunger.”
Sandra was about to start crying and this alarmed me. She shook her head, challenging my words.
“This baby deserves to have an intelligent mother, a mother who’s got some qualifications and who’s capable of making beautiful pullovers.”
“This baby deserves to have a mother who doesn’t think such things about herself. You’re very brave, braver than you believe and, when some years have gone by, you’ll understand this. You’ll look back and see that you were splendid and that, with what you had, you did all you could and in the most honourable way possible.”
She looked at me with tear-filled eyes. She was bearing an emotional burden that was greater than I’d believed. I knew that better than she did. She couldn’t see, from the outside, the labyrinth she’d entered. This is why, when you get to my age, when we can see it from above, we want to go back and retrace our steps without stress or anguish.
I passed her my paper napkin so she could blow her nose.
“And now you’re going to have a slice of chocolate cake with cream, while I have a coffee with a bit of milk. And, as for tomorrow, God will tell us.”
All of a sudden, as if answering a question I’d unconsciously put to her, she told me that one of Fredrik’s and Karin’s friends was going to take the puppy. His name was Alberto, but she called him the Eel because of the slippery expression on his face. It was likely that her head too was exploding with information that she wasn’t a hundred per cent aware of. Having to process data and details she didn’t know how to fit together was probably making her anxious. We believe that we’re only harmed by things we know are harming us, but there’s a host of memories and images that cause great distress because we can’t make any sense of them.
“He says I have to go out with him some day.”
I was left staring at Sandra, trying to work out what the fellow wanted from her. From the way she’d described him, he didn’t seem to be the typical mindless fanatic. This one had the reek of a psychopath.
“You mustn’t trust him. Try to do what he expects you to do. What we don’t know is what he wants of you.”
“I’m going to tell him I can’t. I don’t want to talk with him. I’d rather go out with the Black Angel. I trust him more.�
��
The Black Angel? Black Angel? German, olive-skinned, my height, elegant, affable, apparently level-headed, intelligent, the brain of any organization. From what Sandra told me, he might have been Sebastian Bernhardt. No, that was impossible, as the official story had it that he’d died peacefully in Munich in 1980. Nevertheless, it might also have transpired that he’d been yearning for his marvellous Spanish refuge. These rats went in one hole and came out of another, and were well accustomed to dying and being resuscitated. It was a relief to know they weren’t eternal, though they’d tried to be, though they’d desperately been trying to get their hands on the elixir of eternal youth. And at what a price. Ask the prisoners, the victims of maniacs like Heim.
“Wait a moment. I’m going to fetch something from the car.”
Sandra didn’t answer. She was pensively nibbling her cake, little bits of cake, off the end of her spoon.
When I came back with Elfe’s photo album, she was still in the same position, thinking about her son, or the Black Angel, or the Eel, or maybe Karin or her mother, who wouldn’t have the slightest idea of the situation her daughter had got into.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 14