The Scent of Lemon Leaves

by Clara Sanchez

  “Might I know where we’re going?” I said.

  “To the lighthouse. It’s very nice there.”

  He looked at me sideways and I looked back at him.

  “I’d prefer to go somewhere more lively, where we can see people. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go into town,” I told him.

  Thank God he didn’t insist on going to the lighthouse. Why did he say that about the lighthouse? Would that have been intentional?

  We went to one of the pubs in the town and had to leave Bolita in the car.

  “How do you manage things with the dog?”

  “I try to make sure he doesn’t die of hunger.”

  He ordered a beer and I asked for a fruit smoothie and a slice of cake. I was starting to go hungry living with the Norwegians. They didn’t eat much, not enough, I’d say. The only decent meal of the day was breakfast. At their age, a feast probably meant certain death and sometimes they forgot that I was young. So, even though I was nervous about this encounter with the Eel, I guzzled the cake and the smoothie.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked him straight out. I didn’t want to beat around the bush, because he had more experience than I did of life in general, and situations like this in particular.

  Instead of answering, he got up and went over to the display case, which had some delicious-looking goodies inside. I wanted to make the most of this pause to think, but with a full stomach it was a very uphill job.

  He came back with a plateful of different sorts of little cakes and another smoothie. He ordered another beer. I was going to tell him that this was much better than the ice-cream parlour at the lighthouse. Luckily I stopped myself in time. The best thing would be to speak as little as possible.

  “I don’t want what you think I want. I just want to know you. You’re something new in our lives.”

  “And what did you think I was thinking?”

  “That I wanted to get into bed with you or something like that.”

  “Hold your horses!” I said with a start that pepped me up a bit. “If I thought that, I’d need to have reasons.”

  “And what reasons have I given you?”

  “Your eyes, your way of looking. You’re strange, and it’s impossible to know what you’re thinking.”

  “You see? You’re just like the rest of them, getting carried away by appearances.”

  “Yes, I’m just like the rest of them, so why do you say you want to know me?”

  “Okay,” he said, “what I want to know is how you ended up living with the Christensens.”

  “It’s very simple. I met them on the beach. I’m alone and they need me. I’m glad to have the money they pay me. That’s all.”

  “That’s all? There’s no one else?”

  I sipped the smoothie so I wouldn’t have to answer.

  “How come you gave that dog to Karin? Precisely that dog?”

  “I’ve asked myself that over and over again since that day. I don’t understand anything and that’s the truth.”

  “Yes, you do understand. Don’t try to fool me.”

  “And if I’m trying to fool you, what do you plan to do to me?”

  “The worst thing you can imagine.”

  “I’m not scared of you or of Martín either.”

  “Well, you should be. Don’t act too smart. I know what I’m talking about. Do you want something else, something savoury?”

  “I’d like to go for a walk. I’ve eaten too much.”

  The Eel wasn’t as terrible as I’d imagined, based on present appearances. Though he said these things, I didn’t believe he was capable of killing me and I’d even say there were moments when he gave the impression of looking at me with concern. In any case, I couldn’t let my guard down and had to be very mindful of Martín’s words.

  We wandered round the port. At one point we stopped and stayed there contemplating the sea. We looked at each other from the corners of our eyes, he at my profile and I at his. The sky was full of stars. It was a marvellous moment to be with someone I cared about.

  “Why did Martín write the note and not you?” I asked, sitting on a stone bench.

  “Because… Never mind.”

  “Is he a good friend of yours, Martín?”

  “We’re in the Brotherhood. We’re more than friends. A friendship can be broken but not the bonds of the Brotherhood. You should know, for your own good, that Martín isn’t as patient as I am. I don’t know if you get what I’m saying.”

  “Well, it’s difficult to understand everything. I only just arrived.”

  “I know. What I don’t know is whether you know what that means. Why do you think we’re together? Have the Christensens explained that to you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I thought you got on well, that you helped each other and that people try not to be alone. Don’t tell me it’s a cult.”

  “Something like that. Oh God!” he burst out. “Why didn’t you just stay home with your husband, your partner, or whatever he is?”

  “I’m going to be a single mother,” I said.

  And then the Eel stroked my hair, moved swiftly over to me and, without giving me time to think, kissed me.

  I didn’t react. It all happened so quickly and unpredictably. I was embracing him for at least a minute. I noticed his lips, his tongue, his saliva, his hands on my head, his smell. When he moved away from me, his hair lightly caressed me and mine lightly caressed him. He moved away slowly. I still had the impression of his kiss, a long, warm impression. My mouth wasn’t the same any more, the Eel wasn’t the same and the world had suddenly changed. I didn’t speak, stayed quiet because I couldn’t be angry, because the kiss was the kiss I needed, the kiss I needed exactly as he’d given it to me and never, not in my wildest dreams, even if I lived a thousand years, would I have imagined that the person responsible for giving me that kiss would be the Eel.

  I didn’t look up. Also looking down, he said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. You’re gorgeous.”

  I still didn’t make a sound, waiting for a cataclysm to shake me out of my stupor. Or a second kiss.

  “Would you kill me now?”

  “No, and not before either, but you mustn’t tell anybody I said that. And when I say not anybody, I mean not a single solitary soul. Understood?”

  I nodded. I looked at him. He wasn’t the Eel any more and this change flustered me. Before he was a terrible being, an enemy, and now he wasn’t. I felt attracted to him, to his jacket of a blue as dark as the night which had just fallen on us, to his creased shirt. I would have walked back to the car through the port clinging to him. I would have liked him to put his arm round my shoulders and press me against him. It was madness. What had happened was madness. It might have been the magic of the night, the stars above us, the lights of the port, the sound of the sea, the breeze, being alone together…

  “This is madness,” he said, this time daring to look me in the eye, unflinchingly.

  Now I liked his eyes. I liked his almond-shaped eyes and that slippery look. I had nobody near me who could make me feel something like this. I hadn’t even felt this with Santi, which should have been so easy. The Eel hadn’t needed to do anything, except for not resisting, so I didn’t understand why it had to be him and not the father of my baby that had lifted my feet off the ground. It wasn’t Santi’s fault. It was mine, because then I wasn’t what I was now.

  In the car we were on the point of kissing again, but we didn’t. We were letting a good moment escape, and who knows if it would be repeated.

  “Do you think I should give in, that I should join the Brotherhood?”

  He took a minute to respond, pretended to be concentrating on his driving and then said somewhat curtly, “What matters is what you think. No one called you. You got into this all by yourself.”

  I got slowly out of the car. This might never happen again. And I wasn’t the same person who’d left Villa Sol a few hours earlier. I was returning from a long journey a
nd what I’d left behind here seemed less important now.

  Fred and Karin were waiting for me in the living room. They were curious to know how it had gone.

  “Goodnight. I’ve had a big dinner,” was my only answer.

  When I got to my room I lay on the bed. I could see stars through the window and, beneath the stars, the palm leaves were swaying. I was slightly giddy. It was something like floating.

  Julián

  Sandra probably wouldn’t turn up for our appointment after what had happened the other day. If I was her I wouldn’t come. Why would I want to see somebody who’d deceived me and put me in danger? Yet it was my obligation to be here in case she did decide to come. The only thing I could do was to show her the deep contempt I had for myself.

  I didn’t get out of the car, didn’t want to see the face of the waitress in the ice-cream parlour before I had to. I didn’t want to take her into account but couldn’t avoid it. You can’t avoid seeing, hearing or feeling liking or antipathy for people you come across, five-minute people. You can’t be dead before you die, however much you might wish it. So when I heard the wheels of Sandra’s motorbike on the pebbly ground, I beeped my horn lightly, to get her attention. My heart gave a dangerous leap of joy.

  Sandra appeared and came over to me. I opened the door so she could get in.

  “Is it full inside?” she asked.

  “I can’t stand that waitress. I’m offended by her way of looking at me as if I’m a pervert.”

  Sandra laughed half-heartedly. Her face was gaunt. She’d lost at least three kilos and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to take her so she could eat something. I only trusted the bar with the set menu and this place, because we ran the risk of being seen together in any other establishment in town.

  “But, on second thoughts, I’m hungry,” I said. “I could do with a toasted sandwich and a bit of chocolate cake. They don’t make them anywhere else like they do here.”

  “Whatever you want. I’m not hungry.”

  It soothed me to be sitting at our table by the window. It gave our meeting a feel of normality.

  “It looks like the Norwegians don’t keep a very full fridge.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked as she unenthusiastically picked up the plastic-coated menu. We knew by heart what they served in the ice-cream parlour, but we always spent quite some time perusing the menu as we spoke.

  “Pregnant women put on weight. They don’t lose it.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The waitress interrupted us, glaring at me with her customary hostility.

  “Espresso coffee for me and, for the young lady, a toasted ham sandwich with wholemeal bread, a slice of chocolate cake and a smoothie.”

  Sandra didn’t want the chocolate cake and the waitress crossed it out, aiming a compassionate look at her.

  “They’re sucking your blood. If you stay in that house, you’re going to fall ill,” I told her.

  “No, it’s not that. I’m nervous. Well, nervous isn’t the word. I’m on edge, in suspense.”

  “In suspense about what?”

  Sandra went quiet. The waitress brought paper napkins and cutlery.

  “In suspense. I’ve got the impression that my life, my real life, is going to begin any time now. This journey has been very important for me. Imagine, I believed I was going to spend the whole time lying in a hammock, and now look…”

  I listened vaguely. Deep down, I was thinking about Sebastian, about how I could locate his house without having to use Sandra.

  “The puppy’s fine,” she burst out.

  It vexed me that I took a minute to twig which puppy she was talking about. She looked at me with her greenish-brown eyes wide open. They’d got bigger and had lost some of their joy, but had gained in intensity. The puppy reminded us of the bad thing I’d done. I was so engrossed in the turn things had taken that I suddenly noticed the things we’d ordered on the table. They’d apparently appeared by magic.

  “And how do you know?”

  She kept looking at me, giving me time to remember and pick up the thread. According to what Sandra had told me, the Eel had taken the puppy the night of the party and, besides, he’d wanted to go out with her one day.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been seeing that fellow, the Eel.”

  She nodded, her expression transformed.

  “He’s called Alberto,” she said, nibbling apathetically at her sandwich.

  “So, it’s Alberto then.”

  “He came to pick me up at the Norwegians’ house and brought the dog so I could see him. He’s got really tubby. He’s very well looked after.”

  “So you think he’s a good guy because of that?”

  Guy? I’d been picking up Sandra’s vocabulary. I felt odd saying the word “guy”, as if I was turning into someone else.

  “I haven’t seen him since. He hasn’t been there or left me a note. Nothing,” she said, looking gloomy.

  This time I didn’t even need a minute to understand. Her eyes were shining dangerously.

  “You’re not scared any more.”

  She shrugged. She’d finished the smoothie and had only nibbled at the sandwich.

  “Things have changed. Those people can’t hurt us any more. At best, the least old of that lot will last five years more.”

  I had to raise my voice a little to get a reaction out of her. The waitress, who was keeping an eye on me from the bar, would think we were a couple having a tiff.

  “Things go on being exactly the same, or worse, and precisely because both they and I have one foot in the grave, old scores need to be settled.”

  She looked at her watch. She was wearing a large watch with a wide blue leather band and she had lovely hands. There was usually nothing languid about Sandra, yet now she was one step away from being so.

  “You don’t understand… Alberto would never let them harm me.”

  “Why, if I may ask?”

  “He kissed me in the port.”

  That was the end of the thread. She needed to tell someone that she’d fallen in love. She preferred forgiving me to not being able to say it.

  “And did you kiss him back?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you feel?”

  “That everything that’s happening to me is the best thing in the world.”

  “Everything? Now we’ve really got a problem,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  “But I haven’t seen him since and I don’t know where to find him. Why is he doing that to me?”

  Until that point, I’d been concerned about Sandra. But now she had me really alarmed, especially because I found her a little distant. She was moving away from me and our objectives. I told her that by the time she saw him again she would probably have come to her senses and realized it had all been a mirage. I told her that soon she’d find a man who really loved her. And I told her that, maybe, after all her recent experiences, she’d be able to see her baby’s father with new eyes. I told her that the Eel was no good for her, even if his name was Alberto and they’d kissed. I told her that he’d taken advantage of her because she was alone and needed to be loved. But Sandra didn’t hear me.

  What could Alberto’s real feelings towards Sandra be? However cold the blood he had running in his veins, he might have fallen in love with her. Only a fool wouldn’t fall in love with this big warm soul, her clear gaze, her sincerity and her strength. She was infinitely better than all of us put together, and the fact that the Eel could have got so far inside her heart was worrying, because it’s very difficult to defend oneself against love. He’d managed to get Sandra still more entangled in the spider’s web. If Sandra stayed in the group because she’d fallen in love with one of them, it would be very hard to get her out again.

  I left this encounter more upset than ever, and with more feelings of guilt than ever, because, if I hadn’t behaved like such a moron, Sandra wouldn’t have felt so helpless and wouldn’t have thrown herself into
the arms of anybody.

  Sandra

  I think that – just as I was becoming one of them – Fred and Karin were gradually becoming wary of me, prey to doubts if not paranoid. I played at acting in the most ingenuous way I could. I played at being the way I was before I met them, before knowing who they were. I tried to bamboozle them. What did I have to do with their nightmare world? They’d found me on a beach, I was pregnant (and what mother would put her own child in danger?) and I’d gone to live with them because I urgently needed money and I was alone. These were sufficient reasons for them not seeing clearly that I’d found them out. At the end of the day, our relationship had begun purely by chance, with a fluky meeting on the beach. That’s why I didn’t realize that the venom of suspicion had really got into their heads until I came back from my last meeting with Julián.

  When I arrived, announced by the noise of my motorbike, Fred was there on the ground floor, watching television as usual, while Karin was reading one of her romantic novels. When she raised her eyes from the pages, I found her expression strange but, since I still didn’t know anything, I stayed there for a while talking about how good it had been walking around on this marvellously cloudy afternoon and how I’d felt the air on my face while I was riding the motorbike. To tell the truth, since my encounter with Alberto I’d been producing lots of happiness hormones, so I wasn’t able to interpret Fred’s semi-smile and Karin’s penetrating stare. They were looking at me from a different angle of their brains. But there came a point when my bladder was about to burst and, instead of using the downstairs bathroom, I preferred to go up to mine and, while there, have a shower. Then the world changed.

  I went up to my room humming some song or other, softly because I can’t keep a tune, and took off my boots and pants. I mechanically opened up the wardrobe to get out a clean T-shirt. Something in the mirror on the wardrobe door caught my attention or, rather, stopped me dead in my tracks. I was paralysed because I had to concentrate to the maximum in order to take in the situation. I felt a fiery heat shooting up from my neck to my face in something like shame or fear, and I decided to stop looking in the mirror and to check the bed where what was reflected in the mirror was located.