It was time I was on the road. I made the return trip more quickly. I hurried down the main stairway and opened the door, fearing I’d run headlong into someone coming in. I replaced the big flowerpot over the trapdoor, and went into the vegetable plot where I’d left the car. Luckily it was still there. Before going back into town, I went by the house that was supposedly Frida’s (perhaps the blonde who was with Heim right now), and saw Elfe’s other car parked there.
They’d got rid of Elfe and they could get rid of anybody else. They were still active and I hadn’t found a safe place to keep the album or my notebooks. They could ransack the car any moment and keeping them in my room was unthinkable.
Sandra
Sometimes solutions appeared in my dreams, because now I knew what I had to do and I wanted to do it. I downed a milk coffee as fast as I could. I had no desire to drag things out for ever with slow sips of tea. I told them I wanted to check out some prenatal classes, that I’d been awake all night thinking about it and I was leaving now. They didn’t raise any objections or even remind me that Karin had to go to the gym that afternoon. They were still mulling over the situation. Fine. I had the newspaper page in my anorak pocket. I could have sought Julián’s advice, but thought it was childish to consult him about every step I took, and anyway it would only prolong things.
Two hours later I was back. Fred was making more tea, which was as good as a meal for them, and, despite the coolness of the day, Karin was sitting outside. For a Norwegian the concept of coolness is not what it is for us. Neither Fred nor Karin were in long sleeves yet, or closed shoes, and they didn’t need any kind of heating.
I waited until we were sitting at the table, and then I got up and took a gift-wrapped object from my backpack. I held it out to Karin, saying that I’d never given them a gift and I hoped they’d like it. Karin unwrapped it and was rendered speechless when she saw before her the newspaper piece with their photo, now behind glass and in a lovely gilt frame that would go very well in their bedroom.
“Ever since I came across this photo I’ve been keeping it so I could get it framed. I wanted it to be a surprise, but I suppose you’ve already seen it. You’re famous! It’s incredible. You’re famous.”
They didn’t know what to say or what to think. I looked at them, beaming my best smile.
“Thank you,” Fred said. “It’s a very nice thought, but you shouldn’t have taken the trouble.”
Karin was very tough. She didn’t blush or apologize for poking around in my things.
“We’ll put it here,” she said, placing the photo on the mantelpiece. “It’s quite an old newspaper,” she added.
“I saw it by chance in the gym while I was waiting for you and took it. Someone must have left it there.”
Finally I was lying to them. In all likelihood they’d find me out. They were experts at interrogation and, when they were speaking with desperate people capable of anything in order to save themselves, you’d expect that they wouldn’t believe such lies, but neither could they be completely sure that I wasn’t telling the truth.
“It was a fluke,” I concluded, raising a bread roll to my mouth. “I couldn’t have imagined that they’d be publishing newspapers in Norwegian here. By the way, what does it say?”
“I was thinking about the design that could go on the baby’s pullover,” Karin said with an expression that put an end to the matter. She’d decided to believe me.
Julián
I didn’t know whether or not to tell Sandra what I’d found out about the Eel (that’s if I’d got the right man).
I’d discovered that he was avoiding her. On Thursday afternoon, when I was going to have a quick look at Otto’s and Alice’s house to see if Sebastian Bernhardt was there or if they were going out so I could follow them, two young men in a car I’d seen before pulled up in the small square of El Tosalet. When I turned into the first street on the right and was parking by a pinkish-coloured stone wall, I realized that it was one of Elfe’s cars, the newer one. I could watch what was happening in my rear-view mirror. I saw Martín getting out of the car with a small package in his hand. The other one, who must have been the Eel, stayed in the car. Judging by the route taken by Martín, he would have been going to the Norwegians’ house, and yet the Eel preferred staying in the car to going to see Sandra. In all likelihood Sandra would be there now, in this strange prison that she had imposed on herself with my help. She’d be waiting for the Eel to give some signs of life. When she heard the doorbell and footsteps that weren’t Fredrik’s or Otto’s coming inside, her heart would be filling with hope. The Eel must be thinking along these lines too, yet he stayed here, far enough away for her not to see him. It hurt me to think that Sandra was suffering because of this moron.
Ten minutes or so later, the moron got out to smoke a cigarette leaning against the car. He was nothing to write home about, very ordinary, if it wasn’t for something in his movements and features that made him sinuous and frightening. He had a long pale face with a receding hairline that would soon be leaving him without his fine light-brown locks. I thought him more than capable of leading on a girl like Sandra. He wasn’t the first I’d known who could turn from a toad into a prince, and still more so if he was kissing Sandra’s marvellous mouth.
If I was Sandra’s father and if I was young, I’d take him by the ear and make him go and see her, although in fact it’s impossible to disabuse anybody of self-deception. If you shed one illusion, another follows, as if there was a quota reserved for every human being. If the Eel didn’t betray Sandra, somebody else would, just as she had betrayed Santi and, if she hadn’t, another woman would have. It was better that such a contemptible creature wasn’t just a little contemptible, or only half contemptible, but that he should be totally contemptible, like the Eel.
When he’d finished his cigarette, he crushed the butt with his foot and ran his hands over his head, pushing the hair off his face. He breathed in deeply and gazed into the distance for a few minutes. This wasn’t the way of looking of someone who wasn’t thinking about anything. He was thinking with great concentration about something, barely moving a muscle. Then he got back into the car and spent a quarter of an hour writing in a notebook that he rested against the steering wheel.
I was patient enough to wait there almost an hour, until Martín returned. But before he entered my field of vision, the Eel put the notebook in his pocket, wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and put his head down as if he were sleeping.
I took a chance on following them. It was almost suicidal because they were young and agile. If they spotted me I was lost. They’d realize that I was tailing them. I’d only be safe if I caught them with their guard down, when they weren’t interested in being alert to anything. I followed at a good distance but having the same car constantly behind you can look fishy, so when I saw that they took the turn-off leading to Elfe’s and Frida’s houses, I stopped at the corner, parking between some other cars among the weeds of a vacant lot. It was too hazardous to enter such a narrow track. It would be a trap. If the car didn’t appear again within half an hour I’d leave. In the opposite case I’d follow them again.
The car was back within ten minutes, driven by the Eel, now alone. I’d surmised that at this hour of the afternoon they weren’t going to stay indoors until the next day and I was right. There was still plenty of daytime ahead for everyone. The Eel was driving like a madman. I only hoped that my contact lenses wouldn’t start giving me trouble in this sprint.
He parked next to the Bellamar restaurant, which was under lock and key until next summer, and went to sit on the sand quite close to the water’s edge, but not close enough to get wet. Then he lay back with his arms outstretched in an expression of freedom. I watched him from the car. After a few minutes a girl approached him, he got up and they hugged. They sat together contemplating the sea, her head on his shoulder. They had their backs to me and I couldn’t see if they were talking. I imagined they were.
T
hey spent half an hour like that, after which they strolled along the water’s edge. I felt enormously sad for Sandra and wondered if she should know this. Maybe it would help her get him out of her head. Maybe she should know that she was just another girl for him, that she’d been the port girl and this one was the beach girl, and there were probably more. The Eel took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. A couple of times he put his hands on her shoulders and she put hers on his waist. Shortly afterwards they said their goodbyes. The Eel walked back along the water’s edge until he was level with the car and then turned towards it. I pretended I was asleep, with my head on the wheel so he wouldn’t see me. When I raised my head again, he was sitting in his car with the door open and his feet dangling outside as he brushed the sand off them and put on his shoes and socks again. He then adjusted the rear-view mirror and I had the impression that he glanced towards me, but it was probably just my own apprehensive imagination.
Would that girl on the beach be one of them too? I wasn’t sure that I’d recognize her again if I ran into her. I stopped tailing him. Dusk was falling and night would soon hurtle down on us and I didn’t want to be driving in the dark around places I didn’t know. I’d have to call it a day and return to the solitude of my room, though I still needed to find a discreet place to park where my car wouldn’t be noticed, and that took time. All my valuables were in the car and I didn’t have the money to pay for a car park. Then again, my enemies would find me more easily there. As I parked, images of the lovebirds on the beach came into my head. There was something that didn’t make sense, something disconcerting in that farewell. Why didn’t they go off together? Who was preventing that?
Sandra
Julián signalled to me from his car when I was bringing Karin down to the gym in the four-by-four. He was saying that when I dropped her off he’d be waiting for me double-parked and that I should follow him because he knew where I could leave the car. Now he knew the town like the palm of his hand, including the most tucked-away streets. Thanks to the fact that there was never a free parking space near the gym, I was free for an hour and a half, more or less. Sometimes when I came back, Karin was already waiting for me at the entrance with her sports bag in her hand and hair still damp from the shower. On those occasions I explained that I couldn’t risk coming too early because then I’d have to drive round and round.
As soon as Karin disappeared through the gym door, I rushed off to follow Julián. I left the four-by-four in a small vacant lot and got into Julián’s car, which he parked somewhere else. He offered me water from the arsenal of bottles he had in the car. Besides water, he had notebooks, binoculars, a blanket, his hat, a cushion plus a beach towel and another towel from the hotel. He also had apples and the car smelt slightly sweet. I put the cushion behind me at kidney level and asked what he wanted. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me about Alberto, hoping he wasn’t going to get up my nose about that matter, which was exclusively my own business. But no, he said nothing about him. What he said was that they’d killed Elfe. He didn’t want to scare me, but he didn’t have the right to hide something like that from me either. Julián had met her by chance. She was the wife of Anton Wolf, who’d died of a heart attack while playing golf, a woman who was given to boozing big time and who talked a blue streak about things she should have kept quiet about, so they did away with her. She was a hopeless case, a nuisance, a danger. If they’d killed so many people who bothered them, why not Elfe too? Did I understand what he meant? Yes, I understood, although I thought they respected their own people.
“Elfe wasn’t like them any more. She was human dregs. They couldn’t stand her.”
Now Elfe’s lovely house was vacant and the cars and the dog had been taken to Frida’s house, although it seemed that at Frida’s everything was for everyone, because Martín and the Eel were using Elfe’s cars as well. I felt something bittersweet in my stomach. If Alberto wanted, I could be happy, but since he didn’t want it I was feeling a bit sorry for myself.
“Have you seen Alberto?” I asked.
“In passing. He was heading for the beach in one of Elfe’s cars.”
“To the beach?” Elfe didn’t matter any more. Their killing each other had stopped mattering, and even if they killed other people it stopped mattering. I was only wondering why Alberto hadn’t come to see me, or left me any sign, or sent me any note with Martín. Why?
I could see that Julián knew more than he was letting on, that he wanted to tell me but knew he shouldn’t tell me.
“I followed him to the beach.”
“Ah, did you?” I asked nervously, knowing that what was coming wasn’t good.
“As far as that locked-up restaurant, the Bellamar.”
“So he didn’t go inside the restaurant.”
“No, he stayed on the sand. He lay down fully dressed, without taking off his jacket, and opened out his arms, as if he wanted to purify himself.”
How I wished I’d been there and that he was embracing me with his body, purified or not. I knew it was an illusion and that I couldn’t really be in love with someone I’d seen so little of, without even knowing what he was like, or if he was a killer, or some poor sod. He’d only kissed me with a kiss I was afraid to forget. This story couldn’t end well. I couldn’t keep going with only the memory of a mouth. Everyone has lips and a tongue, and that was the terrible thing, because there was no other tongue like his and I’d probably never find another one the same. And, especially when I was lying on my bed or watching television with Fred and Karin, images kept coming to me of scenes that had never existed in which Alberto was naked and me too, and he took my head in my hands, gazed at me and then closed his eyes, because it was time to make real, deep love. Sometimes I imagined it in so much detail I couldn’t bear it and I had to get up and go out into the garden. And it was even worse in the garden, because at least when I was sitting with Fred and Karin I had to swallow my disappointment and struggle against it.
“And what happened on the sand?” I asked, not trusting Julián a hundred per cent for the simple reason that he had a different way of seeing things and clearer objectives than mine. My objective now was Alberto.
“When he was on the sand, a girl came along and they went for a walk.”
My heart flip-flopped.
“Just a walk?”
“I don’t know how to put it. You young people are different nowadays. Friends kiss like sweethearts. I wouldn’t know how to tell you what kind of relationship they have. They were together less than an hour.”
How ridiculous I was. A thousand times ridiculous. I meant nothing to him and that’s why he hadn’t appeared again; he didn’t want any commitment with me, and he might even be regretting what happened.
I couldn’t help feeling sad, and sadness put things in their place. The world suddenly stopped having this layer of meringue that had covered it since the port and the kiss. It was real and serious again. And in the real world terrible things happen, like them killing Elfe. You could almost say that Elfe’s death came to my aid, was balm for my spirit.
I got out of Julián’s car and into the four-by-four. All these precautions for what? I was fed up. I didn’t check the time. When I got to the gym, Karin was waiting for me looking really pissed off, but the one who was more pissed off was me. I didn’t open the door for her or help her to get in, but let her sort it out herself as I watched the birds flying by and the people walking past and my life escaping from me. My son kicked. At least I had him and all the compassion in the world for myself. I felt Karin’s twisted, difficult gaze on my profile. She couldn’t harm me now. Any harm she was capable of inflicting was nothing compared with what Alberto had done.
6
Eternal Youth
Sandra
Karin took some alarming turns for the worse. She’d have four good days then five bad ones, until Martín turned up with a packet about the size of his hand, which she bore off to her room. At first I didn’t make the connection
between the packet and Karin’s health, but one thing gradually led to another. My eyes saw that the packet arrived and that Karin improved, and then my mind got to work and I couldn’t help but suspect something fishy. What was in that damn packet? They never left it within my reach. If Karin was in bed when Martín arrived, he himself or Fred took it up to her, or she came down. If they were out, he opened the library-den with a key that he took from his pocket, left the packet inside, locked up and tucked the key away again. What at first had looked like simple habits started to turn into real mysteries: the uniform, the packet, the Gold Cross, the locked door. Maybe I’d been so busy looking for the Gold Cross that I hadn’t twigged to something so straightforward. This is what Julián must have meant when he told me over and over again to keep my eyes open, saying that you believe you’re not seeing anything when, actually, you’re seeing lots of things. No doubt there were a lot more interesting signs like the packets, which is why they were always on guard because of what I might have discovered. When they took me into their house, into the lion’s den, it wouldn’t have as much as entered their heads that someone as young as I was, so removed from their world, someone so lost she didn’t know what to do with her life, who vomited on the beach, all alone in the world when they found her, someone who hadn’t even gone to university – no, they couldn’t possibly have imagined that this somebody was going to bump into somebody else like Julián, that this Julián was going to pull back the veil, and that behind the veil lay the truth.
At the beginning of November, Karin had spent several rock-bottom days, extremely fatigued and with her arthritis giving her hell. She couldn’t even get up the stairs. Fred said they’d have to think about installing a chairlift, something that Karin had always refused to do because those chairs gave out a message of decrepitude. She spent the day in bed. I didn’t feel well either. I was coughing and sneezing and sometimes I thought I had a touch of fever.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 18