The Scent of Lemon Leaves

by Clara Sanchez

  “Okay, let’s have this party in peace. I’ll treat you well and you do what I tell you. Let’s see, one arm here… The princess is ready,” she said, making me sit on the edge of the bed. Frida was very strong. The muscles in her arms were like balls.

  Since, in her opinion, the mountain boots didn’t go with the floral dress I’d worn for Karin’s birthday, we settled for the platform-sole sandals, though this was no weather to be wearing them. But I already had the flu, so what the hell? Then she went to the bathroom and came back with some blusher and a brush, cussing me all the while.

  “Now you look halfway normal.”

  She called Fred and the two of them got me downstairs. I looked for Alberto but couldn’t see him. It was then that Karin cynically enquired whether I was all right. I was shivering and she put her shawl that reeked of perfume around me.

  “It’s always colder in the cellar,” she said.

  I didn’t like hearing about the cellar. I wasn’t mad about cellars. In films the cellar’s where the worst things happen. It’s where somebody is locked up or where they kill somebody or where they hide the murder weapon. In all the time I’d been living in that house, I’d only been in the cellar once, and I never went back.

  The only good thing was that they were all being nice to me. They asked how I was feeling and the Black Angel came over and kissed my hand, after which he held it for a moment in his.

  “She has a temperature,” he said to someone. “I believe she is not well enough to go through with this ceremony. She will not understand anything.”

  “The time is ripe, believe me,” Fred said.

  Between the two of them, Frida and Martín got me down to the cellar.

  It was certainly colder there than upstairs. It was a dank cold.

  They all took up position around the sun engraved in the floor and stuck me in the middle. I saw Alberto, who was staring at me and very serious. Alberto had come. He was here. I ran my hands through my hair in a reflex gesture of trying to look as good as I could. I couldn’t explain to myself how it was that I hadn’t seen him before when I was seeing him now. Then the Black Angel (and now I understand why I got the idea of calling him that) pronounced something that sounded like a prayer. It went more or less like this: “Sun of wisdom that illuminates the true world, the world of spirits, through you Sandra consecrates her soul. You are concealed behind the golden sun that lights the material world. We wish to ascend to your light, to the light of wisdom, so we may reach illumination and true life. Beyond the heavens and in the depths of the heart, in a small cavity, the universe reposes, a fire burning within and radiating out in all directions. Darkness disappears and night and day no longer exist. Beyond the rampart that sustains the world there is no night, no day, no old age, no death or pain, no good deeds or bad deeds. Beyond the rampart the blind man sees, wounds are healed, illnesses are cured and night becomes day.”

  I started to tremble and thought I was going to faint, which obliged them to cut short the ceremony. It seemed that the most important part had been completed.

  The Black Angel laid his hands on my shoulders.

  “You belong to us and we belong to you. You will know our secrets and we shall know yours.”

  “All right, thank you,” I answered, not having a clue what to say. They all looked at me as if expecting something more. Maybe I should have prepared something, but nobody had said anything about that or, if they had, it hadn’t sunk in.

  “I’m sorry,” I added. “I am very happy but I’m cold.”

  Alberto took me by the arm and helped me to go upstairs to the entrance hall. Everything was set out for them to have a few drinks. Alberto didn’t stop but kept pushing me upstairs.

  “Now, get into bed and don’t talk to anyone,” he said. “Rest as much as you can.”

  “I love you,” I said, answering the ghostly I-love-you of some days back. Days? How much time had gone by?

  When we got to the door of my room, Frida was there watching us.

  “I’ll take care of that,” she stated, pulling me out of Alberto’s hands. “You get downstairs with the others.”

  Alberto didn’t let me go. I felt how his hands stayed on my arms till the last moment. Then I felt how they’d gone and I felt utterly alone.

  Frida dragged me over to the bed and I half lay on my side without even taking my sandals off.

  “I need to see a doctor,” I told her.

  “Don’t worry. One will be coming up later.”

  She was good enough to cover me with a blanket and then she went out. This time I didn’t hear her turning the key in the lock. Not that there was any need to. Where would I go in the state I was in? How was I going to escape when I was in the midst of such a concentration of enemies? I curled up and tried to forget the whole thing, although something was bugging me and it was this story about a doctor coming up to see me.

  I must have been fast asleep, because it was very difficult for me to move and open my eyes. I was dreaming about people talking. And, when I finally managed to get away from those voices and wake up, I thought I was going into another nightmare when I saw looming over me the faces of Fred, Karin and the Butcher, who was preparing an injection. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening to me. I laughed and, in a matter of seconds, switched to crying. I was burning.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “My dear,” Karin said, “this will make you better. He knows what he’s doing.”

  No! No! No! I screamed with an anguish that, before this, I’d only ever known in nightmares. No! I screamed at the top of my voice and woke up. This time I really was awake. I pinched myself to make sure. Sometimes I’d pinched myself in dreams when I wasn’t sure if I was asleep or awake, but never consciously like now, except that now I felt so bad that I had my doubts as to what my real state was.

  Needless to say, Fred, Karin and the Butcher were standing there looking at me:

  “Dear girl,” Karin said. “You’ve got a high fever.”

  The Butcher stretched out his hand towards me. It was enormous and full of tendons, like tree roots. I wanted to hide under the blanket, I wanted to turn invisible and I wanted to go missing. He pulled the blanket slightly aside, looking for my arm, but my arms were glued to my body, like two bars of iron. Fortunately he didn’t try to separate them. He took my wrist with finger and thumb. I closed my eyes and started thinking about possible names for the baby.

  “She’s got a high temperature. Thirty-nine point five degrees. You’ll have to put her in a bath.”

  “Very well. I’ll tell Frida to get it ready,” Karin said.

  I didn’t open my eyes till they all went out.

  Then I got changed as best I could. I put on my trousers, mountain boots and a pullover. I put my documents in the backpack. Then I threw up in the bathroom, on the floor I think, and washed my face with cold water.

  I opened the window and threw my backpack into the garden. Now what? My head was whirling. I put my hand in my trouser pocket and tightly squeezed the little bag of sand Julián had given me. I could try to get hold of one of the branches near the window and swing down on it. How easy everything seems in your imagination, and how hard to do. The branch wasn’t that close and the jump didn’t seem a sure thing either, but I wasn’t going to let them give me a bath. What kind of bath? A bath of water? Coming out of the Butcher’s mouth, the word “bath” sounded terrifying. I went back inside, wet a towel and put it round my head. Fever, go away, I said. I sat on the window sill. From up there I could see a shadow with a red point, like a burning cigarette, moving around below. I waited for it to go and then started trying to reach the branch. Until some arms surrounded me from behind. I tried to get them off me. Then they felt familiar.

  “Take it easy. Don’t even think about jumping. You could hurt yourself.”

  It was Alberto, and if I couldn’t trust Alberto, life wasn’t worth living. I went back into the room. The wet towel had helped and I w
as thinking more clearly.

  “I want to get away. They’re going to give me a bath.”

  “It’s to get your fever down.”

  “I’ve got it down. Help me. I’ve got to get out of here. I need to see a proper doctor.”

  He looked at me, very serious and sad.

  I took off the towel and ran my hand through my wet hair.

  “Okay. I’m going to help you get down. First I’ll jump. Then I’ll bring the branch closer to you. After that I’ll get you from underneath by the legs. Let’s go.”

  Alberto jumped for the branch and then dropped to the ground. I was scared the branch would break, but it didn’t. Frida must be coming now, although she might have been waiting for all the guests to leave before giving me the bath. So when I found the branch with my fingers, I grabbed hold of it as tight as I could. With my last bit of strength I hung there swinging. In those few seconds, my body, my joints, my vertebrae were all stretching and it was a very nice feeling, but when I dropped, Alberto couldn’t get hold of me in time so I fell and hurt my side. Then I panicked.

  Alberto acted fast. He slung my left arm round his neck and put his arm round my waist. He was taking my weight. We left quickly. He’d parked the car some distance from the house and all the way there I was painfully repenting everything I’d done. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d only put myself in danger, but I’d involved an innocent creature whom I was supposed to be protecting.

  We went into the hospital and, after Alberto explained to a nurse behind a counter that I had fever, possibly flu, that I was pregnant and that I’d fallen, she sent us to a waiting room. Five minutes later Alberto said he had to go. He told me not to worry about anything because they’d look after me here and he’d come back as soon as he could. Then I closed my eyes and everything started to spin.

  Julián

  Even after everything that was happening to me, the last thing I would have expected was to see the Eel coming into my room. I nearly died on the spot. All of a sudden I heard someone fiddling with the lock on the door and, before I could even get out of bed, I saw him coming towards me. I saw death coming for me. I was leaning back on two big pillows, in my pyjamas and thick-lensed glasses, reading a newspaper. I’d had a light dinner and had taken my seven mandatory pills. I was so relaxed it was difficult for me to make any movement.

  “Take it easy. I just want to talk to you.”

  The Eel watched how it took me an eternity to pull the blankets off, stick my spindly shanks out of the bed and get my feet into the slippers that were so precisely positioned I didn’t have to look when I put them on. I didn’t want my feet to be cold when I got up to go to the toilet.

  “You’ve got to hurry,” he said. “You must go to the hospital. Sandra’s there. She’s in a bad way.”

  He spoke like a telegram so I wouldn’t get confused by any superfluous words, so I’d understand him as clearly as possible.

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to grasp the situation.

  “I took her there. She had to escape from Villa Sol, through the window.”

  “Through the window?”

  At last I was waking up. I could picture the windows on the second floor where Sandra’s room would have been.

  “Through the window,” I repeated. “And you, how did you get in here?”

  “Very easily. There’s no security in these places. Come on, get dressed and go to the hospital. I have to get back to the Christensens’ house. Will you do that?”

  I was getting the shirt I’d worn that day from the coat hanger. I had to take off my pyjama top in front of him and of course he stared at my scrawny arms. I thought I saw a flash of compassion and admiration on his face. When he got to my age he’d realize that you simply do what you can at each moment of your life, and there’s nothing heroic about that.

  To speed things up, he helped me to put my shirt on.

  “Where are your shoes?” he asked, looking around as I took my pyjama pants off.

  “In the bathroom.”

  I always left them there with the socks inside.

  “She hurt herself when she jumped. She hit the ground in a bad position,” he informed me as he brought my shoes to me. Then he hurried out of the room, giving me no time to ask anything.

  I only had to put my lenses in. I ran the shaver quickly over my face and took two doses of my medication with me.

  It was a damp night. When I got to the hospital, they told me Sandra was being examined. They asked if I was a relative of hers and I said I was. I told them I’d be looking after her.

  I knew what an examination in the casualty department consisted of. They put you in a compartment boxed off by curtains. They take blood and urine samples for testing and put you on a drip. I asked if I could go in to keep her company, but they wouldn’t let me. Suddenly I was afraid that she was unconscious and they hadn’t realized she was pregnant. They might take an X-ray. They might be that stupid. I couldn’t let that happen. Then again, the Eel hadn’t told me she was unconscious. In any case, I went over to the counter.

  “Please tell the doctors that this girl’s pregnant.”

  “They know their job,” the nurse answered. “Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry, don’t worry. The worst things in life happen because you don’t worry. I sat in the waiting room. Why had she escaped through the window? She should have left through the door ages ago. Not through a window.

  I was so anxious to know how she was, so wanted some doctor to come out and speak to me, that I didn’t dare to go and get myself a coffee from the machine in the corridor. When I finally decided to go, I told the staff at the counter what I was doing, but there was no guarantee that they’d actually listen to me. So when I came back, at the risk of being considered a pain in the neck, I asked if they’d called me while I was at the coffee machine.

  “I’ll check,” the nurse said, picking up the phone. “Yes, you can go in.”

  I downed the coffee in one gulp, burning my tongue, and went into the place I’d seen from a stretcher some weeks earlier.

  Sandra was surprised to see me.

  “Have you been conscious all the time?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  “They haven’t taken any X-rays, have they?”

  She shook her head and lay there looking at me with immense tiredness.

  “I’m OK and the baby is too. They’ve got my fever down and now I only need to rest. It’s because of all the stress. And you, why are you here? How did you know?”

  “The Eel told me. He’s very worried about you.”

  “Where is he?” she asked with her typical apprehension.

  I shrugged. In fact, I didn’t know.

  Before we left the hospital, they did an ultrasound scan, just to be sure. We left at six in the morning after she checked herself out. They’d got her fever down and started her treatment, which mainly consisted of resting a lot.

  In the car she told me she had absolutely nothing with her. The backpack into which she’d put the money Fredrik had been paying her and a few other items had been left lying in the garden. I told her not to worry and asked her what we should do. She said we should go to my room via the alternative route in the hotel, but first we needed to stop at an all-night pharmacy to get her the syrup they’d prescribed and a toothbrush.

  I did everything she asked, wondering how we were going to deal with the double bed in my room. If I’d been younger, I would have been fine with a bed made up on the floor with a folded bedspread and a couple of blankets, but I wasn’t up to such things any more. If I tried that now, I’d be getting up with devastated bones and then it’d be Sandra who’d have to look after me. I could also push the two armchairs of the small living area together, but even more than that, I was worried about her seeing the real me, the one with the thick-lensed spectacles, the old pisser who had to get up five or six times in the night. I didn’t want her to see me in my singlet. Perhaps this was the last lesson tha
t Sandra would have to learn in our short friendship, and the lesson I’d have to learn too.

  We walked through the passages and stairways we already knew, sometimes in darkness. We opened doors trying not to make a sound, although Sandra was limping because of the damage she’d done when she fell and I was afraid of tripping and falling too. We heaved a sigh of relief when we got to the door of my room. I got out my card, put it in the slot, the green light came on and we went in. Sandra fell onto the bed and started to cry, but not loudly. Tears were falling and she was biting her lip but that was all.

  Within the hour they’d be opening up the breakfast buffet and then I’d be able to bring Sandra some good things to eat. I told her to get into the bed on the unused side, not to worry about anything, to rest, and that everything would look different tomorrow. It was just words, reasonable words, and they convinced her. She was fast asleep in five minutes.

  I picked up the newspaper from the floor and settled down on the side where I always lay, next to the phone and near the bathroom. It was yesterday’s newspaper. Other disasters were happening today. I didn’t even take my shoes off. I didn’t want to go to sleep before breakfast. After that I too would certainly be resting.

  I didn’t go down to the dining room too early. I wanted it to be fuller, so that after having my own breakfast I could make her a small ham-and-tomato sandwich and then put that, some fruit and two croissants into the bag I was carrying. I’d also take one of those instant decaf coffee sachets they leave on the table, put some hot milk in a glass and carry that in my hand next to my leg so the glass wouldn’t attract attention. If they did ask me about it, I’d pretend I hadn’t realized, which wouldn’t be so surprising in a man of my age.

  When I got into the lift, I reckoned I’d done a good job.

  Although I nearly spilt the milk when I opened the door, I felt very pleased with myself when I could set out, on some paper napkins placed on the table-cum-writing desk, the croissants, the sandwich, the fruit and the glass of milk with the coffee and sugar bags. When Sandra woke up, she’d find it, with the milk gone cold, of course, but she might be able to warm it a little if she filled a wider glass from the minibar with hot water from the tap and put this tall narrow glass inside.