The Scent of Lemon Leaves Read online

  “I saw the Gold Cross.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Until now I’ve doubted everything. If you go looking, you can find things that fit with what you’re looking for and yet they give a false impression. But seeing the Gold Cross has been decisive. You told me yourself. The Gold Cross is real. Why would they have something like that if it wasn’t theirs?”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “I already knew,” I said, “but you needed proof.”

  “And what are we going to do now?”

  “Leave that to the professionals. You go. You’ve done enough. I’m serious about this. Later might be too late.”

  “Not yet. They don’t know that I know, and nothing’s changed except that I’m not that airhead they found on the beach any more. Why would they want me?”

  “It could be for nothing in particular. They want you because of what you’re doing, bringing a bit of joy into their life, bringing more life, your life, into theirs. You’re doing them a favour.”

  “I’ll convince myself that I don’t know anything, that I haven’t seen the Gold Cross, and I’ll keep going as I have been up to now. Tomorrow we’re celebrating Karin’s birthday and I don’t know what to give her. I want it to be something she likes, something that would help me gain favour with her so I can get a better idea about her life.”

  “But, Sandra, we already know who they are and, from now on, you’ll be finding more and more skeletons in their closets and in their heads. Now that you know the basics, you’ll become aware of many more things, and we can’t go on like that indefinitely. We need to give a twist to the situation, get them jumpy, force them to betray themselves, making sure they never know where the shots are coming from.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “It comes out. You only have to exert a bit of pressure. Come on, let’s go and buy your gift. We’ll put it on my account.”

  Sandra protested, but it was the least I could do at this point when I was getting carried away by a bad but necessary idea. I took her to a pet shop that sold dogs and cats. I’d seen it in the shopping centre and Sandra thought that it was a great idea.

  Sandra

  Karin, on the last day, the day of her party, wanted me to do her make-up. It looked like she was going to celebrate this birthday as if it was the last one of her life, and she was probably right about that. All her friends were coming and she was very excited and hardly noted her arthritis. She’d feel it when it was all over and she relaxed, and then I’d better make my getaway. What for her was great fun was a pain in the neck for me. In the end, I was totally fed up, and the worst of it was that, with only one day to go, I still hadn’t got her a present. It was Julián who suggested that I should get her a puppy. He was certain that the real Karin would love dogs and especially one particular breed. And he kindly paid for it. It was a black-and-brown Rottweiler pup, a cute, soft little ball. I’d planned to present it to her in a wicker basket with a flowery lining and a great big red raffia bow on one side.

  I dressed up fairly formally to fit in with the rest of them. I was wearing a strappy dress with a shawl over it and, in my hair, a flower I’d picked in the garden, bigger than a rose, but I wouldn’t know what it’s called. In fact, everything looked lovely and Fred set about lighting candles all over the place. As soon as the first guests started arriving, champagne corks began to pop and a waiter hired for the occasion passed around trays of canapés made by the best restaurant in the area. Karin introduced me to everyone as if I were family, with the exception of Alice and Otto, who knew all too well who I was, and who limited themselves to greeting me coldly, and Martín and Alberto. They came to the party with a few more like them and these guys asked me if I was in the Brotherhood until Martín muttered something to them, after which they moved away. Frida was there too. She’d baked the fish and had made some colourful salads with lettuce, beetroot, pickled peppers and salted fish. And she’d pushed several tables together to make one long one in the greenhouse, which, with all the plants and the candlelight, couldn’t have looked nicer. I don’t know why but, sitting there amongst all those people who were asking who I was and who were talking to me out of strict courtesy and a very big dose of curiosity, I had a certain sense of guilt, because I’d never taken so many pains to organize a birthday party for my mother. It had never occurred to me to spend several days preparing a party for her. And now I was here, amid these strangers, celebrating a birthday that meant nothing to me. What was I doing with my life? I was drifting, like when I rode the motorbike down to the town at night with only stars and an abyss before me.

  You don’t know what kind of mother you’re going to have, I telepathically addressed the baby. I’m not ready to be a daughter or a mother. I’m lazy, erratic, I’m nobody and I’m going to have a baby that will depend on me. I don’t even know what I’m going to call you and now you’re here, in this greenhouse in the middle of a set-up that’s not your thing, and it’s not mine either. As I was feeling more and more out of place, the faces around me were getting redder and the voices more and more excited. Food and drink never fail when it comes to making a tribe happy. I began to have clear images of the men dressed up in SS uniforms and the women in dresses like the ones Karin kept in her wardrobe. If they had been young, the dinner might have been followed by an orgy, but now they couldn’t even get down on all fours. And there among them, paying tribute to them, venerating them, were Martín and his cronies. They’d got dressed up in suits and ties but they looked like thuggish nightclub bouncers, except for the Eel, who was watching it all out of the corner of his eye and keeping his head down. He was the one who spent the most time talking with Alice and Otto, and the one I most often caught stealing sideways glances at me.

  I still felt like crying when the cake with its ten symbolic candles appeared. You can’t stick eighty-two candles into a cake, so I’d suggested using two wax numbers, but Karin didn’t like numbers. Then I suggested one candle, but she thought one candle seemed ridiculous, so in the end we opted for ten, which filled it up nicely.

  She blew them out and, after the singing and the champagne toasts to her, Karin opened several gifts, saying it was the happiest day of her life, that she never thought that she’d reach this age surrounded by friends, after which she said a few words in German. I slipped off to the garage. That afternoon I had left the puppy in the four-by-four, so if he whimpered it wouldn’t be noticed. I let him suck my finger so he wouldn’t make any noise until I entered the greenhouse and presented him to Karin.

  I’m not much given to smiling, but I managed a half-smile as I handed her the basket. Karin looked at me with that deep wrinkle etched between her eyebrows and then peered inside the basket. The puppy wriggled and whined. She took it out with her right hand, on which she was wearing a ring that matched her diamond bracelet.

  “What is this?” she said, taken aback and staring at the pup.

  “Have I got it right? Do you like him?” I asked.

  Karin didn’t thank me, didn’t answer me, didn’t look at me. She put the pup back in the basket and put it down with the other gifts. There was no comment. The silence was only broken by Bolita, as I called the puppy, and the sound of leaves when somebody brushed past the plants. Then Fred said that we’d go and have drinks in the house, and everyone wandered off. I stayed behind in the greenhouse. I couldn’t drink alcohol – I wanted to do at least that properly and not pass on to my baby anything bad that could be avoided – so I got in amongst the plants not knowing what to think.

  Not only was she not pleased with the puppy, but her reaction had been strange, which meant she wouldn’t be keeping it. Now, this really was a problem. What was I going to do with a puppy? I wanted to cry but held back.

  Behind the greenhouse glass, the moon trembled slightly. It was enormously big and shiny. I’d heard people saying that we’re nothing so many times, but now the words came back to me. I’d taken shelter between two
large tropical-looking plants and had the stupid sensation that any moment now their giant leaves were going to wrap themselves around my body so they could devour me. There was something human about them. I heard what sounded like breathing, and it wasn’t fantasy, because when the sound accelerated I turned round and the Eel was standing there staring at me. The moonlight shone on two terribly brilliant eyes. I shuddered and moved towards the table where the presents were, to put some distance between us, but the opposite happened. I had to brush my whole body against his in order to avoid a cactus. It was a matter of choosing which type of thorns I preferred to hurt me. He didn’t move, but just watched what I was doing, which made me even more nervous. If only I could have turned invisible, disappeared, but no, I couldn’t. I had to stay cool whatever happened.

  “Why are you still here? Aren’t you coming in to have a drink?”

  The puppy whimpered loudly. Soon it would be barking its lungs out.

  “I can’t drink alcohol.”

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I regretted them. I’d just made myself too vulnerable. I didn’t like the way his slithery eyes went down to my belly. I clamped my lips together with the intention of not opening them again. Whether I stayed or didn’t stay in the greenhouse, it was no concern of his. I picked up Bolita and held him next to my face. He licked me. It was time for his bottle. I’d counted on Karin seeing to his needs, thought that the pup would amuse her, and now look what I’d gone and brought upon myself, all off my own bat.

  “Do you like dogs?” I asked him.

  “You really put your foot in it,” he answered. “And I think you don’t even know you have. Who suggested that you should give this dog to Karin?”

  I’d already talked too much. There was no way I was going to blab Julián’s name.

  “It was by chance. This was the one I liked the most. Now it turns out that Karin doesn’t like animals, so that’s that. So now what are we going to do with him?”

  He was looking at me trying to understand. Understand what? I pulled out the flower I’d put in my hair. I was sick of it and threw it in a pot.

  “I’ll do you a favour. I’ll take the dog, I’ll look after it and, in return, you’ll come out with me one of these days, okay?”

  What was worse, taking charge of the pup or having to stand those eyes of his opposite me throughout a whole dinner?

  I handed him the pup in the basket.

  “Wait here a moment,” he said, marching off quickly.

  I barely had time to reflect upon the situation because he was back in no time with some milk in a bowl. Bolita lapped it up and I almost felt sorry to be giving him up. I thought that in all probability I wouldn’t be in this house tomorrow.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I said.

  “What do you take me for?” He looked at his watch. “I’m running late.”

  He walked away to the gate with the basket hanging from his hand and soon I heard a car engine.

  I could get out the motorbike and escape from here, go to my sister’s house, to the “little house”, but the tenant, a secondary-school teacher, had turned up earlier than planned and was about to move in. I could also go to a hotel. I had money, though this money wouldn’t last long and a hotel room would guzzle it all up, and, most important, it was cowardice go stampeding off like that because I felt hurt by Karin’s reaction. A mother, a future mother, should know what to do in any situation. I wasn’t a little girl any more and couldn’t throw in the towel just because of some setback. Tomorrow I’d probably see everything in a different light. Then again, I had an appointment for an ultrasound test. I’d thought that Karin could come with me, that I could share with her the moment of discovering the sex of my baby. But I’d just had a change of heart. I’d go alone and maybe call my mother from the clinic, because Karin wasn’t my mother and my baby couldn’t mean anything to her. Life constantly throws up completely artificial situations. And my relationship with Karin was artificial, because it hadn’t existed a couple of months earlier and it wouldn’t exist later. It was like an inflatable mattress floating in the middle of the sea.

  The best thing would be to go to bed and try to sleep.

  I timidly entered the living room. Some women were dancing and others were seated. The door to the library-den was half open, so you could see, without really seeing, what was going on inside, sufficiently to know that the young men were in there with Fred, Otto and the rest of them. The smell of tobacco and dope wafted out. They were laughing. A hand closed the door. Outside there was only one German, a short, dark-eyed fellow who looked Spanish. He was yawning as he sprawled in an armchair. He didn’t seem to be interested in anything. When he saw me he smiled slightly, not at me but to himself.

  “Having fun?” he asked.

  I was about to say yes, but I said no.

  “No, I’m tired.”

  “Would you like to have a walk in the garden?”

  “I was on my way to bed.”

  He’d already stood up and gave a slight bow with his head by way of farewell, something that nobody had ever done for me in my whole life. So I wrapped myself up in my shawl again and went to have a walk with him.

  “Don’t those piercings hurt?” he asked, looking at my ears and nose, although I doubted he could see them in the tenuous light of the garden, so he must have spotted them earlier.

  “No, once the hole is made, they don’t hurt, although I’d never have one in my tongue.”

  “How awful!” he exclaimed, admiring the moon. “You young people are crazy – young people are always crazy. We also did terrible things.”

  “What terrible things did you do?”

  “They did not seem terrible to us in those days. We did these things because we could and they seemed normal. Like putting a ring in your nose.”

  The conversation was starting to make me jumpy. I didn’t know whether we were talking in code.

  “I can do a lot of things that I don’t do. I could kill somebody and I don’t do it,” I said.

  “Because you would not find it easy and you would be traumatized. Whether they found you out or not, you would have become an outlaw, and you would feel you had sinned or were simply a criminal. But imagine if there existed a system in which it was legal and patriotic to kill a certain kind of person and nobody would be pointing the finger at you afterwards or wanting explanations.”

  He took out a cigarette from a silver case that made a pleasant clicking sound when he closed it, and lit up. He didn’t offer me one, so I guessed he knew I wasn’t smoking. When he was young he must have been very dashing, and it didn’t look as if his friends were making him crazy with joy.

  “In the end, what is done is done and there is no turning back. Moreover, life is short and, when you reach the end, it seems as if you have just woken up from a five-minute sleep and in your dreams you have done things that do not make sense.”

  “Like sticking a steel ball in your tongue,” I suggested.

  “For example.”

  “As long as you only do damage to yourself…” I added.

  “You are right. In the end the damage to yourself is the only thing that can ease your conscience.”

  He was leaning against a tree. I moved away from him and put an end to the conversation. I didn’t want him to say anything more to me. He might have been drinking and the next day he’d regret what he’d said to me, and I had no wish to be hurt by those people. I left him finishing off his cigarette, engrossed in his past with the moon casting all its pallor over him. He didn’t turn towards me and looked like an unbearably melancholic statue. And I wanted daybreak to arrive and the sun to come out, so its rays could drill into my head.

  He must have been an elegant man once. Now he was wearing a dark-grey suit with cuffed trousers and a black polo-neck sweater underneath. He was the image of a black angel, though I didn’t know what that might have meant for other people. But that was the first thing that came into my head, a black angel. He cou
ld have been the most intelligent of the whole bunch. He didn’t seem to be dominated by the atmosphere in which he lived and yet he couldn’t move out of it, so he must still have been afraid of solitude. None of the women there was with him. Perhaps he was a widower. It must have been very exasperating having only the past left to you and not being able to share that with anyone, which was why he’d spent a minute sharing it with me. The problem was that this occurred to me later. Luckily for him, he could still share it with these monsters even though he couldn’t stand them sometimes.

  So many things in a few hours. Fuck Karin’s reaction to the dog, fuck her not looking at me, fuck the black angel and fuck everything. I’d go upstairs to my room as fast as I could. As if it was so easy to go up to your room! I had one foot on the first step when a hand firmly gripped my arm.

  It was Alice.

  You couldn’t consider her old; she didn’t look old, her skin wasn’t loose and nothing sagged as you’d expect at her age. She looked about sixty, but in reality she must have been over eighty. And it couldn’t have only been due to sport, sun and drinking natural juices. She gave the impression of having submitted herself to some experiment. You could even see the biceps in her arms.

  “Do you want to dance with me?”

  I was stunned by her proposal. I couldn’t refuse her, couldn’t be rude the way things were, and I needed to observe Alice for my own ends.

  They were playing a slow song that I’ll never forget as long as I live, ‘Only You’. I stepped off the stair I had mounted and took her by the waist. She was wearing a very elegant dress of dark-green velvet, sleeveless with a V-neck front and back. It was slithery velvet that hung fantastically. It was full length. Close up, she had the typical freckled skin that’s been in the sun. I stroked my hand over the velvet, not for pleasure of course, but out of curiosity. I was curious to know what Alice’s waist was like, if she had any small roll of fat or just hard bones. And, surprise surprise, it was quite a normal body, or better than normal, perfect. I think Alice interpreted my exploration as something more, and she drew closer in a way that made me uncomfortable, although I was only uncomfortable for a second. What the hell! Alice, though suspiciously young, was a woman, and I preferred a woman to take liberties with me than Martín, or his friend the Eel, or the Black Angel, or Otto or any other one of that lot. A bit of human warmth wouldn’t hurt me. I needed to be hugged and kissed. And that’s what Alice did. She embraced me and rested her lips on my hair until the song ended, at which point I removed myself from her arms and, with a slightly droopy face, informed her that I was tired. She said something in German and I looked at her. It was a difficult language to interpret and you couldn’t know whether what she said was good or bad.