The Scent of Lemon Leaves Read online

  I wasn’t counting on Salva’s coming to meet me at the Alicante airport. He hadn’t even answered my letter telling him the date of my arrival. What would he be like now? Maybe I wouldn’t recognize him. Or he me, of course. In any case, I looked at the signs people were holding up behind the security barrier and made myself as visible as I could, in the hope that Salva would suddenly come over and hug me. After around fifteen minutes, I decided to go to the bus station and take a coach that would get me a hundred kilometres away to Dianium, the town where I’d booked my hotel. The Christensens were living in the surrounding area and only a little farther away was Salva in the old people’s home.

  When I got out of the bus, rather than go directly to the hotel, I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Tres Olivos, the old people’s home, and later drive me back to the centre of town.

  I put my bag in the boot and we headed off inland, swathed in the fragrance of sun-warmed pines. After a while, the driver asked me, somewhat surprised, whether I was going to be staying in the home. I didn’t take the trouble to answer, but pretended to be absorbed in the landscape – which in fact I was. Dusk wasn’t far off, and it all looked wonderful to me: the red soil, the small woods, the vineyards, the orchards, the birds coming down to peck about on the ground… it reminded me of when I was a kid, before anything was important, and my parents took us on holidays to the beach. I patted my jacket pockets to make sure I’d left nothing on the plane or the bus. I worried that tiredness might be making me lose reflexes without my even noticing.

  The home had a smaller garden than Salva had led me to believe, but it was in the middle of the countryside and this seemed to be a good thing, although we elderly folk usually prefer to see people than trees. There was no need to ring the doorbell: the door was open, and I entered a room where they were starting to lay the tables for dinner. I asked the waitress if I could see Salva, saying I’d come a long way to visit him. She looked at me in surprise and led me to a small office where a solidly built woman told me that my friend had died. When I showed her his letter, she told me that he’d asked them to post it immediately after his decease. Decease. What a word to use. They’d had him cremated and sent his clothes to a local church in case some poor person might want them. He’d died of multiple organ failure. His body had packed it in. She told me, without my having to ask, that he had not suffered.

  I went out for a little walk around the garden and imagined Salva there, weak, shrunken, still holding out, sometimes looking at the sky as he reflected on what he had on his plate, without ever losing sight of his objectives. We’d had no contact for many years, ever since the people at the Centre had stopped thinking we were useful and I’d preferred to spend my time with my family and make the odd enquiry by myself without ever achieving anything. I tried to tie up the loose ends of the cases of Aribert Heim, the world’s most wanted Nazi criminal, and of Adolf Eichmann, but never had any luck. It was difficult to believe that Salva would have stopped working during all these years. He would certainly have kept gathering material and passing it over to others on a plate, so they’d get all the glory. Now it was my turn. He’d left me his last discovery, and it would only be significant if I was able to make it known to others. When he realized he was about to die, he thought of me, remembered this friend, and the legacy he left me was a poisoned chalice, as was anything else coming from our tormented souls. I would have loved to talk with him, to see him one last time. Now there was nobody who knew everything about me, nobody who knew what my hell was really like. A dull, pearly light was bringing the afternoon to a close.

  I got back into the taxi and, after asking the driver to go to the Costa Azul hotel, I took the handkerchief out of my pocket and blew my nose. The sight of Tres Olivos disappearing in the distance filled my eyes with tears – feeble tears that only wet the rims of my eyes, but that meant I was alive. I’d outlived Salva without wanting to, just as I’d outlived Raquel against my own will.

  The taxi driver glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. There was such a gulf between his youth and my old age. There was no point in saying anything, trying to explain anything, telling him that my friend had died, because he’d think it’s natural to die at our age. But it wasn’t natural, because otherwise we wouldn’t find it so strange and incomprehensible. Was I still worthy of seeing these beautiful silvery fields? Raquel had told me off for having such thoughts, had called me a masochist, a misfit. After all, Salva and I hadn’t seen each other for ages, since I went to live in Buenos Aires with Raquel, while he continued with his itinerant life. I would never have imagined him secluded in an old people’s home. And, as he himself used to say, we’re not the only ones who die. Everyone, the whole of humanity dies, and we have no option but to resign ourselves to that.

  After arriving at the hotel, I unpacked my bag, put my clothes in the wardrobe and then studied the map of the region, trying to locate the house of Fredrik and Karin Christensen in a wooded area called El Tosalet. Since I didn’t want to go to bed too early and was trying to fight the jet lag, I went down to the bar to take my evening dose of pills with a glass of hot milk. A girl in a red waistcoat, busy doing a juggling act with glasses and ice blocks, asked me if I wanted a dash of cognac in my milk. I said why not, and entertained myself by watching her as she served me. She gave me a radiant smile. She must have had a grandfather who needed cheering up from time to time. When I was starting to feel woozy in my tiredness, I asked reception if they could answer a couple of queries I had about the map and booked a car for the following day. I wasn’t surprised when they asked me if my driving licence was up to date, since this had been happening to me quite a lot recently. If I’d had time, I would have felt offended, but I had other matters in my head that were more pressing than being old and being treated as such. I had to fulfil Salva’s mission.

  The room was nothing special. It looked onto a street, and you could see the lights of a few bars through the lace curtains. I stretched out on the bed, feeling more relaxed than I had in a long time. I’d gone back to the old habit of being alone in hotels and not telling anyone about what I was really up to, with the difference that I expected nothing now, because after this there was nothing more to be expected.

  It didn’t matter that the whole world was stronger and younger than I was. I had the enormous advantage of not expecting anything… feeling – how can I put it? – resigned. When I realized I was nodding off, I undressed, slipped into my pyjamas, turned off the air conditioning and took out my contact lenses and put on the thick-lensed glasses I used for reading in bed. At least my teeth stayed put. Oh for the times when I needed only myself, without all the paraphernalia, when I was moving about. I closed my eyes and delivered myself to Raquel and Salva.

  The rays of sunlight coming through the net curtains woke me up. I showered and shaved with the electric shaver that my daughter had put into my bag, very unwillingly as she said that it was silly not to use the shaving kit supplied by the hotel. I shaved my face smooth. Not even when I was ill in hospital, not even in the most difficult moments of my life had I stopped shaving. My wife used to say that my meticulous way of shaving was my personal trademark. Maybe she was right. I had more than usual for breakfast, because the buffet was included in the price of the room, and so I’d only need a snack at lunchtime. I was planning on having an early dinner.

  The rented car was only being delivered at twelve, so I strolled down to the port and, for twenty euros, bought a panama hat at a stall on the Paseo Marítimo. That provided more shade than the peaked cap I was wearing. My daughter had insisted that I shouldn’t pack so many things I could easily pick up here, but I thought it was a waste to leave them behind when they weren’t going to know what to do with them later. Although it was quite hot, I had no choice but to wear a jacket – fortunately a light one – because I needed pockets to hold my glasses in case I lost one of my contact lenses (I’d taken my sunglasses out of their case and put them in my shirt pocket), and take my
wallet with money and credit cards, a notebook and my little box of pills. When I was young I also carried my packet of Marlboros and a lighter. Luckily I could leave my mobile phone at the hotel because it had stopped working as soon as I had crossed the Atlantic. I liked carrying everything distributed evenly among my pockets as this balanced out the weight. My daughter once bought me a backpack but I’d left it behind, as it didn’t feel like something that belonged to me. Whenever possible I’ve worn a suit or, at least, trousers and a jacket and, in winter, a mid-calf-length beige wool overcoat. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t know how to survive without my little quirks.

  I sat down at a terrace bar to have a coffee and kill time studying the map again. Coffee was the only health-damaging habit I hadn’t given up and wasn’t planning to give up either. I refused to move on to green tea, like the few friends I had left. The worst thing about being old is that you’re left more and more alone, turning into a stranger on a planet where everybody’s young. But I still had my wife somewhere deep inside me, and my daughter had to get on with her own life without taking on the burden of mine and all the bad things that had happened in it. On my scales, hatred weighed heavy but, thank God, love also weighed in. Yet I must say, and regret to say it, hatred had encroached too far into the territory of love.

  I thought, as I was sipping my coffee on this terrace – quite a good espresso, by the way – that when you’ve known evil, goodness is never enough. Evil is a drug, evil is pleasurable and that’s why those butchers kept on with their exterminating and were more and more sadistic. They could never get enough of it. I took the label off my hat, put it on and tucked the peaked cap into my pocket. If Raquel was alive, I’d buy another hat for her. She looked good in any hat. Then women stopped wearing them and thus lost some of their elegance. Not long ago, a doctor told me that, at my age, memory is crystallized memory, meaning that you recall long-ago events better than recent ones. It was true and now I set about remembering, in minute detail, the hat Raquel wore the day we got married, back in 1950, one bright spring morning.

  Sandra

  The next morning I didn’t risk going to the beach. I didn’t feel like using the motorbike, so I just walked to the little supermarket some five hundred metres away to buy some juice. I had all day long to make myself healthy meals, read and take it easy. The lemon tree and the orange tree gave the small garden an air of paradise, and I was Eve. Paradise and me. My sister had left me piles of dirty clothes to wash. I had to water the garden morning and afternoon, put the washing into the machine, hang it out, bring it in, fold it up and, if I was in the mood, iron it. If I took her seriously I could spend the whole time working. Where did she get all those dirty clothes from? I think she let me move into her house to oblige me to do something and, as she saw it, I’d end up being useful, if only for this. Maybe she’d even spent a few days getting the clothes dirty. She liked being bossy, but in such a way that she didn’t seem to be giving orders. Even I had taken years to wake up to the fact that she was bossing me around and, without my realizing it, making me do things I didn’t want to do.

  It was precisely when I was doing my afternoon watering chore, after my siesta, that I saw a car pull up next to the ironwork gate at the entrance. I heard car doors closing and the sound of slow footsteps advancing. It was the old couple who’d helped me on the beach. They seemed happy to see me, and I was happy too. I’d been spending too much time mulling things over all by myself. I turned off the hose and went over to greet them.

  “What a surprise!”

  “We’re happy to see you’ve recovered,” he said.

  They spoke very good Spanish, although with an accent. It wasn’t English or French. Or German either.

  “Yes, I’ve been resting. I’ve hardly been out.”

  I invited them to come and sit on the porch.

  “We don’t want to bother you.”

  I served them tea, in a beautiful teapot that my sister kept in an imitation antique cupboard. I didn’t mention coffee because I hadn’t found a coffee pot yet. They drank it in small sips as I told them about the father of my child – that I wasn’t sure whether I was in love with him and that I didn’t want to make a mistake at this stage in my life. They seemed to understand as they listened in silence, and I didn’t care if they knew all these things about me – or at least what was bugging me more than anything else right now – and it didn’t bother me that they were strangers. It was like telling the air.

  “The uncertainties of youth,” the man commented, taking his wife’s hand. You could see he’d been really in love with her and now he couldn’t manage without her. She was something of an enigma.

  He wasn’t a man who smiled, but he was so well-mannered he seemed to be smiling. His enormous height made the wicker chair look like something out of a doll’s house. He was very thin, and his cheekbones were prominent. He looked elegant in his grey summer trousers and a white shirt with mid-length sleeves.

  “If you like, we could come and get you tomorrow, take you to the beach with us and then bring you home again,” he offered.

  “It would be a change for us,” she said. Now she really was smiling with her little blue eyes, which might have been pretty once, but were ugly now.

  Instead of answering I poured them more tea. I was weighing up the situation. It had never entered into my plans to make friends with a couple of old people. In my normal life, the only old people I had anything to do with were members of the family, never friends.

  They glanced at each other, communicating with their eyes, and let go of each other’s hand so they could pick up their cups.

  “We’ll come at nine, not too early and not too late,” he said, and they stood up.

  She seemed very happy: her eyes had become lively. She certainly seemed to be the one in charge. She was the one who decided what to do and the one who had her little whims. I might have been one of this lady’s whims but, in principle, that was neither good nor bad. She clutched my arm, as if trying to stop me from escaping.

  “You don’t need to bring anything. I’ll see to it all. We’ve got a portable fridge.”

  “Fredrik and Karin,” the man said, holding out his hand.

  I held out my hand too and gave Karin a kiss on her cheek. I hadn’t known their names before now and hadn’t even realized I didn’t know them, perhaps because they hadn’t mattered until now. They’d been totally detached from me, just people going by in the street.

  “Sandra,” I said.

  I’d never known my grandparents, who’d died when I was a little girl, and now life was compensating me with these two old people, and I didn’t mind being their favourite granddaughter or, better still, their only granddaughter, the depositary of all their love and… all their worldly goods, these fabulous goods for which you shouldn’t have to struggle or even want because you deserve them from the moment you’re born. Maybe what I hadn’t been given by blood ties was being handed to me by destiny.

  Julián

  The following day, what with one thing and another, I didn’t manage to set off in the car until one o’clock. I opened the window because I preferred the air outside to the air conditioning. I had to stop at a petrol station and then a newsstand to ask where El Tosalet was. I ended up on a long winding road, so it was impossible for me to ask anybody and, after that, I went into a wooded area in which the houses were submerged among fifteen-metre-high trees and where the only thing you could hear was a dog barking. It took me quite a while to find the street where Fredrik and Karin Christensen lived, maybe because my reflexes had deteriorated with age, but in the end I got in front of their house, Villa Sol. Nothing remarkable about that name round here.

  The house was built like a fortress. It was practically impossible to see anything inside, and I didn’t want anyone to catch me nosing around because, even if I couldn’t see them, it didn’t mean they couldn’t see me. Silence reigned, and the scent of flowers lay heavy everywhere. What could this have to do with su
ffering, humiliation, wretchedness and boundless cruelty? Like the newspaper article, the letterbox did nothing to disguise their names. It said: “Fredrik and Karin Christensen”.

  The iron gates were painted dark green – both the sliding gate for the cars and the smaller one for people – and the ivy growing around threatened to cover them. I pretended I was admiring the climbing plants, hoping to hear some sound or notice some movement inside, then I went back to the car, which I’d left parked in a more open area two or three streets higher up. I now realized that this could be a good vantage point, given that their street was a cul-de-sac and that they could only leave through there.

  But that could happen any time, and I couldn’t hang around all day. It was already three thirty – time for me to have a bite to eat, take my pills and lie down for a while. I didn’t want to squander the little energy I had on the very first day.

  I struggled to find a parking place close to the hotel and, when I finally managed to, it was around quarter-past four. I went into a bar and asked them to make me a French omelette and an orange juice, which I rounded off with a coffee with a dash of milk. The coffee was as good as it had been in the morning. I was feeling slightly euphoric, pleased with how things were going, and called my daughter. I tried to calm her fears, saying I was feeling better than ever, that the change of air was doing me good, expanding my lungs. I didn’t tell her that my friend Salva had died.

  I told her that we’d already located the Christensens’ house and that we’d soon be starting our surveillance. My daughter wasn’t at all happy to hear this. Anything that sounded like obsession to her had her saying “Enough of that!” – so I changed the subject and told her it was a perfect place for a holiday, with a large community of old foreigners. Then I added something I knew she’d like: that I’d use this trip to go looking at houses for rent or for sale with a porch and a little garden, where I could retire and where she could come and spend all the time she wanted.