The Scent of Lemon Leaves Read online

  I was looking right and left along the track amid barking dogs that furiously hurled themselves against the fences, apparently trying to kill themselves. Then I spotted her, next to a bougainvillea, lying in a hammock. She was young, about thirty years old, neither fair nor dark but with brown hair, some of it dyed deep red. She had a black-and-red tattoo that looked like a butterfly on her ankle, another on her back, plus some black Chinese or Japanese lettering. She was lying half on her side, so she might have had more tattoos on the other side. The garden was small, with an orange tree and a lemon tree besides the bougainvillea, although it might have been bigger at the back of the house. There was a clothesline with a bikini, underwear and a towel hanging from it. She was alone. A perfect victim for the Christensens. They might have met her on the beach and singled her out to suck her young blood, absorb her energy and defile her freshness. At bottom, people don’t change much and, as far as Fredrik was concerned, a fellow human was someone to be taken advantage of, someone to steal something from. He wouldn’t be changing in two days or in forty years, and neither had I changed in any essential way.

  What could this girl know about all this? How could she discover evil in those two old people who were concerned about her? I didn’t want to frighten her and I didn’t want anyone to think I was a dirty old man, entertaining himself with the vision of a slumbering, defenceless girl. I still had some sense of modesty, in spite of everything, although I didn’t care what people thought of me. I left off my scrutiny and kept walking down towards some end to this track, searching for “For Sale” or “To Let” signs, so as not to be completely disloyal to my daughter. Lying to her over such a small thing, deceiving her by saying I was looking for a house I wasn’t looking for, seemed to me more miserable than doing something on a bigger scale, something dangerous, something that really warranted hiding. Hence, in order to stick to what I’d promised her, I’d have to spend my free time looking for a nice house for us, and I’d even have to consider the possibility of coming to live here. I didn’t want to end up being, along with everything else, a bigmouth that held out false hopes to the people he loved. Not that.

  At the end of this winding, shady track where the red-headed girl lived, there were more and more tracks bordered by houses, next to which the girl’s cottage was dwarfed, almost a little storybook house. Since I didn’t find any sign and couldn’t see a clear exit to anywhere, I decided to return to the car and, walking past the cottage again, I glanced at the bougainvillea. The girl was gone. Someone, and it must have been her, had opened a window. I kept walking. It was time for me to take my pills and lie down for a while.

  I went back to the same bar as the previous day, but I was still very full from breakfast and only asked for some juice and a coffee so I could take my pills. Then I went up to my room to rest. It smelt fresh, of detergent, with the bed perfectly made and the doors to the small balcony over the street left ajar. Nonetheless, I couldn’t get my mind off things, relax and go to sleep like a normal pensioner making the most of what remained of his strength, like my friend Leónidas who got up early and went to bed late so he could live more, but then spent the whole day nodding off. The time would come, and it wasn’t far away, when I wouldn’t be able to drive or catch a plane by myself, and the time would come when there wouldn’t even be a Fredrik Christensen. Life placed me in a world I didn’t want, an inhuman world without dreams, and now the finale of this world was approaching, like a film coming to an end.

  Sandra

  As time went by there were fewer neighbours – none, to tell the truth – the days got shorter and the silence grew. Sometimes the silence was so tremendous that any small movement of leaves sounded like a tempest, and when a car came down the track it felt like it was going to come through the wall and crash into the bed. Thank goodness it didn’t take long before I stopped being deceived by distances and, if I heard a drop of water plopping on the floor in the passageway, I knew that it was actually falling on the porch. It was on one of these afternoons that I felt the baby’s first kick and, if I’d known where Fred and Karin lived, I’d have hotfooted it over there to tell them about it. I was sure it wouldn’t have bothered them if I’d suddenly turned up on their doorstep. Of course I resisted the temptation to call Santi, who’d desperately seize on our baby’s first kick as an excuse to come and see me, and I didn’t want to phone my parents either, because they’d be giving me a sermon about my being alone.

  I seemed to remember that the Norwegians had mentioned something about El Tosalet, but the villas in El Tosalet were widely scattered over a very extensive zone of pine woods and palm trees, so it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I kept lounging there with my hands joined at the nape of my neck, waiting for the next kick. Until I couldn’t stand it any longer, until I felt I just had to share this moment with somebody, until it clouded over and threatened to rain, and I had the whole afternoon ahead of me, and couldn’t resist the impulse to act. I had nothing better to do than to go looking for the Norwegians’ house. I don’t know why, but as I was getting on the motorbike that grey afternoon it occurred to me that the Norwegians had never invited me to their house. They’d never given me their address or telephone number. They’d be very surprised to see me turning up there if I did manage to track them down, and then I’d feel uncomfortable, as if I’d crossed some invisible line drawn by them and them alone.

  In any case, I didn’t mind going on a nice tour through the peaceful streets of El Tosalet. Even before they’d got wet, the smell of damp earth and flowers mingled with the moist air from the sea. It was opening up my lungs, I was breathing better than I’d ever breathed and it would be very good for the baby. After all, I was his or her door and window onto the world and not much would filter through. Oxygen, music sometimes, my heartbeats and possibly my moments of sadness and happiness. This would be getting through, but the baby would never know that it was, and that it would be his or her baggage for a whole lifetime. That’s why, even from kindergarten, people have a very marked character, so I was wondering how I’d be marking the character of my baby right now.

  I went as slowly as I could, staring at the houses that would seem to fit with my new friends and checking names on letterboxes. The latter course was more reliable because, what was I expecting to find, a Norwegian farmhouse? When it comes to houses, people are quite surprising. There are some people who get around looking very stylish and yet live in a pigsty, and vice versa. My parents, for example, had a disastrous, intense, crazy way of being in the world but they were incredibly orderly with their papers and bills, and the house was very tidy too, with everything in its proper place, so whenever a light bulb blew it would be replaced immediately. That’s why I wasn’t sure whether the dwelling would be a true reflection of the dwellers.

  I went deeper inside the housing estate and parked in a small square, chained up the motorbike, and when I looked up I saw a restaurant on the other side. It was closed, which was a shame, because they might have given me directions. A few heavy drops of rain had begun spattering here and there but I kept walking. This was a perfect moment, as long as I stopped thinking. Almost all the villas were closed down, well and truly under lock and key, with stone walls and metal gates everywhere, as if they didn’t want to see or be seen, as if they had everything a human being could possibly need inside. It was raining, then it was pouring, and, before long, it was wildly pelting down. I was soaked through and didn’t know where to go, as there was no jutting roof or overhang under which I could shelter.

  Finally a woman in a car, opening her garage door with a remote control, asked me if I wanted to come in until it eased off. She didn’t have to ask twice. I went into the garage, walking past the car in my sopping-wet sandals, and, from there, into the garden. There was a pergola in the garden and I told this lady, a foreigner like Karin, that I’d sit there in the pergola for a while.

  Before I could tell her myself, she’d guessed that I’d got lost. I told her
I was looking for the house of a Norwegian couple called Fredrik and Karin. I assumed that didn’t ring a bell with her, because she marched off to her front door without another word. She went in between the Doric columns on either side, as I wrung out the water as best I could, wondering how much time I’d have to spend on the alien planet of that woman – who didn’t have very good taste by the way, although she evidently had plenty of money. In this case, dwelling and dweller seemed to match up. After ten minutes of daydreaming about what I’d do with that block of land and how I’d try to salvage the façade of the house, the lady came back, holding up an umbrella and trailed by the racket of several small dogs. Now she was smiling as she came over with a towel in her hand. She held it out to me so I could dry myself, but I didn’t dry myself, because it was a beach towel with signs that it had been used by several people, so I just stood there holding it in my hand as she told me that she’d phoned Fredrik and Karin and that Fredrik was on his way to get me.

  “Poor Karin,” she said. “Her arthritis is really playing up today. Any change of weather is the death of her.”

  The little dogs were now yapping at my ankles and jumping up around me. In the middle of all the hullabaloo I said it had been a real stroke of luck that she knew my friends.

  “Around here we know everyone,” she remarked. “They live three hundred metres away.”

  She looked down at my belly, letting her gaze linger there for a moment, but didn’t make any comment so as not to put her foot in it in case it was a false impression. At that point I was still wearing very summery clothes with a waist-length T-shirt and low-cut trousers with my belly button in the air. I could feel my feet squishing in my platform-soled sandals.

  “Don’t go catching a cold now. That’s not a good idea. You’d better dry yourself.”

  The little dogs shook out their well-groomed pelts.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, handing her the towel.

  “Have you known the Christensens long?”

  “We met on the beach a few days ago and we like spending time together.”

  The lady stuck the closed umbrella between the slats of a wooden bench inside the pergola. She was wearing a white ankle-length dress that was transparent enough to show her knickers. Although she was more or less Karin’s age, she looked agile and not much aware of her years. She smiled at me pensively.

  When we heard Fred’s horn, we all went over to the gate, the youthful old lady, the little dogs and me. As I’d imagined, Fred looked at me with some surprise. He asked me about the motorbike and if I’d come alone, and I told him what you say in such cases, that I was passing through here, that I remembered having heard them say they lived in El Tosalet and that… When I got tired of explaining myself, I stopped talking. It wasn’t such a big deal. Next to the entrance there was a very beautiful bit of mosaic work showing the number 50. The elderly young lady pulled out a small packet from one of the pockets of her dress and handed it to Fred.

  “Thank you, Alice,” Fred said. “Thank you very much.”

  I got into the car feeling a bit awkward and worried that I might wet the upholstery.

  “Karin’s making tea. We’ll be there right away,” he said, with a cheerfulness that wouldn’t have been just because of me, as we wound through streets and more streets in which it was a miracle that the four-by-four could fit and emerge without a scratch.

  It said “Villa Sol” at the entrance to the house. We then descended into its depths and rose again by way of some stairs into a vestibule.

  Karin was in the kitchen, a kitchen of thirty square metres with well-used authentic antique furniture, not imitation antique like my sister’s. She didn’t ask any questions and was happy to see me. She was walking with more difficulty than on other days and a few more lines of suffering were etched into her face.

  “My whole body’s hurting today,” she said.

  “Yes, that lady told me about your arthritis.”

  “Ah, Alice! Alice is very lucky. She’s got incredible genes. Impossible as it may seem, she’s a year older than me.”

  Then Fred put the little package in Karin’s hand and her eyes lit up.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” she said.

  She soon reappeared with a pink silk dressing gown in her hand and she made me go into a small bathroom next to the stairs to take off my wet clothes and put it on. She ordered Fred to go to the garage to get me some plastic sandals. Villa Sol looked nicer to me than Alice’s villa. It was less pretentious and more personal. There were more flowers and the architecture was the traditional style of the zone, with an ochre façade, tiled roof, Mallorcan-style shutters and dark-green parquetry. We adjourned to a small sitting room where they must have spent a lot of time because it smelt like Karin’s perfume. It had a fireplace and looked out onto the garden. In one corner there was an armchair that I liked from the moment I set eyes on it, so I went to sit there. Fred brought me a little footrest. The cups were decorated with gold, as were the plates and teapot.

  “In two weeks we’ll be starting to light the fire at night. This zone is very damp.”

  “I’m sorry to have turned up unannounced.”

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Karin said. “I want to show you something. Look, I’m making a pullover for your baby.”

  Fred picked up a newspaper and I drew closer to Karin. I couldn’t believe they’d been thinking of me to such an extent.

  “Today I felt a kick, two kicks actually.”

  Karin smiled at me through her difficult wrinkles, which gave her smile a slightly diabolical effect, as if she was saying how lonely you must be when you have to tell a perfect stranger something so intimate and important. But, since she didn’t actually pronounce the words, I couldn’t reply that the reason I was telling a stranger about it was that I wanted to tell a stranger, and that maybe I wanted to tell it but not share it.

  She set aside her knitting needles and the ball of wool because, with her arthritis, she couldn’t do anything just then. She let her hands drop to her lap and clasped them.

  “I hate the winter,” she said. “I used to like it when we were young, with the sparkling snow, the icy cold on your face. The winter never bothered me then. I could cope with everything, but now I need the sun and its warmth. Days like today make me feel sad and I start thinking. And do you know what the worst part is? Thinking. If you think about the good things you miss them, and if you think about the bad things you feel bitter. When it’s very hot and I’m on the beach I don’t think about anything at all.”

  It was more or less the same thing with me. On the beach, with the sun sizzling my brains, I was in seventh heaven.

  “Don’t you worry about anything, dear. You’ll have plenty of time for forgetting. You’re so young…”

  The two of us sat there looking out at the garden, without speaking, thinking, watching the drops falling from the roof and the trees. I closed my eyes and dozed off, not because I was sleepy but because it was very agreeable. Forget what? Santi? That wasn’t such a drama either. Even if I didn’t want to get married or share my child with him (I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going to the park with him and the kid), I was fond of him. When I opened my eyes and sat up in the armchair I started being nagged by the guilt of feeling much better with Karin than I’d ever felt with my mother, of preferring to be under the same roof as Fred leafing through the newspaper than with my father. They soothed me. I drank what was left in my cup, now cold. Karin said that, if I wanted, she could show me how to make some baby clothes.

  I liked the idea of learning to do something useful, using my hands, and I thought it would also be quite nice working with clay in the middle of all this peace, on days when nothing at all happens. I didn’t need to be asked twice when Fred announced at eight o’clock that it was dinner time and they hoped I’d stay and eat with them. I set the table while Fred made a salad that was a bit on the light side. He had a beer and Karin and I drank water. After clearing away the serviettes, wh
ich had probably been embroidered by Karin, and the plates decorated with shields, Fred got out a pack of cards so we could play poker precisely when I could have seized the chance to take my leave. But I settled for moving a little farther away from my world and fully immersing myself in Fred’s and Karin’s dimension. Then again, it was better to keep trying to find out about what lay in store for me, when I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the luxury of getting bored.

  Karin held the cards in her tortured fingers and kept casting vivacious glances at her husband. According to her, Fred had won several poker championships. He was very good, the best, but the trophies were in their farmhouse in Norway, along with those he’d won at target-shooting. Fred was trying not to change his expression despite all the flattery. He didn’t raise his eyes from the cards and let himself be praised. When he finally looked at us, his eyes were shining like a child’s.

  We only interrupted the game when someone rang at the door.

  It was two guys. One of them was not tall, not short, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped hair and very fine sideburns outlining his jaw. A black singlet hugged his large chest. They called him Martín. Martín looked at me intrigued and Fred took him by the arm and led him into a small den just off the living room. The other one stayed by the door. He was verging on skinny and you could almost say that his light-brown hair, by comparison with Martín’s, was long.

  “Are you a friend of Fred’s and Karin’s?” he murmured, holding out his hand. “I’m Alberto.”

  I gave him my hand and the contact was too intense. His hand was very hot. Or was it mine? I pulled it away as if it was burning and scurried into the kitchen. I didn’t want to be looked at any more by those slippery eyes, which seemed to be moving behind a layer of oil. It was impossible to know what he was thinking while, with the other one, it was easy to see that he was surprised to see me there. This one didn’t show anything. He was like an eel.