I couldn’t believe it. Now I was well and truly done for. Right before my eyes, placed like a pillow, was the newspaper clipping with the photo of the Norwegians that Julián had given me. The Norwegians had surely put it there or Frida had surely found it in my bag. I didn’t as much as dare to touch it, as if it was going to set off all the alarms in the house. I stood there staring at it without knowing what to think and feeling quite dizzy. The cutting could only have got here if somebody had pulled it out from underneath my clothes and, in order to do that, they had to poke around in the depths of my bag.
And what if it had been me? Maybe when I was rooting around getting out clothes the page had slipped out and somehow dropped on the floor and Frida found it and left it on the bed.
It was hard for me to respond to this, so I remained in my room as long as I could without having the nerve to go downstairs and face them, or to escape through the window. It occurred to me that there was no need for me to put up with such a tense situation, so I’d just wait in here, putting my clothes in my bag and backpack until they were asleep and then head for my little house, as Julián called it, and stay there till the new tenant arrived, or I’d ask Julián to give me shelter in his hotel. My mind was blank and I was confused. I’ve never been good at confrontations and I had no idea of how to lie to these two. After all, I’d come here to escape having to deal with the father of my baby, my family, my lack of a job, a future and reality in general, and now I was faced with this, as if it was impossible to escape from problems. However, now I’d met Alberto, who’d become another type of worry, the only kind of worry I liked. Why was he showing no signs of life?
I sat on the bed for a while, totally flummoxed. Then I took three deep breaths and decided to have a shower as planned. When I was wrapped up in a dressing gown with fresh skin and wet hair dripping, things started to look less tragic, and the solution to this uncomfortable affair came heaven-sent, as if in some part of the world an emergency cabinet had met to think fast about this mess and had telepathically sent me the result because I was in no condition to be making such an effort. So I got dressed, left the page on top of the chest of drawers and went down those increasingly infernal stairs (made, according to what Karin told me, of pink marble brought from the Macael quarries).
They were still on the sofa doing what they’d been doing before, he watching television and she reading her eternal romances. They shot the same look at me. I understood its meaning now and it intimidated me. But I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Gathering all my strength, I told them that I was very tired, that I was going to have some yogurt and go straight to bed. Then I got the velvet bag, took out the pullover and showed it to Karin. I asked her if it would be very difficult to work in some design on the front to brighten it up. She’d kept staring at me, trying to suss out my intentions, and all I could think of was to shove my work in her tortured hands and say something.
I could see from the look in her eyes that they’d gone in to search my room when I went shopping, or just to get out for a while, or to see Julián. They searched even before suspecting me of anything, as if it was a kind of duty for them to mistrust everyone. Worst of all, they didn’t care if I knew that they were monitoring me, that they didn’t trust me and that they didn’t entirely see me as their friend, maybe because, with this find, the cards were well and truly face up on the table. It was all so open now that Karin averted her gaze. Suddenly her eyes and her age-twisted face were those of Nurse Karin sixty years on. Youth and beauty were no longer there to hide her true soul.
“If you want a design on it, you’ll have to start again. You’ll have to undo what you’ve done. It would be better if you tried with another one. Finish this one first.”
Her words rang with some kind of occult meaning: you’ll have to undo what you’ve done, she’d said. I sat on the sofa to have my yogurt and when I took my leave and wished them goodnight, they didn’t insist I should stay, which would be the usual thing.
I hadn’t undone what I’d done but felt relieved at not having to face them. I took my trousers off, left my T-shirt on, removed the satin negligee from under the pillow, flung it on the chair and got into bed. I did what people advised and opened the window slightly so I could breathe better and to improve the flow of oxygen to my brain. Then I began to read for a while. Tomorrow would be another day.
Julián
I still didn’t know where Sebastian Bernhardt, the Black Angel, lived. I hadn’t seen him around the Nordic Club and neither had he turned up when I was following Fredrik or Otto. Evidently he led another life unless he was practically obliged to meet up with them. He was another cut of person, more intelligent and less fanatical. Everything people said about him suggested that he might seriously have believed that what he was doing was for the good of humanity. He was an active man, a man of vision, with a plan in his head that required suffering, because every change entails pain, and changing the world wasn’t going to be easy or comfortable for anybody. He was all the more frightening precisely because of this. He wasn’t a sadist, but he’d done the groundwork for sadists like Heim to give free rein to their instincts and run amok.
At this time of my life, I had a pretty good idea of what they were like. Their mindset was rigid and self-centred, with a totally instrumental idea of life, devoid of all understanding. They were sociopaths and the ones that weren’t infected had ended up getting infected. I had no interest in speaking with them, but Sebastian was another, more complicated story and, at bottom, more dangerous. He wouldn’t enjoy doing evil, or grinding his boot in the necks of his fellow humans, but he’d think of it as a necessary evil, coming from the same packet as good, and the greater the good one wished to attain, the greater the evil had to be.
I went to keep an eye on the floating home of Butcher Heim with a sense of foreboding. It was a sort of presentiment or sixth sense I developed in the camp. Maybe I developed it at an age when such talents tend to emerge but it came upon me in that death-serving place. The fact is that I learnt to notice in my soul or spirit when something worse than usual was going to happen, and also when something good was coming. One never felt good there, but when they were going to gas a friend or suddenly called us to the infirmary to check whether we were still fit for work, which is to say, fit to stay alive, the previous day I felt unbearably bad for no particular reason. All of a sudden, in the quarry, in the hut, or naked in the courtyard among the human livestock, the shadow of evil got inside me and the world went dark, like dusk falling. At first I didn’t relate one thing with another but then I started to realize it was like my grandmother’s arm, which started hurting whenever it was about to rain. The day I tried to kill myself was the day my soul or spirit had collapsed and I couldn’t take any more, the shadow was too big and inside my head there was nothing to be seen. Salva caught me just in time and the following day was horrible. The chimneys smoked so much that it was impossible to breathe with the smell of burning flesh. A grey pall hung over the camp and then I thought that this cloud would watch over those of us who were left and I asked the molecules comprising the cloud to protect us from all evil, and to see to it that Salva, who weighed thirty-eight kilos, wouldn’t be judged unproductive or useless. And they heeded me. Somehow, Salva turned invisible until we left the camp.
Until then, I’d had to invent all kinds of strategies to protect him. I managed to stand in front of him, keep him concealed from the quarry overseers and had studied where he had to go so as not to be seen. I got desperately exhausted when we climbed the one hundred and eighty-nine steps leading to the camp, trying to carry his load when they weren’t looking, and I attempted to pass myself off as him whenever possible. It was hell, Salva was at the limit, I couldn’t keep going like that and the time was coming when I’d have to abandon him to his fate and then, then, that ashen sky understood me, heard my pleas and, from then on, nobody noticed Salva, to such an extent that I stopped fearing for him. I got used to the fact that the guar
ds didn’t realize that he wasn’t carrying the stone up the steps. He only went down and up once a day, at the beginning and end, and, meanwhile, pretended to be busy. Sometimes he even sat down for a while.
Exhausted as he was, he didn’t realize what was happening, but I couldn’t believe my eyes: looks went right through him as if he was a ghost. They probably saw him but he never interested them because there was always someone or something that was more eye-catching. The baptism of fire came on the day (and I’m not sure whether it was morning or afternoon) when a guard was staring at him. I saw that skeleton through the eyes of the guard who, when he impulsively went straight towards Salva, looked as if he was going to push him, shove him over the edge of the quarry. I was so terrified that I wasn’t even thinking about what I was seeing, because the end was happening, we’d come to the finale, the moment in which you realize that, whatever you do, you’re a puppet. And right then, the guard walked straight past Salva, who was comfortably leaning against a rock waiting for them to come and kill him, towards a poor fellow whom he finished off with a bullet, on the spot. That was my moment of greatest amazement about Salva’s new nature, and after that I stopped worrying. Whatever was going on, neither Kapos nor dogs got a whiff of Salva. He was going to be saved, and I, who was inside his magic sphere, was going to be saved as well. And, in particular, I liked being in his magic sphere, which required no walls or doors. It was others who’d lost the power to see him. And I’m the one who’s saying this, I who do not believe in such things.
Neither did I believe in the shadow of evil, yet I could feel it more than my own arms and legs. There was no shadow when something good or, at least, nothing especially bad was about to happen and, right then, I felt the warmth of summer inside me, bringing me to life again, giving me strength. Salva looked at me ironically and told me to grab hold of anything I could, that this idea of heat to combat cold was a good one. Naturally, I didn’t tell him what his situation really was, didn’t tell him that he was living in a magic circle, because I feared it might break. Nonetheless, that day of total absence of shadow, the day in which I confessed to him that I felt so good I thought I was going mad, something happened that made me think that strange things do happen sometimes.
I don’t know whether I went so far as to hum under my breath. It was the day Raquel arrived in the camp. As soon as I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the reason. She came in a consignment of Jews and marched past among them, in a brown coat and with her black curly hair rather tangled. She looked around astonished and horrified. We, Salva and I, our skeletons draped in striped rags, were part of the horror. She couldn’t know that she’d bewitched us and filled us with sun. Neither could she know that, in no time at all, she was going to be like us.
Please don’t have any gold in your mouth, please be healthy so you can work, but please don’t let them notice you, please let them see you as a useful number and not assign you to prostitution. Please survive long enough to enter Salva’s magic circle.
That day, Salva, seeing her coming in, looking around her with her huge black eyes, said, that girl’s beautiful. And I said, didn’t I tell you that something good was going to happen today?
Good for us and terrible for Raquel. We knew that because of what was going to happen. We thought that if she got through the first few days alive we’d take her under our protection. Salva fell in love. He said that never, but never, in all his life had he felt anything like this. He said it might be a means to feel he was human but, whatever it was, it was an emotion he’d never experienced before. I asked him why he was so sure he’d fallen in love.
“Because she makes me fly, because she lifts my feet off the ground, because she makes me so nervous when she’s nearby that my hands shake, and because I’m desperate to kiss her,” he said shamefaced.
Lamentably, Raquel fell in love with me, and I with her, though I’ve always doubted whether my love was as great as Salva’s. I don’t know if I’ve flown high enough, and now we shall never know.
Later on, after we were liberated, I didn’t know much about Salva’s private life. He threw himself into taking revenge for all of us. He hunted down all the Nazis that he got in his sights. Me too, but I was also as happy as I knew how to be. Would Salva have been happy with Raquel? Would he have carried out his mission with the same single-minded tenacity if he’d been happy? Life has no answer to that. And now neither Raquel nor Salva were here any more, but out of that came a daughter whom I love, and loving someone frees you from a great deal of despair. Out of that, I’d met Sandra, whom Salva had probably enclosed in a magic circle while I was pushing her towards the brink of disaster.
Although I could park in a place where I could stay in the car and comfortably observe the Estrella with my binoculars, I wanted to have a breath of fresh air, so I strolled down to where she was moored. The sun was shining most agreeably. I sat down on a stone bench three moorings before Heim’s, as I thought it was a good idea to stay as close as possible to the car in case I had to make a quick getaway. Heim was sunbathing or just finishing his tanning session in the hammock, because he suddenly got up, went down the cabin steps, stooping half a metre to do so, and came back with a notebook that looked ridiculously small in his huge fist. I was irked that I’d left the binoculars in the car. What would he be writing down? Probably what he’d eaten. He liked to leave an account of what he was doing, of how he’d influenced the world. Thanks to his meticulousness, we knew, in his very own handwriting, the bestial things he’d done in the surgery, and that catalogue of his was proof that he was a war criminal. He wrote slowly and at one point he looked up at the sky, either to help him think better, or to describe the clouds perchance.
A minute later the writer Aribert Heim dropped into the background when I saw a familiar-looking four-by-four pulling up between me and the Estrella. A few years ago I hadn’t needed to memorize things, hadn’t needed to dredge my mind to come up with a damn four-by-four. It would have identified itself, would have shot out like a ray of lightning from among all the four-by-fours I’d ever seen in my life. Now, by contrast, I had to wait a few minutes for light to be shed, and in extreme situations a few minutes can be too long.
A four-by-four and a German shepherd with its head stuck out the window. Elfe’s car and dog. A woman with a blonde plait got out. She was certainly one of them. Seeing her, Heim got out of the hammock. In fact he’d had her in his sights long enough to have reacted earlier, but what was happening to me was also happening to him.
With a jump she was on the deck. They didn’t greet one another or exchange any kind of friendly gesture. They talked but I couldn’t keep watching, because the dog picked up my scent, recognized me and went crazy. It was barking in my direction and looked as if it was about to shoot out through the half-open window. It was the dog that had saved Elfe’s life; it wanted to greet me, it already had half its body out and the blonde woman turned round to look at it, so I decided to retreat. She and Heim were talking about something more momentous than the dog’s excitement and would be thinking that anything could have set it off.
The dog kept barking in my direction until I got into my car. I could still hear it in the distance as I drove off. This didn’t look good. I already knew, had already noticed that something bad was happening. The shadow of evil disappeared from my life many years ago but its memory had remained. I checked the fuel gauge and headed for Elfe’s house. It was total rashness, because the tracks around there were very narrow. It would be a real rat trap if they discovered me, but I needed to confirm my suspicions.
The problem with this zone was that it was very easy to take the wrong track. The same vegetation was everywhere and getting to the faux-rural houses would involve some desperately tricky manoeuvres. I got lost twice and, with my third try, recognized Elfe’s house, where the carport was now empty. The silence was absolute and I didn’t dare to hang around for long, but then again I was there and I knew there was a trapdoor through which I could get into
the cellar. I scratched the back of my neck almost to the point of abrasion. Obviously I couldn’t leave the car where it was and suicidally call attention to myself, so I took the plunge and drove into a nearby vegetable garden, squashing lettuces and tomatoes as I went. I walked back to the house, removed the weighty flowerpot and opened the trapdoor, closing it behind me as I went down the steps. The most important thing was not to get agitated. I didn’t want to die in that cheerless house with its stench of alcohol and stale vomit. I turned on the cellar light and something on the floor caught my eye. On the clay tiles they’d painted a black sun, which meant that they’d performed ceremonies in this cellar. I went up to the house fearing that the door that separated it from the cellar might be locked, but it opened, so they weren’t expecting any intruder to get in.
The kitchen and living room were in a terrible mess, much worse than last time. They’d opened drawers and cupboard doors without taking the trouble to close them. God knows what they’d been looking for. The album I took? Probably more things. I ventured upstairs not wanting to think that if they caught me they’d kill me. I stepped carefully, though I was certain there was no one there. They’d eliminated Elfe. She was living a life she didn’t deserve to live, in the view of her friends. I looked into her bedroom, which had been ransacked. I didn’t bother to do a search, because I wouldn’t have known where to begin. Whatever they were looking for, they would have found it and, if not, I wouldn’t be capable of spotting it. I had a quick glance in the wardrobe. Some coat hangers were bare and the drawers half empty. I opened the doors of the other rooms, but didn’t detect anything special except marks on the walls where paintings had hung. They could have been Rembrandts or Picassos.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 17
