The Scent of Lemon Leaves

by Clara Sanchez

  Karin was enjoying the scenery. The sun wasn’t very hot, but it warmed the glass of the windows and created a very pleasant feeling of cosiness inside the four-by-four. Karin sometimes closed her eyes, seemingly trying to soak up more life. Would she ever think, at times like this, of the people she’d killed or helped to kill, of the people she’d denied the warmth of the sun, of her own free will and not even in a fit of rage? I could see her out of the corner of my eye, almost smirking with the pure happiness of feeling well. It didn’t look as if she was having any remorseful prickings of conscience. It looked as if, for her, she was the only one that mattered. It was this absence of guilt that made me wonder whether Julián had got the wrong people. It made me have my doubts as to whether everything he was telling me was totally true. Julián might have suffered so much that he couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad people.

  In the shopping centre, after half an hour in the gardening section, I told her my feet were swelling, that I needed to sit down and that I’d go and catch up on a bit of knitting in the car. She insisted on my staying, insisted that walking around all over the place was precisely the way to reduce the swelling of my feet, and she insisted, because she liked making comments about everything she saw. But I wasn’t going to let her twist my arm and headed for the four-by-four. It was great not having to listen to Karin’s voice. I took out my knitting, which I hadn’t touched for days, and got into it. I almost forgot to think about Alberto. Absent Alberto. I opened the window to let some air in along with the clatter of shopping carts trundling out to the cars. Life could be so simple, a peaceful life of struggle-worn pensioners pushing their shopping carts and enjoying the small everyday things.

  A couple of hours later I spotted Karin in the distance amid metallic gleams and got out to go and help her. She let me push the cart, didn’t ask if I felt better, didn’t speak to me. It made me suspect that this whole time, without having anyone to talk to, she’d started thinking about me and what she’d been thinking wasn’t very good. I kept quiet. I opened up the boot, put her things in, then praised some terracotta flowerpots. She told me she’d hurt herself lifting them into her cart, but luckily some dark woman (did she mean black?) had finally come to help her. She said “dark woman” with contempt and she said “help” with the intention of making me feel that I’d abandoned her. I was about to tell her that there was no point in buying flowerpots if she couldn’t manage them, but that would have made things worse, would have made me look worse in her eyes. So I opted to apologize.

  “I’m sorry. There was a moment when my stomach was quite upset.”

  Did she relent with these words? I wouldn’t call it relenting, because she wasn’t thinking about me. She was thinking that I hadn’t stopped liking her after all, thinking that I liked being with her, and that only feeling ill could drag me away from her side.

  “When we get home, you’ll be able to see everything I’ve bought.”

  I told her I was dying to see all her lovely things and we made our way to the gym. This time, she had a morning appointment and, luckily, at this hour too there was no parking spot nearby and she had to get out at the door while I went on to look for somewhere to leave the car. I’d been praying that this would happen so I could go to the hotel to see Julián or leave him a note. Otherwise, I’d have no choice but to go in with her and, if I left while she was doing her exercises, she’d know about it and then I’d have to come up with some explanation.

  I went directly to the hotel. A minivan left a free space right at the door just as I arrived. I asked for Julián in reception and they called his room, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to go back with the syringes. I’d throw them away rather than go back with them on me, but, first of all, I had to try to get them to Julián.

  Where would he be? What did he do when he wasn’t with me at the lighthouse? I had to do everything all by myself. I was fed up. Fed up! I rushed out and went down to the seafront where there were some flower stalls. I went to the first one I found and bought the cheapest bunch they had. They were seasonal flowers, hothouse of course, and had no smell at all, or at most they smelt of wet cut stalks. The Chinese florist pulled them dripping out of a bucket and wrapped them in transparent paper. I asked her for an extra piece of paper, telling her to hurry, although now that I was buying the bunch of flowers I didn’t want it to end up looking weird either. She also gave me a card and envelope so I could write something.

  I sat down on a bench looking at the port and wrapped the two syringes, still wrapped in toilet paper, in the cellophane the Chinese woman had given me. I stuck this small package down among the stalks. You couldn’t see anything at all. The bunch was also tied up with a great big ribbon that would cover up anything. I wrote on the card:

  Happy birthday! I hope you will always find unforgotten youth in the tender stems of these flowers.

  Instead of “unforgotten youth” I was going to put “your eternal youth”, but that seemed too explicit if there was any possibility that the flowers were going to fall into the wrong hands. That was total paranoia, of course, but I wasn’t going to take any chances for the sake of a few words. I hoped that, after the risk I’d run, the syringes would still contain a drop or two in good enough condition to be analysed. I went back to the hotel and left the bunch of flowers in reception for them to be given to Julián when he came back.

  Next I went to a nearby bar and phoned my mother.

  She almost squawked out loud when she heard my voice and said they were worried about me and wanted to know where had I gone after my sister had kicked me out of the “bungalow”. When my mother was angry with my sister, she called the house a “bungalow”, so I deduced that they must have had a fight over me. I told her not to worry, that I was sharing a flat with some girl friends and having a great time.

  “Don’t you have anything else to tell me?”

  “No. That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked in the inquisitorial tone she just loved putting on when she’d caught somebody out.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I’m referring to… you know.”

  “No, no I don’t know,” I said to mortify her, or to mortify myself.

  “For God’s sake, Sandra! I’m your mother. You weren’t found under a cabbage leaf, you know.”

  Cabbage leaf? When she lost it she used to say these stupid things, so I thought this was as good a time as any to come clean.

  “Are you talking about babies, babies coming into the world?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m referring to. Your sister told me. She couldn’t have this secret on her conscience. What if something happened to you?”

  She started to cry. It had taken quite a while to get to this, given what the subject matter was.

  “I told your sister that she shouldn’t have rented out the bungalow, that she should have let you have it till you came back.”

  “Mum, she needs the money. Leave it. I told you. I’m in great shape.”

  I told her that I’d had an ultrasound and that her grandchild was going to be a little boy. I told her that he was a very healthy, perfect little boy, and that my walks along the beach in the open air were fantastically good for me. She was now in floods of tears. Nothing I ever did fitted with her idea of the way things ought to be.

  “Do you need money?” she asked in a choking voice.

  “I’ve got a job. I’m living very well,” I told her. “When my friends leave, you can come and see me.”

  Basically, I felt relieved. I’d only forgotten to tell her not to say a word to Santi, but time was running out and I had to go and pick up Karin. I didn’t know whether going back to Karin was going back to reality or to the utmost unreality.

  When I pulled up she was waiting at the door with her sports bag slung over her shoulder. As usual, her twisted face – all the more so since the sun had contracted it – expressed all by itself the question that I had no intention
of answering. I didn’t even resort to my well-worn excuse of having to leave the car miles away and then driving round and round till she came out. I limited myself to asking her how her session in the gym had gone.

  “It was just great,” she said.

  Fred and Karin spoke Spanish very fluently, but with their accent it was quite funny to hear them using these colloquial expressions.

  Karin was tired and we didn’t talk much until we got home, when she said that the instructor had really worked them hard. All of a sudden, Karin stopped being a witch and turned into an old lady with problems. She couldn’t carry as much as a single bag into the house. Her energy was running out faster and faster. I had to do it all. As soon as she got inside, she lay on the sofa. Frida had left some soup she’d made. It was incredible that she had time to do so much and, on top of that, to be on the lookout for the slightest sign that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

  As I was taking things out of the bags, putting them away and telling Karin how beautiful they were, she asked me if I’d thought about the proposal of joining the Brotherhood. Right now precisely, Fred was trying to convince Otto and the rest of them to accept me.

  “That’s where golf and lunch and dinner with our friends are useful,” she informed me.

  I told her the truth. I told her that I’d forgotten about it, that I hadn’t given it any thought, that I was really grateful for all their efforts but that they should understand that all of this was a complete surprise to me, something I’d never as much as imagined I might do. She started to nod off and I covered her with the tartan blanket she tended to use for her siestas. I went on putting things away, fearing that Fred would be turning up any moment, possibly with his friend Otto.

  Now Fred wasn’t like he was before. A great gulf had opened up between the man who helped me on the beach, who lifted me up with his big hands, who burned the soles of his feet bringing me water, and this one. This one was simple and obedient and I thought him capable of anything. If Karin told him to kill me, he’d kill me. If the Brotherhood ordered him to do it, he’d kill me then too. Ever since his and Karin’s courting days, they’d lived in a group, and for him true law and true justice were what the group decreed. Anything outside the group had to be accepted grudgingly without any public protest.

  Julián

  I spent the morning running around still trying to gather more information about Fredrik’s and Karin’s friends and what I was turning up looked like some sort of dream, of the nightmare variety. Salva had discovered a nest of Nazis, Nazis about to kick the bucket, but still Nazis. My question is why he hadn’t left me the information he’d managed to put together in the old people’s home. He must surely have left express instructions for them to hand over to me the box, the briefcase, the envelope or whatever in which he kept it. I’m certain that when he wrote to me he must have known how many of them there were, who they were, the kind of life they lived and what they were up to, apart from their shared bent for torture and murder. He would have told me about this business of eternal youth and would have known a lot more too, so as soon as I could I’d make a trip to the home. For the moment, I needed to rest for a while. Eat and rest.

  I went to my usual bar and asked for the set menu. By this time the waiter knew me and had taken a shine to me. As soon as he saw me coming in, he came out from behind the bar with a fistful of cutlery in one hand and waving a paper tablecloth in the other. He was going to set, if it was free, a table at the back facing the door. This was something I couldn’t avoid, one of the tics that had stayed with me after my work at the Centre. Never sit with my back to the door; turn round suddenly in the street if someone was hovering too close to me; cover up the number they’d tattooed on my arm, even in summer. Sometimes, when my daughter was small and we went to the beach, I put a bandage or sticking plaster over it so that the other children wouldn’t ask me what it was. I didn’t like people feeling sorry for me or seeing me as different. I had been different but, then again, I didn’t want to make children feel threatened or to start deceiving them either.

  Children immediately notice what really matters, however insignificant it may seem at first sight. There was a time when my daughter was crazy about the sand in her school playground and she used to put the most golden grains in a plastic bag and bring them home to me. I still have some of those little bags and I’d brought one with me on this trip, as a talisman. Fortunately, I always had it with me, in the pocket of my jacket, so when they went snooping in my room they couldn’t take it from me.

  My daughter told me that I could probably get the numbers on my arm removed by laser, but I told her it was one thing to cover them up and quite another thing to remove them. That number was part of me and my life could not be the same after they’d marked me with it. I’d be fooling myself if I had it taken away. And, anyway, why? My future was here, and what I was doing now would be what was left of my future.

  I’d moved on from the French omelettes of the first days to having the set menu. What with one thing and another, the price was almost the same, I was well fed for the whole day, the waiter made sure they didn’t put salt on my food and recommended what would be best for me. Some days I left him a decent tip. They knew in the bar that I was staying in the Costa Azul Hotel and told me I did well to eat with them. They didn’t want to say any more, didn’t want problems, but I did well not to eat in the hotel, and that was that.

  I found the hotel slightly unappealing and didn’t feel the same way there as I did in the bar. The last straw came when I came in after lunch to lie down for a while and tidy up the notes I’d been jotting down in the library, the town hall, the land and property registry and the deaths registry. One place led me to another and I was now seeing clearly that some Nazis had been living here since the Forties and Fifties, others had come here to join them after being called by those who were still here, and several had left or had pretended to leave. The fact is they’d led a gilded existence and had even set up some very prosperous businesses in real estate and the hotel trade. One of them had gone into private practice as a gynaecologist. I didn’t know exactly what year Salva had come to live here, but he must have accumulated a vast amount of information. He must have had an infernal feeling of impotence when he realized that he was going to die before many of them. He didn’t believe in God or the afterlife, and neither did I. We were republican atheists all our lives. After what we witnessed, we denied the existence of any being that might have been concerned about us. Nonetheless, I would have liked my friend to be buried somewhere, so I could take some flowers to him in the cemetery.

  As I said, it was the last straw. To get to the lifts I had no alternative but to go through reception, and there was the hotel detective with a bunch of flowers in his hand. They more or less knew my habits and timetable. This is one of the things about old age, when it’s impossible to survive unless it’s on the basis of routine and ritual. When I was young, I’d never given it a thought, but anyway, there was Tony, handing me a bunch of flowers.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Happy birthday,” said Tony.

  I was admiring the flowers and kept doing so, making no movement that might betray me, but why would he say such a thing to me?

  “Thank you,” I replied with a festive gesture that would do the job both if it were true and if it were a joke. “You’re really on the ball.”

  Tony smelt a rat and I did too, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. It was Roberto, the receptionist with the big freckle, who couldn’t stand the tension.

  “We’re sorry, Don Julián, it’s not us. A girl, a punk, brought them,” he said, staring into my eyes so I’d understand whom he was referring to.

  They were both still waiting for an explanation.

  “Well, well, what a lovely thought. This is why I’ve been missing my country so much, because the people here are so extraordinarily nice,” I offered, attempting to sidle off to the lifts with the bunch of
flowers.

  However, though I’d been taken by surprise and was rather full after the delicious meat and potato stew they’d served in the bar, I still conserved a modicum of lucidity, so I started looking inside the transparent paper for the card that they always include with a bunch of flowers, and by means of which nosy Tony must have learnt of my bogus birthday.

  “Wasn’t there a card with this?”

  Roberto hastened to hand it to me. He didn’t want problems. It wouldn’t have bothered Tony in the least if he’d kept it. He’d been born and raised for this.

  I took the card out of the envelope, had a quick glance at it, planning to read it at my leisure in my room.

  “Don’t tell me you read the card,” I said to Tony, looking him in the eye. I’ve had enough experience with these animals to know that they have to be made to understand you’re not afraid of them.

  “The envelope was open,” he answered, not taking his dead-fish eyes from mine. “We did it for reasons of security. We can’t be in receipt of anything strange without guarantees.”

  Be in receipt, what crap!

  “A bunch of flowers is strange?”

  “If I were you,” Tony said, “wouldn’t it seem strange to me that a young girl, who doesn’t exactly look like a nun, should bring me a bunch of flowers? We could be talking about some terrorist plot or some sort of threat. I’m responsible for everything that happens here.”

  “Try to understand,” Roberto chimed in. “If we knew who this girl was, if we knew that you approved of her, then we wouldn’t find it so strange if she turned up here with another bunch of flowers. After what happened in your room, we’re concerned about you.”

  “She’s not a terrorist and, as you’ve already seen from her card, she’s not making any threats,” I said, realizing that it was better to go along with them. “She’s a normal girl. I helped her one day on the beach when she was having a dizzy attack. At some point I must have told her that my birthday was coming up… It’s her way of saying thank you for what I did.”