“You surely can’t be thinking we’re going to eat all that.” Karin flashed her diabolical smile.
Alice then said something in German, Karin answered her in German, and they were at it for about ten minutes in what looked like a slanging match until Karin got to her feet.
“Now we really are leaving,” she decreed. “This girl has things to do and so do I. You make an excellent sponge cake, Frida.”
I also mumbled that it was very good, even though I had it for breakfast quite regularly. From the expression on Alice’s face it looked as if Karin had won the day with their chat in German. And, from the look on Frida’s face, she seemed satisfied, as far as I could tell, being unable to get through the barriers of German and big secrets.
“Just a moment,” Alice said as we were about to leave.
Karin huffed and puffed and looked at her watch as if she had something pressing to do. During our visit, she might have got the idea of going to the shopping centre, which wouldn’t surprise me. Alice opened one of the doors on the ground floor and after five minutes emerged with one of the usual packages.
“This is a personal gift, something of mine.”
Karin took it and clasped her in something like an embrace or more like a pressing of shoulders. They were reconciled. After all, as an endangered species, they were doomed to get on.
There was a moment, just an instant, as this scene was unfolding, when I instinctively looked to my right and caught Frida watching me. I looked away at once and couldn’t draw any conclusion from it, but it was clear that Frida was studying me or keeping an eye on me, and it was also evident that she hadn’t said anything to Alice about my taking the used syringes, so either she didn’t know or she was keeping this trick up her sleeve. It was possible that all the time I’d been paying no attention to Frida, Frida was already observing me.
Saying goodbye, Alice squeezed me against her as she’d done the night of the party. I could feel her hip bones digging into me.
When we were at last sitting in the four-by-four, I didn’t dare to look at my watch or alert Karin to the fact that I had a life of my own to lead.
“Looks like you put her in her place,” I commented with some admiration, real admiration.
“I had to remind her of one or two things. People are very forgetful. And, now we’re in the car,” she said, “we could go for a drive, couldn’t we?”
“Okay,” I said, tired of the cat-and-mouse games.
“This woman drives me mad. She wants everything that anyone else has. If she found the biggest, most beautiful diamond in the world lying in the street, it wouldn’t interest her. She’d only want it if someone else was wearing it. And you. If you weren’t with us, she wouldn’t have even noticed you.”
The predator Alice. The whole lot of them were predators, each in his or her own way. Except Alberto. Alberto had given me more than he’d taken. Love is a double-edged sword that can make you happy or make you miserable. Then I remembered the Black Angel, who seemed to be the most intelligent of the bunch and who might be the leader of the Brotherhood. He’d only appeared in our house for Karin’s party, giving the impression that he was fed up with all of them. It occurred to me to ask Karin about him.
“What about Sebastian? That really elegant man who was at your party.”
“Sebastian… Yes, he’s got class. He’s got nothing in common with Alice. Alice is just another upstart, nouveau riche, as you say here, and you will have noted it in her manners, but Sebastian’s in another league. I still watch what I say when he’s around.”
I drove towards the lighthouse. Karin kept looking out the window. It was getting dark.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The town will be crammed full of people and at Alice’s I started getting a headache.”
“Yes, Alice was a real pain in the neck.”
To get to the wild palm trees at the lighthouse I had to take a dirt road, make a detour. I tried to see if I could make out Julián’s car from the road, and naturally he wouldn’t be waiting for me at this hour, but we were already there and it was stupid not to go and look. Karin wouldn’t be able to relate our visit to this place with anything else.
I parked next to the ice-cream parlour. Its lights cast phantom shapes on the trees around it. I liked this sensation of peace and solitude, but knew that it terrified Karin. She needed hustle and bustle.
“What are we doing here?” she wanted to know. She preferred to be in the shopping centre looking at people and pretty things.
“I need to pee. There’s sure to be a toilet in here.”
“You could have done it in the countryside. No one would have seen you.” She burst out laughing.
“Yes, it’s true. That tends to be the custom. If you don’t want to get out, I’ll be back in a moment.”
“I’ll wait for you. Don’t be long,” she ordered, getting cranky now because I wasn’t doing everything she wanted.
It had been too much of a risk bringing her here and now I was regretting it. I was counting on her getting addled with her idea of going to the town.
I went inside, not expecting to see Julián and not knowing how to make the most of the situation. There were two or three couples sitting down and a couple of men trading jokes at the bar. When she saw me going to the toilets, the usual waitress looked at me and I looked back at her. I went over and asked if anyone had left a message for me.
“For you?” she asked, considering whether or not to give me the information.
My heart was thumping hard. If Karin got it into her head to come in, I was lost. The waitress looked under the bar. I heard a car door slamming and was about to run outside when Miss Nosy took out a bit of paper and stared hard into my face, wanting to bend my ear about her opinion of my relationship with the old Julián, which is what she did. I put the note in my pocket and was about to ask her to keep this to herself please, but then I didn’t say anything, because it would be blowing the whole thing out of proportion and would end up making her remember the incident more clearly. I went out again without going to the loo and, once outside, saw another car parked next to ours. I checked to see whether Karin could have seen me through the window talking to the waitress and stuffing the note in my pocket. And it was possible.
“Done?” she asked.
I didn’t reply, but simply sighed as if I was feeling pressure on my diaphragm and started the car.
“All those pieces of jewellery were beautiful, but the pearl necklace…” I said as I nosed the car down, heading for the town.
“Those pearls would have looked very good on you, but they don’t on that old woman. I don’t know who she thinks she is. Pearls are for young women. Do you plan to take that ring out of your nose some day?”
“Well, I got the hole made so I might as well use it.”
She wriggled happily in her seat. She enjoyed being with me. I drove past to the El Tosalet turn-off and got us in amongst the tumult of the town. I could feel Karin’s growing enthusiasm, but she said nothing, in case I hadn’t realized and was taking the long way home. I stopped in the shopping-centre car park.
“Didn’t you say you had a headache?” She was getting excited.
“Yes, but it’s gone now, and we need to forget about the Alice thing, don’t we?”
She was like a kid with new shoes, as they say. She didn’t expect that the idea of going to the shopping centre would come from me, without her having to ask. I trusted that any doubt, any suspicion, any shadow that might have crossed her mind at the lighthouse would disappear now. When we were inside and we’d got a shopping trolley and her eyes were roving around all the pretty goods, I told her that I thought I might have left the car lights on. I’d be back in no time. I’d know where to find her.
As soon as she was out of sight, I took the note out of my pocket. He’d drawn some circles, three to be exact. Each one had a letter, A, B, C. Inside circle C was a cross. There was also a rectangle and
some palm trees. I closed my eyes to calm down, and when I opened them again and looked at it carefully, the drawing started to look familiar. Stubby wild palms, bench, stones. It was the place at the lighthouse where Julián and I used to sit before it got too cool, which might mean that he’d left me some kind of message under stone C. It could be a way of telling me not to go to the hotel but to the lighthouse. But it would be complicated to go now. It would take too long and Karin would be surprised and get tetchy. But I could also invent something along the way. When Karin was happy, she was ready to believe anything. Karin knew the good life was running out on her, that when the tap of the magic liquid was turned off she’d shrivel up and be prostrated in a wheelchair, unable to go out any more. Her jewels would dry up one day too. She had to live for the moment.
I zoomed out of there, tooting at any car that crossed my path and held me up. On the motorbike I would have been there in a flash, but with this tank everything was complicated.
I finally got to the lighthouse. It was madness to have left Karin alone. It took me a quarter of an hour to get through the bloody bends on the road. I left the lights shining on the bench and the palm trees and, when I located stone C, I threw myself at it. It was quite heavy, but I finally managed to turn it over. I picked up the bit of paper he’d left wrapped in plastic and rushed off. It was like being in one of those obstacle races on telly where you’ve got to get through all the problems at top speed. Would all this rushing around be bad for me? In a couple of months, of course, I wouldn’t be able to do it, but luckily I still could now. I got into the car and started it up. At the traffic lights I prayed they’d go green soon, begged for it with all my heart, and then I prayed for a space in the car park. At this hour the shopping centre was filling up and if I didn’t find a spot to park in there’d be no human explanation for it. And my prayers were answered. I found a place one floor down. On this point, if Karin had any questions I might be able to make her doubt herself. I was sweating out of every pore in my body and my heart was racing. As soon as I set foot in the supermarket, I tried to get control of my breathing. I didn’t want her to see me in a state. I wiped the sweat off my face. It had taken me almost three quarters of an hour. One more prayer. I swore that this would be the last one for the afternoon. I prayed I’d be able to spot her in the midst of the multitude.
I took up position near the centre, concentrated and swept the scene with my eyes, section by section. My prayer included her not being hidden behind one of the columns. I saw her. I saw her in the books section buying several gilt-lettered volumes.
I went to her side and took the bag with the books in it.
“Where did you get to? I was worried. You haven’t been feeling sick again, have you?”
There was a trap in her comment, as I very well knew, so I told her that, no, it was a simple matter of not being able to find her. It was impossible with so many people and I’d been about to throw in the towel and get them to call her over the public-address system. And then I’d seen her at last.
“Are they good, these novels?”
“I’m keen to get started. I’m not going to watch television today.”
That was good to know. Then I could go upstairs and run into my room too. I didn’t want to be left alone with Fred. There were so many things I had to hide now that something might slip out.
In order to distract Karin’s attention from the fact of having to take the lift down one floor and the short time that would figure on the car-park ticket, I told her I’d like to learn German. I thought that learning German would open up doors for me and that maybe she could teach me.
“For example,” I asked, “how do you say, ‘I live in Fred’s and Karin’s house. Fred and Karin are my friends’?”
Karin let fly a couple of sentences in German and then stopped for a moment to think. “I don’t think I’d have the patience to teach you. You’d do better going to an academy. I know a very good one.”
So simple, so simple. Karin had paid for the ticket and I’d taken it and thrown it into a waste-paper basket, we’d gone down one floor and were opening the boot and putting Karin’s purchases inside. This time, besides her usual caprices, she’d bought practical items like fruit and milk. It was then that she looked around her and said that we hadn’t parked there before. I said yes we had, but this time, instead of taking the escalator, we’d come down in the lift.
She looked around again and said nothing. I could have told her that when I’d gone back to check to see whether I’d left the lights on, I’d realized that I’d parked the car in an area reserved for the disabled and that I’d had to move it, but I took the shortest route. If she believed me, fine, and if not, she wouldn’t have swallowed the other story either.
“Shall we go home now?” I asked, to shake her out of her thoughts.
“It’ll be more for your sake than mine. I’m not tired.”
I asked her, to shake her out of her thoughts again, if she’d mind calling by my sister’s house to make sure everything was in order and to pick up a folder I’d left there, a folder that didn’t exist of course.
Julián
I was waiting at the lighthouse for an hour and Sandra didn’t turn up. Any snag could so easily appear and prevent her from being able to meet me. When this happened, I didn’t know whether to hang around or leave. It made me feel bad to think she’d find that I’d gone when she was inventing a thousand stories in order to come. What seemed really dangerous was her turning up at the hotel again. More than anything else, I wanted to warn her not to go there looking for me, and to tell her that when she needed to speak with me she should do it here, at the lighthouse. Our problem until now had been where to leave my messages for her and hers for me. Sometimes I’d been tempted to get hold of a mobile phone here and give her some money so she could call me, but phone calls end up betraying you, they’re indiscreet and you never know the situation of the person you’re calling. It was better like this. The fewer possibilities they had of tracking our ways of making contact the better. That’s why the Norwegian couple didn’t use mobiles and many of the invisible ones didn’t have a home number either. They tended to use the phone of someone they knew or go to a nearby bar. It was then that I got the idea of what could be the simplest letterbox for us: the place we knew best, the stone bench where we’d sat so many times. That was the place where we could leave our messages and, while I was having a milk coffee and a bun loaded with butter and sugar in the ice-cream parlour, I drew a small map of the site. It was very rudimentary but, if you didn’t know how to put two and two together, it wouldn’t be so easy to decipher either.
I folded the piece of paper and wrote, “Please deliver to the girl with the ring in her nose.”
Sandra
I drove slowly to the little house so that Karin would be putting a good distance between the parking-lot episode and our arrival at Villa Sol. When we left the town behind us, the landscape was lovely, dark, with little lights here and there, shadows of trees and a sky that was swallowing us up. And there I was sharing that moment with a creature that had killed hundreds of people without batting an eyelid, without remorse, and sadistically. I could smell her perfume and I opened the window.
“You’re very romantic, aren’t you, Karin? You’re really crazy about love stories.”
“I couldn’t live without them now that I’m old. But there are stories that remind me about things. I love them. It’s the spice of life, love, conquest, seduction. You can’t begin to imagine what Fred was like when I met him. He was a spectacular man. Tall, handsome, indomitable, he was the man I’d been dreaming of. He was an athlete, good at all kinds of sports, riding horses, skiing and mountaineering. He was a superior man… complete. I fell in love with him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was as good as being in a novel or a film. Now we’re two old people. How old are your parents?”
“My mother’s fifty and my father’s fifty-five,” I told her, thinking that the description Karin had given
me of her Fred was like the one I’d had from Julián, though his was less idealized. In Julián’s opinion, Fred was the raw material that Karin needed to move up the ladder and, I would add, to give shape to her sickly-sweet romantic dreams. From what I’d managed to deduce so far, Karin could be both terribly practical and also given to fantasy.
“What about your grandmothers?”
“They’re not alive any more. I hardly knew my grandmothers. Sometimes I don’t know if I remember them or imagine them.”
“Now you have me,” she said.
Without wanting to, I gave her a smug smile. Although I knew that this was a show put on by the two of us, I felt comforted. Even in her moments of greatest weakness or those in which she managed to feel more human, Karin would never give any more than she received. She wasn’t used to generosity. It didn’t enter into her scheme of things.
The lights were on in the little house, as Julián called it. I stopped the four-by-four and told Karin she could wait for me there if she liked, but, as I imagined, she didn’t like that idea. When she was feeling well, she wasn’t going to miss a single thing. She got out of the car, leaning on me, and waited with me for the gate to open. Basically, I’d brought her here to fill her head with so much stuff that she’d end up getting muddled. I thought that, in her head, this stop would assume greater importance than the fact that we’d stopped at the lighthouse or that she’d had her doubts about which floor we’d parked on at the supermarket. If she wanted to tell Fred anything, she’d have her conversation with Alice. She’d only turn Fred against me when she no longer needed me, or if I let her down and, meanwhile, I was willing to put on a show for her.
A man in shorts came out, his hair all over the place, the sort of man who carries on like a pig when he’s at home. He listlessly opened up the wrought-iron gate. He was barefoot despite the cold, the sort of man for whom going into his house is the same as getting into bed. He was a secondary-school teacher. I knew from my sister that he was running away from a divorce and had asked for a transfer to somewhere by the sea. I informed him that I’d called in to see if he needed anything and to pick up a folder I’d left behind. He stood aside so we could take the few steps that would get us to the front door. I couldn’t bear to think about the state the living room would be in.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 23
