I didn’t know how I could penetrate this other world of Sandra’s, but then I recalled Karin’s enthusiasm for going to the shopping centre. It was half-past seven, so it was quite likely that Karin had asked Sandra if they could go and have a stroll around there. Although I’d been thinking about going to the Nordic Club to see if I’d be lucky enough to spot Sebastian Bernhardt, I drove towards the shopping centre.
It was crammed with people. There was one near our house in Buenos Aires and Raquel loved going there every second afternoon. At first I hated it, thought it a waste of time. I had better things to do, like following the trail of this or that Nazi, but with time I found that it relaxed me. Simply thinking about all the things I was seeing, I felt it was like strolling round inside the horn of plenty or Ali Baba’s cave. Everything was there, all you could ever need, and all you would never need. So I didn’t mind using the occasion to buy myself some socks and handkerchiefs. My daughter told me it’s more hygienic to blow your nose on paper tissues, but I liked the touch of soft cotton on my nose and wasn’t about to give that up. I don’t know if it was a taste for luxury or my own fads, but I couldn’t stand normal socks made of synthetic fibre. They had to be natural fibre and my underpants had to be a hundred per cent cotton, like my shirts. I needed my body’s musculature to feel soft and comfortable and to be as minimally perceptible as possible. And when I saw the old men of the Brotherhood I thought that they must have their fads too, like Fredrik’s abnormally wide shirts. We’d come to the same point, then, some along the path of the executioners and some along the path of the victims. We’d reached the edge of the precipice.
I didn’t get to go into the shopping centre, strictly speaking. I’d only just parked between two columns when someone came up from behind and pushed me up against one of them. My head and back were bashed against the cement. Since I still had the car keys in my hand, I jabbed the madman in the stomach as hard as I could, but he was so close I didn’t manage to do any damage. He moved away and twisted my wrist. It was the Eel.
I asked him to let me go.
“I’ll let you go if you keep away from Sandra.”
“Sandra?” I asked.
“Yes, Sandra,” he answered, hurting my hand a little more.
“All right,” I said, freeing myself as much as I could, because if he damaged me any more I certainly wouldn’t be seeing Sandra again. “All right,” I repeated. “What’s all this about?”
There was no anger in the Eel’s expression. It was full of tiredness, sadness even.
“Get away from here and don’t go near Sandra again.”
With one of his hands he pressed my neck and I begged him to let me go if he didn’t want me to die on the spot. Once free, I cleared my throat and held my damaged hand in the other one. This was going to cost me dearly. My whole body would be aching for several days. I opened the car and sat down. He watched me.
“Who are you? Why have you come to this town?”
“A friend invited me to come, but when I arrived, he’d died. Either I made the long trip home again or I stayed for a while. I decided to stay as I hadn’t had a holiday for a long time.”
The Eel knew I wasn’t telling him the whole truth. He sat on the seat beside me and lit a cigarette without asking permission. Evidently, someone who’d just beaten me up wasn’t going to observe such niceties.
“How do you know Sandra?” he asked, looking around. He was thinking I had too many things in the car. He saw the hotel blanket, the water, the apples, the binoculars, the notebook and the newspapers. If it didn’t occur to him to do a search now, it would eventually.
“I met her on the beach and we became friends. When we see each other, we say hello.”
“It’s much more than saying hello. You spend a lot of time together. You meet up frequently.”
His tone was malicious. My hand and wrist were hurting quite a lot.
“Maybe Sandra’s lonely and needs someone to talk to. I’m not the man of her dreams but she can count on me. At least I don’t deceive her, I don’t give her any false illusions, and I don’t spend my time checking to see how hard she’s taking it while I’m getting on with my Don Juan existence.”
The Don Juan bit brought a derisive grimace to his mouth.
“You’re causing Sandra problems by letting yourself be seen with her. I can imagine what you’re after, can imagine that Sandra’s crossed your path and now you’ve thought of a thousand things Sandra could do to help you, but I can also imagine that you wouldn’t want to die precisely now that your dreams might come true, or at least now that you have dreams.”
“For a while now, every day I’ve stayed alive has been a pure bonus.”
“That was before. Now you don’t want to lose her. And believe me, if we see you with her again, it’s curtains for you. Do you get me?”
I nodded, and at last the Eel got out of my car.
I didn’t feel like going into the shopping centre to buy socks any more.
The best thing would be to go back to the hotel before my body got cold, because then I wouldn’t be able to move.
I drove with my good hand, the right one, gripping the steering wheel, and using the bad one to change gears. I found the strength, Heaven knows where, to leave the car as well-hidden as possible. Before going up to my room, I went to the hotel bar and asked for a glass of hot milk to take up with me. My hands were trembling, not from fear but from tiredness. It was still early, but I only wanted to take my medication, remove my contact lenses, put my pyjamas on and get into bed. I wouldn’t fold back the padded bedspread, because I was going to need all the warmth possible. I wanted to forget about Sandra and about what might be going on with her so I’d be able to function the next day.
When I’d got my thick-lensed glasses on there was a knock at the door. This didn’t seem to be the most appropriate moment for the end to come. If they’d really wanted to do away with me, they should have done it in the shopping-centre car park, when I was dressed in street clothes and next to my car, as if it was a robbery. It wouldn’t even have merited as much as a note in the newspapers. In contrast, it would certainly get people’s attention if they killed a totally defenceless old man in a hotel room. So I asked who was there.
Roberto came in, looking around the suite as if wanting to check that nothing was missing. To me, it no longer seemed as impressive as before. I’d got used to it and found that it was a just wannabe suite.
“Are you all right? The people in the bar told me with some alarm that you looked terrible and your hands were trembling a lot.”
He saw the glass of milk on the bedside table and then noticed that I was holding one hand with the other one.
“I slipped over and hurt myself.”
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
“It’s only painful because of the bruising, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
He insisted that I should have it X-rayed, but I told him that now I was in my pyjamas I wasn’t going to leave the hotel.
“I just want to rest.”
I began to think that Roberto, with his big freckle, might be my friend and that I could tell him what I was doing here and deliver into his care Elfe’s photograph album, Heim’s incriminatory notebooks and my own. Too easy, too friendly and too much weakness on my part. I had already thrown out the idea when he came back again with some ointment and a bandage, which he strapped on very well, and I was most grateful to him for that.
I dreamt that the Eel was twisting Sandra’s hand, that he was hurting her, that her joints were throbbing with pure pain and that I was bandaging it. But when I woke up I was the one with a sore hand and I couldn’t do anything for Sandra if she didn’t want to save herself. She could flee from Villa Sol, taking advantage of any of the moments when she went into town. She could go to the bus station and disappear. Even if I could get into the house, immobilize them all, and take her by the hand to get her out of there, she didn’t want to go. She’d been poisoned
by ideas of revenge, justice, or wanting to finish what she’d started, or falling in love. So I had to think about more practical matters.
Any time now they’d ransack the car. They knew I was keeping evidence and that I wasn’t going to be hiding it in the hotel, so that car had to be the best option. I didn’t need to think about it a lot. Since I’d been in the “little house” chatting with the tenant, the chaos of books and papers in which the teacher was submerged came into my mind again and again. The notebooks and the album wouldn’t attract any attention. Or not his. He had so much to read that he wouldn’t be looking for still more papers.
I took a Gelocatil with my breakfast. I wasn’t hungry, but I couldn’t afford to get weak and, since it was sunny and windless, I thought that it would be best to go to the beach and let the sun’s rays fortify me. I’d sit down by the wall where the sun was strongest, come back to the hotel to rest for a while on the bed, and then go over to the little house shortly after three.
Everything went as planned. I waited for the tenant to walk out with his briefcase, get into a third-hand (at least) Renault, and I went in without any problems. If he surprised me, I’d tell him I was taking measurements for bookcases. However, there was no need for that. I opened the small gate, and in a few steps I was at the front door, which opened easily. Making my way through mountains of papers and folders, I managed to reach the stairs. Of the upstairs rooms I immediately deduced that his was the one with the tangled bedclothes and newspapers and magazines scattered round the floor. There were a couple of copies of Playboy and I didn’t want to look more closely. It seemed that he didn’t go into the other rooms very often. One of them, the larger one, had two beds (I vaguely remembered having seen it when Sandra showed me the house), two desks with drawers down the sides and, on one wall, a bookshelf with school books that must have belonged to Sandra’s nephews. I didn’t believe these things would attract the tenant’s attention, and if he did have any interest in them he would have investigated them already, so I opened up one of the drawers. Inside were notebooks and some bound folios of drawings going back to primary-school efforts. Only parents could be interested in these, so I put Elfe’s photo album underneath them and stashed Heim’s notebooks and mine lying on their sides behind the textbooks. Nobody who wasn’t expressly looking for them could possibly find them. And if they stumbled upon them they wouldn’t be able to interpret Heim’s notes or know what to do with the album.
I left feeling quite relieved, certain that neither the Eel nor anyone else connected me with the little house, or at least it wouldn’t occur to them to suspect that it was my strongbox. What I wasn’t so crazy about was that anyone could get in, so the next day, when Sandra and I had arranged to meet, I’d tell her that the tenant was perfectly fine but that it would be a good idea to give him a new key.
Then I went to the casualty department at the hospital to get my hand looked at.
Sandra
I gave the new key of the house to Julián and he offered to take it to the tenant. I had no intention of telling my sister that, right now, anyone could get into her house and raid it, because I didn’t want her to come and disturb my world any more than it was already disturbed. Julián was a wreck, because he’d slipped over in the shopping-centre car park and twisted his hand, though it wasn’t serious. They’d put an elastic bandage on it in the casualty department.
I wanted to spend the minimum possible time with him at the lighthouse in case Alberto went to the Norwegians’ house while I was out, which would have upset me a lot. Then again, spending so much time in the house, only to be left without his putting in an appearance, sometimes made me even more upset. Sometimes I even thought about sending him a message via Martín, when the latter came to bring Karin’s injections or to speak with Fred in the library-den, but then I desisted, somehow sensing that Alberto himself was asking me not to say anything. All I had was that kiss in the port, Julián’s confession that he’d seen him with another girl and no show of interest from him since that night, and there I was, worrying about what he might want me to do. Was I some kind of cretin?
What would he want me to do?
“Have you done many stupid things because of love?”
The question took Julián by surprise. And he couldn’t have done many, because he had to think about it for too long. The night on the coast was black and clammy, with damp creeping into your bones. The estates of summer holiday houses were barely lit, dotted with isolated lights, giving an even more intense sensation of darkness. It was all stars, the waning moon and the invisible sea roaring. Every minute, a flash lit up the lighthouse in the darkness. There, you were outside the known world, completely alone on the planet, with others, but they were also alone.
“Not many, actually,” he said. “I didn’t need to, because I only loved one woman and she loved me back straight away, so I was never in the predicament of having to do anything out of the ordinary.”
“And what you’re doing now, why are you doing it? Why did you come here?”
“Out of friendship and out of hatred,” he said, raising his cup of coffee with the bandaged hand. “I came out of friendship for Salva and I stayed out of hatred for the monsters you know.”
“And that’s all?”
I don’t know why I asked that question. It made Julián look away, towards the waitress.
“I’m living, I feel alive, I’m taking risks, I have something to do here, and I’m doing it without needing to lean on my daughter, although I suspect that Raquel, tucked away in some corner of my head, is helping me a lot.”
“And that’s all?” I repeated, without any particular intention.
“You’re right. I’m not doing it alone. I’m doing it with you. I never imagined something like this was going to happen. When I got here, Salva had gone, but you were here, and I didn’t mind the change.” He looked up a bit as if to ask forgiveness from his friend Salva. “Situations are never repeated exactly the same, and, in this one, one of the two of us was superfluous, so one of us had leave a space for you.”
“Do you believe everything’s planned, rather than things happening just because? Do you believe it was part of this plan that you and I should be here having a fruit juice and a coffee?”
“No, no, I don’t believe that. It’s just a manner of speaking. We’re the ones who are linking this up with that, trying to give things some lovely meaning, but, at bottom, it’s all savage and brutal.”
“Feelings can’t be controlled. Either you have them or you don’t,” I said, thinking that I could never feel for Santi what I felt for Alberto, although Santi deserved it much more.
“Sandra, I’ve been very ham-fisted with you. I’m not good enough for you. I’m a selfish old man.”
When I was going to ask him to stop mortifying himself and to point out that somebody had to teach me the things he’d taught me, the waitress banged the plate with the bill on the table. It was a little dark-brown plate, with a clip to hold the bill. In good weather, when the outside terrace was set up, it would stop the wind from blowing it away.
I took back to the house the image of that plate and the small tip Julián had left. When I got there, I tried to find out what visitors they’d had, and they tried to find out where I’d been, so we were even.
Julián
Salva, if only you could have seen me going in and out of Heim’s boat whenever the mood took me. Salva, if only you could have seen this, I was thinking as I was watching the spectacle of Heim, the Butcher, going mad. I knew how he was feeling, because losing my memory was what terrified me most about all the morass of old age in which you end up wallowing. And, however different Heim and I were, on that point we had something in common. First, it was the bar of soap, the little flower from the vase and the knife. They disappeared and then they reappeared, which for such a methodical and organized man, who ordered the world around him down to the last millimetre, must have been quite unnerving. And now the notebooks detailing his best
ial acts in Mauthausen. Where had he put them, he’d be asking himself, and why would he have taken them down from the shelves where they were camouflaged in the covers of normal books? Had someone got onto the boat? No, no one had ever done that and, even if somebody had, that person would have to know very well what he or she was looking for. And even if Heim assumed that somebody had stolen the books, that would never explain the business of losing and finding the knife. Most probably he’d more than once weighed up the possibility of changing the place where he kept the notebooks. What if he’d actually done it and didn’t remember?
It was one Tuesday morning, a nice day but a bit chilly to be wearing shorts as Heim was, and I was whiling away the time watching how he took up on deck practically everything he’d kept stowed below. It was strewn with books, sheets, blankets, casseroles and more oilcloth-covered black notebooks that I hadn’t found. He was going up and down. In the end, he sat down in the foldaway hammock in which he tended to have a nap after his meals in order to go through every item, one by one, writing it all down in yet another notebook with black covers. Sometimes he clasped his head in his enormous hands and then got on with the job. Everything he was noting down went back to its proper place, and he was at it for several days, morning and afternoon. I watched him at different times, for a while in the morning and then again in the afternoon, always savouring a good espresso in the bar over the way and thinking about Salva and what I’d give for him to be here with me. I’d been tempted to tell Sandra about it, but thought it was better for her not to know. Finally, on the last day, when he’d taken up all his things into broad daylight several times and noted them all down several times, he came to the terrible conclusion that his inventory wasn’t panning out the way it should. Looking very purposeful, he left the boat and went off to the garage where he kept his stately black Mercedes.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 29
