I drank some water because the cough was irritating my throat, and I put the anorak on again. I was hot and cold. I didn’t want to knit, didn’t want anything. There was nothing there that could make me feel at home enough to enjoy stretching out on the sofa and reading a magazine. But I wasn’t there for that, and I wasn’t going through all this apprehension to throw myself on a sofa and read a magazine. I had a mission, a job to do. Frida and I were struggling on the same ground but not with the same weapons. I had none.
I went up to my room to pass the time. The bed was still mussed up. When I was late getting up, Frida didn’t clean my room any more. It was her way of punishing me for my laziness. She couldn’t stand me. I’d caught her watching me out of the corner of her eye when she saw me lazing around in an easy chair, or on the sofa, or yawning my way round the house. She hated people like me, parasites probably in her understanding. Frida had such clear ideas about everything that she made you both envious and afraid.
Through the window I saw the Mercedes coming into the garage. That was strange. They hadn’t taken the four-by-four but the car they used when they wanted to make an impression or look more formal. They almost always took the Mercedes when they visited Alice and Otto. They knew each other very well, knew what belonged to each person, but even then they didn’t want to give any ground when it came to presence and power, so they might have gone to Alice’s house or somewhere similar. Maybe they’d gone to sort out some paperwork or simply to the bank. Then I heard snatches of conversation, worked out they were speaking German, and finally I captured Frida’s voice mingling with theirs. The situation was making me uneasy. I lay on the unmade bed to think.
I didn’t understand what could have happened, but everything indicated it had something to do with me. Would it be because of the hotel? Would they have seen me going into Julián’s hotel while Karin was at the hairdresser’s? I could always say I’d gone nearby looking for somewhere to park and I needed to go to the toilet. They might have seen me with Julián at the lighthouse, or in the town. It could be so many things… But… oh my God!… Perhaps they’d also found out about the syringes. That’s what it was. I’d defend myself, saying I didn’t know what they were talking about. What was this about used syringes? Surely someone must have thrown them out with the rubbish and the rubbish into a container. I’d ask them how I could possibly join the Brotherhood if they were thinking such things about me. Why would they want to bring into the Brotherhood somebody they believed was capable of stealing used syringes from a rubbish bin? What would I want with used syringes? Did they think I was a drug addict and that I’d used them to shoot up heroin?
I heard light footsteps approaching my door. They weren’t the enormous, heavy, slow, solid footsteps of Fred. They weren’t Karin’s dragging footsteps. These seemed hardly to touch the floor, like a low-blowing wind, like big autumn leaves falling, one after the other. They were like the footsteps of a fairy, or a witch.
She knocked, or rather brushed the door with her knuckles and opened it before I answered. Frida was making her declaration of war, which irritated me, scared me and was going to make my life a lot more difficult. She caught me lying on the bed with almost no time to react.
“Get downstairs,” she said. “They want to see you!”
“Why didn’t you knock at the door?” I asked as a way of getting my act together.
“I did knock, but you didn’t hear me. You must have been asleep.”
I could hear in her voice the contempt she had for me, and knew she’d harm me as much as she could. Maybe her feelings for Alberto had something to do with this. If that was the case, I was really glad.
“Why did you say I was sleeping? Were you spying on me through a hole somewhere?” I said, sitting up and speaking as loudly as I could. Something was telling me I had to rebel against Frida and make it clear to Fred and Karin that we didn’t hit it off.
“Carrying on like that isn’t going to help you,” she said, without raising her voice so only I could hear her.
Then I had another coughing attack. Since the visit to the hairdresser’s I’d been coughing almost non-stop and now my nerves were making my throat tickle, my chest hurt and my eyes weep, so I could barely get the words out.
“Ever since I came… to this house… you’ve had…”
I was going to say she’d had it in for me, but just then she went out, slamming the door. The coughing was choking me. I heard water running in the bathroom, which was on the other side of the passage, opposite my bedroom. Frida must have gone to get me a glass of water. I lay face down on the bed to cough better. More steps were coming up the stairs. I needed the glass of water, but I wasn’t going to take it from her hands.
“Can we come in?” Karin asked.
“It’s open,” I said. This was absolutely true, because it was the only room in the house that didn’t have a bolt on the inside.
Karin grabbed the glass of water from Frida and held it to my lips. I took a small sip and it relieved me. I mopped up my tears. I was tired and sweaty.
“Calm down now,” Fred said. “I’m sure there’s an explanation for all this.”
“There has to be,” Frida added.
“Please be quiet,” Karin said, sitting on my bed.
I got up. I didn’t want my bed to be full of monsters. I might sleep under the same roof but I needed to have a space as far away as possible from their bodies and their spirits.
“I’m better now,” I said, going to the door.
They followed me. The heavy steps, the dragging steps and the rubber steps came down the stairs behind me. By comparison with theirs, my steps were the most normal. I listened to my steps, something I’d never done before, and they were more like those of normal people than theirs.
I went into the kitchen, to terrain that was a little more neutral than my bedroom, and got myself a big glass of cold water. They came behind me, not speaking. Only Frida said something in German, but nobody answered her. I could swear she was saying that I was putting it on so they’d feel sorry for me, that it was pure theatre. She’d be right to some extent, because I wanted to distract them from whatever it was that they’d caught me doing. I didn’t want to feel like the condemned prisoner awaiting sentence.
I sat down to drink and they sat down too, except for Frida.
“I’m sure there’s some explanation for this,” Fred repeated.
Frida looked at the clock. Karin looked at Fred. I drank some more.
“There’s an ampoule missing from the box you and Karin brought from Alice’s,” Fred said.
An ampoule missing from the box? That wasn’t my work. I was so amazed I almost burst out laughing.
The three of them were looking at me with very serious faces. I took a while to respond, sitting there with the glass in my hand. Then I very slowly put it down on the table, and when I looked up I met the eyes of that bitch Frida. I didn’t want to get my fingers burnt and tried to work out what I should say. Which would be nothing.
“What do you want from me? I don’t understand anything.”
“Maybe you took it without meaning to, or you took it and put it somewhere else.”
“But why would I want to take one of Karin’s ampoules? That doesn’t make sense.”
“We all have to try to find it,” Fred said.
“And the other ampoules?” I asked. “Have you used them all up?”
“No, I’ve still got one left,” Karin said. “I wasn’t going to start the other box without finishing this one.”
“I’ve never touched these things and I’ve never even been in your room.”
“You do go in there,” Frida said. “The other day you went in and dropped this.”
She showed me one of the small coloured hair clips I was using to keep my fringe off my face before I got my hair cut.
“You come into my room and you could have taken it from there,” I said.
“I found it,” Karin said, her voice a little depre
ssed, as if she was sorry to have caught me out.
I had to think fast because, to begin with, I was certain that no clip of mine had ever fallen in their bathroom. Frida must have put it there.
“The clip might have been dragged along by the broom. Frida sweeps my room too.”
Karin looked thoughtful.
“Then again, Frida, you might have dropped the box on the floor while you were cleaning and an ampoule was broken, so you want to blame me.”
I’d just guaranteed for myself the world’s worst enemy.
Karin and Fred shook their heads.
“She would have had to take the box out of the chest of drawers for it to have fallen on the floor and, in that case, the box would have been wet with the contents of the ampoule,” Fred said.
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anything about this. Maybe Karin used it and didn’t remember.”
Karin frowned. She didn’t like me saying that. Probably Frida had noticed the absence of the two syringes in the rubbish bin and would have thought I had an alibi, so she’d preferred this dirty trick. I couldn’t think of any other explanation. She wanted to incriminate me all the way. Then Fred spoke.
“What do you think is in these injections?”
“Vitamins. I suppose it must be a very strong, complete vitamin complex which I wouldn’t dare to try because I’m pregnant.”
“Maybe you wanted the ampoule for something else,” said Frida.
Frida had made up her mind to put an end to all this and was trying to accuse me of being a spy who’d taken the ampoule away as proof. But Karin looked at Fred, and Fred said that was enough, they’d find a way of getting to the bottom of this situation and that Frida could go. Karin hadn’t finished with me yet. She still wanted to suck a bit more of my blood and wasn’t willing to let Frida spoil her fun before she was ready.
Frida said something in German. I didn’t need them to translate it to know she was telling them that she was going to report this. The others nodded.
“If you did this, it’d be better if you told us,” Karin said when Frida had closed the door behind her.
“I have not touched those ampoules. I swear it.”
I was telling the truth, and I looked them in the face and held their gaze.
“I don’t know what could have happened, but it had nothing to do with me.”
“Maybe Alice,” Karin said, “ordered Frida to take it, thinking that Sandra would immediately get the blame. So she gets one ampoule more and I’m left without Sandra. You know she always wants anything that isn’t hers.”
“I have to confess something,” I said. “I want to be sincere. A few days ago I went into your bathroom. I wanted to put on a dab of Karin’s perfume. I love it, but I was there only as long as that took, and I didn’t drop any hair clip. I swear it.”
“That changes things,” said Fred. “Before you swore that you’d never entered our bathroom and now you say you did. Now you’re not to be trusted.”
“I didn’t swear. I only said I hadn’t been in there and I said it to Frida, not to you. I didn’t want her to use that information against me.”
“You do well to tell us the truth,” Karin said, looking reprovingly at her husband. “Since you live here, it wouldn’t be surprising if you’d gone into our room and our bathroom sometimes, and it wouldn’t be surprising, either, if you’d had a look at my dresses and tried them on.”
“No, no, I haven’t tried them on. I wouldn’t dare do that. They’re not mine.”
“Do you like them?”
“They’re really beautiful. I only saw them once.”
“That’s normal.” Karin was addressing Fred.
“But what is it about this liquid that makes Alice risk putting your friendship in danger?”
“Our friendship is not in danger,” said Fred. “We are not united by friendship but by the Brotherhood. There are members who can’t stand each other and yet they can’t stop being brothers. There is nothing that can separate us for ever.”
“So what are we going to do now?” I asked ingenuously, knowing that someone was still testing me: them, Frida or Alice. It was like having to do an exam when you don’t know a single answer, because you can’t understand the questions either.
I told them I wasn’t feeling well, I thought I had the flu and in this disagreeable situation it had got worse, so I was going back to Madrid. I couldn’t take it any more, I felt lonely, I was going to have a baby and I was with a family that wasn’t my own. And however much they said they were like my grandparents, they weren’t, because my real grandparents would have believed me instead of a foreigner. Well, Frida wasn’t a foreigner for them. I was the foreigner. They had more faith in their housekeeper than in me. I understood that. I was a new arrival, I wasn’t their granddaughter, they’d found me alone and vomiting on the beach and they’d brought me to this house, which Frida had known long before me. As I was talking, my eyes had been filling with tears, and now I’d exploded. And I really wanted to explode. I wasn’t their granddaughter. They weren’t my grandparents. I was an employee, like Frida, whom they paid, and they paid me too, very well, it had to be said, and that’s why I was with them, but not everything can be bought with money. They’d just accused me of stealing and I’d never stolen anything in my life. We’d come to that. I couldn’t go on speaking, because I was crying and coughing all at once. Karin’s crooked fingers pushed the glass over to me. I drank and I drank and calmed down a little.
“I’m going to play golf. I think better in the open air,” Fred said.
I was still caught up in my coughing attack when he came back dressed in his checked trousers, black-and-white shoes and golfing cap. He took his golf bag out of the cupboard in the hallway and left. When I heard the Mercedes leaving, I said, “I’m going to get my things together. It’s time to say goodbye.”
I went upstairs with a great sense of freedom. They hadn’t tried to detain me, I was leaving, and I was freeing myself from this nightmare. I’d eat somewhere, go and lie on the beach till it was time to meet Julián, and then say goodbye to him. Now we’d discovered that the famous liquid was a scam, I’d done my duty to humanity and I didn’t have to engage in any more heroism for the rest of my life. I was going to a normal world where people take what a normal doctor prescribes.
I was surprised that Karin, who couldn’t bear anybody acting under their own free will, had let me come upstairs. When I got to my room, the window was open, the birds were singing and everything seemed like it was before. I was exhausted by my physical discomfort and by having to get out of this predicament as sincerely as I could, but I had no choice but to pull myself together. The only friend I had here was a wreck and I couldn’t trust the rest of them. So I got out my backpack, opened it up, and put my few things in it. I was thinking that Fred and Karin didn’t seem anything like the old couple on the beach who helped girls like me and, in that case, how many times had I got it wrong and judged people too kindly or too harshly? But neither can you go through life suspecting everyone who crosses your path just so you can always be right. There are some people who see straight away what lies underneath a face, or a smile. I must admit that I was slow and that’s why Fred and Karin had blown up in my face and, in some sense, Julián as well.
With what they’d paid me, I had enough to keep myself for a while. After all this, I was running my hand over the last shelf in the cupboard to be sure I hadn’t left anything behind, when I heard Karin’s knuckles rapping at the door. Come in, I said before she came in, which was exactly what she was going to do at any moment anyway.
“You mustn’t go like this. You’re not well, you’ve got a cold and you might have the flu. Stay a few days more, until you feel better, and when you’ve recovered we’ll take you ourselves to get the bus or the plane or whatever you want. But meanwhile, rest.”
I saw Karin’s witch’s face and it frightened me. I was younger and stronger than her and would win if it came to a tus
sle, but she frightened me. She knew about terrors I’d never seen and perversions that had never entered my head, and I intuited that, even if we were alone, it wouldn’t be easy to win.
“No, I’ve decided to leave today,” I said, putting on my boots and my rucksack on my back. “I want to go before Fred gets back.”
“Not so fast,” Karin said, grabbing my handbag.
It was a brown suede bag with fringes and a very long strap, so I could cross it over my chest. It was a soft, comfortable bag and very much my style. Santi had given it to me. Everything Santi gave me suited me very well. I was thinking about this stupid stuff as Karin was opening up my bag. It was as if I needed to escape from what was happening right then. I didn’t understand why Karin was ferreting around in my bag. This act was too aggressive, even for Karin. And when I reacted, when I was about to tell her to get her dirty twisted hands off my things, she pulled out something wrapped in toilet paper. It was one of the ampoules that she injected.
“I didn’t want to believe Frida. I refused to think you were betraying us, and now look… She was right.”
“Frida put it there,” I whispered. “She’s crazy about Alberto and I’m in her way.”
“Stop talking nonsense. Right now, Frida will be telling the Brotherhood about what has happened. And how am I going to defend you after what I’ve seen?…”
“I swear, Karin,” I interrupted her, “that I did not take this ampoule or put it in my bag. I swear it by whatever you want.”
I couldn’t believe I was saying something like that.
“I can’t be disloyal to them. You’ve put me on the spot. It’s them or you.”
“If I can’t do anything to demonstrate that it hasn’t been me, then I’m leaving.”
“Wait,” Karin said, blocking my way with the bag in her hand. “You’re in such a bad way you won’t even get as far as the corner.”
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 31
