As for me, I spent quite a few nights with my thick-lensed glasses and the adjustable table lamp writing a long letter to Sandra, reminding her of all the events we’d gone through together. I gave it to Pilar to send it to her after my death, as Salva had done with me. I wasn’t sure whether to tell her or not that the Eel had died in a suspicious car accident (in which I couldn’t help seeing the hand of Martín), and that I’d never seriously thought he was having an amorous affair with the girl on the beach, but had suspected it was another kind of contact. In the end I didn’t say anything because I was hoping that another love would appear in her life, a love as powerful as the one she might have had in her dreams of the Eel, without my having to drag her out of it. Neither did I tell her that I’d managed to find Bolita, that he’d been in Tres Olivos ever since, and that Pilar and I took him to the beach so he could have a good run.
Meanwhile, while the day in which the letter would be posted was still coming, I devoted myself to driving Heim mad. I knew how to do that. They had taught me.
Endnote
Most of the old Nazis that appear in this novel are based on real people who, after the Second World War, found refuge under the warm, serene sky of our coasts, where they managed to live to a ripe old age without anyone bothering them. Only the fictional character of Aribert Heim, also known as Doctor Death or the Butcher of Mauthausen, keeps his real name.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 38
