The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  “What boy?”

  “Your son, Maribel; who else would I mean?”

  Maribel frowned as if Sara’s words had completely confused her, and asked:“Why would he be ill?”

  “Well,” Sara sighed, as if she couldn’t struggle on with so much air in her body—a feeling she experienced every time her cleaner, an uneducated but intelligent woman, became stuck in a deep pool of incomprehension—“because you said you’d just been to the doctor’s.”

  “Oh, right! You had me worried. No, no, that’s not it,” she went on, struggling out of the teetering sandals whose fine straps had left pink marks on her feet and ankles, and donning a pair of tatty old espadrilles with frayed rope soles. “Dr. Olmedo owns number thirty-seven, he’s just moved in. Jeró called me last night and said that Dr. Olmedo had asked him if he knew someone who could come in and clean for him, and I . . . well, I was thrilled, after having found you, getting another job, right next door, and so near to where I live. I’m going to get changed.”

  Maribel was wearing her best and newest dress that day, a tight red Lycra number—the kind sold on market stalls that lose their shape with every wash—but she would have taken just as much care had she been wearing any of her other dresses: her long black dress with a tiny flower print that buttoned down the front, for instance, or the short piqué dress, always gleaming white if a little worn. Before even turning on a tap, Maribel would shut herself in the bathroom, reappearing a moment later in an old pink housecoat spattered with bleach and carrying what she called her “good clothes,” now neatly folded. She did the same this morning, but was so excited by all her news that she went on talking from the bathroom, speaking more loudly so that she could be heard through the door.

  “So, we got up early this morning, and I went straight there to see them. It’s really good, you know, because I was worried the job would only be for the summer, but no, they’re going to live here all year round. They’re from Madrid too. He’s a doctor, he works at the hospital in Jerez, maybe you know them, their name’s Olmedo . . .”

  “No, I don’t know them.”

  “Sure?” Now squeezed into her pink housecoat, Maribel put her new dress in a canvas bag before giving her employer a second chance. “But they’re from Madrid.”

  “No, Maribel,” said Sara, smiling at the obstinate skepticism of her cleaner, who couldn’t quite believe that everyone from Madrid didn’t know each another. “I’ve told you before, Madrid must be over a hundred times bigger than this little town. I couldn’t possibly know everyone who lives there. And it’s no coincidence that we bump into one another all over the place, we’re like flies—there are swarms of us.”

  “Right . . .” Maribel, leaning over the dishwasher, seemed to accept this. “Well, anyway, they’re from Madrid, and they’re here because of his work—”

  “What about her?” interrupted Sara.“Does she work too?”

  “What ‘her’?” asked Maribel, straightening up and staring at Sara.

  “Well, the doctor’s wife. He is married, isn’t he?”

  “No.That’s the strange thing, you see. I mean he doesn’t look like a poof, and he’s quite good-looking.Well, maybe not good-looking, you know, handsome, blond and all that, but he’s definitely very attractive . . .” She stopped stacking the dishwasher for a moment and started listing Dr. Olmedo’s attributes, counting them off on the fingers of one hand. “He’s tall, slim but not puny, dark not balding, well dressed.A pretty good catch, if you ask me. And being a doctor he must earn a packet. But he definitely doesn’t have a wife. Maybe he’s divorced. And the child isn’t his, that’s for sure, because she calls him ‘Uncle Juan.’”

  “He has a little girl living with him?” remarked Sara neutrally, trying to divert the torrent of words in the direction that most interested her.

  “Yes, she’s about this one’s age, and really pretty, gorgeous, even though she isn’t blond and doesn’t have blue eyes or anything. Her name’s Tamara. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?” Maribel had her back to her employer so she didn’t see Sara give a start when she heard the child’s name, instead taking her silence as a sign of agreement.“I think so too. If I ever have a daughter, maybe I’ll call her Tamara. Well, anyway, the niece looks just like her uncle. Her face is softer, more delicate, and rounder like all kids, but apart from that she’s the spitting image. Same eyes, same mouth, same nose, same everything. Apparently she’s his brother’s daughter. He and his brother must have looked identical, if you ask me, though who knows, because I didn’t find out much else—he’s like you, doesn’t go around telling you his life story. He said the child’s an orphan, that’s all, and only because I asked. I think it’s because of the retarded one.They live with a man who’s not all there, if you know what I mean, and the less you talk about that kind of thing and the less people you tell, the better.That’s what I think. He’s the doctor’s brother too, like the little girl’s father was.When you see him around, you’ll know it’s him straight away, because he’s bald and you can see how retarded he is, the way he moves and talks and all that. Shame, isn’t it? It was because of a difficult birth, apparently. Imagine, he’s been like that all his life, thirty-two years! Of course, I won’t ever be left alone with him, thank God, because those people—I know you’re supposed to pity them and all that—but they give me the creeps, they really do.What if he had a fit or something, with only me in the house? People like that have seizures and they get violent, you wouldn’t believe it, a neighbor of mine, she’s got a daughter like that and she really whacks her mother sometimes. But this one seems quiet and he’ll be going to a school for people like him, in El Puerto. He’ll be having lunch there and everything. The girl too, except she’ll be at the school near here of course. Anyway, the arrangement suits me down to the ground, because I’ll leave here at one, do four hours over there so the house is all clean and tidy when they get back around five, and then off I go to put my feet up, because I’ll be knackered after all that. But I won’t have any more money worries, at long last. I’ve been thinking that, if I keep cleaning the stairwell I’ve got in the village, what with your house and the doctor’s, I’ll be earning as much as a builder! The problem will be Christmas, and then next summer, because the retard’s school—his name’s Alfonso—has holidays the same way normal schools do. The doctor’s already warned me, and he doesn’t dare leave him alone all day with his niece, so I’ll have to be there for longer, but anyway, we’ll manage somehow, won’t we, Andrés?”

  Maribel turned to the boy and gave him a long, solid look, like a bridge between them, forcing a smile that seemed strangely independent of her face. Sara, who had witnessed such scenes before, was struck once more by the mysterious, secret intensity of the relationship that bound Maribel to Andrés. Beneath the cleaner’s overt preoccupation with painting her toenails and other trivia, beneath the apparent indifference and even contempt with which she sometimes treated her son, ran a violent undercurrent that occasionally forced itself to the surface. At times like this, Sara came to doubt her incipient theories about Maribel’s moral weaknesses and came close to understanding the truth of her brutal history, symbolized perhaps by Maribel’s childish addiction to the shiny things, cheap cosmetics, and fripperies that made life worth living, that made her feel human. The little boy was so serious, with such a strong sense of responsibility towards his mother, that he was capable of playing for weeks at a time with one of those small toys you get inside a chocolate egg. Sara was sure he had never felt neglected, but that didn’t stop her feeling protective when she saw him every morning, a skinny little kid with neatly combed hair, looking uncomfortable in his hand-me-downs, a ridiculous pair of flowery trunks that were too long for him and a green T-shirt so tight you could count his ribs through it. Now she took advantage of the first gap in Maribel’s monologue to include him in the conversation.

  “So, that little girl will probably be in your class, won’t she?” she said, smiling at the boy.

&nbs
p; “Maybe,” he answered.“She’ll be in my year, but they might put her in a different class.”

  “Does she seem nice?”

  “Well . . .”Andrés thought a moment. “Yes, but she sounds very posh.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes, but with you it doesn’t make me laugh.”

  “What is he talking about?” his mother interrupted harshly.“He didn’t laugh at her, he didn’t even open his mouth.This son of mine’s an idiot. Can you believe he didn’t go anywhere near Tamara? I was so cross with him. The little girl kept on showing him things and he wouldn’t say a word, acted as if he was deaf and dumb. God, this kid’s such a pain!”

  “Well, she didn’t want to play either,” complained Andrés, sitting up in his chair. “Her uncle made her, otherwise she wouldn’t have got out a single toy. And it’s not true, I did go and look at them.”

  “Rubbish! You didn’t show an interest in anything!”

  “But kids are like that, Maribel,” Sara intervened.“Children can be very shy, it takes them a while to make friends.You shouldn’t be angry with him for that.”

  “That’s right, go on, defend him! You always side with him! It’s quite incredible, because, no offense, but you spoil him more than his own grandmother, all day long doting on him, so he’s always ‘Sara says this,’ ‘Sara says that,’ arguing with me from the minute he gets up till he goes to bed at night.You’re going to spoil him if you keep giving him so much attention.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Maribel!” Sara burst out laughing. She stroked Andrés’s hair, ruffling it and then smoothing it down again.

  She had her own secret feelings about the boy, but she couldn’t tell anyone about them, not even Maribel because she wouldn’t understand. Nobody would understand what Sara Goméz felt the first time she realized that, when she thought of Andrés, she could remember him only in black and white.

  Arcadio Gómez Gómez was a dark man. In those days, almost all men were, but young Sara had learned to distinguish between limited shades of grey.At one end of the scale were all the gentlemen who came to call at the flat in the Calle Velázquez: Don Julio, doctor to her godmother’s husband Don Antonio, and Don Fernando, the solicitor, and Don Cesar and Don Rafael, who had been friends of Don Antonio’s since attending the same Jesuit college as children, long before he became ill and before they won the war with the army in which they all three enlisted the same morning.They were all very much alike, from their heads—all three usually wore stiff hats with a band round the crown—to their feet clad in pointed shoes of punched leather. Each had a little moustache so fine and straight that it looked as if it had been painted on with a brush, dividing the space between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip into two precisely equal halves.They always wore grey suits, sometimes made from a light cloth that had a metallic sheen, sometimes in a heavier, dark flannel that was soft to the touch. And they always wore a badge in the buttonhole of their jacket, except Don Julio, who was a widower and wore a button covered in black fabric to show that he was in mourning. Doña Sara, the younger Sara’s godmother, enjoyed teaching the little girl about different fabrics, and the cut and style of her own clothes, but she never told her much about the uniform elegance of Spanish gentlemen in the 1950s, except that all those suits—so intrinsically grey they appeared grey even when they were navy blue—had been made in England, while the ties, with discreetly bold polka dots or little stars on plain backgrounds that sometimes even dared to be deep red, were always Italian and made of silk.

  These men in grey made up for the dry monotony of their appearance with the sophisticated elegance of all their gestures, from the studied nonchalance with which they handed their hats to the maid at the door, to the skilful way they tapped—always three times and with just the right force—the end of the cigarettes they were about to light on a silver cigarette case pulled with a magician’s dexterity from the inside pocket of their jackets. Secretly watching them through the crack of a half-open door, Sara enjoyed everything about these visits, especially when it was Don Cesar and Don Rafael, who always seemed so youthful and full of jokes that their mere appearance lit up the gloomy drawing room with the sparkle of a party. But the little girl, who was only allowed in to greet the adults and then leave, had fun witnessing these adult gatherings from afar, even when the visitor was just Brother José, the Father confessor, an imposing Dominican friar, tall, fat, bearded, who sweated profusely even in winter and had mad eyes that Sara found frightening.The Father, as they called him, had only one subject of conversation: El Pardo, the official residence of General Franco. Every time he uttered these two words, it was with the kind of reverence reserved for a person’s name, but he spoke so elliptically that it was impossible to make out what he was really trying to say.“It’s always the same, Antonio,” Doña Sara would conclude after seeing the monk out,“all that boasting and trying to make himself sound important, but he really doesn’t have a clue.” Although Sara didn’t understand this criticism any more than the gibberish spouted by the coarse monk himself, she took a dislike to him and although she continued to watch him from afar, she never lurked behind any more, hoping to be invited to stay, when he was the one seated on the guest sofa. But not even Brother José, in his food-stained habit, a rough cord tied round his waist and wooden rosary bumping against his thigh, was as dark a man as Arcadio Gómez Gómez, her father, a solitary figure at the other end of the spectrum from the pearly sheen of the gentlemen, a denizen of the margin where grey merged dangerously into black.

  Every Sunday at midday, her father would be waiting by the front door. He never missed their appointment and he was never late.Winter or summer, rain or shine, he was always there, leaning against the same tree, when she returned with her godmother from eleven o’clock Mass. As they turned the corner, they could see his grey, opaque form, a grotesque mistake in these elegant surroundings, an image cut from an old photograph, flat and dull, and set down at random in front of the majestic front door. Arcadio Gómez Gómez was a shadow at the center of a world that ignored him.When Sara and her godmother first caught sight of his figure, they became nervous. He quickly removed his hat and squeezed it without realizing what he was doing, shuffling sideways, measuring the width of the pavement with his feet, three or four steps in one direction, three or four in the other, still looking at them both but not daring to come any closer. Instead, Doña Sara would stop dead and search her bag for a cigarette with her right hand, still gripping the little girl’s hand firmly with her left. It was as if she couldn’t face this defenseless man without the comfort of a cigarette. Young Sara was divided between her own anxiety, which made her glance around to make sure none of her schoolmates were nearby, and the fear emanating from both adults, the mysterious tremor she detected in her godmother and the uneasiness of her father as he tugged repeatedly at his shirt collar. In those days, when she was eight or nine, she never wondered exactly what it was that she felt every Sunday morning. She was an unusual child, she always had been, she couldn’t know how much she had gained and how much she had lost when she was allotted a destiny that didn’t belong to her.

  “There he is again . . .” Having consumed half her cigarette in three or four greedy drags, Doña Sara barely disguised her displeasure. “I’ve told your mother, let her come to fetch you, not him, I really can’t bear that terrible man. She pays absolutely no attention to me. Every week, I have to put up with the sight of him standing there, damn him. Really! The things one has to endure.”

  Sara didn’t like her godmother talking like this, breaking her own rules with a vehemence that was disconcerting. At the house in Calle Velázquez, nobody ever mentioned Sara’s parents, whether to speak ill or well of them.When the lady of the house referred to the child’s mother she used her Christian name, as if she were merely an acquaintance—“Years ago Sebastiana washed a pair of curtains like these and she ruined them; Sebastiana used to cook a delicious roast chicken; Sebastiana used to clean windows with wa
ter and bleach and despite the smell, they were marvelous,” and so on. When her god-daughter came back on Sunday afternoons, Doña Sara never asked the girl if she’d had a good time or if they’d gone for a walk or had a nice lunch—the smiling interrogation she always subjected the child to when she got back from a birthday party or a school outing.Those hours remained outside time, suspended inside a parenthesis of silence, detached from a reality that paused at midday on Sunday and recommenced eight hours later with a bath, supper, and prayers, just like every other night.These were the rules that governed young Sara’s life, strict and immutable except on the days when she returned from eleven o’clock Mass, in the hundred meters of pavement that seemed to give way beneath her feet, registering the crack that her godmother’s uncharacteristically harsh words opened up in her comfortable existence. She didn’t like it when Doña Sara spoke like that, as if every syllable was an invisible knife peeling away the good, kind woman Sara had always known, to reveal a harder, drier, hidden skin, like a vague threat that made her ask questions of herself that she didn’t want to answer.And she was even more disconcerted by her godmother’s sudden return to courtesy and correctness, for she couldn’t imagine which button Doña Sara pressed when she wanted to switch back to the charming, polite lady they were all accustomed to.

  “Hello,Arcadio.”At the decisive moment, nobody seeing the genuine freshness of her smile would have doubted her sincerity.“How are you? How is Sebastiana? And the children?”