The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  Sara had not dared tell her godmother that she had a boyfriend, but she assumed that Doña Sara must have guessed from all the comings and goings and phone calls of the last few months. When her godmother decided to make a final appearance at the party just before ten o’clock, just as the tumult of guests thronged into the hall in search of their coats, she was sure that Doña Sara knew everything. Her godmother took advantage of the general confusion to sidle over to Juan Mari, who had stayed behind in the sitting room, obviously intending to leave last. Sara glimpsed this dangerous encounter out of the corner of her eye and hurriedly abandoned her duties as hostess. By the time she reached them, her godmother had discovered that Juan Mari’s second surname was Ibargüengoitia, the same as her husband’s fourth surname, and she was about to establish that they were related, unquestionably if remotely, via a village in Alava and a shipping company in Bilbao. “Imagine,” she said to Sara.“What a coincidence! This boy’s mother must be Antonio’s second cousin, there’s no doubt about it.” Juan Mari was nodding, embarrassed. “Amazing,” said Sara, for the sake of saying something. Then, thankfully, Ramón returned to ask Juan Mari to help him carry the records, and the uncomfortable trio dissolved amid polite goodbyes.The look of relief on Juan Mari’s face was unmistakable. Sara told herself that her godmother hadn’t done anything any other mother wouldn’t do, and she decided she would have to talk to her that very evening. But Doña Sara got in first, as soon as the last guest left.“Are you happy?” she asked her. “Very,” Sara answered as she took off the pearl earrings and necklace, “it went fantastically well.” “You must be exhausted,” her godmother replied, putting her arm around Sara’s waist and walking her along the corridor. “Look, I tell you what, put on something comfortable and come to my sitting room. I need to talk to you.”

  When Arcadio Gómez Gómez got out of prison, he was ill and weak, but he still had his pride.The city he found on 6 April 1946 was quite unlike the city he remembered and he soon realized his fears about his wife’s ambiguous allusion to “old friends” contained in her first letter were correct. Many of his comrades in the union were dead, quite a few others were still in prison, but some had been lucky enough to disappear just in time in the colossal confusion of defeat. Of these, most would have sworn that they never knew him if they happened to bump into him in the street, and the new Arcadio, a man sick of feeling alone, of being scared, hungry and exhausted, would not have dared reproach them for it. But a few were true to their memories, and had helped his wife and children as much as they could. Now they helped him in the only way they knew how—Arcadio had been free barely a month before he found a job. “We’re through the worst,” he told Sebastiana then, “everything’s going to be fine now, you’ll see.”They would both have liked to sever all links with their unfortunate past, but it seemed advisable that Sebastiana should continue working for Doña Sara, on the same terms, for at least a few more months. Former convicts didn’t tend to find jobs so easily, and the friends who had called upon every distant acquaintance to find work for an excellent, experienced plumber, who’d just arrived from a village in La Mancha looking for a better life, didn’t deserve to run any more risks. And with two wage packets, they were finally able to move down from the attic room to a third-floor flat with four rooms, where the boys could have a separate bedroom from the girls for the first time. Life was still difficult, but it seemed to have stabilized at a tolerable level of difficulty when, in mid-September, Sebastiana found that she was pregnant again.The news was a complete disaster. Speechless, stunned, unable to react, Arcadio simply felt guilty as his eyes followed his wife round the room. Sebastiana, on the other hand, couldn’t keep still, pacing around the flat with the desperation of a caged beast, whimpering and cursing under her breath, “This was all we needed, just what we needed.” The pregnancy progressed despite the expectant mother’s dismay. She was inconsolable. She did her sums over and over again, but she could see only two possible options: either go through the same hell as she did when Socorrito was a baby, taking her to work, leaving her in her basket in a corner of the kitchen, unable to go to her when she cried; or take her daughter Sebas, now aged eleven, out of school and have her look after the newborn baby, turning her into a poor wretch like her mother instead of the hairdresser she wanted to be.There was no point in sending her eldest son out to work, because his wage as an apprentice would not make up for the loss of her own; nor could they move back to the attic flat, as there would now be seven of them.There was another solution, but it was Doña Sara, not Sebastiana, who thought of it. “Look,” she said one autumn morning as they were having coffee at the kitchen table, “I’ve had an idea, but above all I want you to remember that it’s just that—an idea. I know you’re indebted to me, but I want you to listen and think about it, and I don’t want any decision you make to be influenced by your husband’s situation, or your own, or anything I might have done for you both in the past. I’m mentioning this first of all because I don’t want to have anything weighing on my conscience.”

  Sara took off her clothes, had a quick shower and put on a white piqué dressing gown, going over in her head all the calm assurances she intended to give her godmother—that Juan Mari was a wonderful boy, that he treated her with all the respect and dignity a respectable girl could wish for. But when she reached the door to the little sitting room, she could see that her godmother was behaving oddly, and she knew that Doña Sara would be the first to speak. Sara feared the worst, although at this point she had no real idea of what that word could mean. “Now, darling, I have something to tell you. I probably should have told you before but . . . I don’t know . . . it’s difficult.” Her godmother sounded hesitant and couldn’t look Sara in the eye, her gaze fixed on a napkin that she slowly twisted in her hands. “Now, darling,” she continued after a moment, sighing, “when you were born, Spain was a very different place than it is today.We’d had a war. Afterwards, the situation was very bad—the harvests had been lost, cities had been destroyed, people were hungry and would do anything to survive. In those days, your mother used to work here—well, you already know that.When she became pregnant, it wasn’t that she didn’t love you, Sara, of course she loved you, and so did your father, but things were difficult for them.They already had four children, they didn’t know how they were going to give you what you needed, feed you, educate you, help you to get on in life. Anyway, we’ve talked about this before. By that stage I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have children, but I did have this big house, and the means to look after you, and to pay for your education—you know this too.What you don’t know is that—well, my husband and I never legally adopted you.Your father wouldn’t have agreed to it and it wasn’t exactly what we intended. We . . . we came to a kind of agreement that best suited all of us. I undertook to make a lady of you, and what I’m trying to tell you is . . . well, I’ve fulfilled my part of the agreement. In two weeks’ time, you’ll be finishing school. There’s no point in you continuing with your studies because . . .That’s why when I saw you with that boy—Juan Mari, isn’t it?—well, I started thinking. I’m sure it’s not serious yet, at your age these things are never serious but . . . It’s probably my fault. I should have told you all this a lot sooner. The fact is that you have to prepare yourself, Sara, because this evening’s party was a kind of farewell.When term ends and we leave for Cercedilla, you’ll go home.” As she said this, she raised her head and looked at her god-daughter. Sara, for her part, seemed to be staring at something far away, a point in the distance, a vague shadow on the horizon. “Home?” she asked after a while. “Yes,” said Doña Sara, “to your parents’ home.Your home, darling.”

  That afternoon in the autumn of 1946, Sebastiana Morales Pereira left her employer’s house with dry eyes. Her veins felt as cold and heavy as lead, and her mouth was filled with a metallic taste that was familiar: Sebastiana had listened and learned, and would never forget the taste of fear. She recognized it again as she walked along the str
eet, taking small steps, mired in loss, defenseless against the sadness that made her ears ring, the roots of her nails ache, the soles of her feet seem frozen. There was always some new sadness to encounter, and only a dirty old rag to fight it with. Doña Sara had said that she was going to be absolutely honest with her—her husband, Don Antonio, would not hear of her legally adopting the child, so her intention wasn’t to keep it forever, only to bring it up, give it a good education, equip it with the means to do well in life, and return the child to them having turned it into a gentleman, if it was a boy, or a lady, if it was a girl. Her words were convincing, which was why Sebastiana repeated them to herself so many times, walking round and round the Puerta del Sol like an idiot, not daring to go home.The words were convincing, but she still hadn’t found a way of swallowing them by the time it grew late and she simply had to return home.When she got there,Arcadio was waiting at the front door, worried, Socorrito in his arms. Seeing him there, as serious as ever, still very thin, his hair now grey and with the cough that he couldn’t shake off, Sebastiana realized that she loved this man more than the child she didn’t yet know growing within her. But still, remembering the smell of a newborn baby, its softness, the strange peace that filled her when she withdrew to suckle it alone in the gloom of her bedroom, she felt as if she was suffocating, and decided not to say anything to her husband until after supper, once the children had gone to bed. Only then did she sit facing him: she took his hands, looked him straight in the eye, and started talking.The words sounded good, but Arcadio didn’t wait to hear them. “Out of the question!” he said straight away, banging his fist on the table. “It’s absolutely out of the question, do you hear me? I don’t care that they haven’t got children of their own! I don’t know how you could even consider something like this.” She wanted to cry, but she’d resolved not to burden her husband with her tears. So, because of this, and because she couldn’t tell him the whole truth, forcing him to share her worst anxiety—Doña Sara’s words that hung like a sword above her head—she looked into his eyes with an intensity that made him fall silent and then, for the first and last time in her life, she spoke disrespectfully to him. “How can I consider something like this?” Sebastiana Morales Pereira hissed in a whisper, her lips tight, emphasizing every word with her eyebrows, punching the air with her white clenched fists, but not daring to raise her voice in case the neighbors heard.“What’s the matter with you, have you gone mad? Where have you been all these years, Arcadio, in prison or on the moon? In case you haven’t noticed, you don’t give the orders any more, do you hear me? You’re not the one in charge, that all ended years ago. You take orders now, like me, like all of us—get it through your head.We’re like pigs at the slaughterhouse, tied up with a knife to our throat—that’s how life is for us now, for you, and me, and there’s nothing we can do about it,Arcadio.We have no choice.” As Arcadio looked at her, she saw his infinite helplessness, the uncertainty of a child lost in a crowd, the foreboding of a final, decisive defeat, and she covered her face with her apron, turned, and ran away to the kitchen to escape the appalling humiliation in his eyes. Children are the only wealth the poor have.When he was alone,Arcadio Gómez Gómez remembered Don Mario as he’d last seen him, at the front at Teruel, as sickly as ever, so thin he was lost inside his uniform, with his glasses that were always dirty and carrying a rifle that weighed more than he did. Arcadio remembered Don Mario’s joy, his enthusiasm, the fervor with which he believed in the offensive that would cost him his life the very next day. Children are the only wealth the poor have. Arcadio Gómez Gómez swallowed his pride and a void opened up inside him. He closed his eyes, leaned his forehead on his knees, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and wished that he too had been killed at Teruel, like Don Mario.

  On 21 June 1963, a taxi took over a dozen suitcases and boxes containing most of Sara Gómez Morales’s belongings from the Calle Velázquez to the Calle Concepción Jerónima. She followed, with the rest of her things, in a second taxi.When she arrived at her home, her parents embraced her with an intensity that did nothing to mask their uncertainty, even fear. Their daughter responded to every movement, every embrace, every kiss, mechanically, meekly, and with the same coldness that had frozen Doña Sara’s blood half an hour earlier, as she took leave of her god-daughter at the front door with the two marble lions. “Come with me,” Sebastiana said to her now,“we thought you’d prefer the boys’ room, it’s bigger than your sisters’ room. I didn’t mention it to you last Sunday because I wanted it to be a surprise, but your father’s repainted it, and he’s laid a new carpet—blue, it’s your favorite color, isn’t it? I hope you like it.” Sara had never realized that the floor of the room sloped, but that morning it was the first thing she noticed as she stood on the new carpet. She said nothing. Her mother supposed aloud that she must want to unpack and Sara nodded, but when she was alone she sat on the bed and did nothing, didn’t even move, until they called her for lunch. She was exhausted. She had no tears left, or fear, or rage, or pity, or bitterness, or hatred, or nostalgia. She felt dried up, shriveled, as if she’d been boiled vigorously in her own confusion until all that was left was a mannequin of skin and bone.Three days passed in this way. Mid-morning on the fourth day, her father knocked on the door and entered determinedly. He sat beside her on the bed and told her an old story. It was murky, cruel, absurd, barbarous and true. It was the story of a girl called Sara Gómez Morales. Her story.

  This west wind is really getting into my bones . . .The first time she muttered these words under her breath, Sara Gómez smiled to herself; yet this sign that she had at last begun to decode the mystery of the winds did nothing to lessen the crushing sadness of an autumn afternoon. In summer, with the shutters half closed to stop the sun reaching into the living room, the sound of children laughing as they splashed around in the pool, and the friendly heat—making rain seem welcome and silence miraculous—it would have been different. In summer she would have been delighted by this modest progress, but now she was worried about a more pressing lesson she needed to learn—the way to govern time. Neither the calendar, nor the barometer, nor the capricious tyranny of the hour change that suddenly brought darkness, were of any use. It was the ticking lethargy of the clock that she needed to master; the sickly, ailing motion of the minute hand as it measured each and every passive moment. Over the last few decades, as she devoted herself to planning her future in minute, obsessive detail, making sure every element was under her control in order to secure the life that should always have been hers, it had never occurred to her that the success of her scheme might also carry this risk. She had not reckoned on the fact that, if her plan worked—and it had—time would become her enemy, and that clocks would administer her punishment with frugal, aimless cruelty.

  Since that spring so long ago when she had quarreled for the last time with Maruchi over a record player, Sara had not had any friends. The universal distrust with which she had armed herself during that long taxi journey from the Calle Velázquez to the Calle Concepción Jerónima had prevented her from ever running such a risk again. But this lack of friends didn’t worry her, because she always had so much to do, and there were plenty of agreeable, even likeable people around with whom she could exchange a pleasant word. Before she disappeared without a trace, Sara Gómez had had many acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues, and distant relatives with whom she occasionally went shopping or to the cinema, although she invariably would have been just as happy to go alone. She didn’t miss the capacity for surprise, faith, or joy that she had suppressed, because she knew that the distrust that had hardened inside her was also the key to her strength; the thick, solid, indestructible beam that kept her upright when she most wanted to collapse.The only constant in the torturous path of Sara Gómez’s life had been her resolute intention to keep going, always keep going; yet now, the certainty that spring would unfailingly follow winter was no longer enough.This sudden, unforeseen helplessness was a challenge to the choices she had
made, a question mark over the route she had taken. But when she tired of laughing at destiny’s joke, when she resigned herself to accepting loneliness and the slow hostility of clocks as one more requirement of the difficult peace she had made with herself, when she understood that she had always kept going because she was looking for a place to stop, only then did she begin to let go of her old ways of thinking. Until that moment Sara had lived for revenge; now she had to learn to survive the consequences of vengeance. Her goals had changed, and with that, her life, and the rhythm of her days, her pleasures and her needs. She had sensed something of this towards the end of the summer: as Andrés and Tamara counted down the remaining days of their holiday, she was surprised to find that she was missing them already.And although she hadn’t been aware of any change in herself, the old, hard, leathery scales on which she had depended for survival were gradually peeling away and floating silently, light as feathers, to the ground.