The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  “It’s simply a question of perspective,” Damián said to him one evening when an excess of alcohol combined with the intoxication of success made him more talkative than usual.“Who lives in this area? People like Papa and Mama, who aren’t too badly off any more, who started at the bottom and worked hard and have done well in the end.Then, there are people who earn more but who live here because they can’t afford a flat in the Calle Serrano yet. So what does that mean? Well, it’s no longer a working-class area. Even the worst parts of it are all more or less middle-class now, because it’s so central. And opposite the Dehesa park they’ve just built some blocks of flats for people who’ve got much more cash than the families in the old blocks, and that’s not counting the Bellas Vistas estate.This is a middle-class area now, even if the residents don’t know it. And why don’t they know it? Because of the shops. Because even if they can’t afford a flat in the Calle Serrano, they don’t mind paying twenty-five pesetas more for a special loaf of bread, or the extra two hundred pesetas it costs to have a croissant filled with crab and a cinnamon-flavored coffee in a place like mine, which is smart and has modern furniture, instead of a plain white coffee and a piece of tortilla in Mingo’s Bar, where the floor’s covered with screwed-up napkins and the tables have all got initials carved into them.They feel flattered into spending their money, because it seems like the kind of thing people from somewhere elegant like Salamanca would spend their money on. It’s not always about cutting prices. Sometimes, you earn more by putting prices up.That’s the secret.”

  But despite the clear, astute, shrewd way Damián presented all of these calculations, Juan knew his brother’s weakness, the ambition hidden beneath the self-possessed exterior and the arrogance of his words. On the top shelf of the bookcase they shared, stored in order of date and protected, or hidden, by a plastic folder, was a stack of articles—almost always from magazines or Sunday supplements—featuring young entrepreneurs who were millionaires by the age of twenty, owning chains of clothes shops, software companies, or huge nightclubs in Ibiza or the Costa del Sol. Damián might have devoted his energies to convincing his neighbors they lived in a middle-class area but he couldn’t resign himself to being like them, to belonging to the same dull, mediocre class.As the young, almost childish, faces in the magazines became celebrities, there grew inside him an unqualified desire to emulate them, and a dark resentment as his merits remained unrecognized.

  “Look at this one!” he’d say, pacing around the table that took up most of the space in the small dining room of his flat.“Inherited a jeweler’s from his parents! Can you believe it? And this one! What about this one? I mean, she’s thirty! A model agency? Ha! I bet she’s the only one on her books. Call that being an entrepreneur? Give me a break!”

  When they witnessed these outbursts of indignation, his parents and sisters were supportive, breaking out into all sorts of sympathetic lamentations—“I know, it’s unfair!You’ve worked so hard, son, and you started from scratch. These articles are always about the same people! All this talk about democracy, but if you don’t have a famous name, there’s nothing you can do. It’s a disgrace, it really is an absolute disgrace”—and Damián would finally shut up. Juan’s voice was the only one missing from the shrill, bitter chorus, the noisy exercise in catharsis that the family offered as consolation to Damián, their unsung hero. Damián’s insistence on seeking social recognition, the only reward to elude him so far, inspired in Juan a strange mixture of compassion and embarrassment. For him, it was the most disconcerting aspect of his brother’s sudden acquisition of wealth. He was as sure as any sane person could be that no writer from a big newspaper would ever pick up the phone to find out about the owner of the smartest bread shop in Estrecho, however thriving it was. In the world to which Damián unrealistically aspired, his business talents didn’t elevate him above the status of a pygmy, and even if he did ever manage to turn himself into the “Bread King” of northern Madrid, it would make no difference, because the glamour shots in these magazines had little to do with the size of a person’s bank balance.That Damián didn’t realize this, and was so vain with so little pride, was a mystery that Juan couldn’t fathom. He couldn’t help acknowledging Damián’s talent and his great ability, but for the first time in his life, he thought his brother appeared rather foolish, a pathetic caricature, a clown prepared to sell his soul to the devil for three lines and a photo in a newspaper. This was why he said nothing about what would be Damián’s first and only media success, a blurry photo with smudged colors that you couldn’t even recognize as Damián without squinting. But Damián knew him too well to accept that his silence was neutral, and after filing the interview of which he was so proud in the same folder as the ones that fuelled his ambition, he pulled from his sleeve the only ace that could leave Juan naked, ruined.

  “Oh, yes, and another thing—that girl Charo who lives on the second floor, the one you were going out with?” Juan swiveled in his chair and looked at him. “Well, now she’s going out with me.”

  This time Juan didn’t miss. Damián found himself on the floor before he’d even had time to lose the self-satisfied smirk with which he’d made his announcement. Juan knocked him down with a single blow, a punch directed at his right cheek that reached its target with force and precision. Charo’s new boyfriend now had a cut under his eye which, within a few hours, would develop into a magnificent bruise, making Damián look rather more like his photo in the local paper.Though it was many years since Juan had won a fight with Damián, though his victim wasn’t even sure how it had happened, Juan knew that his victory had no more value than the miserable little interview that had prompted the fight.

  “You bastard,” he said anyway, looking down at him before walking out of the room.

  “Ha!” said Damián from the floor, and then again before getting up: “Ha, ha!”

  Forty-eight hours later, that odious little laugh was echoing in Juan Olmedo’s head while the image of Charo and Damián naked, caressing each other on a bed, pounded inside him with the merciless, mechanical throb of a pneumatic drill. He recalled the words with which his brother had concluded his hateful speech about Charo being out of Juan’s league—“Bet you haven’t fucked her yet, have you? Bet you haven’t even fucked her.” He told himself that Damián was an idiot—Juan knew that already, but he couldn’t lose to his brother in such a pitiful way. Before he could summon even the appearance of calm, he had to pass through the full gamut of foolishness, alone in his room, pacing up and down in the tiny space, making plans. He’d kidnap Charo—without hurting her—knock her out with chloroform and take her somewhere safe, the boiler room at his old school in Villaverde Alto, for instance; a huge basement that nobody checked from April to November because the heating wasn’t turned on.The padlock on the door was easy to open and he and his friends had forced it many times, going there to smoke joints or make out with girls. He’d take Charo there, tie her to a chair and wait patiently for her to regain consciousness.“Don’t be scared,” he’d say to her, “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want you to listen.You’ve got it all wrong, Charito, you’ve made a big mistake, and I’ll prove it to you.”Then he’d tell her the truth, that Damián, with all his businesses, all his money, driving about in his new car acting like a big-shot, was pathetic, a deluded fool who’d sell his own mother for half a page in the Sunday supplement of El Pais, and who couldn’t love her. Damián would never love her the way he did, because he was better, more intelligent, more sensitive, more self-aware than his brother, and he was so in love with her that he couldn’t find the words to express anything close to how he felt. “How can you be so blind, Charo?” he’d ask her. “How could you do this to me? Is it because he takes you to expensive places? Gives big tips to the doormen at nightclubs? What a load of shit that is, Charito. I loved you so much my eyes hurt just from looking at you, and my fingers ached every time I touched you. I would have done anything for you, anything.”

  At this poin
t, terrified by his own weakness, Juan fell onto the bed. Reality was very different from his fantasy, and it was also very simple. Charo wasn’t tied to a chair, her hair clammy with sweat and sticking to her face, her eyes wide with fear and surprise, showing that she understood at last. He wasn’t walking towards her, then slowly circling the chair, he wasn’t standing behind her, letting her feel his prick on the back of her neck, or covering her breasts with his hands, or pinching her nipples, or whispering in her ear:“If this is what you like, I can do this too.” Instead he was alone in his room, lying on his bed, rejected, humiliated by the only girl he’d ever been in love with, and she was out there somewhere, fucking his brother. It was too dreadful, he simply couldn’t accept it, even if it was true. So he masturbated slowly, delicately, trying to prolong this break from all the pain. He had a very strong orgasm but felt cold at the same time, and the sticky feel of his semen covering his hand made him feel a combination of pity and disgust. Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the bed, opened his eyes, closed them again, fell back and started to cry like a child.

  The following morning the sky was grey, as it would be for many months to come. He didn’t see Damián until lunch and then, although he didn’t say a single word to him, and nothing happened to distinguish that meal from any other, everything seemed to collapse inside him. Looking at his brother, happily joking with his sisters and complimenting his mother on how delicious her lentils were, he had a precise image of his future life—the constant, unremitting fear of seeing her again, and of seeing her with Damián, fear of bumping into her in the building, at birthday parties, fear of the telephone ringing and having to answer it without knowing whether it would be her on the other end of the line. “I’m fucked,” he thought as he left the table, “well and truly fucked.” This feeling never quite went away in the following months, but he grew used to his new situation sooner than he would have thought possible. He became accustomed to seeing Charo every day, hearing her voice in the corridor, finding her sitting at the lunch table on a Sunday, seeing her laugh and talk and kiss Damián; accustomed to having her close but not being able to touch her or kiss her, not even wanting to look at her.

  Almost eight years later, as he got out of the car in the Calle Altamirano at the entrance to his Aunt Carmen’s building, Juan Olmedo barely recognized himself in that boy who had suffered so much, that gauche, withdrawn child who had a strong sense of duty but was too proud, helpful and unsociable at the same time, quiet and a little distracted, excelling only at his studies, sitting glued to his books for hours on end. And yet he retained a memory of the passion too, the violence and desire that had never ceased to torment him over the years. He had never desired Charo more than he did now, when he could imagine with absolute precision the echo of the voice in her ear, the feel and size of the body pressing against hers, the familiar amalgam of words and stock phrases, of movements and gestures, habits and quirks. He knew his brother well, he’d known him all his life, so he could see him even when he didn’t want to, his profile against a pillow, his hand on the small waist that Juan could still feel in his own fingers, or sinking into the sex of a satisfied girl who would happily return his every caress. And he was stuck in the middle, caught between them, tied to their bed, unable to shake off the daily torture of their company. Occasionally, he tried to object, to tear himself away from this mysteriously indispensable pain that enslaved him. He tried, but he didn’t succeed, and every morning he felt he desired Charo a little more than the day before, and that the hatred he had begun to feel for his brother grew by the same amount.And yet, life continued. Much later, Juan Olmedo would understand that this was the most important lesson of those years—learning to live at any cost and despite everything. He would never forget the taste of fury, nor the mute screams with which he rebuked God during all those agonizing years of sleepless nights:“Give her back to me, God, give her back.”While Damián slept in the next bed, Juan writhed, facing the wall, making no sound: “Give her back to me and I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll be whatever you want, I’ll give you whatever you ask if you give her back to me.” He hadn’t spoken to God since then, but when Charo sat beside him in the passenger seat, and the split in her skirt parted, and she did nothing to rearrange it, he wondered whether the Devil wasn’t a little hard of hearing.

  “Wait, don’t drive off yet,” she said, lowering the sun visor and examining herself in the mirror.“I need to touch up my make-up.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, abandoning himself to his fascination as she re-applied her lipstick with less resistance than he would have liked.“You look beautiful.”

  “Really?”

  “Damn you, you bitch,” he thought, but didn’t say so. He just turned the key in the ignition and stared straight ahead, as if he hadn’t noticed the poisonous sweetness of her last question. It was four in the afternoon on a Sunday and the Gran Vía was almost deserted, but the red lights gave him an opportunity to think.“Nothing’s going to happen,” he told himself.What could happen? She’s just teasing me. It’s too late—for me, for her, for everything.And yet he was nervous, as if hordes of ants were swarming under his skin. It wasn’t the first time his sister-in-law had played this game, but she’d never gone beyond playful teasing and he, too aware of his own scars, hadn’t even gone that far. But that afternoon, there was something new and it worried him. It was the first time that he and Charo had been alone since that spring evening, long ago, when he’d persuaded Damián to lend him money so he could take her to the most expensive disco in Madrid. And all of it had happened purely by chance. He’d rung the bell at his mother’s house at two on the dot and found Charo there. She’d looked to his left, then his right, checking that no one was with him, before leaning calmly against the door, blocking his path.

  “Where’s Elena?” she asked.

  “She can’t make it, she’s on duty.”

  “That’s a shame, isn’t it?” she said, and smiled, as if nothing could have made her happier. “Poor thing, working on a Sunday and missing your mother’s paella. It’s always so delicious.”

  Only then did she let him in, and he followed her down the corridor to the dining room, where Damián was bragging to his in-laws that his friend Nicanor had managed to get two tickets for the royal box at the Calderón Stadium.

  “Apparently, you get a drink beforehand,” he was explaining in his booming voice as Juan came in,“and a cocktail after the match, so I hope we’ll be having lunch soon—I’ve got to shoot off early.”

  After he left, without waiting for dessert, Charo moved stealthily to her husband’s chair so that she was sitting next to Juan.

  “They’ve left us on our own, Juanito,” she whispered in his ear.

  “So it seems.”

  “We could go to the cinema,” she said and looked round.The television was on but nobody was nearby.“Like the old days.”

  Those words caressed the bruised spine of the desperate boy that Juan had once been, but the man he had become still felt them as keenly as the edge of a knife. He kept his composure so admirably that he felt she must have been offended, and he forced himself to believe that nothing was going to happen, that nothing could happen, nothing at all. On reaching Callao, Charo’s skirt revealing a tantalizing glimpse of her glossy left thigh and her mouth curved in a private smile that didn’t change as he parked the car, he still couldn’t accept the possibility that something might happen, that he had been kidding himself, trying to hide from his own irresistible predisposition towards flinging himself into the abyss.

  “OK, so where are we going?” he asked, looking at her, and she reacted somewhat strangely. “You said the cinema you wanted to go to was in Callao, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said and leaned forward so that her skirt slid open even further.“Let’s see.This one will do,” she said pointing at the building to their right.“Yes, this one’s fine.”

  “What do you mean, it’s fine?” he asked, laughing openl
y to hide the effects of the spasm that had just gripped his entrails. “Do you want to see this film or not?”

  “Of course I do! What are you talking about?”

  Then they both laughed. She stopped and tried to behave casually as if there really was nothing going on as they walked to the entrance of the cinema.When they reached the ticket office, Juan Olmedo finally understood what was at stake. He suddenly felt weak, as vulnerable as when he saw her for the first time, dancing in front of the mirror.

  “Get seats upstairs,” she said quickly, as if she could read his mind.

  “Upstairs?”

  “Of course. I like to watch films from high up,” she said, lying coolly.

  “Since when?”