The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  All the brandies on offer were fairly awful. Juan encouraged her to try the whisky, which was a little better, but she stayed faithful to brandy, although it was sourer and rougher than she was used to, rather like the harsh, anonymous stuff that filled her father’s bottles.

  “And do you know what the worst thing is? He hasn’t even tried to seduce me yet. Here I am, going over and over the same thing all the time, and maybe he’s not even thinking like that—I don’t know. Maybe he thinks that it’s not even worth bothering at our age, although he has asked me to go to Seville with him for the weekend. He’s said that we could go and see the coronation of some Virgin or other. In Los Remedios, I think.” She stopped to emphasize her disbelief, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, mouth agape.“Can you believe it?”

  He laughed first, but she soon joined in with a boisterous, childlike complicity, as if they were schoolchildren exchanging dirty words in the playground.Then Sara realized that everything would have been much easier if the long, sedate conversations she’d had with the American had ended in a burst of that same simple, silly laughter, whose only purpose was to bring two people closer together. Afterwards, Juan Olmedo yawned.

  “Would you like another drink?” he asked, rubbing his eyes vigorously.

  “No, we’ve got to leave,” said Sara, placing both hands on the table as if she were about to stand up. “You’re going to fall asleep on me, I’ve been going on for so long.”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” said Juan, looking round for the waiter and signaling to him for another round of drinks. “Let’s have another drink. I am tired, but it’s not because of you. I was on duty last night and I couldn’t sleep this morning for some reason. It happens sometimes, but I feel fine, honestly. I was just thinking that if you go to Seville, you’ll miss Maribel’s birthday treat, the rice with galeras.”

  Sara nodded as she remembered how disappointed Maribel had been, the pout with which she greeted the news, the vehemence with which she explained that “galeras,” strange creatures that seemed like the prehistoric ancestors of Dublin Bay prawns, could only be found along a couple of miles of the coast and only at this specific time of year, for six weeks at most, and were hugely expensive.At the restaurant where she’d planned to have her birthday lunch, they couldn’t guarantee they would have any, so that was why she’d had to convince her brother, who was a fisherman, to keep her a couple of dozen. “Well, well,” she’d said to Sara, “imagine yourself getting an American boyfriend now, when we were all getting along so well.” Sara had quickly denied everything, as if she had something to be ashamed of. “He’s not my boyfriend, Maribel,” she’d said,“and it’s not definite that I’m going to Seville with him. I’m not even sure I feel like going.” Maribel looked skeptical. Her face had changed, becoming more angular, more delicate, more interesting, as she lost weight. It was now, above all, a face that was lit up from inside with a gentle glow, a new softness that erased all memory of the bitterness that sometimes used to twist her lips.“Well then,” Maribel went on at last,“like I said, if he was the love of your life or something, I mean if you’d been after him for months, then I’d be happy for you, I swear. But if that’s not the case . . . I mean, there are plenty of men in the world! There are loads of them, that’s the truth, and they’re all the same, they all want the same thing.” Then it was Sara who stared with interest at Maribel. And she reflected that what was mutely expressed by her rosy color, her eyes, her mouth, was a metamorphosis that could only have been caused by a man, just a man but different from the others. Maribel was sending signals that were as clear as day: she sometimes curled her hair now, and sometimes she wore tights to work instead of the thick socks she used to wear, she checked her nails and she arrived with a clean face, and applied make-up before leaving. “So what are you saying?” Sara asked while she tried to think of a more delicate phrase than the one in her head. She couldn’t find one, so she smiled to soften it:“If you want a fuck, any man will do? Is that it?” “That’s right!” said Maribel, thumping her fist into the palm of her hand and nodding. Sara smiled again. “But that’s not true, Maribel,” she said,“just look at you, recently.” Maribel blushed but she still had something to say: “Well, OK, but bad fucks are useful too, because they put you off it for a while.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sara said to Juan once the waiter had brought their drinks. “We were talking about it yesterday morning, and I think she might even be a little bit cross with me. Although I shouldn’t think she really cares that much, because she’s got herself a new boyfriend.”

  “She’s got herself a boyfriend?” Juan asked, eyes wide, neck tense, all signs of tiredness now entirely gone.“Maribel?”

  “Well,” Sara went on cautiously,“I’m assuming she has, at least. She hasn’t told me anything, but she certainly looks as if she’s met someone, because she pays more attention to herself, she’s on a diet, and she looks reasonably happy. Anyway, I don’t think she’s about to give up work, you don’t have to worry about that.The only thing is, I don’t know, I was quite touched that she should be so bothered, so keen for me to be there on her birthday. I didn’t expect it.”

  “Right.” He smiled, seeming much more relaxed. “Well, the children are even worse—they’re both green with envy. Maribel’s told them that if you get involved with the American, you’ll probably end up marrying him, and if you do, sooner or later you’ll go and live in America.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” said Sara, shaking her head, while Juan laughed. But she wondered whether this wasn’t exactly what she had wanted to hear, whether she hadn’t come here to hear those very words.

  Juan Olmedo didn’t know her story, the toll taken by a childhood of fairy tales without wicked stepmothers, Hansel and Gretel loaded with gold, plastic tiaras and shoes covered in yellow silk as far as the eye could see, Christmas Eve an annual torment and no home to return to. Sara didn’t want to tell him any of this but on the walk back she sketched her past for him including the few key elements that outlined why she was different from Maribel, who could blaze, burn, be consumed in a single flame; Sara had never been like that, she had never been able to be. Sara Gómez Morales, mistress of very little, was born with her passions contained, and she couldn’t remember how long it had been since someone last said to her that they loved her, loved her for herself, because she was easy to love.“We’ll really miss you if you don’t come to the lunch!” said Maribel.“Andrés really loves you, he looks up to you more than anyone else, and I’ve become very fond of you, almost without noticing it! That’s the good thing about you, you’re easy to love.” Juan Olmedo would never understand what those words had meant to her, he’d never guess her real motives; someone who’d always known his way home, always had a place where he belonged, would never understand.

  Sara Gómez Morales walked along the beach, and said nothing, she had nothing to say, but she took her neighbor’s arm to thank him, and looked straight ahead. The beach seemed to stretch on endlessly, long, white, inexhaustible, as if it were the edge of a world that never ended, but that could be contained in a few gestures—Maribel’s warmth as she spoke, the way Alfonso squeezed Sara’s hand,Andrés’s worried face when he saw her with Bill on the promenade,Tamara nervously touching the handlebars of the bicycle next door without daring to look at it. It didn’t seem like much—an employee, a mentally disabled man, a little girl of eleven, a boy of twelve—it wasn’t much, yet it was more than she was used to having. In fact it was everything she’d wanted since moving there, a world apart from the risks and rewards that had marked out her earlier life. She’d chosen a discreet house, on a gated development, on the outskirts of a remote town that was neither too big nor too small, to embark on the elegant life of a wealthy outsider, and she believed she had expected nothing more. She’d tried to take refuge in her own strength and found that it wasn’t enough, so she’d drawn a line in the sand and faced the unknown, not wanting to recognize a familiar face to her dreams.

 
; Many times in her life, she’d tried to find a place to fit in, to replace the memories of a divided little girl with the certainty of a new future, but it had never worked. Her whole life amounted to a list of attempts and failures. So she’d thrown herself into what had seemed like the definitive opportunity, a project that redressed the balance of her divided self and the brutal severity of her life of distrust.And she’d succeeded at last, she’d achieved it.Yet, as she walked home arm in arm with Juan Olmedo, she realized she’d done nothing different now from what she’d always done. Her conversations with Andrés, with Tamara, the cheerful, instinctive ease with which she let them both exploit her, the casual way she’d accepted Alfonso as part of duties no one had forced her to take on, the stubbornness with which she had convinced Maribel that she had to buy a flat, and even her aim of discovering the key to Juan’s past and why he’d come to live there, probably had less to do with boredom, the unbearable slowness of clocks, and more to do with an automatic reflex, so ancient and intimate that she couldn’t distinguish it from all the other components of her being—the instinct to be part of something, anything, to feel she had a home that was more than just the building in which she lived.

  In the early hours of Saturday morning, the sky was clear and quiet, with no trace of a west wind and no sign of an east wind.The air was still, the sea like a mirror. Sara Gómez got up late, feeling well rested, and found that the world echoed her mood exactly, as far as the eye could see. Three days after its official start, spring seemed confident of its own strength. And she was too. She had a leisurely breakfast, got ready with more care than usual, chose comfortable, light clothes, and at one o’clock went across the road.Andrés and Tamara spotted her. Juan, with his back turned, and Maribel, who was combing Alfonso’s hair, heard her cheerful greeting:

  “Did you think you’d get to eat all the galeras without me then?”

  They all looked at her and smiled. As they were all about to set off, Andrés and Tamara both raised their hands. It was their way of claiming the passenger seat next to Sara.

  Sara Gómez Morales passed four subjects in her first year of economics, but never registered for the second year.At the time, giving up her plans didn’t bother her much, and she never really regretted a decision that more or less took itself, born of weariness—weariness of going to the cinema alone, studying all the time, drinking too much. In exchange,Vicente González de Sandoval restored brilliance and intensity to her life just at the point when she was about to turn thirty.

  “Don’t lie to me,Vicente.”

  They’d gone out for a coffee mid-morning.They’d had to walk for quite a while before finding a café that neither of them had been to with colleagues. It was eleven thirty in the morning and the coffee machine was noisy, but there was no one in the room. Vicente picked a table with a view of both sides of the street, took her by the hand and began to give her confused explanations. She then asked him not to lie to her, thinking she’d never ask him anything else.

  “It’s the only thing I ask of you: don’t lie to me. I’ve been told quite enough lies in my life—I don’t need any more.”

  “Not lie to you . . .” he said, rubbing his eyes, as if to gain time. He turned his head to look out of the window at the street, then turned back to her. “So what can I tell you? I’m one of your bosses, I’m married, I have two children.The youngest, a little girl named after my wife, María Belén, was born only a few months ago. I didn’t want to have a second child, but her mother didn’t consult me.We make a good couple. We started going out together when we were at school.When I left home, I left her.When I came back, I went back to her too. My mother adores her. I don’t. I like you. I like you a lot.That’s it. It’s the classic story, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Sara, smiling. “It is.”

  “And sordid. Ugly . . . sickening.”

  “Of course,” said Sara.“Like all true stories.”

  “Almost all true stories,” he said, lifting a finger.

  “All right,” she accepted his qualification with a nod.“Almost all.”

  Vicente had been playing with a sugar cube as he spoke, turning it over and over, passing it from one hand to the other, putting it down on the table, flicking it with his index finger, picking it up and starting all over again. Now he unwrapped it slowly and dropped it into his cup. As he stirred his coffee, Sara wondered whether he was genuinely flustered, whether his nervousness was spontaneous or premeditated. Suddenly, he smiled.

  “And if I tell you you’re the first woman I’ve been involved with since I got married, you wouldn’t believe that either, I suppose?” She laughed, shaking her head, and he laughed too, but as his laughter faded, his face took on a peaceful, almost melancholy look.“But it’s true, in a way.”

  “Let’s not bother with ‘ways,’Vicente.”

  Talking was hard. Everything else, what had happened the Friday before, had been much easier. Sara had been surprised when the quantity surveyor, who was also a union member and whom she knew only by sight, had invited her to the dinner, and she accepted only because she couldn’t think of an excuse quickly enough. When Vicente, who’d spent the last month walking down corridors with her and paying her numerous little visits, appeared a moment later to say how pleased he was that she’d be going to Miguel Angel’s stag party and offered to give her a lift to the restaurant—“It’s quite far out of town, beyond Arturo Soria, even taxi drivers get lost”—Sara recalled having seen him chatting to the surveyor. They had been joking around, elbowing each other when some secretary in a miniskirt went past. So she assumed they were good enough friends for the surveyor to have invited her to the dinner as a favor. It didn’t bother her, in fact she quite liked it, because she liked Vicente, and she was starting to experience the same agitation she could see in his eyes, on his lips, in his nervous movements, the sudden tension, an instant reaction like an alarm that made his head jerk up whenever she came into the room. But the certainty that their desire was ripe didn’t stop her assessing her situation precisely, just as an apple might calculate the extent and pain of its fall just as it felt the last fiber attaching it to the tree break.

  As she dressed, trying to bear in mind that she would probably be getting undressed twice that evening, she realized that after all that effort, all those years, all those fierce resolutions, she was going to end up just like Señorita Sevilla, in the arms of her boss’s boss, although Vicente González de Sandoval was younger, richer, and more elegant than the owner of the secretarial school. She had sworn to herself a thousand times that she would never play a part like the one she was rehearsing that afternoon. He was a Republican of course, and she was a free, independent woman. It was also true, however, that her godmother and her friends would split their sides laughing if they heard her set out the problem in those terms. As the rejected dresses, skirts, blouses, and bras piled up on the bed, the feeling that her fate was already sealed, that someone else had written the script of her life, seemed stronger than ever. She wondered how many of the women she saw each morning—secretaries, telephonists, receptionists—had got ready for a night out with Vicente before her.“This isn’t his first time,” she warned herself,“it can’t be.”Yet she still felt happy, and nervous, and hoped that something would happen.

  Until that day, men had played only a secondary role in her life. She’d gone out with a few—almost always colleagues, or acquaintances—and in her last year at the Robles School she’d almost become engaged to an office worker from a village near Ávila who’d pursued her for a whole year without being discouraged by his lack of success. Eventually his perseverance, the tenacity with which he asked her out one Saturday after another, endeared him to her. He wasn’t much to look at. He had glasses, was balding, skinny, and always wore one of two jackets, both of which were too big for him. Sara gave him the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months, because she was twenty by then, and she hadn’t been out with anyone since Juan Mari. But she found him boring, and desp
aired because he never seemed to understand the endings of the films they went to see. So she was taken completely by surprise when he attacked her the night she finally agreed to accompany him up to his room,“Just so you can see where I live,” he said. She could have screamed, she could have shouted for help, waking up the other lodgers, hit him, kicked and bit him; she would probably have been a match for him he was so puny, but she felt sorry for him. His skin was cold, covered in goose bumps, he had a few sparse black hairs on his puny chest, and very narrow shoulders, and he wanted to marry her. He was very nervous, he finished almost immediately, and it was all a disaster.Afterwards, as he gathered his clothes and started dressing, he said sorry, and Sara felt like crying, for him and for herself, for how squalid it all was and how incredibly ugly a man’s naked body could be. On Monday, after class, he began to plan a more formal engagement and even started to talk of a wedding. Sara said she didn’t want to see him again and refused to answer his questions.