The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  “All right,” said Maribel. “If you promise you’ll behave and won’t drive Sara mad.”

  “OK,” said Juan, and then added:“But Alfonso’s not going.”

  Alfonso hadn’t paid any attention to the conversation until then. He appeared to be dozing, legs stretched out, hands lying limply in his lap, but he sat bolt upright when he heard his name.

  “I am going, yes, I am, I am,” he said, eyes still blurry with sleep, but nodding vigorously to emphasize his words.

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Juan, shaking his head,“you can’t go, Alfonso.”

  “Why can’t I?” he asked. “I want to go. I can go, can’t I?” He looked pleadingly at each of them in turn.“I am going, I am going.”

  “But you don’t even know where!” said Juan, smiling. “So where is it that you want to go then?”

  “We’re going to the cinema,Alfonso,” cut in Tamara, seeing how confused Alfonso was.“To the cinema in Chipiona. Sara’s taking us.”

  “She’s taking me too,” said Alfonso, looking very pleased.“Aren’t you, Sara? You’re taking me too.”

  “Of course I am,” said Sara.Andrés saw that she was smiling and realized that, although she was the cleverest of all of them, she hadn’t noticed the look exchanged by Juan and Maribel.“And I’ll buy you a carton of popcorn this big. If Juan lets you come with us, of course.”

  “No, Sara, really,” said Juan, shaking his head, but without much conviction this time. “You’ve got enough with these two.You can’t take Alfonso as well, with all the trouble he creates.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “He’s always on his best behavior at the cinema. He loves going, don’t you, Alfonso?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going to the cinema. I’ll be good, and I’ll eat my popcorn quietly.”

  “You really don’t mind?” asked Juan.

  “I really don’t,” said Sara, smiling, and then gesturing towards him and Maribel.“Why don’t you both come too?”

  Andrés thought she should have noticed then that something odd was going on, because both his mother and Tamara’s uncle immediately looked away in opposite directions. He was certain he was right, that when they exchanged glances earlier, they’d agreed something, and it was something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.

  “Well, I’ve arranged to meet up with some friends,” said Maribel quickly.“With it being my birthday and everything.”

  “I’ll go with you to the cinema, if you like,” said Juan half-heartedly. “But I had planned on going home for a siesta.”

  Sara burst out laughing and assured them they weren’t needed. It was true, they never needed anyone else to have a good time, the four of them had a lot of fun together. But as Andrés kissed his mother goodbye, he almost decided not to go to the cinema.

  “You’re going home, aren’t you?” Maribel asked Juan, and he nodded. “Would you mind dropping me off at mine first?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It means you taking a detour.”

  “No problem,” Juan said, smiling. “I’m not in a hurry.”

  Then Sara called, “Come on, Andrés,” and he turned and saw that Alfonso and Tamara were already sitting in the back of the car, with the passenger door open, waiting for him. He really wanted to see the film—he’d been the one who’d been most keen to see it last summer—but he was on the verge of saying he wouldn’t go and slipping quickly into the other car, telling his mother he’d rather go out with her and her friends, though he was pretty sure she hadn’t arranged to meet up with any friends. He was about to, but Dr. Olmedo was quicker than him and started up the engine while he was still deciding what to do. Meanwhile Sara was hooting, “Andrés, come on, hurry up, we don’t want to find we can’t get tickets again.”

  He really enjoyed the film, even though he was only half paying attention to it. His mind was still on Dr. Olmedo’s red car as it drove off. In every actress on screen he saw his mother, her face in every face, her body in every body, and an imagined, imaginary, eagerness in the angle of open arms, parted lips, the open violence of hands and kisses. He was only twelve years old, but he thought he knew about that sort of thing, a few vague words, the hint of a murky mystery. Sitting stiffly in his seat, not responding to any of the comments Tamara whispered in his ear from time to time, he thought of his mother, and this made him think of his grandmother and the things she said to him, the revolting way she had of clicking her tongue and venting her mean, coarse rage.

  “What does she care what I do, where I go, who I go out with?” his mother would say when she found him particularly quiet and withdrawn, and guessed that her mother had been criticizing her again.“The world’s changed, your grandmother doesn’t have a clue, she belongs to the past. Just ignore her.” This was what she said to him and then he didn’t know what to think, other than that things were as they were, and even if he didn’t like it, it might not be anyone’s fault. “A mother is a mother,” thought Andrés, this at least he was sure of, and that his own was a good mother, because she loved him and he knew it, he could feel it. He closed his eyes and felt safe against her body, in her arms, her warmth. But his grandmother never took any notice of his opinion when she started wondering aloud what her daughter Maribel was doing at night in those bars, in the lives of those men—always other women’s—who treated her as if she were an old rag. When Andrés heard his grandmother, he didn’t feel strong enough to stick up for his mother and give his own version of things.All he could think of was getting out of there, running away before his face became red with shame, and hiding somewhere where no one would see him.

  A mother is a mother, and his own mother, who would be thirty-one the following day, was waiting for him at home, the table laid with a special dinner for the two of them.

  “Prawns!” he exclaimed when he saw the dish in the kitchen, not noticing that she was wearing slippers and no make-up.“Yum!”

  “You haven’t had a hamburger and ruined your appetite, have you?” she asked. He gave her a kiss and shook his head. “Good. I won’t be a minute. I’m going to have a shower and change into my house clothes. I’ll be quick.”

  It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night.

  “Aren’t you going out?” he asked, surprised.

  “No,” she shouted from the bathroom, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Andrés didn’t yet know the word “paradox,” but he didn’t need to, as he welcomed the strange effect of that spring on his mother’s usual lifestyle. Maribel still occasionally went out for a drink with friends in the evening, but as she left, she always told him where she was going, and with whom, and she almost always came home sober and steady on her feet, early enough to find him still awake and to tell him off for not turning off the TV at half past ten like she’d told him. Then Andrés remembered other nights when her voice had been thick and slurry, trying to reassure him when she staggered in at dawn, the light already filtering through the blinds. He remembered her slow, difficult sentences, her disjointed words:“It’s only me, sweetheart, I bumped into the chest of drawers. Go to sleep, dear, it’s only me,” and he remembered her coming into his room carrying her shoes—“Ouch, my feet are killing me”—lying down beside him—“Let me give you a kiss”—falling asleep next to him fully dressed, and in the morning shielding her eyes from the light, her foundation dried and cracked like mud, eyeliner and lipstick smudged, hair in a mess, and the insatiable thirst that came with hangovers.

  “You’re very selfish, Andrés,” Sara had said to him the only time he had dared tell her about it, a few months earlier, during the Christmas holidays.

  “No,” he said, very serious.“Mama’s the selfish one.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Well, because she’s my mother, isn’t she? And I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She brought me into the world because she wanted to, so she should take care of me.”

  “Of cours
e she should. So what’s the matter, doesn’t she take care of you?” asked Sara, raising her voice, as if she were angry with him. “Doesn’t she feed you and buy you clothes and send you to a good school? Doesn’t she look after you and make sure you have everything you need?”

  “No, not when she goes out and spends all night out somewhere,” he said, getting cross now too.

  “Ah, well, now we’ve got to where we were going. Considering the fact you’re only eleven, you sound like an old lady, you know.”

  “What if I had an attack of something and died while she was out?”

  “What if you get run over by a car outside your school, what then? Is your grandmother going to come and give you the kiss of life?”

  He didn’t know what to say to this. Sara took advantage of his hesitation to put an arm round his shoulders.Then she went on, listing the kind of truths she liked, the kind he would have liked too if life hadn’t sometimes turned them into a pack of lies.

  “Your mother’s much more than just your mother,Andrés. She’s herself too, can’t you see? She’s very young and very lively and she has a right to enjoy herself. She’ll have plenty of time to slow down in the future.You know how she lives, how hard she works, and she looks after you all on her own, making sure you turn out all right. That’s a huge responsibility, and she hasn’t got anyone to share it with. It’s not a bad thing that she tries to have fun. Quite the opposite. I’m sure that if she was bored and bitter and sad, she’d be a much worse mother.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, nodding sadly.“I know all that, you always say the same thing. But things aren’t like that here.”

  “No, Andrés,” Sara said. They were sitting on the seesaw, swinging slowly up and down. “Things are the same everywhere.There are people everywhere who think one way, and people who think another way, and that’s what matters, don’t you see? What people think, what people feel.You’ve got to try and think about what you know, what you feel, not what other people tell you.”

  “But you can’t think bad things about people who love you,” he objected.

  “Of course you can,” she disagreed gently. “Because affection is no guarantee of anything.Your grandmother, for instance, might really love you but she could be wrong and she could be hurting you, even if she doesn’t mean to.”

  He understood—he always understood what Sara said. He understood the meaning of the words she poured over him gently, cautiously, like drops of balm stinging an open wound that never quite healed. But he’d never managed to stop being selfish, never managed to stop feeling sorry for himself, to face his grandmother with his head held high, to understand or forgive his mother’s absences.

  Nor had he ever found out exactly what she did, what she was looking for and never finding on those nights out.Yet now, when he was more than convinced, almost certain, that she must be performing scenes like the one in that film with Tamara’s uncle, it turned out that at last he had a mother like other people’s, a mother who no longer bothered to wear make-up all the time, or wear the tight dresses he hated when she went for a walk; a mother who sat on the sofa with him to watch TV every evening, who didn’t bump into furniture or thickly curse her fate all the time, a mother who walked straight down the street and looked past the men who dared to wolf-whistle, a mother who saved up to buy a flat, a mother who had found something he didn’t know anything about, and which he wasn’t sure he’d like, but which meant he could at last feel calm and even strangely proud of her.

  That spring was warm and peaceful, and in its light the nature of things began to change. Andrés quickly got used to this new feeling of security, and as he shed the responsibility of taking care of his mother, he felt a new lightness. He’d always liked Dr. Olmedo, always thought he was very nice, and had even envied Tamara that she was in the care of someone like him, a man who knew how to do things and do them easily.After the first moments of confusion, of sudden, violent jealousy, like the one that had stopped him in his tracks outside the restaurant, he started working out the advantages of his new situation. Quite apart from the new state of domestic calm, he began to see this unexpected conquest of his mother’s as a personal triumph.

  One afternoon, as Andrés was cycling to the stationer’s to get a pad of graph paper and an extra-long ruler, he saw his father in the distance, leaning on a car, beer in hand, outside his friend’s bar.Andrés realized he wasn’t hunching, stooping as he used to do each time he saw him, or feeling regret, or dread, or sadness, or shame. This sudden, unexpected robustness meant that his heart didn’t start thumping, his legs didn’t feel weak, and he didn’t look down. He only checked to see if the man whose surname he bore had recognized him. Then, not giving his father the chance to rush off as he usually did, he turned down a side street to avoid him. And he never flushed at all.

  Andrés’s father was very handsome.The most handsome man she’d ever seen.This was what Tamara thought when she first met him. But also that Andrés had been unlucky.

  Their art teacher was becoming impossible.The art materials he told them to bring to class were increasingly sophisticated, and harder to find at the shops in the center of town, shops that sold all sorts of things—stationery, books, newspapers, magazines, gifts, toys, sweets, cigarettes—but never had very much of anything. Tamara was just thinking she’d have to get Juan to drive her to Jerez or El Puerto, when Andrés said he knew where they could get the extra-long steel rulers and A3-size graph paper they needed.The only technical stationers in the area was in a part of town she didn’t know, an area of red-brick blocks of flats, the streets lined with young trees only about a meter high. She and Andrés cycled there after school, pedaling slowly side by side along the Paseo Maritimo. As they reached the red apartment blocks, Andrés sped up and shot off down a side street as if he were trying to win a race. It meant he didn’t see the man waving to him from outside a bar. At least Tamara thought he hadn’t seen the man, or heard him calling out. She sped after Andrés and caught up with him at the traffic lights.

  “Wait, Andrés! Somebody was calling to you back there.”

  He shook his head, but she couldn’t tell what he meant by that. He stared fixedly at the traffic lights and gripped the handlebars as if he were revving up a motorbike, and didn’t say a word. Surprised at his attitude, Tamara looked round and saw the man again. He was heading towards them, apparently confident that he could catch up with them before the traffic lights changed.

  “Well, what was all that about?” he said loudly, coming round Andrés’s bike and grabbing hold of the handlebars.“Why are you in such a hurry? Whenever I see you, you always shoot off.”

  His hair was an unusual color, dark gold, with paler yellow highlights that glinted as he moved his head. It was weird, so perfect it looked fake, and his face was the same.Tamara thought his eyes—large, hazel, almond-shaped, with the longest, blackest, thickest eyelashes she’d ever seen—could have been a woman’s, and so too could his small, perfect nose, and his fleshy lips. But despite these delicate features, he had a man’s face, large, with a square jaw. His skin was smooth and dark, without a single spot, line or blemish, and it looked soft. He wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t short either, and he looked as good in his jeans as a TV model. He was wearing a white shirt with half the buttons undone, showing a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin of El Rocio on a tanned chest, as deep a gold as his hair, and pointy snakeskin boots. Tamara thought he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t think of anyone to compare him to.

  “What do you want?” Andrés said without looking at him, still revving up that imaginary motorbike. Tamara wondered who the man was for Andrés to be so rude to him.

  “Well, I don’t know, what d’you think I want?” he answered. He had a very strong Andalusian accent, and his voice was very deep, better suited to a taller man.“Just to say hello, see how you are, how you’re getting on. I am your father, you know.”

  Andrés screwed up his face but said nothing.


  “At least introduce me to your friend,” the man insisted, turning his brilliant smile on Tamara.

  “Her name’s Tamara, she goes to my school,” said Andrés, and then, to Tamara:“This is my father. He’s got the same name as me.”

  Andrés’s father came over and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Isn’t it you who’s got the same name as me?” he said and burst out laughing.“Come on, I’ll buy you both a drink.”

  “The thing is, we’re on our way to the stationer’s . . .” Andrés began.

  “You can do that later, can’t you? It’s still early.”

  The man turned round and headed for the bar, apparently assuming they would follow, as indeed they did. But just before they set off after him,Tamara glanced over at Andrés and saw a look on his face unlike any he’d ever given her before—an appeal for help, but also a look of anger and misgiving, indignation, uncertainty, and an ancient, icy resignation.Tamara didn’t fully understand the message his look conveyed, perhaps even Andrés didn’t fully understand it himself, but she felt a stab of fear—as if a red light were flashing, an alarm sounding—and she realized her friend was having a bad time.This much she could tell, and she didn’t like it. So she followed him without a word, leaned her bike against the same street lamp where he had left his, and put her hand on his shoulder as they made their way to the table where the handsome man,Andrés’s father, was waiting for them, smiling. There was a fat woman beside him, with hair dyed a bluish black, wearing heavy make-up and a short, tight, cheap velvet dress. Her big fat legs were encased in fishnet tights that strained over the bulging flesh.