“To be honest, I feel terrible,” she announced, reclining on the sofa, her dress spread out over her golden thighs like the corolla of a tropical flower. She controlled her body and her posture with the same wisdom, the same marvelous cunning as before, not succumbing to the shapelessness that pregnancy so often induced in women.“I’ve stopped smoking, of course, so I’m very irritable. Happy, but tetchy.That’s normal, isn’t it? Well, your brother can’t understand it. He says he’s scared of coming near me and that my belly gives him the creeps. Normally I wouldn’t care, really, you know that, but the thing is I’m all on edge, so that’s why I thought,‘Come on, Charito, what do you bet your stomach won’t bother Juan.”
Even though he was stunned, Juan still felt like shouting “Olé!,” “Bravo!,” pulling out his handkerchief and waving it about in her honor, like at a bullfight, the theatre, or a soccer match. He would have called for an encore, she deserved it for being so clever, so daring, so irrepressible. He would have liked to show her in some way how much he admired her performance, but he couldn’t, because his feet carried him towards her and he simply did what he had to. Like a good boy.And that morning, as he discovered that he liked Charo just as much with a thicker waist, Juan Olmedo learned that he had never known what it was to feel truly scared.
It wasn’t a question of what he was doing, but of what he was capable of doing. He, who had so often and so cheerfully claimed he’d be prepared to do anything, sometimes realized it wasn’t a question of mere words. Kneeling on the bed, he pulled his sister-in-law towards him and entered her slowly, his eyes fixed on her bulging belly, which suddenly seemed as soft as a grass-covered hillock, and then he stopped hearing the voice of Elena, the girlfriend he’d left for Charo, and heard his own voice instead: “What the hell are you doing, Juan? Think about what you’re doing. Have you gone crazy or something?” And he felt fear, and pleasure, and more fear, and more pleasure.
“Have you ever had sex with a pregnant woman before?” she asked, because she liked to talk in the early stages of sex.
“No, you’re the first.”
“Well you’re doing it very well.You’re very gentle.”
“I’m always gentle with you.”
He loved her. Dishonest, confused, and contemptible as she was, he loved her, and he wanted her for himself. His love consoled and sustained him; it absolved him of his mistakes and released him from his anxiety. But it did scare him. It terrified him to think of time and limits. He’d gone back to her halfway through her pregnancy and they hadn’t even discussed it, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask her for an explanation, she hadn’t given him any, because there was no need. She’d only had to knock at his front door to create the right situation for him to take all the responsibility, all the blame for what was happening. Her return, her essential display of boldness, loaded the gun, but it was he who had pulled the trigger. Charo simply appeared, sat down in front of him, and looked into his eyes, risking rejection but knowing it would never happen.And when she departed, she left him alone with his misery, the profound indignity of being a mere puppet, the weakness of his intentions, and the humiliating destruction of a desire that is love, but is not good.
He was terrified by his sudden inability to control himself. He couldn’t understand what had happened to him, how he’d got where he was, and yet he also knew that it had only just begun, and that the end was a long way off.The morning before the birth of the baby who was to be his niece, Charo behaved strangely, after surrendering to him with the same eagerness, the same determination with which she used to annihilate him in the days when her waist was narrow and her body docile. Her pregnancy was very advanced, she was in the thirty-ninth week, and he thought it would be better to stop having sex with her at that stage.“Honestly, it’s fine,” she’d laughed,“you should know that better than anyone. Sex is good for you right up to the end because it strengthens the muscles and it can induce labor—that’s what they said at those classes you sent me to.” It was true. Charo hadn’t wanted to do anything to prepare for the birth but he had insisted, and he’d been such a pain about it that she’d finally given in.That morning he didn’t manage to be quite so persuasive because his sister-in-law attacked him with the kind of arguments that he usually used to disarm her, and he couldn’t find a response quickly enough. So he let himself be disarmed by her, and when at the end he saw her lean over her now huge, low belly and look strangely at the fingers of her right hand, and sniff them, and look at them again with the same terrifying curiosity, he realized that of everything that could happen, the worst had already taken place.
She refused to go straight to the hospital. She was quite calm, and so sure of what she knew that she insisted he take her home first to collect her suitcase. “We’ve got plenty of time,” she said, “two hours, I learned that at the classes too.” Juan felt so guilty that he didn’t stand up to her, but as he drove, detached from what he was doing, pressing the pedals and stopping at traffic lights, mostly in their favor at ten in the morning, he could see a single staring eye everywhere he looked—in the sky, on the road, on the windscreen—an eye that was staring at him. He knew of course that fetuses couldn’t see, didn’t know, lacked any awareness or capacity to interpret what was going on around them, but he could still see it, a tiny eye staring at him, accusing him through the hole that had now opened up in its peaceful little world of watery echoes; an elemental world in which she’d swum like a drowsy happy fish until an enemy burst in and destroyed it.
He knew it was nonsense, of course, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Hi, Damián, it’s me.”
Her suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. Juan picked it up and turned round, about to head back to the car, but saw that Charo was going towards the sitting room.
“Right, well, it’s started. My waters have broken. My waters. So I’m going to the hospital. No, I haven’t gone into labor yet, I haven’t got any contractions, Juan says when I get to the hospital they’ll give me something to get them started.What? No, Juan’s here, with me.When I saw fluid coming out, I got a bit scared—I didn’t know what it was, so I called him, and he rushed over.Well, he can drive me to the hospital, I’m sure he won’t mind. OK, I’ll see you there.Yes, silly, love you too, see you in a bit.”
On the way to the hospital, Juan Olmedo started to cry.
“Honestly! What’s the matter with you?” Charo snorted impatiently when she noticed.“Are you an idiot or what?”
Juan Olmedo was crying because it was all so ugly, so sordid, so unfair that an awareness of his love for her could only make it worse. For at this most difficult time, she had gone back to being the person he didn’t understand. He’d never wanted to live like this, in a state of continual anxiety, where all his wishes and actions had come to nothing. He loved her, he wanted to be happy, but everything he had now suddenly fit inside this car and this monstrous, shameful situation.This was where so much love, such lofty ambitions, had got him: to the saddest form of madness.
“Please stop it, Juan. Please don’t cry.” It was the first time he’d ever cried in her presence, and when he looked at her, it was the first time he’d ever seen her cry.“Pull yourself together, please. Shit, don’t do this to me now. Not now.”
They still hadn’t quite recovered by the time they got to the hospital, but the receptionist in A & E didn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t leave me,” Charo said, holding the admissions form. “Please don’t leave me on my own.”
So he went to the room with her and stayed while she changed and unpacked her things. Damián arrived, and he too asked Juan to stay. Juan went into the delivery room with them, and he was the only one to stay with her throughout the labor because he made Damián go outside when he was about to faint.The hospital routine, the familiar smell of disinfectant, warmed him and restored a little of his confidence, the comforting company of a landscape he knew so well. But when he left the building through the main entrance, on the
threshold of a night that seemed quite different, his mood had changed for other, more profound reasons. Because, even if he’d known from the beginning that this was what was going to happen, and that it wasn’t advisable to be taken in—even a little—by the sweet, deadly loop of happy endings, Juan Olmedo already knew that the child was his, and he felt, even without wanting to know, that the eye was calling, not accusing him. He was terrified of limits, but also of time, and Juan Olmedo grew tired of denying with his head what he knew with his heart, and succumbed to a surge of pure, foolish joy because, that afternoon, Charo had given him a reason to hope.
For months, carefully, meticulously, literally, he went over everything Charo had said in her hospital bed:“You’re not just the most intelligent of the three, you’re also the best. Nobody deserves to have a father like your brother, I wanted you to know just in case.” Sentences like images that fade slowly in a stack of photographs lying forgotten in a drawer, like an endless prayer repeated until it becomes meaningless. Tamara was growing, losing the blurry, undifferentiated features that make all babies look alike, turning into a dark-haired, unique little girl at the same rate as her mother was going back to being herself, wearing the same clothes, the same blood-red lipstick, and nothing happened, no path opened up to link the closed, parallel compartments in which his split existence unfolded.
Juan Olmedo could not understand that his sister-in-law had chosen him as the father of her child simply because at the time she got pregnant, she liked him better than her husband. This was too brutal, too cruel even for a professional victim, a deluded despot who had never paid the price for placing herself above everything and everyone. He couldn’t accept that hers had been an irrational, arbitrary choice because, apart from anything else, Charo adored her daughter and in her own characteristic, and characteristically egocentric way, she lived for her. Juan had reckoned it would be so, not just because it was natural that Charo would feel this way, but because she’d always been like a surrogate mother to her brother-in-law, Alfonso, and her young nephews and nieces, the sick and the weak. Damián made fun of her, mocking her generosity, her often excessive self-denial when she thought someone really needed her. But this was the light that Charo radiated. Juan Olmedo clung to this thought for a long time, and as he watched Charo play with the child, change her nappies or hold her in her arms, singing her quietly to sleep. Yet all that happened was that time continued to pass.
“She looks adorable.”
Tamara was playing in the sunny garden, piling earth onto plastic plates and feeding it to her doll with a little yellow spade. He and Charo were sitting on the back porch watching her and waiting for Alfonso to wake up from his afternoon nap.Alfonso had moved in with Charo and Damián after their mother’s death and it gave Juan the perfect excuse to call in often after work.
“Yes,” said Charo after a pause. “She really is very cute. Even though she looks like you.”
“That’s not true,” said Juan smiling, quickly recovering from the shock of his sister-in-law’s words—she never mentioned the subject of her child’s father any more.“She looks like you. Exactly like you.”
He was scared of talking about it and he was just as guilty as she was of avoiding the subject. He was scared of what he might say, but also, above all, of what he might hear if he pushed Charo to the limit. In short, he was scared of the word “no.” He absolved himself of blame, reflecting that he had nothing more to say and she knew it, knew that he was there, waiting for her, always, for as long as she liked. He had told her so many times he’d lost count, and he’d lost count of the times she had refused to answer, wrapping herself in an ambiguous silence that meant nothing because it hinted at too many things. But that afternoon it was the beginning of spring, the sun felt good and new, like a surprise gift. Tamara opened her own mouth every time she held the little spade to her doll’s mouth, instinctively imitating what her mother did when feeding her. Juan had left a junior doctor asleep in his bed. He’d slept with her three times in ten days, even allowing himself the luxury of calling Charo to cancel a meeting without any explanation.
His relationship with all the other women in the world had changed some time ago, although it hadn’t reached its final form. At first, he was scrupulously faithful to Charo. It seemed ridiculous, but he felt incapable of desiring any other woman. The women around him, the ones he worked with, the ones he saw in the street, seemed like flat, lifeless images, more or less pleasing to the eye, but quite devoid of reality. He still looked at them, but he no longer wanted them even in his imagination. He didn’t need them.When Charo announced she was pregnant, betraying him for a second time, the process became more acute until he was completely stripped of his capacity to desire. If he couldn’t have his sister-in-law, he wouldn’t have anyone. But one evening, when Tamara was eight months old, the friend of the girlfriend of a friend backed him up against the wall of a bar and asked him what the hell was he up to, and he said he wasn’t up to anything, so they slept together, and they had a good time. From then on, and though she called him many times and he wouldn’t see her again, Juan Olmedo recovered a certain neutrality. He didn’t go in search of women, but if ever he liked one he let her find him. There came a time when he no longer recognized himself, a time during which he slept with and then rejected many women; a frenzied, feverish time when he went from one name to another, one mouth to another, one body to another, in an impossible search for an antidote, a poison that would cure him or destroy him completely.And yet, on that sunny, peaceful afternoon in April, he couldn’t see the color of his future. Before him was a scene so sweet, so right that it didn’t even yield to the memory of that junior doctor he found so attractive, and who was so good in bed, but wasn’t part of his true life. That afternoon, Juan Olmedo reflected that all of his life was there in that garden, on that porch, in the characters of a scene that belonged to him, a part of his life that had been hijacked by another. The certainty dispelled his fear and loosened his tongue.
“I think about the child a lot, you know. I wonder what’s going to happen to her.”
“Well, nothing,” said Charo, looking at him with interest, and he realized she was gauging the meaning of his words.“What could happen?”
Juan didn’t want to reply to this question, and he fixed his gaze on his daughter before going on:“I don’t know. She’s two now.”
“Almost two and a half,” said Charo, and from her look, Juan realized she already knew what he was going to say.
“I mean, when all’s said and done, I am her father.”
“No, you’re not,” said Charo, smiling without a trace of bitterness or malice. “You’re her uncle, remember? You were very clear about that. Nothing’s going to happen, this is the only sensible way forward.That’s what you said and that’s how it is.”
“I know, but I was wrong,” he said. Deep down, he didn’t care about the child, not yet; at the time all he cared about was her mother, and what Tamara, as their child, represented. But he wasn’t lying.“I can’t help it, every time I see her, all I can think about is that I’m her father.”
“I’m glad,” said Charo, still smiling, comically unmoved by what she was hearing.“That’s best for all of us.”
“What about Damián?”
“Well, nothing, what about him? He’s my husband, and he’s Tamara’s father.We’re a happy family. Doesn’t it show?”
“Yes,” said Juan. He stood up and collected his things, not looking at her.“You look good in photos.”
This time she didn’t ask where he was going. He couldn’t bring himself to make an excuse so he just left. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, because a sudden, powerful weariness prevented his rage, pain, and contempt from rising to the surface.When he got home, he collapsed on the sofa and switched on the TV. He didn’t change the channel, which was showing a quiz show with big money prizes and hostesses in pink bikinis and a loud, bald presenter.A contestant from Teruel won half a million pesetas.A woman
from Huelva wasn’t so lucky, winning only a hundred thousand.The roulette wheel was turning again when the doorbell rang.
Charo threw herself at him without giving him a chance to say anything. She put her arms round his neck, her legs around his waist, and covered his mouth with hers. Only later, when they were in bed, naked and sated with each other, did she explain why she’d come.
“It wouldn’t work, Juanito,” she said, moving close to him so that their noses were almost touching, their breath mingling in the tiny but constant gap between them.“It would be a disaster.”
She looked at him as if she needed to hear him say something, but he remained silent. She closed her eyes and went on:“I know what’s going on.You’re sleeping with other women.That’s it, isn’t it? I know you so well, Juan. I realized from the start.”
The Wind From the East Page 39
