When at last Sara Gómez Morales returned home that evening, it was almost dark, but a permanent illusion swam before her eyes—the image of a bare, white room in which Alfonso Olmedo sat huddled and whimpering like an orphaned puppy, cowering at the furious threats of a faceless man who punched the walls with his fists. Sara knew she’d have to tell Juan everything. Everything, in as neutral a way as possible, and at the first opportunity. But when she reached her front door, just above the hole the children had made in the frame by inserting one drawing pin after another, she found a handwritten note, in Tamara’s clear, round hand. We’re at home, playing Monopoly. Come over if you want.
Sara smiled to herself as she crossed the street.The door of the Olmedos’ house was open. In the sitting room, half a dozen children were staring at the board, looking after their houses and hotels and piles of cash. Alfonso was sitting on the sofa, watching the game with a look of concentration intended to convey that he understood what was going on, when really it was beyond him. Sara sat down beside him and asked where Juan was.
“He’s gone to have grilled sardines at the bar,”Tamara explained.“We didn’t feel like going—we’re fed up with sardines, but he loves them. Maribel’s gone with him, because she said what she’s fed up with is pizza.”
“I’m not surprised,” Sara said sympathetically.
“Well, we’ve ordered some,” said Tamara laughing. “It’s just about to arrive.”
“I’ll play with you.” Alfonso was looking at Sara, nodding.
“But I’m not playing.”
“Yes, you are,” he insisted.“We’ll play together, you and me. Let’s have the horse.”
By the time Juan and Maribel got back, Sara and Alfonso had fleeced all the other players at the table. Mortgaged to the hilt,Tamara had given up. Andrés and another girl who lived on the development called Laura were still making a last stand, selling them streets and houses at a ridiculous price. All Alfonso understood was that his team was going to win, so he was clapping and shouting delightedly. He seemed so happy that Sara thought she’d never forgive herself if she ruined everything for what appeared to be so little, a distant shadow, a strange visit from another world to which nothing could force them to return.
Over the following weeks, the feeling of impunity, the certainty that her neighbors were at least as safe as she was in her new life, alternated with moments of sudden, alarming lucidity in which Sara forced herself to think about the fact that the police wouldn’t waste their time or pursue any matter unless there was a definite reason. She was sure that her neighbors weren’t in any real danger, but if they were under suspicion, some day things might change, in which case her warning might prove to be important. Nobody who knew him would ever dare think that Juan Olmedo was capable of committing a crime, much less his brother Alfonso. No one except Sara, because she had her own reasons for keeping quiet.This was the third factor that she considered during the final weeks of that summer—she didn’t want the police anywhere near her. Although there was no connection between her own past and that of the Olmedos, although she’d never met them before moving here, although she had her own guarantees, and however much she’d carefully rehearsed all her answers, she didn’t want anyone snooping around her asking questions.
Sometimes she felt as if her initial anxiety had been foolish.The days passed, August was stiflingly hot and as crowded as ever, the tourists arrived and left, filling pavements, café terraces and restaurants like a predictable tide, and nothing happened. Letters were delivered, the phone continued to work, Ramón sat in the same office, and nothing changed. Or so it seemed until reality came to contradict Sara Gómez Morales in a way she didn’t foresee.
She had noticed a poster stuck to a lamp post at the entrance to the supermarket. She’d been to street markets in El Puerto a couple of times, but this one was going to take place in Sanlúcar. Sara liked to browse these small, overpriced markets, and she always bought some trifle—an ashtray, a picture frame, a vase—paying more for it than she would have in a shop, but she never minded because it was all part of the fun.The children had accompanied her once but they’d been terribly bored, so, on the last Tuesday in August, she went to Sanlúcar on her own. She brought plenty of money with her and was in a good mood, but found nothing she liked. By the time she’d finished examining all the stalls it was already half past nine in the evening. Before she’d left,Tamara had invited Sara over to have pizza with her and Andrés, but Sara was also fed up with having pizza for dinner.
She drove to Bajo de Guía, found a parking space straight away in a car park full of cars with foreign number plates, and joined the river of people moving slowly between the beach and the crowded restaurant terraces, parallel to the mouth of the Guadalquivir. She was sure she wouldn’t get a table, but she didn’t mind eating at the bar. She didn’t pay too much attention to the people she passed, but when she got to Joselito Huerta, the last restaurant on the seafront and purveyor of the best sea bass in town, she caught sight of Juan Olmedo. Her neighbor, who must have taken the precaution of booking, was sitting at one of the best tables by the beach. Sara was just congratulating herself on this happy coincidence, when she saw him burst out laughing and realized he wasn’t alone. Sitting opposite him, a young woman with long hair and wearing a red dress was poking her tongue out at him.As he responded by throwing a ball of bread down her cleavage, Sara recognized Maribel. She instantly backed away and, hidden behind an ice cream stand, she watched them from a distance.Though apparently innocuous and childish, their relationship seemed very close and self-sufficient, but she didn’t detect any other signs of intimacy until a waiter placed a tray of king prawns on their table. Maribel took one, peeled it and put it in Juan’s mouth. Before he began chewing, he kept her fingers in his mouth and sucked them. Maribel parted her lips and started to breathe through her mouth. Sara was watching this scene with amazement rather than disbelief, when the stall-holder asked her if she wanted an ice cream. No, she said, and walked slowly back to her car, turning round once or twice until she could no longer see their heads in the distance.
As she drove home, Sara felt clumsy and incapable, but not cheated or let down by this discovery. It explained so many things, including the recent harmony that had reigned in their lives. She felt ambivalent, alternating between a painful understanding of the impulse that had pushed Juan down the slope of a secret relationship with someone from a very different social class, and a no less sympathetic fear of the future that awaited Maribel beyond the kind of affair that never ended well. Nevertheless, inspired by a silly vestige of romanticism that she never would have believed herself capable of, Sara also knew that whatever it was and however long it lasted, it was a good thing, and if it was good for Juan and Maribel, then it was good for all of them.Too good to spoil with bad news. So she decided to shut the news away in a corner of her memory where other secrets languished.
Some trains move very slowly, creating the illusion that they are at rest, inoffensive, peaceful. But they are still moving, and sooner or later they catch up with the naive hare that thought it could outrun them, running the creature over quietly, cleanly, quickly, economically, with no crushed bones, screams of pain, or the messy inconvenience of bloodstains.These trains then go on their way, tooting their whistles happily to passers-by; healthy, pretty, well-dressed children and young girls, who wave at them cheerfully as they travel onwards, soon forgetting the hare that stands up on its broken legs and struggles on, in a vain and desperate attempt to proclaim that it isn’t hurt. Such is their character, their nature. The condition of trains.The condition of the hare.
As Sara Gómez Morales slid down to the bottom of the slope, the tragedy of her unborn child came to join her memories, bitterness, anger, rifles and love in a reality that was absolutely flat, grey, featureless, with no emotion and no surprises. Of all the lives she’d coveted in the warm dreams of her future, this was the only one she’d never wanted. But she hadn’t shied away from it; Sar
a Gómez Morales kept going, always kept going, no turning aside, no looking back, without stopping to rest because resting can sometimes be worse than keeping going. She kept going, in her love of brandy and in the oblivion of that love. She didn’t know what else to do, and she was now too old to learn.
The loss of the child that she had not sought, had not planned, hadn’t even wanted until she gave in to the unforgivable weakness of making it a refuge, hurt her more deeply than she would ever have thought possible, because this selfish project had involved much more than the accidental promise of motherhood. It had been her chance to break the siege, the vicious circle of her life, and yet it had gone wrong all by itself, as if her cards had been marked since birth.The script of her life had never been so succinct, so obvious, so accurate. Sara Gómez Morales—borrowed life, superfluous daughter, mother of no one. She was nothing at all, and would never be anything; she’d be nothing for the rest of her life.
She missed Vicente. Very much. His arms and his words, the trips abroad, breaking up and getting back together. She’d always had so few things that she’d never learned to let any of them go. She’d even come to miss the taste of disappointment, the company of her own tears, the intermittent shudder of all those truncated dreams. Behind the patient, inscrutable smiles with which she’d tried to calm her father’s bewilderment, her mother’s anxiety over the fate of the child, the mistake who had refused to keep growing till the end, there was less pride and more hope than it seemed. Sara hadn’t been counting on Vicente, but she was still in love with him at the time, and the child was his, and with those three simple elements, the variations in the equation were endless. And yet, when Vicente came for her, she couldn’t go with him because this defeat had devastated her inside. It had stolen her faith and changed her forever. She missed Vicente terribly. She regretted having thrown him out of her life, but she knew it was the only way forward, the only thing she could do. She didn’t have the strength to get hooked on disappointment again as a way of life. She knew by now that nothing would rise from the sterile ashes of hope, nothing except more ashes.
When her savings began to run out, Sara convinced herself that she’d recovered enough to start looking for a job. She didn’t find much. She was thirty-five, had a pile of humble diplomas gained on obsolete correspondence courses and no higher qualifications, all of which made her prospects surprisingly worse than the last time she’d looked for a new job. It was as if universities had exploded like popcorn makers in the nine years since then, filling the streets and houses, businesses and factories, with graduates. Sara settled for the best job she could find, even though it was the most inconvenient—an accountant in the offices of a large supermarket where she had no lunch break, changed shifts every week, and was constantly forced to undergo training, sacrificing one Saturday after another to an endless succession of computer courses.This was the only noteworthy novelty in her life until the health of her father—a man who had always seemed relatively healthy despite his chronic lung disease—deteriorated definitively.
Arcadio Gómez Gómez died on the first dawn of 1984. Sara thought that death had chosen a good date for him, because he was conscious almost until the end and was able to say goodbye to his children and almost all of his grandchildren, a privilege he would not have enjoyed had his final hours not arrived during the Christmas holidays. Sebastiana was so bereft, however, that she wouldn’t even let her family comfort her. She shut herself up in her room and told them all, one by one, that she wouldn’t see another New Year’s Eve.
She was wrong, but only just. She outlived her husband by sixteen months. Sara found her dead in her bed one morning in April, the sheets lying tidily over her body and a placid expression on her face, eyes closed, lips parted, as if she were snoring at death. In the middle of the night, her heart had stopped beating without waking her.Although this was a clean and pleasant end, compassionate, in fact the best end that Sara could have wished for her mother, it seemed cruel at first, and somehow more harsh than the long, dry agony that had slowly, mercilessly crumbled away the final weeks of her father’s life. Before the peaceful corpse of the woman who had felt she was not cut out to be a widow, and had had her own way, Sara began to tremble, her fingers shaking, her knees weak. She felt suddenly hot, then cold, and realized that she was about to faint. She sat down quickly on the edge of the bed, on the side her father had left empty when he died.The dizziness threw her senses into disarray, making her feel nauseated for what seemed like an eternity. Later, much later, she was able to cry. By then she’d called work, called her brothers and sisters, and the undertakers were on their way, but she was still alone in the flat.Then she went to the kitchen, sat on a chair, leaned her elbows on the table, covered her face with her hands, and wept; for her mother and her father, for herself, for the suffering that had parted them and the suffering that had brought them back together again, for the stories they’d never managed to tell her and for those she’d heard from other lips, for the stations in the metro every Sunday, and for the green and black lines of an apron, for the traps and tunnels of a duplicitous, lying memory, for the arcades of the Plaza Mayor in black and white, for the pavements of the CalleVelázquez in resplendent color, Sara wept. For her parents’ fate, which had been so dark, so unfair, and for her own, Sara Gómez Morales wept for a long time.
In the bewildering frenzy of the first few days, the constant visitors and sleepless nights, she asked herself many times why this second death had affected her so deeply, so much more profoundly than the first. She’d always been more like her father. She had the same personality, the same useless, obstinate pride, the same anger fermenting deep inside her. She’d inherited Arcadio’s words and silences, his will, his determination, his way of suffering and telling no one.Things would have gone better for her had she been more like her mother, she thought sometimes, more flexible and yielding. Sebastiana adjusted better to the blows of fortune, as well as the caresses. In her, hatred was a requirement of love. In her husband, love had always been a manifestation of hatred. But they had loved each other equally, and had loved each other until the end. Sara, who had only ever loved another woman’s husband, was amazed when she compared her own history of borrowed beds and guilty secrets with the astounding simplicity of her parents’ love. In their whole lives they had fought only one war, and it was a war they had lost. But they’d survived defeat together, unaware that this was a way of beating history at its own game. She loved them both, each in their own way, but perhaps she had always loved her father, the one who was like her, a little more. She’d often felt guilty for this slight preference, although she never betrayed it in either words or gestures. Nevertheless she had mourned Arcadio more briefly, more fleetingly; her grief for him had been ample, private, acute and wide, but it had never paralyzed her as her mother’s death did.
Later, when all the visitors had left and sleep returned, Sara Gómez Morales realized she was alone. She was thirty-eight years old, and she was more alone than ever before. Her hands were empty and she had no home to return to. But then, as if she’d read Sara’s thoughts from afar, the woman chose that moment to come back into her life.
The doorbell rang at exactly five o’clock one afternoon in June, the week after her birthday. Sara almost didn’t open the door, because she wasn’t expecting anyone. “It’ll be some awful traveling salesman,” she thought, but the doorbell continued to ring so insistently that in the end she gave in out of curiosity, and found the last person she was ever expecting to see standing in her doorway.
“Hello, darling,” said her godmother, with a smile that belonged to another time, as if the life they had shared had never come to its abrupt end.“Won’t you ask me in?”
Stunned and unable to move, Sara eventually stepped aside to let her in.
“Of course. I wasn’t expecting you.”
Doña Sara Villamarín Ruiz slowly entered the tiny hallway of her god-daughter’s flat. Before, Sara had always been able to guess which
direction she was walking in from the sound of her heels clicking energetically, almost furiously, across the floor, but now she realized that her godmother was shuffling her feet. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen her.
“Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?”
“Of course,” she repeated, as if she were unable to say anything else. She leaned towards her godmother, who’d grown smaller since the last time she’d kissed her.“Of course.”
Doña Sara walked on into the flat, slowly and laboriously, without asking where the living room was. She didn’t need to—the flat was so small it would be impossible to get lost. Sara, who had been dozing on the sofa in the darkened room when the doorbell rang, went ahead to open the blinds.
The Wind From the East Page 43
