The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  At this point, Maribel closed her eyes. Sara looked up and saw the hut, a simple construction of corrugated iron with a bloody handprint on one corner, and a trail of red drops, some more like puddles, leading across the road.Then she heard Maribel’s frightened voice, a whisper as thin and sharp as a needle.

  “Juan,” she said, and she squeezed Sara’s hand. “Call him. Please call Juan.”

  “Of course! I’m such an idiot.” Sara turned to the security guard who was standing beside her, frozen, resigned, as if he could no longer even think. Sara waved her hand at him vigorously to make him react and get him moving. “Run to number thirty-seven, straight away. Ask for Juan Olmedo and tell him everything. He’s a doctor, he’ll know what to do. Hurry, please!”

  The wound had made a dark stain on Maribel’s bright red dress.When Sara dared look at her, the precarious calm she’d obtained from telling the guard to go and get Juan evaporated instantly and her feelings of powerlessness and terror returned. Maribel spoke again, and tears slid slowly down her cheeks.

  “He knew,” she whispered, looking at Sara, and she squeezed her hand again.“I don’t know how, but he knew. He knew that I was signing the contract for the flat on Monday, and it was his last chance. He’s been pestering me for money for months—he wanted us to set up a business, he said I’d be rich. But that’s not what he told me today. He said they were going to kill him and that it was all my fault. He said he needed at least half the money—two million pesetas, and that I had to give it to him, or he’d kill me himself... He said that he loved me, that he was the father of my child, I was his wife, and he’d always loved me. I told him to fuck off and leave me alone . . . ‘I’m going to kill you’—that’s what he said. ‘I’m warning you, you’re a worthless whore, and I’m going to kill you’ . . .”

  A car pulled up beside them, and a moment later Juan Olmedo appeared. His face was white and there was a mechanical abruptness to his movements that belied his apparent calm.Without a word, he gently pushed Sara out of the way and knelt down beside Maribel, making a strange sound with his tongue, the kind of rhythmic clucking mothers use to soothe their babies. He was frowning in concentration, and there was a look of brisk efficiency in his eyes as he swung into action, doing a thousand things at once before examining the wound. While he extracted a packet of sterile gloves from his trouser pocket, he looked closely at the pool of blood. Still staring at the ground, he put on the left glove, and as he pulled on the other glove, he estimated the distance between the hut and the body lying on the ground. Before he’d even examined Maribel, he already had answers to a number of questions.

  “Try to speak as little as possible and answer only yes or no, OK? Do you feel cold?”

  “Yes.”

  “How cold?”

  “Getting colder.”

  “But you’re not shivering.”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel as if you might start shivering at any moment?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but . . .”

  “Don’t speak more than you have to, Maribel. What’s your blood group?”

  “A-positive.”

  Only then did he lift the dress to examine her. He parted the edges of the wound, then pressed them together again and, keeping his hand firmly positioned against the gash in her belly, he leaned down towards her.

  “What did he do it with?” he asked quietly. Sara, who had begun to cry without even realizing it, now understood why Juan hadn’t dared look at her at first and why his voice was little more than a whisper.“A kitchen knife, hunting knife, a flick knife . . . ?”

  “A flick knife.”

  “With a blade about twenty centimeters long.”Then he looked at the wound again and, with chilling calmness, inserted his index finger into it.“Or a little less?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He moved it around, the bastard.”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated.

  “No.” Juan cleared his throat and when he spoke again he sounded more like his usual self.“It wasn’t a question. OK, Maribel. It looks dramatic but it isn’t serious.We’re going to go to the hospital straight away so that they can stitch you up, and then you’ll be fine. I’m going to put a towel in the wound to plug it.” He looked round at Sara and she saw that the color had returned to his face.There was something else too—a look of fury in his eyes.“In the car there’s a white towel wrapped in a pink towel. Could you bring it to me? But don’t touch it directly, only touch the pink one.”

  On the passenger seat of Juan’s car there was a small case, a blanket and two white towels wrapped in pink towels. When Sara handed them to him, Juan unwrapped one of the white towels and rolled it up. Suddenly Maribel grabbed his wrist.

  “Am I going to die?”

  When they got to the hospital, the first thing Sara noticed as she entered the Accident and Emergency department was a clock. It was eight minutes past six in the evening.Then she remembered that when she’d heard the doorbell she’d glanced at the clock on the video and seen that it was five twenty-nine.The hospital clock must be wrong, but her wristwatch seemed to be in agreement. A porter confirmed that it was indeed only eight minutes past six on a day that now seemed endless—long, thick, and slow as if each second were a drop of lead—and this sudden cruelty on the part of time scared her more than thinking of the suicidal speed at which Juan must have driven there. He had acted quickly, so she accepted that perhaps no more than seven or eight minutes had passed from his arrival to the time they left for the hospital, but she’d always recall the scene as if every word, every gesture, every movement had happened in slow motion. Until Maribel asked if she was going to die.Then time came to an absolute halt.

  “No, you’re not going to die,” Juan had answered, and looked away. Holding the rolled-up towel by one end he had inserted it neatly and precisely into Maribel’s wound.“Not you.You’re not going to die. Could you give me a hand, Jesús?”

  The security guard rushed forward, but Maribel wouldn’t let go of Juan’s hand.

  “If I die, we’ve never talked about . . .”

  “You’re not going to die.” Juan slipped his right hand under Maribel’s neck and lifted her head, resting it on his thigh. He leaned over her and stroked her hair with his thumb as if she were a little girl.“I won’t let you die, do you hear me? You’re not going to die.”

  Since arriving at the scene, Juan had been a blur of movement, doing several things at once, but now he stopped and looked deep into Maribel’s eyes. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips just once, then once again.

  “You’re not going to die,” he repeated quietly.“Now keep still, don’t speak and only do as I say.”

  As if he’d become aware of the almost obscene intimacy that had just filled the air, he rested Maribel’s head on the ground once more and stretched out her body on the pavement before getting up and issuing instructions.

  “Open the back door of the car, Sara.You sit in the back with her. I’ll explain what to do in a minute. Could you come here, Jesús? Stand by her knees, there.We’re going to crouch down, slip our hands under her and when I count to three, we’re going to lift her and put her in the car. OK? I’ll hold her by the shoulders and you take her legs. Understood? OK, here we go. One, two, three, now!”

  A moment later, Maribel was lifted, leaving on the pavement a red stain with wavy edges that no longer resembled a carnation. Sara suddenly felt her grip on reality slacken. But then Juan grabbed her by the arm and led her a few meters away from the car.

  “Now, Sara,” he said, rubbing his face with his hands, and revealing just how anxious he really was.“It’s a miracle she’s alive. But I mean it when I say she’s not going to die. At least, I don’t think she is, I’m almost sure. But I think the wound might have reached her liver. It’s a deep, long wound and she has major internal bleeding.Whoever did it moved the knife about to do even more damage, and she’s lost a lot of blood. Too much. She can’t afford to lose any m
ore.That’s the major risk, if she goes on losing blood. And that’s why I haven’t called an ambulance—we can get to the hospital by car in half the time it would take an ambulance to get here and back. So I want you to sit in the back with her.You’ve got to lay her legs over yours and press on the towel the whole time. I’m going to give you a pair of gloves. Put them on and make sure you don’t touch anything, because if the wound gets infected, she’s finished. Do you understand? And if you notice that it’s stopped working, that the towel isn’t absorbing the blood, or that blood’s starting to gush out, you have to tell me. I’ve brought plenty of equipment, and if things get ugly I can stitch her up myself temporarily.” At this point, Sara realized that she must have looked so terrified that Juan felt he had to reassure her:“That’s not going to happen, Sara. I’m almost sure. But if it does and we don’t do something quickly, she could die en route. But it’s not going to happen, OK?”

  Sara nodded, and Juan took her by the shoulders and squeezed them quickly. Before he went back to the car, he said:

  “One more thing. It was her husband, wasn’t it?”

  Sara nodded.

  “Why did he do it?” His face was suddenly white again. “Do you know?”

  “Yes,” she heard herself say when she’d thought she’d never be able to utter a single word again.“It was because of two million pesetas.”

  “Fuck!” Juan Olmedo punched his fist violently against his palm. “I can’t believe it! That son of a bitch! Fucking unbelievable!”

  For a moment Sara Gómez Morales allowed herself to think that Juan would have accepted a crime of passion more readily than this cold, futile stabbing, this desperate last resort. She thought he would even have understood it, and just for a moment she was scared. Later she felt that these thoughts had more to do with her own guilt, but at the time everything was happening too fast to analyze it. A moment later, she was sitting in the back of the car, struggling to put on a pair of surgical gloves. Meanwhile, Juan, who seemed to have calmed down, had the presence of mind to ask Jesús to find the children and tell them to go home and wait there until he phoned.

  “Tell them to stay at the house. But don’t tell them what’s happened. Just say that Maribel suddenly felt ill and I’ve taken her to the hospital, but they mustn’t worry, it’s nothing serious.” Then he added, “Oh, and don’t mention Sara.You don’t know where she is or what time she left—nothing.”

  As he finished saying this, he switched on the ignition. A moment later, as he drove along, he dialed a number and started talking on the hands-free phone Tamara had bought him for his birthday, although they’d gone to buy it together and he’d paid for it.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Olmedo from Orthopedics. Could you put me through to Accident and Emergency immediately.”

  Sara followed all his instructions. She could feel Maribel’s hand squeezing her own gloved hand as she pressed down on the wound beneath the blanket Juan had covered her with, as if she too found the sound of his words comforting although she probably didn’t understand what he was saying.

  “Accident and Emergency? Hello, this is Dr. Olmedo from Orthopedics. I need you to prepare an operating theatre and a supply of A-positive blood. This is an emergency. I have a seriously injured patient in the car—a woman, aged thirty-one, in good health, with a knife wound to the right hypochondrium, very probably involving the liver, in a state of hypovolaemic shock. I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Please have an operating theatre ready, and get Dr. Barroso—I need to speak to him. And if Dr. Iglesias is around, could you get her too? Thank you.”

  Before reaching the main road, taking a short cut that forced him to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, Juan passed a group of houses under construction—half a dozen square apartment blocks with three floors. The only one that was completed had salmon-pink walls and white balcony railings. The flat on the ground floor had a sitting room with French windows looking out onto a tiny, private garden.The flat on the second floor had an extra bedroom, but the top-floor flat had a large, oblong balcony that Andrés had liked so much his mother had decided to buy it. Sara had gone with her to look at the show flat, and thought it perfect.The following day they all went back to see it together. It had a large L-shaped living room, a practical, well-designed kitchen, one bathroom and an extra cloakroom leading onto an area for hanging washing, where there was also room to put a larder. It cost a million pesetas more than the ten million that Maribel had set as her maximum price, but Juan had encouraged her too: “You can always sell it if you have to, before you’ve paid off the mortgage,” he said, repeating almost exactly what Sara had said twenty-four hours earlier. Maribel was so keen on the flat that she listened to their advice. Keeping her hand pressed down firmly on the towel that was plugging the wound, Sara thought about the flat. She listened to Maribel gasping for breath and, in the background, Juan’s voice was gradually blocked out by voices from her past: “This is how things are, Sari, there’s nothing you can do about it,” her mother had said to her once, “this is how things are and it’s nobody’s fault.” Andrés was twelve years old and he knew this already. “This is how things are done, Sara, this is how they’ve always been done.”The older, more powerfulVicente knew this well.“This is how things are, Sara, Sari, Sarita.What can you do? This is how things are.”

  “If I hadn’t put the idea of buying a flat into Maribel’s head,” thought Sara,“she would have taken Andrés off to Disneyland and that bastard of an ex-husband would have coaxed his way back in, slept with her, even moved back in with her if necessary, until he’d got all the money off her and left her without a penny.That’s the way things are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But Maribel would be all right—no more humiliated or hurt than she has been before, nor worse off than she will be when Juan Olmedo leaves her, because Juan will leave her, he’ll have to leave her sooner or later. She wouldn’t have this gash in her side, and for a time she would have served some purpose, she would have been deceived and robbed, and she’d have obediently performed every scene of the corny screenplay that had been her lot since the day she met the handsome boyfriend who bought her a pair of coral earrings and gave her a ride on his horse. Things are the way they are, and nobody’s to blame.And maybe, if Mr.Tasty Bread had been on the scene, she wouldn’t have given in to temptation and fallen in love with the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Instead, she’s almost died, because her life is only worth two million pesetas, and because I talked her into buying a flat, because I gave her the stupid idea of trying to raise herself up.”

  “How’s it looking, Sara?”

  “Good.” She lifted the blanket to take a look, and saw that there was no blood around the edges of the towel and almost none on her hand. “Very good.”

  Juan was still talking. Maribel squeezed her hand, opened her eyes and looked at her, then closed them again.

  “What about the flat?” she whispered in a feeble, cracked voice. “What’s going to happen to the flat? What if I lose it, after all the trouble I had finding it?”

  “Don’t speak, Maribel.” Juan had heard her whispering.“Please don’t speak and don’t move.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to the flat, don’t worry.” Sara felt an overwhelming urge to hug her, but she remembered that she mustn’t move her, so she tried to convey the warmth of an embrace with words: “I’ll go to the bank first thing on Monday morning and have a word with them. If they can’t wait, I’ll grab them by the ears and drag them to the hospital, with a notary and everything, and you can sign the contract there. I promise, Maribel. But whatever you do, please don’t worry about the flat now.”

  Sara turned to look out of the window, and saw Jerez in the distance, at the top of a hill. “She’s going to pull through,” she told herself, eyes closed,“she’s going to pull through, she’s going to be OK, we’re all going to be OK.”Then Sara felt something hard and heavy in her stomach, as if she’d swallowed a large stone without
realizing it, but the tension eased as she looked out of the window and saw Jerez again, much closer now. Maribel was going to be OK. Sara could count the buildings, distinguish one from another, read the names painted in big letters on the white fences of the wine cellars. She heard the car horn—Juan was blowing the horn constantly—and felt something damp and warm against her hand.

  “Juan,” she began. She didn’t know how to continue, but he understood.

  “Is it gushing out or is it just that the towel’s soaked?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s much.” Sara lifted the blanket again and peered at the wound, trying to interpret what she was seeing correctly.“No.”

  “Doesn’t matter.We’re here now.”

  They were driving up the ramp to the hospital.The last part of the journey was almost comforting, like waking up from a nightmare. At the entrance about a dozen people were waiting for them, a small crowd of white coats and green scrubs standing around a trolley, faces alert, legs tense, like athletes waiting for the starting pistol. Juan put on the handbrake and all four doors were immediately opened from the outside.