The Wind From the East (3 page)

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Authors: Almudena Grandes

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women

BOOK: The Wind From the East
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Though he wasn’t prepared to admit it—even to himself—as he strolled along the deserted beach, Juan Olmedo had fled Madrid. He’d done so mainly for Tamara’s sake, but, that night, their second in the new house, he suspected that he would probably enjoy the benefits of the place before she did. He stopped worrying about the thirty-mile commute to and from work he would have every day after sending Alfonso off on the bus to the daycare center.This sudden acceptance of the small routine inconveniences the move entailed reduced his anxiety over the more serious problems he faced. It was as if the pleasure of taking a solitary evening stroll along the beach were a balm, a promise of future harmony. By the time he turned round to return to the house, Juan was in a much better mood.
 
On the way back he encountered only a couple of dog walkers and then, as he turned down the path that led from the beach, a woman.The light was so dim that at first all he could see was a cream shape with dark stripes on its upper half. As they walked towards each other, as if their meeting were planned, he could see that she was wearing the type of outfit that people from inland considered nautical: wide-legged trousers and a navy-blue striped top—unmistakable clues to the woman’s origin. Juan Olmedo immediately recognized another recent arrival from Madrid. She was one of those well-preserved women who maintained an appearance of youthful maturity despite her forty-odd years and would probably continue to do so until the first ravages of old age. She had a pleasant, even attractive face, but although she had beautiful eyes you couldn’t exactly say that she was pretty. This was all Juan had time to notice, but it was enough for him to be sure that they had definitely never met. As she passed him, however, she greeted him in a friendly manner. He greeted her back casually, purely out of politeness, as if the instinct to wish each other a good evening were part of a ritual of recognition amongst equals, fellow exiles from Madrid with a confused notion of seaside elegance. His niece was much more observant and, had she witnessed the scene, would have been able to tell him that the woman, while still a stranger, lived in the house opposite.
 
I
 
WEARINESS AND NEED
 
 
In the kitchen of number thirty-one, the units ran along two walls. In the middle of the room was an aluminum table and two folding aluminum chairs, which added a functional, almost industrial touch to the decor. The occupant was clearly at home with adapting the suggestions of the glossy magazines to suit her own style. Sara Gómez had always had very good taste, but little time and even less money. Now, the abundant crop of zeros flourishing in her bank statements was producing magnificent results.
 
Sara had also made her mark at the estate agents’ offices, but for very different reasons than Juan Olmedo. She had arrived after visiting other parts of the coast of Andalusia, evaluating all the houses for sale so conscientiously that by now she could tell at a glance whether a place was worth viewing. Her expedition had begun in mid-March, and as she had no intention of returning to Madrid, the search was open-ended.As she crossed from Malaga into the province of Cadiz, her intention had been to explore the Atlantic coast all the way to the Portuguese border before choosing a place to spend the rest of her life; but soon she was so fed up with traveling, and so discouraged with the results so far, that she settled on a place before she planned to, taking on the challenge of the only house that, in two otherwise fruitless months, had managed to surprise her.
 
She could easily have afforded one of the more expensive, more luxurious houses she’d been offered on the Costa del Sol, but although she’d liked some of them very much, in the end she found them all too ostentatious. And she didn’t want to live surrounded by foreigners, an anomaly in a crowd of pale-skinned neighbors. If she’d wanted to attract attention, she could have stayed in Madrid and bought herself a house in ElViso. No, what she was looking for was the exact opposite, and she’d found it at last on a secluded development, discreetly luxurious, and inhabited by upper-middle-class professionals; a place where she would easily merge into the background. Located on the outskirts of a popular tourist resort, it lacked the dubious elegance that might attract hordes of Arab sheiks or showy
nouveaux riches
like the Lopez Ruiz family, bogus cousins she never wanted to set eyes on again. Sheltered from the wind and from prying eyes by walls so high that, from the road, you could only just glimpse the roofs of the houses, nothing betrayed the privileged nature of this secluded enclave; a place that turned in on itself like the leaves of a plant at nightfall, always seeking the center.As she walked around the development for the first time, having visited dozens of similar projects over the last few weeks, Sara was impressed by the intelligence of the layout. It all seemed simple as she walked through it, but secretly labyrinthine when she looked back, and it was impossible to tell from their rather uniform back walls that the houses looked out onto attractive gardens. From outside the complex, there was no hint of how big the swimming pools, the children’s play areas, or the sports facilities were, and to Sara it seemed that they grew larger with every step.The mysteriously elastic quality of the space became even more noticeable when she went inside the show home, a square house on two floors with a large roof terrace. It was so well designed that she had to ask the estate agent for a tape measure in order to measure the rooms one by one before she could concede that their generous size wasn’t an optical illusion. But even this wasn’t enough to convince Sara Gómez.
 
Having shown her around the house twice, in a viewing so thorough that he noticed things he’d never even seen before although he’d been showing clients around daily for the past six months, the estate agent dared to sit down on the doorstep, just to take a break from this well-heeled client who must be a quantity surveyor at the very least. But Sara seemed quite unmoved by his weariness and continued asking questions, firing the inexhaustible machine gun of her curiosity at his limited knowledge until she’d pinned him against every wall in the house. He’d had to say,“I don’t know” so many times that he ended up simply shrugging to save himself the embarrassment. Nobody had ever asked him why one of the light fittings in the sitting room was not close to the obvious place for a side table, why there weren’t taps for hoses on every terrace, why it had been assumed, judging by the distance between light switches, that all double beds were a meter and a half wide, why all the fitted cupboards had only two drawers, why the unit containing the plate rack had been placed to the left of the double sink, as if all housewives were left-handed, and why such and such a choice had been made in another hundred matters of similarly negligible importance. He was convinced that the woman would vanish into thin air like a bad dream when, having pointed out all the defects of a house whose quality he would have vouched for earlier that morning, she smiled and announced that she had almost decided to buy it. Inwardly awarding himself a medal for being the most long-suffering estate agent in the area, her opponent smiled back, feeling as if he’d overcome the most testing ordeal of his professional life. But she disabused him of this notion immediately and, after informing him that she assumed that he must agree with her that it was vital to examine which way a house faced before making a final choice, she asked him what time would suit him the following day to show her all the available houses on the development.Then, with a compassionate intelligence that he appreciated, she added that she had plenty of free time.
 
Sara Gómez, buyer, and Ramón Martínez, estate agent, almost became friends in the following weeks. She had rented a furnished flat in the town so as to keep a close eye on the completion of the finishing touches, and she became the person he spent most of his time with from Monday to Friday apart from his wife. Every day she came to the office with some new idea, and he had to admit that they were nearly all good, though they invariably involved him hanging on the phone for an age, finding out names and addresses that he kept so that he could suggest Sara’s improvements to subsequent clients as if they were his own ideas. She was rather amused by this little ruse and although she realized his actions were beneficial to them both, she would reward him every evening by buying him a drink in a nearby bar. He insisted on paying for the drinks every other day, however, and he chased the electricians and decorators so that number thirty-one would be finished even earlier than the agreed date, July 1, 2000.The only thing he couldn’t do for the future occupant of the house was recommend a trustworthy cleaner, but he did well when he suggested she speak to Jerónimo, the gardener, who thought immediately of his cousin Maribel.
 
Sara’s cleaner was thirty, with a son of eleven, a broken marriage behind her, and a substantial amount of excess weight, pleasingly distributed over an old-fashioned figure. She made the best of her solid, curvaceous body by wearing tight, low-cut dresses, the mere sight of which would have caused anyone who really had been well-heeled all her life to reject her without even asking how much she charged. But Sara wasn’t quite what she seemed, and she found the showy gold rings Maribel wore on every finger—tarnished by bleach and ruining the effect that the woman was aiming for—so touching that she hired her on the spot. She didn’t regret it. Maribel was hardworking and spirited, as capable of using her own initiative as she was of accepting all kinds of instructions without a word. Even the two apparent drawbacks that had caused Sara to have some doubts about her at first turned out to be advantages. Andrés, Maribel’s son, who was forced to waste his holidays accompanying his mother to work every morning, was a lonely, withdrawn child, older than his years. He would sit quietly on a chair, reading a comic, with a toy car or robot clasped in his fist, until Sara, who soon grew fond of him, encouraged him to go out and play in the garden or suggested they go to the beach. In contrast, and refuting the laws of heredity at one stroke, his mother was incapable of keeping quiet. A steady stream of words poured from her mouth as she went about her tasks, and each time she drew breath it was as if she was winding herself up for another torrent. She was the best source of information that her employer had at her disposal, once her ephemeral friendship with the estate agent had waned. From Maribel, Sara could find out about life in the town, what went on, and what kind of people lived there. And it was also Maribel who, on the first working day after the August bank holiday, told Sara that the new arrivals were called Olmedo.
 
“I’m so sorry, I know I’m late!” she declared in greeting, clicking into the kitchen on her high heels. She found the mistress of the house sitting on one of those peculiar metal chairs that she still hadn’t become used to. “I’ve just come from Dr. Olmedo’s, you know who I mean, don’t you?”
 
“No, I don’t,” Sara replied, turning her attention to the elusive figure of the boy standing by the door, peering in shyly.“Come on in, Andrés. Come and sit here with me. That’s right. Have you had breakfast?” He nodded.“Sure?You don’t feel like eating something?” He shook his head this time, still saying nothing. Sara took his hand, squeezed it, and readied herself to hear all about their visit to the doctor.“The boy isn’t ill, is he?”
 
“What boy?”
 
“Your son, Maribel; who else would I mean?”
 
Maribel frowned as if Sara’s words had completely confused her, and asked:“Why would he be ill?”
 
“Well,” Sara sighed, as if she couldn’t struggle on with so much air in her body—a feeling she experienced every time her cleaner, an uneducated but intelligent woman, became stuck in a deep pool of incomprehension—“because you said you’d just been to the doctor’s.”
 
“Oh, right! You had me worried. No, no, that’s not it,” she went on, struggling out of the teetering sandals whose fine straps had left pink marks on her feet and ankles, and donning a pair of tatty old espadrilles with frayed rope soles. “Dr. Olmedo owns number thirty-seven, he’s just moved in. Jeró called me last night and said that Dr. Olmedo had asked him if he knew someone who could come in and clean for him, and I . . . well, I was thrilled, after having found you, getting another job, right next door, and so near to where I live. I’m going to get changed.”
 
Maribel was wearing her best and newest dress that day, a tight red Lycra number—the kind sold on market stalls that lose their shape with every wash—but she would have taken just as much care had she been wearing any of her other dresses: her long black dress with a tiny flower print that buttoned down the front, for instance, or the short piqué dress, always gleaming white if a little worn. Before even turning on a tap, Maribel would shut herself in the bathroom, reappearing a moment later in an old pink housecoat spattered with bleach and carrying what she called her “good clothes,” now neatly folded. She did the same this morning, but was so excited by all her news that she went on talking from the bathroom, speaking more loudly so that she could be heard through the door.

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