The Wind From the East (35 page)

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Authors: Almudena Grandes

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women

BOOK: The Wind From the East
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“Well, what do you think?” his brother had asked, tossing a newspaper on top of Juan’s book.“And this is just the start.”
 
That was how it had all begun.What Damián had dropped on Juan’s desk was a sort of free newspaper, four sheets of cheap paper folded in two, that the shopkeepers of Estrecho left on their counters for customers to pick up. He’d occasionally leafed through the pages full of advertisements interspersed with the odd article or report and a couple of items on aspects of local life. On the front page of the Autumn issue 1980, printed on a surface so porous that all the colors had bled into each other making the print almost illegible, was a photo of Damián in a suit and tie and leaning on an office desk, smiling at the camera. Beneath it was a caption that declared:“You’re never too young to succeed.”
 
“To be honest, you don’t look too good,” said Juan, suppressing a laugh. He couldn’t resist the temptation of pointing out Damián’s eyes in the photo, smudged with blue, yellow and red.“You look like you’re wearing make-up.”
 
“Very funny,” said his brother, snatching the paper from him and folding it carefully, as if it were something fragile and precious. Juan said nothing more, because it was obvious that, to Damián, the ridiculous article was exactly that—something precious.
 
Since finishing school—which he’d done grudgingly, with great difficulty, and only to comply with his father’s plans—Damián had started three businesses in just over two years, and all of them were doing very well. There had been nothing to suggest he would have such success when, in return for unexpectedly passing his exams, he got a loan from his father to buy a small sweet shop.The shop, which had been closed for years, was just next door to one of the biggest schools in Madrid, and very close to their home. Damián reopened it, saved up to buy a hot-dog machine, installed another for popcorn, and started selling comics, magazines, cigarettes, ice cream and sandwiches. When he had enough money to pay back the loan, he asked his father if he could delay repayment and got an additional loan from the bank—taken out in Juan’s name at first, because Damián was still a few months underage at the time. He then took on a shop that had never, in all its previous incarnations, been successful.There were already quite a few bread shops in the area, but the one Damián started up had a distinctive name,The Bread Boutique, and sold all sorts of exotic bread: bread with raisins, with nuts, with seeds, bagels, rolls of all shapes and sizes, white bread, whole grain bread, rustic bread, baguettes, breadsticks and savory snacks.To his family’s surprise it was a huge success. He opened the sweet shop at key times, at the beginning and end of the school day, because schoolchildren seemed to have more disposable income than anyone could have imagined and, for a few months, he employed his mother part-time in the bread shop, from eight to nine thirty in the morning and from one till two in the afternoon. His sister Paquita looked after the sweet shop from five till eight in the evening, until he was doing well enough to take on a full-time assistant. Damián’s bakery had been open over a year when the shop next door to it became vacant. His parents begged him not to take on too much too soon, not to burden himself with another loan, but the bank manager, who’d appreciated Damián’s business acumen from their very first meeting, said he’d lend him as much as he needed. Damián gave it a lot of thought, did his sums, and decided to take the risk.Again the business was a huge success. By the time his business career attracted the attention of the local paper, he owned, in addition to the sweet shop and the bread shop, a café where he served the bread and rolls he sold in the shop next door (with fillings and at greatly inflated prices), thus guaranteeing, as he put it in all his promotional material, the quality and freshness of his products. Juan had followed his brother’s progress with the same combination of awe and admiration that half the district felt, and he was amazed that nobody else had ever thought of trying the ideas that were now making Damián rich.
 
“It’s simply a question of perspective,” Damián said to him one evening when an excess of alcohol combined with the intoxication of success made him more talkative than usual.“Who lives in this area? People like Papa and Mama, who aren’t too badly off any more, who started at the bottom and worked hard and have done well in the end.Then, there are people who earn more but who live here because they can’t afford a flat in the Calle Serrano yet. So what does that mean? Well, it’s no longer a working-class area. Even the worst parts of it are all more or less middle-class now, because it’s so central. And opposite the Dehesa park they’ve just built some blocks of flats for people who’ve got much more cash than the families in the old blocks, and that’s not counting the Bellas Vistas estate.This is a middle-class area now, even if the residents don’t know it. And why don’t they know it? Because of the shops. Because even if they can’t afford a flat in the Calle Serrano, they don’t mind paying twenty-five pesetas more for a special loaf of bread, or the extra two hundred pesetas it costs to have a croissant filled with crab and a cinnamon-flavored coffee in a place like mine, which is smart and has modern furniture, instead of a plain white coffee and a piece of tortilla in Mingo’s Bar, where the floor’s covered with screwed-up napkins and the tables have all got initials carved into them.They feel flattered into spending their money, because it seems like the kind of thing people from somewhere elegant like Salamanca would spend their money on. It’s not always about cutting prices. Sometimes, you earn more by putting prices up.That’s the secret.”
 
But despite the clear, astute, shrewd way Damián presented all of these calculations, Juan knew his brother’s weakness, the ambition hidden beneath the self-possessed exterior and the arrogance of his words. On the top shelf of the bookcase they shared, stored in order of date and protected, or hidden, by a plastic folder, was a stack of articles—almost always from magazines or Sunday supplements—featuring young entrepreneurs who were millionaires by the age of twenty, owning chains of clothes shops, software companies, or huge nightclubs in Ibiza or the Costa del Sol. Damián might have devoted his energies to convincing his neighbors they lived in a middle-class area but he couldn’t resign himself to being like them, to belonging to the same dull, mediocre class.As the young, almost childish, faces in the magazines became celebrities, there grew inside him an unqualified desire to emulate them, and a dark resentment as his merits remained unrecognized.
 
“Look at this one!” he’d say, pacing around the table that took up most of the space in the small dining room of his flat.“Inherited a jeweler’s from his parents! Can you believe it? And this one! What about this one? I mean, she’s thirty! A model agency? Ha! I bet she’s the only one on her books. Call that being an entrepreneur? Give me a break!”
 
When they witnessed these outbursts of indignation, his parents and sisters were supportive, breaking out into all sorts of sympathetic lamentations—“I know, it’s unfair!You’ve worked so hard, son, and you started from scratch. These articles are always about the same people! All this talk about democracy, but if you don’t have a famous name, there’s nothing you can do. It’s a disgrace, it really is an absolute disgrace”—and Damián would finally shut up. Juan’s voice was the only one missing from the shrill, bitter chorus, the noisy exercise in catharsis that the family offered as consolation to Damián, their unsung hero. Damián’s insistence on seeking social recognition, the only reward to elude him so far, inspired in Juan a strange mixture of compassion and embarrassment. For him, it was the most disconcerting aspect of his brother’s sudden acquisition of wealth. He was as sure as any sane person could be that no writer from a big newspaper would ever pick up the phone to find out about the owner of the smartest bread shop in Estrecho, however thriving it was. In the world to which Damián unrealistically aspired, his business talents didn’t elevate him above the status of a pygmy, and even if he did ever manage to turn himself into the “Bread King” of northern Madrid, it would make no difference, because the glamour shots in these magazines had little to do with the size of a person’s bank balance.That Damián didn’t realize this, and was so vain with so little pride, was a mystery that Juan couldn’t fathom. He couldn’t help acknowledging Damián’s talent and his great ability, but for the first time in his life, he thought his brother appeared rather foolish, a pathetic caricature, a clown prepared to sell his soul to the devil for three lines and a photo in a newspaper. This was why he said nothing about what would be Damián’s first and only media success, a blurry photo with smudged colors that you couldn’t even recognize as Damián without squinting. But Damián knew him too well to accept that his silence was neutral, and after filing the interview of which he was so proud in the same folder as the ones that fuelled his ambition, he pulled from his sleeve the only ace that could leave Juan naked, ruined.
 
“Oh, yes, and another thing—that girl Charo who lives on the second floor, the one you were going out with?” Juan swiveled in his chair and looked at him. “Well, now she’s going out with me.”
 
This time Juan didn’t miss. Damián found himself on the floor before he’d even had time to lose the self-satisfied smirk with which he’d made his announcement. Juan knocked him down with a single blow, a punch directed at his right cheek that reached its target with force and precision. Charo’s new boyfriend now had a cut under his eye which, within a few hours, would develop into a magnificent bruise, making Damián look rather more like his photo in the local paper.Though it was many years since Juan had won a fight with Damián, though his victim wasn’t even sure how it had happened, Juan knew that his victory had no more value than the miserable little interview that had prompted the fight.
 
“You bastard,” he said anyway, looking down at him before walking out of the room.
 
“Ha!” said Damián from the floor, and then again before getting up: “Ha, ha!”
 
Forty-eight hours later, that odious little laugh was echoing in Juan Olmedo’s head while the image of Charo and Damián naked, caressing each other on a bed, pounded inside him with the merciless, mechanical throb of a pneumatic drill. He recalled the words with which his brother had concluded his hateful speech about Charo being out of Juan’s league—“Bet you haven’t fucked her yet, have you? Bet you haven’t even fucked her.” He told himself that Damián was an idiot—Juan knew that already, but he couldn’t lose to his brother in such a pitiful way. Before he could summon even the appearance of calm, he had to pass through the full gamut of foolishness, alone in his room, pacing up and down in the tiny space, making plans. He’d kidnap Charo—without hurting her—knock her out with chloroform and take her somewhere safe, the boiler room at his old school in Villaverde Alto, for instance; a huge basement that nobody checked from April to November because the heating wasn’t turned on.The padlock on the door was easy to open and he and his friends had forced it many times, going there to smoke joints or make out with girls. He’d take Charo there, tie her to a chair and wait patiently for her to regain consciousness.“Don’t be scared,” he’d say to her, “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want you to listen.You’ve got it all wrong, Charito, you’ve made a big mistake, and I’ll prove it to you.”Then he’d tell her the truth, that Damián, with all his businesses, all his money, driving about in his new car acting like a big-shot, was pathetic, a deluded fool who’d sell his own mother for half a page in the Sunday supplement of
El Pais
, and who couldn’t love her. Damián would never love her the way he did, because he was better, more intelligent, more sensitive, more self-aware than his brother, and he was so in love with her that he couldn’t find the words to express anything close to how he felt. “How can you be so blind, Charo?” he’d ask her. “How could you do this to me? Is it because he takes you to expensive places? Gives big tips to the doormen at nightclubs? What a load of shit that is, Charito. I loved you so much my eyes hurt just from looking at you, and my fingers ached every time I touched you. I would have done anything for you, anything.”
 
At this point, terrified by his own weakness, Juan fell onto the bed. Reality was very different from his fantasy, and it was also very simple. Charo wasn’t tied to a chair, her hair clammy with sweat and sticking to her face, her eyes wide with fear and surprise, showing that she understood at last. He wasn’t walking towards her, then slowly circling the chair, he wasn’t standing behind her, letting her feel his prick on the back of her neck, or covering her breasts with his hands, or pinching her nipples, or whispering in her ear:“If this is what you like, I can do this too.” Instead he was alone in his room, lying on his bed, rejected, humiliated by the only girl he’d ever been in love with, and she was out there somewhere, fucking his brother. It was too dreadful, he simply couldn’t accept it, even if it was true. So he masturbated slowly, delicately, trying to prolong this break from all the pain. He had a very strong orgasm but felt cold at the same time, and the sticky feel of his semen covering his hand made him feel a combination of pity and disgust. Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the bed, opened his eyes, closed them again, fell back and started to cry like a child.
 
The following morning the sky was grey, as it would be for many months to come. He didn’t see Damián until lunch and then, although he didn’t say a single word to him, and nothing happened to distinguish that meal from any other, everything seemed to collapse inside him. Looking at his brother, happily joking with his sisters and complimenting his mother on how delicious her lentils were, he had a precise image of his future life—the constant, unremitting fear of seeing her again, and of seeing her with Damián, fear of bumping into her in the building, at birthday parties, fear of the telephone ringing and having to answer it without knowing whether it would be her on the other end of the line. “I’m fucked,” he thought as he left the table, “well and truly fucked.” This feeling never quite went away in the following months, but he grew used to his new situation sooner than he would have thought possible. He became accustomed to seeing Charo every day, hearing her voice in the corridor, finding her sitting at the lunch table on a Sunday, seeing her laugh and talk and kiss Damián; accustomed to having her close but not being able to touch her or kiss her, not even wanting to look at her.

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