The Wind From the East (44 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
“Oh, yes?” called his wife, stopping to shout back.“You watch out, you might get a surprise yourself!”
Sara heard her mother, asking them to calm down, as usual.
“No problem! Where do I sign?” Pablo went on yelling, despite his mother’s pleading, also as usual.“No such luck! No such bloody luck!”
The sound of Pili’s heels faded, and Sara could now hear the children’s voices.The coffee was ready. Pablo, surprisingly calm after the row, took a tray, and placed the coffee cups and sugar bowl on it.
“Is there anything you want me to tell him?” he asked his sister, almost in her ear.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.“What would be the point?”
He shrugged, as if conceding she was right, but as he was about to take the tray to the dining room, she whispered,“Well, remember me to him. Because I do remember him.”
She’d remember him for a long time, never forgetting the feel of his wide, rough-skinned fingers, their instant, analgesic heat when he touched her face, her clothes, her body, fingers that were stronger, more powerful than the confusion of a little girl; she never forgot their warm intimacy between unfamiliar sheets. For years she reproached herself for not having returned to San Fernando, to Manuel’s body, on the Monday that convinced her that nothing had happened, or in the days that followed, prolonging the dream of a fragile love, irrevocably condemned to die.
But she was never truly sorry that she hadn’t gone back to see him again.Whenever she felt tempted to respond to the understanding look that she got from Pablo across the table several Sundays in a row, she tried to picture her brother’s small, cheap flat in the suburbs, to hear his outbursts of barely contained rage, to imagine the rows that were becoming more serious, louder, more ferocious. She imagined the mute presence of the plants her sister-in-law didn’t buy in any shop, spider plants and geraniums and money plants that multiplied through shoots and cuttings, changing hands on the stairs, at the market, in the changing rooms at the beer factory where she worked as a cleaner, spontaneous gestures of basic courtesy in a world that was barely decent, a landscape of tired figures, young men who no longer looked young, young women who looked old, and endless children, shrieking, running, crying, constantly demanding. Perhaps there weren’t all that many of them, it just seemed like it as they slept in bunk beds that didn’t leave enough space to open the doors of tiny bedrooms with paper-thin walls, the ceiling lamp shaking as they charged about cramped flats on boring, wet Saturday afternoons. This was how Pablo lived, and how his neighbor no doubt lived, moving between weariness and disappointment, between monotonous resignation and the temptation to snatch a little pleasure, a glimmer of happiness anywhere, at any price. Sara knew about this kind of life; Socorro told her about it often.
“I’ve put him on a diet,” she’d say with regard to her husband, and Sara felt sorry for her brother-in-law, Marcelino, who’d have to get ten thousand pesetas from his mother’s pension on the first day of every month if he ever wanted to have sex with his wife again. “Don’t be silly, Socorro,” Sara said to her,“you can’t do that to him!”“Oh, can’t I?” she’d reply. “And why not? What else can I do? Can you tell me? It’s what women have always done, it’s the only thing that works, the only thing I’ve got . . .” “What about you?” asked Sara. “I mind less than he does,” her sister said,“and anyway, I just put up with it.”That was the beginning of the end, putting up with it, until good intentions disappeared, and anger was more sustaining than supper when a very young, very tired man got home late in the evening to find two cold fried eggs covered with a plate and a wife, also very young and very tired, who wouldn’t open her legs for him. “Your loss,” the men would mutter, and Sara sympathized, but she sympathized with the women too, they worked as hard as their husbands and still they had to put up with them shouting because they’d drunk three beers in a row and the fourth wasn’t already chilling in the fridge; women who’d got married before they were twenty because they were sick of doing it standing up in a bathroom, or lying on the ground in a dark corner of their local park, and who’d got pregnant two, three, four times before they were thirty, watching their husbands broaden, fill out, and stay young, growing more attractive, while they themselves went from splendor to collapse, stretch marks, sagging flesh, the same shape as the bread rolls they ate in the street, women who had only one weapon and used it so much the rope finally snapped. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get a meek one, like poor Marcelino, who ended up doing everything Socorro told him, and was passably happy, and made her passably happy, but sometimes they turned out bad-tempered, like Pablo, who summed up his philosophy of life in a single sentence, “I’m going to do what I bloody well like and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.” And behind the door there was always another, younger woman, a girl, who was prepared to do all the things a lawful wife didn’t have to do, who never said no to anything, who learned fast, and caressed and flattered them, excited them, sucked them off, and let them suck anything they liked, for as long as they liked, until they realized that not only was it cheaper than going to a prostitute, but that if the girl was so devoted, it must be because she was crazy about them, because she really loved them. So then it started all over again, from the beginning, but with an extra person, an odd one out—the lonely, wrecked wife who didn’t read books or newspapers, who didn’t have a TV, or any idea that in the other half of the world there were women like her claiming as their right the duties her husband had demanded of her in vain for years, a woman who never could have guessed what young female students in Salamanca called liberation, a woman like her sister-in-law, Pili, who went to her mother-in-law’s to cry, and cried until she was empty. Sara felt that, however much she had come to hate her, however many books and newspapers she herself had read and would go on reading, Pili’s tears were heart-breaking, but no more so than the words of her brother, when he looked her in the eye and spoke to her straight.“I’m thirty-three years old,” he’d say, “and all I’ve done all my fucking life is get up at six thirty in the morning and work like a slave, so what do you want me to do now, eh? What do you want me to do?” So when Vicente González de Sandoval, with his slender fingers and carefully clipped nails, said that his story was sordid and ugly, Sara smiled and felt like adding,“You have no idea.You’ll never really know what a sordid, ugly, sickening story really is,Vicente.”
Everything else was easy. When Vicente came to pick her up to take her to the restaurant where his friend was celebrating his last night as a bachelor, he arrived on time, and she saw that he was wearing very different clothes—jeans, a checked shirt and a suede jacket—from the suit and tie she was used to seeing him in at the office. She was pleased by this, and even more by the fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off her legs as she got into the car.“You look great, Sara!” he told her.The bride and groom were saying farewell to their single status with a joint dinner, as befitted a modern couple who would be getting married in church the following morning in an almost clandestine ceremony (with only their closest family present, no confetti, white dress, veil, or bouquet) as a way of keeping their respective families happy.The couple welcomed Vicente and Sara without surprise because, as she later found out, they hardly knew Vicente’s wife, and they were used to seeing him alone, or with a different girl each time. The comfortable combination of indifference and friendliness that Sara sensed in them, and in most of the guests at the dinner, helped to put her at her ease, to rise above the inevitable, occasional little smiles from a few back-biters.Vicente couldn’t keep his eyes off her even when he was eating, enveloping her in an exclusive, tyrannical attention that Sara would have hated in another man, making sure she never ran out of wine or cigarettes or anything else, during the entire meal.That evening, he embodied the man that Sara had been yearning forever since her fateful sixteenth birthday party.
This more than made up for any gaps, any hesitations or uncertainties. “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” she thought as Vicente kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone, with a longing that tensed his delicate fingers as he held her; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” as he whisked her out of the restaurant, kissing and embracing her so that they swayed and staggered; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” as he pounced on her in the car and his hands explored her body; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” when he suddenly stopped and looked into her eyes, and said he was dying to have sex with her, but that he couldn’t take her anywhere more comfortable, or discreet, or pleasant than a hotel. “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him, always.” It was a profound truth, the most brutal and humiliating and purest truth she possessed. So that night, and many other nights, she behaved like a vulgar tart from the suburbs and said yes to everything, to be what he wanted her to be, whenever, wherever, however he wanted, repeating over and over to herself that he was the boyfriend she’d always wanted. And for a long time, that was enough.
But it wasn’t enough, because Vicente González de Sandoval was a weak man, though it would take her years to find out.
At first, he seemed quite the opposite, a wise man, a prince, someone with the power to control reality and subject it to his wishes.
“Why didn’t you bring me here the other day?”
The apartment was small but had magnificent views, on the top floor of a building in the Calle Bailén, almost at the Plaza de España.
“Because I didn’t know it was empty,” he said, taking off his jacket and dropping it on the sofa. “It belongs to my grandmother. She owns the whole building, but no one lives here at the moment. I went to see her and asked if any of the flats were empty. I said I wanted to use it as an office, that I couldn’t work at home because of the children.” He took off his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and smiled.“We agreed I’d return it to her whenever she needed it, but I don’t think she ever will. She’s loaded.”
This wasn’t true. His grandmother was very rich indeed, but neither that apartment nor any other apartment in the building belonged to her, or any other member of his family.This was another classic ingredient of this classic story. He’d looked in the papers, called an estate agent, gone to see the apartment, liked it, paid a deposit, and for years, without Sara knowing, continued paying the rent by direct debit from a bank account his wife knew nothing about. He’d never felt the need to do anything like this for any of the other women he’d had affairs with since marrying María Belén, and this part of his story was true, although he’d looked only at furnished flats so as not to spend more than he had to, just in case things went sour, in case he suddenly went off Sara the way he’d gone off all the others.
“And the furniture?”
“It was already here.”
“It’s hideous.”
“Yes,” he said, putting his arms around her, holding her tightly and kissing her on the mouth. As he gazed down at her, Sara had a feeling that she was going to fall hopelessly in love with him.“I’ll make sure I tell my grandmother off.”
The sheets on the bed were new. They felt stiff and rough, though not unpleasant, because they had never been washed, and the creases from being in their packaging were still visible. Sara noticed this, because she nearly always noticed everything. He undressed her like a greedy child at his own birthday party, not yet resenting the poverty of her responses, her inability to return what she was receiving, her need to remain in control at all times. The others Sara had been with had not minded, Manuel had not minded, but Vicente would come to find it painful.
“Did you buy them?” she asked, lifting a corner of the sheet, when Vicente collapsed beside her, convincing her that everything had gone well because he seemed so happy. She had enjoyed his weight upon her, his smell, and felt the same need to possess him and to give herself to him, that she had experienced many years earlier one August in a borrowed bed. It wasn’t exactly pleasure, but it was the most intense thing she’d ever felt for a man, with a man.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“Did you come here specially to make the bed?”
“Of course,” he said, and she laughed and clung to him as she’d failed to do earlier, when he was moving inside her.
Perhaps it was this, her interest in such a trivial detail, the disproportionate reaction to his answer that enlightened Vicente in that instant. Perhaps, in such a brief space of time, he managed to link Sara’s excessive delight now with her urge to take the little bottles of shampoo from the hotel bathroom that first night.And then there were all the strange questions he couldn’t make sense of:“Where did you live with your parents before you got married?”That was the first.“In the Calle Montesquinza,” he’d answered.“Which school did you go to?”“To El Pilar.”“Ah!” she’d sighed, inexplicably relieved, and on she went, her questions becoming more and more mysterious: “Where did you hang out when you were at the university?”“I don’t know, around Moncloa, I suppose, like everyone else.” “You didn’t happen to meet a civil engineer from Vitoria whose name was Juan Mari García de Ibargüengoitia, did you?” “No.” “Or a very pretty girl called María Pilar Gutiérrez Rios whom everyone called Maruchi?”“No.”“Did your wife go to the Sagrado Corazón?” “No.”“Does the surname Villamarín sound at all familiar? Or Ochoa?” “No, why should they sound familiar? Why are you asking me such bizarre questions?”“Oh, I don’t know, just because.”
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