The Wind From the East (47 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
Perhaps he was more sensitive to movement than anyone else, because he had always stayed in the same place, the same small town where he was born and had grown up, a comfortable, narrow horizon that had now surprisingly unfolded like a huge sheet that could cover the sea and whose edges were out of sight if he looked straight ahead. But he wasn’t looking straight ahead, only glancing out of the corner of his eye, when he discovered something even more worrying than Sara’s involvement with the American, something that would confirm his suspicions.
“Do you know something, children?” Sara said at the end of Maribel’s birthday lunch, after the songs and presents, when they were still sitting at the table but no one could eat any more cake.
“In the paper yesterday,” she went on, with the mischievous look she used when she had good news tucked up her sleeve, “I noticed that they’re showing that film about gladiators in Chipiona, the one we didn’t get to see last summer because we couldn’t get tickets, do you remember? Do you want to go?”
Then there was shouting, please, please, could they go, they’d do their homework tomorrow. Maribel was sitting at the end of the table with Sara at the opposite end; Juan was next to her and beside him was Alfonso with the children both sitting opposite them.Waiting to see what his mother would say, Andrés noticed Juan and Maribel glance at each other first, rather than looking at him and Tamara as they pleaded to be allowed to go. The glance lasted only a split second, but Andrés noticed it, and he noticed that they both smiled an identical smile.After another infinitely brief moment, they looked at the children.Their expressions were identical, and it was obvious they would let them go to the cinema.
“All right,” said Maribel. “If you promise you’ll behave and won’t drive Sara mad.”
“OK,” said Juan, and then added:“But Alfonso’s not going.”
Alfonso hadn’t paid any attention to the conversation until then. He appeared to be dozing, legs stretched out, hands lying limply in his lap, but he sat bolt upright when he heard his name.
“I am going, yes, I am, I am,” he said, eyes still blurry with sleep, but nodding vigorously to emphasize his words.
“No, I’m sorry,” said Juan, shaking his head,“you can’t go, Alfonso.”
“Why can’t I?” he asked. “I want to go. I can go, can’t I?” He looked pleadingly at each of them in turn.“I am going, I am going.”
“But you don’t even know where!” said Juan, smiling. “So where is it that you want to go then?”
“We’re going to the cinema,Alfonso,” cut in Tamara, seeing how confused Alfonso was.“To the cinema in Chipiona. Sara’s taking us.”
“She’s taking me too,” said Alfonso, looking very pleased.“Aren’t you, Sara? You’re taking me too.”
“Of course I am,” said Sara.Andrés saw that she was smiling and realized that, although she was the cleverest of all of them, she hadn’t noticed the look exchanged by Juan and Maribel.“And I’ll buy you a carton of popcorn this big. If Juan lets you come with us, of course.”
“No, Sara, really,” said Juan, shaking his head, but without much conviction this time. “You’ve got enough with these two.You can’t take Alfonso as well, with all the trouble he creates.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “He’s always on his best behavior at the cinema. He loves going, don’t you, Alfonso?”
“Yes, yes, I’m going, I’m going, I’m going to the cinema. I’ll be good, and I’ll eat my popcorn quietly.”
“You really don’t mind?” asked Juan.
“I really don’t,” said Sara, smiling, and then gesturing towards him and Maribel.“Why don’t you both come too?”
Andrés thought she should have noticed then that something odd was going on, because both his mother and Tamara’s uncle immediately looked away in opposite directions. He was certain he was right, that when they exchanged glances earlier, they’d agreed something, and it was something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.
“Well, I’ve arranged to meet up with some friends,” said Maribel quickly.“With it being my birthday and everything.”
“I’ll go with you to the cinema, if you like,” said Juan half-heartedly. “But I had planned on going home for a siesta.”
Sara burst out laughing and assured them they weren’t needed. It was true, they never needed anyone else to have a good time, the four of them had a lot of fun together. But as Andrés kissed his mother goodbye, he almost decided not to go to the cinema.
“You’re going home, aren’t you?” Maribel asked Juan, and he nodded. “Would you mind dropping me off at mine first?”
“Of course not.”
“It means you taking a detour.”
“No problem,” Juan said, smiling. “I’m not in a hurry.”
Then Sara called, “Come on, Andrés,” and he turned and saw that Alfonso and Tamara were already sitting in the back of the car, with the passenger door open, waiting for him. He really wanted to see the film—he’d been the one who’d been most keen to see it last summer—but he was on the verge of saying he wouldn’t go and slipping quickly into the other car, telling his mother he’d rather go out with her and her friends, though he was pretty sure she hadn’t arranged to meet up with any friends. He was about to, but Dr. Olmedo was quicker than him and started up the engine while he was still deciding what to do. Meanwhile Sara was hooting, “Andrés, come on, hurry up, we don’t want to find we can’t get tickets again.”
He really enjoyed the film, even though he was only half paying attention to it. His mind was still on Dr. Olmedo’s red car as it drove off. In every actress on screen he saw his mother, her face in every face, her body in every body, and an imagined, imaginary, eagerness in the angle of open arms, parted lips, the open violence of hands and kisses. He was only twelve years old, but he thought he knew about that sort of thing, a few vague words, the hint of a murky mystery. Sitting stiffly in his seat, not responding to any of the comments Tamara whispered in his ear from time to time, he thought of his mother, and this made him think of his grandmother and the things she said to him, the revolting way she had of clicking her tongue and venting her mean, coarse rage.
“What does she care what I do, where I go, who I go out with?” his mother would say when she found him particularly quiet and withdrawn, and guessed that her mother had been criticizing her again.“The world’s changed, your grandmother doesn’t have a clue, she belongs to the past. Just ignore her.” This was what she said to him and then he didn’t know what to think, other than that things were as they were, and even if he didn’t like it, it might not be anyone’s fault. “A mother is a mother,” thought Andrés, this at least he was sure of, and that his own was a good mother, because she loved him and he knew it, he could feel it. He closed his eyes and felt safe against her body, in her arms, her warmth. But his grandmother never took any notice of his opinion when she started wondering aloud what her daughter Maribel was doing at night in those bars, in the lives of those men—always other women’s—who treated her as if she were an old rag. When Andrés heard his grandmother, he didn’t feel strong enough to stick up for his mother and give his own version of things.All he could think of was getting out of there, running away before his face became red with shame, and hiding somewhere where no one would see him.
A mother is a mother, and his own mother, who would be thirty-one the following day, was waiting for him at home, the table laid with a special dinner for the two of them.
“Prawns!” he exclaimed when he saw the dish in the kitchen, not noticing that she was wearing slippers and no make-up.“Yum!”
“You haven’t had a hamburger and ruined your appetite, have you?” she asked. He gave her a kiss and shook his head. “Good. I won’t be a minute. I’m going to have a shower and change into my house clothes. I’ll be quick.”
It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night.
“Aren’t you going out?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” she shouted from the bathroom, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Andrés didn’t yet know the word “paradox,” but he didn’t need to, as he welcomed the strange effect of that spring on his mother’s usual lifestyle. Maribel still occasionally went out for a drink with friends in the evening, but as she left, she always told him where she was going, and with whom, and she almost always came home sober and steady on her feet, early enough to find him still awake and to tell him off for not turning off the TV at half past ten like she’d told him. Then Andrés remembered other nights when her voice had been thick and slurry, trying to reassure him when she staggered in at dawn, the light already filtering through the blinds. He remembered her slow, difficult sentences, her disjointed words:“It’s only me, sweetheart, I bumped into the chest of drawers. Go to sleep, dear, it’s only me,” and he remembered her coming into his room carrying her shoes—“Ouch, my feet are killing me”—lying down beside him—“Let me give you a kiss”—falling asleep next to him fully dressed, and in the morning shielding her eyes from the light, her foundation dried and cracked like mud, eyeliner and lipstick smudged, hair in a mess, and the insatiable thirst that came with hangovers.
“You’re very selfish, Andrés,” Sara had said to him the only time he had dared tell her about it, a few months earlier, during the Christmas holidays.
“No,” he said, very serious.“Mama’s the selfish one.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Well, because she’s my mother, isn’t she? And I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She brought me into the world because she wanted to, so she should take care of me.”
“Of course she should. So what’s the matter, doesn’t she take care of you?” asked Sara, raising her voice, as if she were angry with him. “Doesn’t she feed you and buy you clothes and send you to a good school? Doesn’t she look after you and make sure you have everything you need?”
“No, not when she goes out and spends all night out somewhere,” he said, getting cross now too.
“Ah, well, now we’ve got to where we were going. Considering the fact you’re only eleven, you sound like an old lady, you know.”
“What if I had an attack of something and died while she was out?”
“What if you get run over by a car outside your school, what then? Is your grandmother going to come and give you the kiss of life?”
He didn’t know what to say to this. Sara took advantage of his hesitation to put an arm round his shoulders.Then she went on, listing the kind of truths she liked, the kind he would have liked too if life hadn’t sometimes turned them into a pack of lies.
“Your mother’s much more than just your mother,Andrés. She’s herself too, can’t you see? She’s very young and very lively and she has a right to enjoy herself. She’ll have plenty of time to slow down in the future.You know how she lives, how hard she works, and she looks after you all on her own, making sure you turn out all right. That’s a huge responsibility, and she hasn’t got anyone to share it with. It’s not a bad thing that she tries to have fun. Quite the opposite. I’m sure that if she was bored and bitter and sad, she’d be a much worse mother.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, nodding sadly.“I know all that, you always say the same thing. But things aren’t like that here.”
“No, Andrés,” Sara said. They were sitting on the seesaw, swinging slowly up and down. “Things are the same everywhere.There are people everywhere who think one way, and people who think another way, and that’s what matters, don’t you see? What people think, what people feel.You’ve got to try and think about what you know, what you feel, not what other people tell you.”
“But you can’t think bad things about people who love you,” he objected.
“Of course you can,” she disagreed gently. “Because affection is no guarantee of anything.Your grandmother, for instance, might really love you but she could be wrong and she could be hurting you, even if she doesn’t mean to.”
He understood—he always understood what Sara said. He understood the meaning of the words she poured over him gently, cautiously, like drops of balm stinging an open wound that never quite healed. But he’d never managed to stop being selfish, never managed to stop feeling sorry for himself, to face his grandmother with his head held high, to understand or forgive his mother’s absences.
Nor had he ever found out exactly what she did, what she was looking for and never finding on those nights out.Yet now, when he was more than convinced, almost certain, that she must be performing scenes like the one in that film with Tamara’s uncle, it turned out that at last he had a mother like other people’s, a mother who no longer bothered to wear make-up all the time, or wear the tight dresses he hated when she went for a walk; a mother who sat on the sofa with him to watch TV every evening, who didn’t bump into furniture or thickly curse her fate all the time, a mother who walked straight down the street and looked past the men who dared to wolf-whistle, a mother who saved up to buy a flat, a mother who had found something he didn’t know anything about, and which he wasn’t sure he’d like, but which meant he could at last feel calm and even strangely proud of her.
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