The Wind From the East (49 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
Papa worked a lot, this was what Mama told her and it was what he told her too.This was why he was almost always away from home, having meals at restaurants and so on, even at the weekends. But when he got home, he always had something for her—big, expensive presents, small ones—and he sat on her bed and told her jokes that would go down well when she told them at school, or taught her how to imitate the sound of a banjo with your mouth, or how to make a little figure out of toothpicks. Papa was like a big kid, a protective, generous friend, the solution to all her problems.“If the princess doesn’t want to eat her vegetables, then she doesn’t have to. If she doesn’t want to go to school, let her stay at home. If she doesn’t want to get dressed, why should she?” Tamara smiled as she remembered this.“Bring it here, I’ll fix it for you.” And he did. Straight away. And then he lifted her up in the air and gave her a quick kiss before he left. He was her father, and he was the best. Until everything went sour.
Perhaps this was why she didn’t think about him often, why her memory greedily kept him for itself, refusing to share him with her conscious mind. Because one day everything did go sour. She almost stopped loving him then, because he started to behave strangely, doing things that were sometimes horrible and unfair, things that made him seem ugly both inside and out, like a different man from the one he’d always been. She almost stopped loving him, but one night, when neither of them knew how little time they had left, Papa came into her room at midnight and, finding her awake, lay down beside her and kissed her and said sorry. He didn’t explain, he didn’t say why he was sorry, and she didn’t ask. She just kissed him back, curled up in his arms and fell asleep, and then he had rewarded her forgiveness with a secret.
Andrés was still cycling round the track, more and more slowly now. In the fading light of the afternoon the outlines of buildings began to blur, and Tamara felt an icy shiver down her spine, as if frozen needles were slowly piercing each vertebra. But it wasn’t the falling night that made her shiver—it was the familiar icy touch of the secret. So she stood up, vigorously brushed the dust from her trousers, grabbed her bike and waited for Andrés to come level with her, then cycled one last time round the track with him.
“I’m going home,” she said.
“Can you get back on your own?”
She nodded, and waved as she cycled off. On the way home, she decided not to tell Juan she’d met Andrés’ father, because she didn’t feel like having him look at her with those eyes that sometimes saw right inside her, because she didn’t want him to try to explain the world to her with words that seemed to be about someone else’s father, but ended up judging her own father harshly. She knew it was best not to talk about Papa in front of Juan, not even to mention him. She didn’t know why, she just knew. Juan had never discussed it with her, but he thought that, at the end, when everything went sour, her father had shown himself as he really was, not the other way round. She’d never heard Juan say this, but she knew he thought it, and that he was wrong.
Juan was a good person and she loved him. She’d always loved him, but with a different kind of love to the one she’d felt for her mother, and without the passion she’d felt for her father, and always much less than he seemed to love her. She knew this too, and the certainty cheered her up, bolstered her when she thought of all that she’d lost, because Juan was all she had left. So she’d decided not to say anything to him, but he was waiting for her at the entrance to the development, worried because she was so late—it was a quarter to nine—and when he asked her where she’d been, it didn’t occur to her not to tell him the truth.
“We bumped into Andrés’s father, and he bought us a Coke, and it got late.”
He didn’t say anything at first, just walked beside her, not looking at her, simply staring up at the sky.
“Had you met him before?” he asked.“Andrés’s father?”
“No, I’d never seen him before.”
“What’s he like?”
“Very, very handsome,” she answered, and Juan laughed.
“Seriously, he’s unbelievably handsome. Andrés really looks like him. But an uglier version. I mean, at first I didn’t notice, but then looking at them together, I don’t know, they kind of look alike. It’s a pity, isn’t it? Because Maribel’s pretty too, but Andrés . . .”
For reasons Tamara didn’t really understand, Juan always stood up for Andrés even when nobody was criticizing him.They’d reached the house and Juan went into the kitchen to start dinner.
“Andrés isn’t ugly.”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “I mean, he isn’t hideous or anything, he’s just thin—his legs look like sticks—and his hair stands up even though he combs it down with cologne, and his face looks like a bird. I don’t know, I don’t think he’ll look like his father when he grows up.”
“You never know,” said Juan, facing away from her, keeping an eye on the potatoes.“People can change a lot over the years.”
He passed by the baby unit to get the results of the newborn’s check-up and then went straight in to see Charo. She was looking scrubbed and calm, smiling, her hair tidy. Her white nightdress—all frills and pale pink ribbons, chosen after she’d found out the baby was a girl—suited her.As he admired this perfect vision of new motherhood, he smiled too, realizing it was the first time he’d ever seen her in bed with clothes on.
“Have you been to see her?” she asked.
“Yes. She’s doing brilliantly.Very healthy, and very cute.”
“What about Damián?”
“He’s gone to fetch Mama. He won’t be long.”
Just then a nurse wheeled in a transparent plastic crib. Inside, a tiny, dark-haired baby lay asleep, all bundled up.Their attention immediately switched to her.
“Isn’t she lovely?” said Charo after a moment, once the nurse had left.
“Yes,” said Juan. “But I can’t understand why you and Damián have given her such an awful name.”
“It isn’t awful!” said Charo, sitting up abruptly, but the movement hurt, so she lay back against the pillow carefully.“It’s—exotic.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Well, of course it is! What would you have called her then?”
“I don’t know,” said Juan, and he thought a moment. “María, probably. Or Inés. Or Teresa. Or Almudena.”
“Like the patron saint of Madrid?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t we posh all of a sudden!” she said and Juan laughed. “You’d never know you came from Villaverde Alto. Anyway, you should have told me before, you know. I mean, there’s plenty of reason to take your opinion into account.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be a good godfather even if I haven’t chosen her name.”
“No,” said Charo, eyes wide, her smile fading a little now.“In the end, we decided that Nicanor’s going to be her godfather.”
“But Damián said—”
“Yes, Damián wanted you to be the godfather, but I made him change his mind. It would be too much, wouldn’t it, if you were her godfather?” she said, looking away, focusing intently on the edge of the sheet. She tugged at the fabric several times before looking at him again, her expression serious, wary.“It’s enough that you’re her father.”
Juan Olmedo’s initial reaction was not to believe what he’d just heard. Then, he experienced the same amazed, guilty, foolish feeling he’d had one afternoon, many years ago, when he was so bored he took out his old chemistry set and didn’t read the instructions properly. He’d absentmindedly mixed two acids with the contents of a white bottle without checking to see what it was and the test tube had exploded. Shards of glass had flown at his face while a greenish stain with burning edges spread across the wall. His father had gone mad and made him repaint the wall, but nothing could get rid of the tiny scar beneath his right eye that reminded him every morning of the day he nearly blinded himself.
“It can’t be true,” he said to himself, “it can’t be.” But it was—it was true. Somehow, he knew straight away that it was true. He suddenly felt cold, hollow, the rush of his cowardly blood emptying his veins. When he was able to speak again, his mouth felt dry.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or tell you to go to hell,” he said, but Charo was the only one of the two to laugh.
“You can do what you like, nothing you do will change things,” she said, pointing at the crib.“She’s yours, Juanito.”
“You can’t do this to me.You have no right to do this to me,” he said, his eyes as hard as he could make them. She looked calmer now, as if her confession had eased her mind.“No right.”
“That’s true,” she said.“I had no right. But it isn’t true that I couldn’t do it. I could, and I did. I’m absolutely sure the baby is yours.There’s no way that she isn’t. If you like, I can fill in on the details.”
“No, thanks, I’ll pass on that.”
“As you wish.”
Juan looked around the room, before standing up and walking to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“None of your business,” he said. He made an effort to speak calmly, and slowly, pronouncing each word carefully.“I can’t accept this, Charo. I don’t have to accept it and I don’t intend to. I don’t want to hear any more about it. Not now, not ever.”
“Look at me, Juan,” she said. Her voice was both firm and despairing, and he had to obey. “Look at me, and look at her, and think a little. Go on.You’re not only the best one of the three, you’re also the most intelligent—look at your daughter. She doesn’t deserve to have a mother like me and a father like Damián, no one deserves that. Don’t you read the papers? Everything is inherited from the parents, everything.Your height and the color of your eyes, how fat or thin you are, whether you have a talent for painting or music, your voice, your will power, your brains, everything. It’s all genetic—your personality, your tastes, even how good or bad you are.”
“That’s a load of nonsense, Charo.You haven’t got a clue.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, sitting up again, this time not giving in to the pain.“It’s all true. I’ve read about it, I’ve discussed it with people who know about these things. I found out about it.”
“You’re crazy,” Juan muttered.“That’s what this is, a psychotic episode. I can’t think of any other explanation.You must be stark raving mad.”
“No!” she shouted.“I know what I’m doing. I even talked to a geneticist. I was scared of Damián, to tell you the truth. I don’t know why, because he hasn’t got a clue, but I thought it might occur to him . . . But the geneticist told me that for the time being you can’t tell who the father of a child is if the two men being tested are brothers.The genes are too similar, or something like that. If Damián gets suspicious, which he won’t, but anyway if he does, the test would be positive, the same result you’d get if you were tested.That’s what the geneticist told me. So there.” She lay back now and went on:“In ten years’ time they’ll probably be able to tell. So remind me and we can have a test done, just so that you can be sure.”
“You’re a fool.”
Under other circumstances, he would have been surprised at his choice of insult, and at the contempt with which he uttered it, but he’d spoken without thinking, without weighing his words. He walked back to the bed with steps so weary they seemed to sap his remaining strength. He sat in the armchair beside it, looked at his sister-in-law, and felt pleased when he saw terror in her eyes. He’d spent his life being afraid of her and this was the first time Charo had ever been afraid of him.
“You’re a fool,” he said again, and this time he was aware of every syllable. “I’ll never rest easy. Never again. But in ten years’ time, this child will have a father, and that father will be my brother. I’ll be her uncle, a nice man who comes to lunch every so often and gives her birthday presents. And that’s it.That’s what’ll happen. It’s what’s right, and it’s for the best. Don’t you forget it, because no geneticist in the world can change it.”
“Yes,” said Charo, and she smiled again, with a gentle, enigmatically content expression he didn’t even try to comprehend. “That’s true, but the child is still yours.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“No. But she’s yours, Juanito.”
“So what?”
“Nothing. Just that she’s yours.”
“What I don’t understand is . . .” He tailed off. He didn’t feel like talking, but he had to go on.“What I don’t understand is why you told me. If all you wanted was for the child to be mine, you could have achieved that without saying a word to me. It would have been less risky, wouldn’t it? Better for you.”
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