The Wind From the East (52 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
His relationship with all the other women in the world had changed some time ago, although it hadn’t reached its final form. At first, he was scrupulously faithful to Charo. It seemed ridiculous, but he felt incapable of desiring any other woman. The women around him, the ones he worked with, the ones he saw in the street, seemed like flat, lifeless images, more or less pleasing to the eye, but quite devoid of reality. He still looked at them, but he no longer wanted them even in his imagination. He didn’t need them.When Charo announced she was pregnant, betraying him for a second time, the process became more acute until he was completely stripped of his capacity to desire. If he couldn’t have his sister-in-law, he wouldn’t have anyone. But one evening, when Tamara was eight months old, the friend of the girlfriend of a friend backed him up against the wall of a bar and asked him what the hell was he up to, and he said he wasn’t up to anything, so they slept together, and they had a good time. From then on, and though she called him many times and he wouldn’t see her again, Juan Olmedo recovered a certain neutrality. He didn’t go in search of women, but if ever he liked one he let her find him. There came a time when he no longer recognized himself, a time during which he slept with and then rejected many women; a frenzied, feverish time when he went from one name to another, one mouth to another, one body to another, in an impossible search for an antidote, a poison that would cure him or destroy him completely.And yet, on that sunny, peaceful afternoon in April, he couldn’t see the color of his future. Before him was a scene so sweet, so right that it didn’t even yield to the memory of that junior doctor he found so attractive, and who was so good in bed, but wasn’t part of his true life. That afternoon, Juan Olmedo reflected that all of his life was there in that garden, on that porch, in the characters of a scene that belonged to him, a part of his life that had been hijacked by another. The certainty dispelled his fear and loosened his tongue.
“I think about the child a lot, you know. I wonder what’s going to happen to her.”
“Well, nothing,” said Charo, looking at him with interest, and he realized she was gauging the meaning of his words.“What could happen?”
Juan didn’t want to reply to this question, and he fixed his gaze on his daughter before going on:“I don’t know. She’s two now.”
“Almost two and a half,” said Charo, and from her look, Juan realized she already knew what he was going to say.
“I mean, when all’s said and done, I am her father.”
“No, you’re not,” said Charo, smiling without a trace of bitterness or malice. “You’re her uncle, remember? You were very clear about that. Nothing’s going to happen, this is the only sensible way forward.That’s what you said and that’s how it is.”
“I know, but I was wrong,” he said. Deep down, he didn’t care about the child, not yet; at the time all he cared about was her mother, and what Tamara, as their child, represented. But he wasn’t lying.“I can’t help it, every time I see her, all I can think about is that I’m her father.”
“I’m glad,” said Charo, still smiling, comically unmoved by what she was hearing.“That’s best for all of us.”
“What about Damián?”
“Well, nothing, what about him? He’s my husband, and he’s Tamara’s father.We’re a happy family. Doesn’t it show?”
“Yes,” said Juan. He stood up and collected his things, not looking at her.“You look good in photos.”
This time she didn’t ask where he was going. He couldn’t bring himself to make an excuse so he just left. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, because a sudden, powerful weariness prevented his rage, pain, and contempt from rising to the surface.When he got home, he collapsed on the sofa and switched on the TV. He didn’t change the channel, which was showing a quiz show with big money prizes and hostesses in pink bikinis and a loud, bald presenter.A contestant from Teruel won half a million pesetas.A woman from Huelva wasn’t so lucky, winning only a hundred thousand.The roulette wheel was turning again when the doorbell rang.
Charo threw herself at him without giving him a chance to say anything. She put her arms round his neck, her legs around his waist, and covered his mouth with hers. Only later, when they were in bed, naked and sated with each other, did she explain why she’d come.
“It wouldn’t work, Juanito,” she said, moving close to him so that their noses were almost touching, their breath mingling in the tiny but constant gap between them.“It would be a disaster.”
She looked at him as if she needed to hear him say something, but he remained silent. She closed her eyes and went on:“I know what’s going on.You’re sleeping with other women.That’s it, isn’t it? I know you so well, Juan. I realized from the start.”
“But you don’t mind.”
“Look, this is what we have, and it’s the best we can have.You’re very important to me, very important, because you’re the only one who loves me, apart from my daughter and Alfonso, who’s like another child.You’re the only one.And I don’t know why you do, frankly, because I’m a shit.” She paused, but still he said nothing. “I know I am, and I don’t understand how you can be in love with me, but I don’t want you to stop. If we lived together you’d stop loving me, Juan, you wouldn’t be able to stand me, I’m sure of it. I’ve often thought about it. It’s better this way. Believe me, it’s much better like this.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling in her own special way, the same sad look with which, years earlier, she’d refused a second slice of chocolate cake. “Yes. I know you better than you know me.You have no idea what I can do, what I can be. I love you, Juan, I can’t love anyone more than I love you. I don’t know why. But I know it’s not enough, that for you it wouldn’t be enough.”
These words would haunt Juan Olmedo for the rest of his life. He would never be able to overcome them, not even when he became strong and cynical, an expert at handling his misfortune. He realized that her words were no more than a partial, inadequate explanation; another trap, another stage in the endless deception.That night, he shared more with Charo than they had ever had together—his pain, his helplessness, his anguish on discovering with selfish but joyful amazement that she too was capable of suffering and that she too was in pain. He couldn’t remember then how moved he had been by her faded, smudged lipstick, her lost look in the bustle of the Gran Vía that Sunday afternoon when they had gone to the cinema and she had confessed without words that she was unhappy. But having lost all hope of ever being happy himself, her unhappiness comforted him and bound him to her with a different tie, a terrible solidarity in common defeat.
Juan Olmedo tried to get used to a different dream, a close horizon of small, immediate benefits, and known, calculated risks. But that didn’t last long either.That sleepless night was the apex of a roller-coaster ride, the summit, the point of a needle on which he would have preferred to remain impaled, because the fall was brutal, and there was no safety net. Charo forgot what she’d said.All the mirrors shattered, and Juan went on cutting his hands and feet on the shards. His life became an endless, intermittent break-up, the chronicle of a failure repeated a thousand times, because she still won all their bets even though, every time, she had to give him more in exchange.
At a certain point, without realizing how it happened, Juan started to see something hysterical, pitiful, almost comical in his sister-in-law’s melodramatic reappearances. At a certain point he began to be flippant with her, smiling sympathetically, using the diminutive of her name, not getting up when she left. He didn’t think about it much, because he wanted to think less and less, but he sensed that the key to the process lay not in Charo, but in himself. Sometimes he felt as if his arteries were drying out, as if all moisture were leaving his shell of a body, fossilized by the endless waiting and the inconceivable concessions he’d had to make. By the implacable, temporary nature of his life and the utter destruction of his pride. But still he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t resist her—her body, her smell, her voice—or the tyrannical, incomprehensible decrees of her will.
He couldn’t even do so that night, near the end. By then he’d started to judge the passing of time by his daughter’s age, not by her mother’s promises. He’d agreed to meet Charo at the same restaurant where she’d stood him up two nights earlier, and once again he was the first to arrive and sit at their table. She’d stood him up so many times it had almost become a habit, a ritual that exerted a mysterious influence over him.This was why he had chosen the same restaurant, where the waiters looked as sorry for him as they had forty-eight hours earlier, offering him a silent sympathy that had bothered him at first. Not any more. Now he felt a wretched satisfaction at displaying his wounds in public, as if it were pleasant having everyone know he was a fool. He didn’t really understand what was going on, and he didn’t like it, but he was used to beating himself up more tenaciously than she ever did. He no longer recognized himself and perhaps he was becoming someone else—someone who was harder, unhappier, a worse person but better suited to the way things were.
That evening, however, Charo did turn up.Three-quarters of an hour late, by which time he’d already had more than half a bottle of red wine, and eaten all the bread and butter and olives. She turned up, and all the waiters glanced at him, impressed, suddenly knowing. Juan could almost feel the pats on his back. He watched her as she made her way to the table and sat down opposite him. She looked beautiful, if a little unwell. Maybe this was why she looked so attractive, because of the slight dark rings under her eyes and her sharp, almost gaunt cheeks. She seemed to have aged, though. That evening, Juan realized that Charo was starting to look older than she was, that she was aging fast.
“Sorry,” she said when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything. “I was running late.”
“Yes, two days late.”
She laughed.
“OK, well, I’m even more sorry, then. I’m mortified. Is that enough?”
“I hope it was worth it, at least.”
“Well . . .” She looked at him with that odious smile that said “I know that you know that I know you sleep with other women, and you know that I know that you know that I sleep with other men. Isn’t it great? Aren’t we marvelous, and wicked, and grown-up? Aren’t we having a wonderful time?” Juan felt a sudden, brutal urge to punch her in the face.“Actually, it wasn’t. I would have had a much better time with you. You’re the one I most enjoy being with, as you know.”
She tried to take his hand but he moved it from the table.
“You’re jealous, aren’t you?”
He didn’t want to answer, but the waiter’s arrival disguised his silence, which became heavier, more noticeable once the waiter had departed.
“For God’s sake, Juan,” said Charo after a while. “I can’t believe that after eight years you still don’t know the score.You’re sulking like a little kid. I don’t know what’s the matter with you, you’ve been very strange lately.”
Juan filled their glasses with wine but still said nothing, not just because he didn’t feel like talking, but because he realized that Charo was finding his silence hard to take, and was getting nervous, maybe about to make a mistake.
“I suppose, all in all, it’s logical you’re jealous,” she went on, trying to sound casual. “Really, it’s as if you were my husband—it’s been so long since I slept with Damián anyway.”
“Go to hell, Charito.”
He’d said it quietly—really he’d been talking to himself—but she heard him clearly.
“What?” Charo said, eyes wide with fury.“What did you say?”
Juan Olmedo stood up slowly, took a ten-thousand-peseta note from his wallet, and calmly, carefully placed it on the table before saying, more loudly this time:
“I told you to go to hell.” She flushed.The people at nearby tables were staring.The waiter had brought another bottle of wine and was about to show it to them, but stopped. Juan added:“Charito.”
As he left the restaurant he glanced at his watch.Twenty minutes later his doorbell started ringing continuously. Charo stood there, weeping, her hair a mess, looking worse than Juan had ever seen her look. She tried to stuff a ten-thousand-peseta note into his mouth before flinging herself at him and starting to pummel him with her fists, screaming like a wild, frightened animal.
“You’ll leave me when I tell you to! Is that clear?” Her mascara had run with her tears, forming thick black streaks down her face. Her nose was running and she was spitting out the words so furiously it seemed as if her teeth might fly out after them. “You’ll leave me when I say so! Idiot! Bastard! What do you bet, you’ll only leave me when I say so!”
He failed to restrain her, to force her to stop and think about what she was doing, to recover the last remnants of the lovely, special girl with lips of caramel whom he’d kissed at traffic lights in the Calle Francos Rodríguez after a shift in his father’s shop.And he also failed to hold on to himself, to resist the desire growing with every attack, every scratch, bite, punch she inflicted on him. He had desired her so much when she was at her best, but he now desired her even more when she was at her worst. He held her tight, and then slapped her hard. Instead of slapping him back, she laughed, and he kissed her, and put his arms around her, and caressed her, and possessed her from a place he’d never been before, feeling as if the floor were giving way beneath his feet. He accepted that he wanted to fall, to boil in the thick magma of the inferno into which Charo was dragging him, teaching him to despise her, and truly to despise himself.
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