The Wind From the East (53 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
Yet he still loved her. He loved her and despised her. But he felt so tired, wrecked, worn out, unable to take one more step, to hold out his hand to her once again. So it was Charo who started to make the first move, to humiliate herself, doing all the running, showing him that she wanted to keep him. Juan couldn’t understand her, and he watched her circling, pretending that there was nothing wrong, that everything was fine, that they had something good. He didn’t even try to see her as he used to, with the innocent eyes of the simpleton. His were now predatory eyes that anticipated, with a shrewd malice born of resentment, every one of Charo’s moves—Charo, who made him feel utterly alone when she spoke, when she touched him, when she lay beside him.
The end came quietly, discreetly, without fuss or warning.They were in bed, about to go to sleep; she stayed at his place often now, lavishing upon his indifference the gift of sleep that she used to be so cunningly sparing with. She talked about her other lovers, perhaps to goad him into jealousy.
“Damián doesn’t know a thing,” she said. He wasn’t looking at her—perhaps that was why she chose this time to tell him. “He only knows about you.”
“What?” Juan sat up and, turning towards her, grabbed her arm. “What do you mean he knows about me?”
“Well, not that we’re still lovers, but he knows that we once had something together.”
“How did he find out?”
“He was driving me crazy one day, so I told him. He’s always done it himself, right from the start, he was always sleeping with one woman or another. He never made the slightest attempt to hide it.”
That night, Juan Olmedo couldn’t sleep. He realized that he had never, ever, not even when Charo closed the door behind him for the first time, known what it was to be truly alone.
“I can’t take any more, Charo,” he said at breakfast, looking straight at her, without hesitating, or hiding.“I can’t. I mean it this time. Don’t think of coming back. Don’t call me. Don’t bother to make yet another scene, because I’ve had enough. I can’t go on with this. I just can’t.”
Charo realized that he meant it this time. She didn’t cry or scream. She didn’t take off her clothes or fling herself at him or try to drag him to bed.
“You’ll regret this, Juan,” she said eventually, eyes dry, lips firm.“You’ll regret doing this to me. I know you’ll be sorry.What do you bet?”
It was the last time she ever wagered with him, but she won the bet easily, just as she had won all the others. Juan Olmedo was never alone with her again until he saw her lying by the side of the old Galapagar road, her lifeless body covered by a thick, grey blanket, and then he realized what it was to be truly sorry.
In mid-May, an optimistic east wind, moderate and brave, brought summer with it, spreading a salty joy of bare arms and cheeks tanned by the sun that felt like a victory over the persistent uncertainty of winter. In the south, the arrival of hot weather is a certainty, a guarantee of stability, a spontaneous scientific proof. The changeable weather that drives everyone mad ceases abruptly with the first blast of true heat. From then on, there is nothing but heat, the only variation a benevolent, refreshing foreign wind, or another drier wind, redolent of the desert.
Juan Olmedo’s body welcomed the arrival of summer before his brain even had time to recognize it. At least this was what he thought when he at last managed to identify the insistent tingling that triggered nervous ripples just below the skin at the back of his neck, his arms and his legs. It was a Thursday afternoon, he was driving home from work on a road that shone like a mirror in the sun, and he was feeling uncomfortably hot. He took off his jacket, switched on the air conditioning, and this improved things slightly, but not enough. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to tire himself out. He watered the plants, tidied his desk, reorganized the junk room, hung all the tools that had gradually been dispersed throughout the house over the past few months back on their board, emptied all the wastepaper baskets, carried a couple of rubbish bags out to the bin and, once he’d done all this, decided not to go for an evening walk on the beach, but headed instead to the telephone.
The woman he used as a babysitter was very happy to hear from him. He’d needed her only three or four times in the last few weeks, when he’d had to go out to dinner with colleagues, bonding sessions he’d gradually grown used to and even enjoyed, although he still felt a little reluctant to go, just as he always had back in Madrid. But these outings on Fridays or Saturdays were not the only way in which his life was becoming more settled, a process he found so disconcerting that he couldn’t enjoy it fully.When he was alone, a sudden mistrust, a poisoned gift from another time, another man’s memory, made him doubt everything that was happening, made him doubt what his senses were telling him. It was a need to regain control, regain faith in his senses, that prompted him to go to Sanlúcar that evening, to head down the path of beaten earth that seemed strangely unfamiliar considering it was only a couple of months since he’d last been there.The neon sign above the bar greeted him like an old friend, however.
“How lovely to see you!” exclaimed Elia, playing the hurt, forsaken sweetheart as he came towards her.“I thought the earth had swallowed you up.”
“I’ll go away again if you like,” he said very calmly, as he reached her side.
“No, stay.”
In an instant she went from sulking to being outrageously affectionate, and Juan couldn’t help comparing her silliness, her superficial skill, her profitable, practiced moves, with Maribel’s greedy surrender. It made her rise in his estimation, even compared to a woman who was younger and more attractive. While Elia purred and coiled herself around him, he glanced around the bar which was unusually full for a Thursday night. “Must be the wind,” he thought to himself, and then, because he was still thinking of Maribel when their drinks arrived, he took the opportunity to rid himself of the girl’s embrace. Leaning both elbows on the bar, he asked casually:“Do you happen to know someone from my town called Andrés? He used to deliver bread. I think they called him ‘Tasty Bread’ or something.”
She smiled with only one side of her mouth and half closed her eyes.
“Yes, of course I do,” she replied.“But they don’t call him that because he delivered bread. It’s because he’s so tasty.”
“Right, well, doesn’t make any difference.” Juan smiled, and she smiled back.“He’s not here now, by any chance?”
“He’s always here. He comes nearly every night. Only for a drink, though. He’s usually broke. He hasn’t got a regular job, but he gets work from time to time and then he has a real party. He’s the one over there, leaning against the pillar. See him? The one in the pink shirt.”
Juan Olmedo looked, not realizing that the man had been watching him for some time. He now returned Juan’s gaze unflinchingly. He must have been about thirty, of average build, with dark-blond hair and the kind of doll-like face—clearly drawn eyebrows, large round eyes, small nose, fleshy lips—that usually graced male models.“He’s too old to pull off that teenage-heartbreaker look successfully,” Juan thought. He also thought he looked shorter than Maribel, which meant he wouldn’t reach above Juan’s shoulders. Just tall enough to impress an eleven-year-old girl. He smiled, so that the man would look away.
“You’re fucking his wife, aren’t you?”
Her comment made him start, and she noticed. He took a long sip of his drink, and thought a moment before answering. “First, she’s no longer his wife. Secondly, he doesn’t give a shit who she’s fucking. And thirdly . . .”“Yes, I am fucking her. So what?” he thought, but didn’t say it out loud, because he remembered how careful Maribel was about this, the strict, universal cautiousness that he found so disconcerting, especially since it was like the shame she might have expected him to feel, but which he didn’t.
“Don’t call me ‘usted,’ Maribel, it’s too polite. Call me ‘tu,’” he remembered to say at last, the third time they slept together.
“Why not?” She held him tighter under the sheets as a way of showing her gratitude for his request, although she didn’t intend to act on it. “Does it bother you?”
“No, it’s not that. It doesn’t bother me, it just seems silly. It’s ridiculous that you use a formal way of addressing me when . . .” He tailed off and shrugged, smiling, hoping to convey the rest of the sentence that he didn’t want to say out loud—it’s ridiculous that you address me as “usted” with the same mouth you also use to suck my cock.
“Maybe.” She stopped to think, to find the right words.“If I start using ‘tu’ at this stage, I’ll get used to it, because, well, that always happens, and then sooner or later it’ll slip out when I’m telling Andrés about something we’ve discussed, or when I’m mentioning you to someone.And if Andrés hears, he’ll realize what’s going on, and then he’ll get used to it, and if my mother finds out . . .”
“What?”
She didn’t answer, only looked at him, and he guessed the rest of the explanation. “This isn’t an easy business,” her eyes told him, “it can’t be because, away from this bed, you and I are not equal, and if my mother finds out I address you as ‘tu,’ she’ll immediately get suspicious, and I’ll end up letting it slip and then everyone will know, and that won’t be good for anyone, because no one will accept that in this difficult business we’re both winners, they won’t understand what goes on in this bed, and I’ll get an even worse reputation, and you’ll start to get a bad one too, and you won’t care because you can afford not to give a fuck what people think of you in this town, but I can’t, because times may have changed, but not in that way. Not for women like me, and for the children of women like me.That’s why this affair, that’s so easy when we’re here in bed, is so difficult outside, because here you and I are equal, but outside we’re not, and you are ‘usted,’ but I’m still me, and I’m not much.”
“The fact is, if you don’t mind,” she said after a while, “I’d rather go on using ‘usted.’”
Then he kissed her on the mouth for a long time, passionately, with a sudden need to merge with her, to absorb her into himself and keep her there inside him, safe. He didn’t bring the subject up again although it was always on his mind, so much so that he managed to lie to Elia so fluently and eloquently that he was sure she believed him.
“And thirdly, I’m not fucking Maribel. The fact is, I wouldn’t mind, but I haven’t even had a chance to try. I never see her.”
“But she works at your house!” Her look was shrewd rather than suspicious, which revealed the discreet reach of her intelligence.
“Yes, but only between one and five in the afternoon, and I’m at work then.Twenty-five miles away. At the hospital in Jerez, as you know.”
“Ah!” said the girl, showing her ugly teeth as she bit her lower lip, as if punishing herself for having made a mistake.“I just thought, as you never come to see me any more, that must be it. And then Andrés said that maybe . . .”
“I’ve been very busy lately.”
He didn’t feel he owed her more of an explanation, and she didn’t dare ask. Instead, she twined herself around him again, like a trained, hungry snake, before pulling him down the corridor at the back of the bar.
Juan Olmedo, who had come very late to this seemingly complicated and problematic world only to discover that it was an easy place, assumed that Elia would take great pains this time.And he was right. His body was grateful to her for all her efforts, and yet, beneath the basic but costly gratitude, the dose of pleasure that she gave him didn’t satisfy him or make him feel any calmer.The following day when he woke up, he felt anxious and stayed anxious until, at two thirty, absolving himself in advance for all his past and future mistakes, he knocked on the door of his head of department’s office.The sky was a vivid blue, the sun was hot outside the window, and the demon of the east wind was tirelessly practicing new ways of insinuating itself into the landscape and its inhabitants. Juan could feel it slipping inside his body, keeping him on edge, unable to concentrate properly on anything.
“Listen, Miguel,” Juan said. Sitting at a desk covered with piles of graphs, his friend looked back at him over his reading glasses. “I was thinking, the department’s pretty quiet, there’s no one in surgery, no one due to come in, and I don’t have any patients this afternoon. So, I was wondering if I could take a couple of hours off to deal with a personal matter.”
Miguel Barroso took off his glasses, leaned back in his chair and smiled mischievously as he gestured for Juan to sit down.
“What for?” he asked, wrinkling his nose as if he hadn’t heard what Juan had just said.
“A personal matter.” Juan Olmedo couldn’t help laughing when he saw his friend’s expression.“It’s in my contract. I have the right to take time off if necessary.”
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