The Wind From the East (65 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
“That’s the deal,” she said, suddenly very serious. “I always keep my side of the bargain, now you’ve got to keep yours.”
“OK,” said Juan, letting go of her arm.“Would you like me to cover my face with my shirt before I ring the bell?”
“No,” she said, and laughed.“There’s no need for that.”
She left, and Juan Olmedo sat wondering whether Maribel’s concerns were justified—all the meticulous precautions, the permanent state of alarm about what her neighbors, her in-laws, her mother, her ex-husband might think. It was a subject she didn’t like to talk about, and she refused to see sense even when Juan tried to reason with her. “No, they can’t do anything to me,” she’d say quickly, “I know they can’t, but they can talk about me, and I’d rather they didn’t, that’s all. I know it’s no big deal but I’d prefer it if they didn’t go around saying,‘Poor little Maribel, silly little Maribel.’ It’s not much to ask, is it?” “No,” Juan would always agree, “it isn’t, but . . .” He could never finish the sentence because he realized that nothing he could say—“You’re over thirty, you’re independent, you’re separated from your husband, you can do what you like, it’s none of their business who you sleep with”—would make her feel better, or stop her hearing their remarks in her head—“Poor little Maribel, she’s gone and got herself involved again, silly little Maribel, she’s found another one to take advantage of her.” He understood, but he persisted, pointing out her insistence on calling him “usted,” the way she always hung back and walked beside Alfonso when they went anywhere in town, sitting in the back if there was ever anyone else with them in the car, the ridiculous need for so much secrecy. He found it all touching, but above all hugely exciting, and as he sat in his car, glancing at his watch and discovering how exasperatingly slowly ten minutes could pass, it occurred to Juan Olmedo that perhaps Maribel was deliberately exaggerating her fears in order to keep him dangling at the end of a rope she’d learned to manipulate so wisely.As Juan jumped out of the car, he didn’t realize that this was the first time he’d ever suspected any hint of a planned strategy in Maribel’s actions. Before the night was over, he would find it incredible that he’d ever doubted it.The fuck he’d been looking forward to for over ten hours was memorable, but what Juan Olmedo would never forget was what happened afterwards.
“I’ve been thinking . . .”
Maribel had got out of bed naked and gone to the kitchen—“Let’s have a drink, shall we?”—leaving Juan alone in her tiny bedroom with rough, white walls in which the showy Empire-style bedroom suite barely fit. A disparate army of soft toys that Andrés had won for his mother at fun-fairs over the years filled every available surface, although the place of honor was reserved for a doll in a First Communion dress. Maribel came back with a glass in each hand and a well-prepared speech.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, handing him a drink and getting back into bed, “but for the last few days I’ve been thinking that, because of the holidays—which I really need, because I’m knackered—but as Andrés is at your house all day . . . Well, it’s no wonder, is it? I mean, compared to this place, you have the pool and the garden and everything, so it’s not surprising he’d rather be there. He was over at your place all the time last summer. Of course I didn’t take any time off last year because I’d only just started my new job.Well, anyway, I can’t really take proper holidays. That’s how it is when you’re a single mother, you’ve still got to do the shopping and washing and cooking every day. So that’s why I was thinking—please don’t take this the wrong way—that I’m just as happy to cook at your place for all five of us as I am to cook here for just me and Andrés. Just as happy.And that way I wouldn’t have to argue with him all the time, and you’d have one thing less to think about, and the kids would get proper meals.Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking.”
She’d said all of this with her eyes fixed firmly on the bottom of her glass, but when she finished, she had no choice but to look up at Juan. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a childishly candid expression on her face.As he stared at her, Juan Olmedo felt like getting up and shouting “Bravo!,” producing a handkerchief to wave in her honor as they did at bullfights. But he just smiled and sat up, intending to convey his admiration for her little show.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, but this time she didn’t know the answer.
“Because I really admire you, Maribel.”
“You admire me?” She looked disconcerted, almost scared.“Why?”
“Because you’re a good person.And because you’re very good to me.”
“Yes, well, I thought . . .” She was blushing furiously now.“I know you like going to the beach in the mornings—people from Madrid always do, I don’t know why; I prefer the afternoons.We could take turns, with the kids, I mean.”
“I don’t think I’ll be spending much time at the beach this year, Maribel.”
She burst out laughing and then, as if she felt more confident now, she was more direct:
“The thing is, I don’t think I could take a whole month without being alone with you.”
He took the glass from her hand, put it on the bedside table, and lay down, taking her with him.
“What are you going to tell your mother if she finds out?” he asked, putting his arms around her and kissing her.
“That you’re paying me overtime.” She laughed.“I have it all worked out.”
“So I see.”
This was how the pleasantly chaotic summer holiday began for Juan Olmedo, ending with his lover almost bleeding to death on a pavement. For a whole month, they lived well, and together, an odd couple living an odd existence with odd hours, in the gloom of a house with its blinds down, where people had their siesta in the morning and lunch in the afternoon, and nights stretched on until everyone was on the verge of collapse, simply in order to take advantage of the time, when even Sara, an obstinate night owl, would have given in. Sometimes, by the time they were alone together on the porch, they were so tired, so sleepy, that Juan only just had the energy to get up, walk to the car and drive Maribel home. One of those times, at around three in the morning when even the garden hammock was looking attractive, he felt so torn between desire and laziness that he had a brilliant idea.
“Let’s go to bed, Maribel.”
“What?” she said, as if she hadn’t understood.
“Let’s go to bed.”
“Now?” she said, eyes wide.“Are you crazy?”
“The kids are fast asleep.Your son’s sleeping in Alfonso’s room at the end of the corridor, and Tamara doesn’t even wake up when her alarm clock rings, so let’s go to bed, come on.” She didn’t dare move. Knowing what she was like, he arched his eyebrows and decided to force things.“What, would you prefer the hammock?”
“No, please, not the hammock,” she said, laughing.
“Well, then. Let’s take off our shoes and creep upstairs. We can lock the door and we’ll set the alarm for ten, or nine if you like. No one here will wake before eleven at the earliest, Alfonso’s always the first one up, and he just heads straight for the TV without bothering anyone.”
Maribel seemed convinced by his arguments and the following morning Juan’s predictions came true so accurately that at ten thirty they both left the house, having had a shower and breakfast without anyone even knowing she’d slept there. Juan went to knock on Tamara’s door and said he was off to the street market, he wanted to buy some new trousers.The little girl responded with a grunt and told him to let her sleep. Maribel needed a red zip and a small frying pan, and she asked if he’d mind taking her into town. Juan said of course he wouldn’t.
“And you don’t mind about last night, do you?” she asked as they got into the car.
“What do you mean?”
“Well . . . that I stayed in your house overnight and all that.”
Juan looked at her, but he couldn’t see her face because it was turned towards the window.
“Does it matter to you?”
“Yes.”
He said nothing more until they got to town. He parked in the first space he found that was reasonably close to the market and suggested they walk the rest of the way. He already knew what he was going to say.
“My father was a baker, you know.”
“Oh! So was mine.” She sounded surprised but Juan couldn’t tell if it was because of what he’d said or the way he’d come out with it so suddenly. “Well, only for a short time,” she added.
“Mine was a baker all his life. He died outside his bakery. His aorta burst just as he was unlocking the shop, and he fell down dead. He wasn’t very old, only in his late fifties.”
“I’m sorry.”
Juan Olmedo stopped a moment, looked at her and smiled. He felt like putting his arm round her, but remembered in time that they were in public, so put his hands in his pockets instead.
“You don’t have to be sorry, Maribel, it was a long time ago. I just told you about it so you’d realize there are many things about me you don’t know.That my father was a baker, for instance. Or why I’m alone, why I’ve never married, why I came to live in this town.”
“So, why did you?” she said, looking at him as if this were a guessing game. He sighed before answering.
“Oh, because I felt it was all over for me, I suppose—it’s a long story. But I’m still alive, I’m walking along here with you now. Nothing really matters to me any more. But that has one advantage: now I only do what I want to do. If I don’t want to do something, I won’t do it. Do you understand?”
“Sort of. But it’s enough.”
“Now I don’t understand.”
“I mean it’s enough for me.”
“You’re happy with so little, Maribel,” thought Juan Olmedo, and he felt the meanness, the hypocritical selfishness of his words. “I wasn’t always like this,” he would have liked to say to her, “I wasn’t, I swear,” but he didn’t add anything more, because he didn’t want to risk telling her the truth, that he’d asked her to stay the night because it was three in the morning, because he didn’t fancy taking his clothes off outside, and he felt even less like getting the car out of the garage and driving her home. He’d liked having her there in his bed in the morning, but it didn’t change a thing.
But the knife that had gone straight to Maribel’s liver, without severing a major artery on the way, was about to change things forever. After he had spoken to Miguel Barroso and knew that the only thing he had to do was carry on driving towards Jerez like a madman, Juan Olmedo began thinking and feeling without wanting to, and seeing, superimposed upon the narrow band of road ahead of him, bodies and names, faces and expressions, images of past and other more recent sins. Deep down, he’d never believed Maribel, he’d never taken her seriously, he’d managed to convince himself that her fear and caution, the anxiety so similar to a shame she might have expected him to feel, but that he did not feel, was simply a happy game, a clever move in a match she’d initiated and controlled from the start.And he’d admired her for it, since it benefited them both. He’d admired her as much as he’d despised her ex-husband, that little man with a big head who surely couldn’t be all that frightening because he looked so comical, with his doll’s face and wannabe gangster mannerisms, the ridiculous way he challenged Juan with his eyes as he raised his shirt collar. He was pathetic. Juan Olmedo knew he was the better man, and the most intelligent of the three, so he’d met the man’s gaze with a proud smile and thought how small and weak he was, without stopping to wonder what lay behind that weakness, the same factors behind the reality now lying on the back seat of his car. He hadn’t taken Maribel’s fears seriously, he hadn’t wanted to see a motive in her ex-husband’s eyes, he’d refused to. Juan was the better man, the most intelligent of the three, that had been enough, and it wasn’t the first time he’d been in this position.
“When you stab someone, you have to turn the handle with the blade inside the body, like this, see? As if it’s a screwdriver, so it does more damage.” As he drove like a madman towards Jerez de la Frontera, Juan Olmedo remembered the gruesome tales of fights he’d overheard as a receptive child living in a tough district, in a tough town, in a tough time.“You can blind someone using two fingers, like this, see?”Without wanting to, Juan was thinking, and remembering his passivity, his indifference, his guilty superiority as he went to the small-town brothel to do exactly what all the others did. He should have done something, said something to the man, threatened him while there was still time. But what for? When you punched someone it was a good idea to have a battery in your fist or, even better, a sugar cube soaked in brandy then left to dry, so that it crystallized, with the edge protruding between the middle and ring fingers of your good hand. He knew all these things, and a few more besides. He pressed the accelerator, honked his horn, drove on the hard shoulder, rushing to get to the hospital, remembering and regretting. He should have punched the man’s lights out, smashed a bottle over his head, because you could have seen this coming, it was obvious from the start. He should have grabbed him by the lapels, got right up close to him and said: “Don’t mess with me, you little bastard.” He should at least have said this. But what would have been the point? The man was only interested in Maribel, in her money, and he knew exactly how to turn the knife so as to cause the most damage. He would probably even have guessed that Juan was capable of kissing his ex-wife on the mouth simply to stop her talking.
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