The Wind From the East (70 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
That night, Juan Olmedo couldn’t sleep, but in the early hours of the morning he managed to convince himself that Nicanor’s visit wasn’t a new development—it was simply another stage in the vicious circle in which Damián’s friend had become trapped ever since Juan had made his one and only mistake, a simple slip. His brother was dead and buried, they couldn’t exhume the body without his knowledge, and it would be of no use, because another autopsy would only give the same results as the first two. Nobody, maybe not even a pathologist, knows as much about accidental deaths as an orthopedic surgeon.Alfonso was now living with Juan, who was his legal guardian, and any meeting or interview, whether official or otherwise, could only take place with his prior, written permission. This hadn’t happened, and would never happen, because there was no point, so Nicanor’s recent visit had to be just another of his veiled threats.“I’m after you,” he’d said to Juan the penultimate time he saw him. “Oh, really?You don’t say!” Juan had replied, in a cocky tone like the one El Canario would have used. Nicanor had done nothing, because he knew there was no case to be made, all he could do was harass Juan, threaten him, first in Madrid and now perhaps here too. Juan hadn’t gone into hiding, he’d traveled over six hundred kilometers and found himself in the same place he’d always been. It was mid-September. If Nicanor had managed the impossible and found evidence where there was none, Juan would have known about it by now. The police didn’t take the month of August off.
Juan got up with a headache and a feeling he knew well: not exactly fear, more a state of active alert, a particular way of keeping his eyes wide open. As he walked to the car, turned on the engine, and set out on the familiar route to Jerez, he berated himself for not having been more open with Sara the previous afternoon. But then he realized that the impassive front he’d adopted, out of sheer surprise, would have been more convincing than a lengthy explanation full of half-truths. Anyway, Sara could be trusted. Juan Olmedo wouldn’t have been able to say why, but he was absolutely certain she could be trusted. Perhaps this was why he felt so intensely weary of silence—he would have liked to talk—but he never brought the subject up again.
This was easy, because he didn’t see Sara until that evening and by then many other things had happened. After her last check-up, Maribel was allowed to leave hospital in the late morning. Beforehand, she’d announced two things: that she didn’t want to have lunch at the hospital, and she didn’t want to leave before him. By the time Juan managed to get away it was already four o’clock and she’d been waiting for several hours in her room. He would never know how much the news that Nicanor was still dogging his steps influenced what he felt when he saw Maribel, in a T-shirt and skirt that looked too big for her, collapsed rather than sitting in an armchair, one hand placed over her wound as if trying to protect it. Her feet were swollen and she was resting them on top of her sandals, waiting until the last moment to put them on. She had dressings on both arms, and her hair was tied back. She’d been in hospital for nine days and had lost a great deal of weight, enough to make her face seem more angular, her cheekbones and jaw more prominent than before. Dressed and ready to leave, it was much more noticeable how pale Maribel’s cheeks had become, how dull her eyes, but when she saw Juan she gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to contain all the other smiles she had ever given him—the mother, the horny girl, the grateful lover, the cunning spider, the cautious libertine, the confused child, the wise old woman, the generous cook, the conspirator, the nocturnal seductress, the conscientious worker, the wounded wife, the dying lover; all the women that Maribel had been for him and through him. Juan Olmedo recognized all these women in the woman now smiling up at him, and he recognized himself in the man who went to meet her. He felt a sudden, unfamiliar urge, somewhere between the desire to possess her and the need to take care of her, and it was only then, seeing her so fragile, so helpless now that she was out of bed, that he stopped thinking about Nicanor. He told himself that without Maribel, without the opportunity to feel useful, good, generous, essential, everything would have been worse.
“Take me out to lunch,” she said after hugging him tightly, kissing him on the lips. “I want something fried and greasy, and very salty. Please.”
“No,” he said, teasing her as if she were a child, but he couldn’t help smiling.“It’s bad for you.”
“No, it’s not.” She laughed. “It’s extremely good for me. I’ve been dying for a plate of fried squid and a beer for days. Seriously, last night I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it!”
Without Maribel, everything would have been so much worse, and definitely less interesting.This thought occurred to Juan again as he watched her tuck into the plate of fried squid, hungrily devouring the first few mouthfuls, then slowing down and stopping. To her own amazement, she had to admit that she couldn’t eat any more, even though the plate was still almost full.
“Maybe my stomach’s shrunk,” she said, smiling as if delighted at the prospect.“No need to diet ever again.”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“What a shame. Now that I’m never going to be able to wear a bikini again, it would at least be nice if I could stay this slim.”
“Why aren’t you going to be able to wear a bikini?”
“Because of the scar.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Maribel!” said Juan, pleased to be able to reassure her, to take care of her internally as well externally. “The navel’s a scar too, and you weren’t ashamed of people seeing that, were you? This one will gradually fade and seem less obvious, even to you. Once you’ve got used to it, you’ll stop noticing it.”
“What about other people?”
“They’ll be looking at you,” he smiled, and so did she,“not at your scar.”
Internal scars are more problematic, he might have added, but he didn’t because he was looking after Maribel and it made him feel good, needed, the best once more, the most intelligent, far removed from Nicanor and his whispered threats, remote from his own mistakes.Yet it was she, keeping to the script of ambiguity that had always governed their relationship, who freed him of the responsibility of looking after her by confirming that nothing would change between them.
“Christ!” she exclaimed as she got home, looking around the tiny living room that was spotlessly clean.“My mother must really be in a state if she came and cleaned the house.”
“It wasn’t your mother,” said Juan, taking her suitcase to the bedroom. She followed, frowning in confusion.“It was your cousin, Remedios.”
“Remedios?” Maribel sat on the bed, shaking her head as if she couldn’t understand.“Why?”
“Because I told her to. I’ve asked her to come over every two days, until you’re better.”
“Oh yes? And who’s going to pay her?”
“Me.”When he saw the expression on Maribel’s face—a mixture of shock and irritation—he explained,“It’s a present.”
“Well, I’m not happy about it, OK? Not happy at all.” Juan stood in the middle of the room, looking so baffled that Maribel relented slightly: “I’m a cleaner, don’t you get it, Juan? I don’t need a cleaner. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“But you’re convalescing at the moment.” As Maribel calmed down, Juan began to feel a little angry.“Your only job is to rest, and move as little as possible until the scar has healed.That’s all I wanted. If you start moving around the house, carrying things, bending down, filling buckets of water, the stitches could burst and you’d be back to square one.You can’t do any cleaning, not even your own home. Not for the time being.You need someone to help you, and that’s all I was trying to do—help you.”
“Right, well it was a bad idea.Things aren’t like that . . .”
Still shaking her head, Maribel lay down on the bed and gestured for him to lie down beside her. She put her arms around him and put her face close to his.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . it’s a bad idea,” she said again.“Things aren’t like that.You don’t have to worry, I’ll sort myself out on my own. I can call my friends, my sisters-in-law, even my mother if I have to. I don’t need anyone to come and clean for me.What would it look like if you were paying Remedios to clean my place—I mean on top of everything else, she’s my cousin. It’s not that I’m not grateful, I am, but there are some things that just aren’t OK, and this is one of them.” She paused, frowned, closed her eyes, and seemed to struggle with what she was about to say next. “I did a lot of thinking while I was in hospital.Well, I didn’t have much else to do, did I? And it’s all the same now with everything that’s happened, but I think you were right, at the beginning, when you said it was stupid for us to get involved. Stupid.” Juan Olmedo, who could never quite get used to the way Maribel was constantly surprising him, burst out laughing even though he didn’t really understand. She laughed too, but continued, “Very stupid. But we went ahead, and here we are. It’s complicated.Very complicated. That’s why I think we ought to leave things the way they are, because if they change, they’ll only change for the worse. I can’t really explain it, it’s just I’m sure that if things do change, they’ll change for the worse. I ought to go back to calling you ‘usted,’ but I don’t think I’ll be able to, because when I was lying there on the pavement and I saw you arrive, I suddenly knew I wasn’t going to die. So I can’t call you Dr. Olmedo any more, I can’t say ‘usted’ to you, that’s just how it is. But one word doesn’t make a big difference, does it? Or does it?”
He looked deep into her eyes, understood more than she had said, and wondered how far he would be capable of going, at what point the clean, transparent pact—that Maribel had apparently willed into existence and with which she was now again offering to relieve him of any responsibility—would become unbearable, stiflingly comfortable, too narrow even for his guilty conscience. He wondered what would happen afterwards, what price he would pay to give her up or to keep her.
“But you don’t have to spend your life working for me, Maribel.”The words didn’t surprise him as he said them.“You could do something else, find another job.Then everything would be easier.”
“Yes, I’ve thought about that,” she said with a sweet, melancholy smile. “I could try, if you like, I could look for another job. But the thing is, I don’t know how to do anything else. I have a son and lots of other expenses, and the only thing I know how to do is clean houses. I realize there are other jobs for people like me, but they pay less.A supermarket cashier might not have to get dirty or ruin her hands, but she earns less than I do. And it’s not just the money. Sara and you, especially you, and your brother, and Tamara, of course, well, you’re like family now. I’m very fond of you. I’m most fond of you, but I’m also fond of Sara, and I don’t mind doing her favors because I like being with her. Sometimes, when I get to her house in the morning, and we have coffee together in the kitchen and chat, I almost forget why I’m there. I like working for you both and things have never been as good as they are now. But I understand what you’re saying, and I know why you’re saying it. So if you want, I could look for another job.”
“No, no, Maribel, that’s not what I mean.”
Juan shook his head and bit his lip, searching for the right words. “I want things to be good for you. I don’t know, I can’t explain it either.”
“It’s not your fault, Juan,” said Maribel. She took his head in her hands, stroked his face, and showed that she was the more intelligent of the two, whenever she needed to be. “You feel bad about the way things are sometimes—I know, I can sense it—but it’s not your fault, it can’t be. It’s my fault. I was the one who didn’t apply myself at school, I’m the one who left school at an early age and got involved with that bastard, got pregnant at eighteen, and didn’t know how to deal with my mother—I’ve done everything wrong. But that’s just the way things are. I can’t do anything about it, only cry over spilled milk. But I don’t want to cry any more. It’s not your fault, Juan, really it isn’t. I feel happier with you than I’ve felt with anyone, but you were right, it is stupid.”
From then on, Juan Olmedo learned to live with a paradox—he accepted the role of immoral, opportunist boss that the ex-husband’s knife had assigned to him when it put an end to what could previously have been considered as simply good fun. But he did it so that Maribel would feel happy with him, and he never again put money in her hand. When she came back to work, it was a few days later than she had intended. Juan had insisted partly because he didn’t want her to take any risks with her scar, and partly because he liked visiting her in the afternoons, under the pretext of examining the wound, and climbing into her warm bed.“I’ll be very careful,” he promised the first time.“You’re always very careful with me,” she answered. He asked for her bank account number and said, casually, that he’d thought it would be more convenient if he paid her wages by direct debit. She smiled and said that was fine.
So, after a warm summery September, autumn arrived, and Juan Olmedo’s life reverted to its usual routine of work and pleasure. Once more, Maribel drew down the blinds on the mornings following his night shifts, a ritual that retained its symbolism even when their planned encounters began to alternate with furtive meetings on Saturdays and Sundays. And while he sometimes thought that Maribel’s attitude—her insistence on never pressing him, her docility, and their private language that let him speak of love in ways that would always remain oblique and comfortably ambiguous—was simply part of her plan, things returned to how they had been before. Or at least they seemed to.
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