The Wind From the East (75 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
This revelation wiped the smile offVicente’s face. He pushed his plate to one side, sat back and looked at her with an expression she found hard to interpret—a slight, sad tension around his lips, as if the past, his story and Sara’s, all the years during which they’d never managed to live together, and all the intervening years, had suddenly landed on the table.
“What’s the matter?” Sara asked, unable to stand his gaze.
“Nothing.” He shook his head, quickly recovering his composure. “You know that I’ve always thought you were clever and strong, capable of anything. But I wasn’t expecting something like this. Not from you.”
“Have I shocked you?” He shook his head again, but she insisted.“Are you disappointed? Do I seem despicable?”
“No.” He took Sara’s hand and squeezed it. “In fact, it’s good to see you like this. In a way, I find it reassuring.”
She removed her hand, but didn’t stop to reflect on his words.
“Are you going to help me?”
“Of course I am. I know someone who might do. Is that all you need?”
“Yes, that’s everything.” She smiled and she would have liked to force him to smile too, to convince him that everything was over between them.“Thank you,Vicente.You don’t know how grateful I am.”
“No, but I’d like to.”
This was bound to happen. Sara looked into his eyes and everything around her began to grow dim, everything merged into the background, the plants, the furniture, the music, leaving her on her own in a sudden void, a blank space filled only with the two dark eyes looking at her from across the table.
“I was crazy about you, Sara,” he said, and his voice sounded as it used to.
She wasn’t sure how she avoided the trap, where she found the strength to stop her hand from advancing across the tablecloth towards his, but then she glanced at her watch, gave a small cry of alarm, and said it was late and she had to leave. He did nothing to hold her back, but cupped her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. “I can’t, Vicente, really I can’t.”And it was true.At that moment, she didn’t want anything—neither money, nor power, nor revenge—as much as she wanted him, but she knew the price she’d have to pay, the terms and mechanisms of her poverty.Ten years ago she would have returned home in tears.That afternoon she couldn’t cry, but it was even worse. She felt so sad, so shriveled up inside, that she told her godmother she wasn’t feeling well, and spent the afternoon in bed, her fists clenched and her eyes open, empty of any sign of life apart from a single obsessive thought—the unbearably clear memory of his body on top of hers.
The following morning she felt no better. She was just sitting down to lunch when a maid came to tell her she had a phone call. From the voice, it sounded like a very young man. She didn’t recognize the name—Rafael Espinosa—when he introduced himself. But he said he’d been given her name by Vicente González de Sandoval, and he wanted to make an appointment to meet her, whenever it was convenient. Moved by the speed with whichVicente had kept his promise, Sara took down the address and agreed to meet the young man in a couple of days’ time.When she saw him standing in the reception of a firm of investment managers that occupied an entire floor of a skyscraper in the Azca district, it took her only a moment to recognize him.
“Do you remember me?”
The last time she’d seen him he was a teenager, a scruffy boy with long hair and a permanent grudge against the world, who slouched and swore with every other sentence. Now his hair was short, he wore highly polished shoes, a deliberately showy tie, a suede jacket, and very clean, pressed jeans—a small concession to rebellion.
“Wow, Rafa! You’ve really changed!”
“Well, you look just the same.”
He was the youngest son of Vicente’s elder sister, and his favorite nephew, maybe because he played the same role in the next generation as Vicente had played in his own. He was also the only member of Vicente’s family that Sara had ever managed to meet. In those days he was a far-left activist and his views were much more radical than his uncle’s, with whom he was always arguing, after ordering twelve-year-old malt whisky or the most expensive dish on the menu:“You can fucking afford it!”Vicente would find it all highly amusing. Sara liked him too; she enjoyed listening to him, because he held up a mirror in which she could see a young economics student, more passionate and naive than the man she’d fallen in love with, and because she herself was sometimes the subject of the reproaches the boy hissed at his uncle—“What about you? Look at you, for fuck’s sake—you’ve got a hot girlfriend like this, but you still stay married to that posh bitch. Some example you set for the working classes!” Once the boy had left,Vicente would tell her that Rafa had a huge crush on her, but she’d never believed him. Maybe this was why she was so pleased to see him again, and felt much more confident than she’d expected as she followed him down the corridor. He closed the door to his office carefully after offering her a seat.
“Right, let’s see.” He sat down at his desk, immediately adopting a serious, professional manner in keeping with the framed certificates from universities at home and abroad that were displayed on the walls. It was clear that he’d also been radical when it came to reinventing himself. “Vicente didn’t say much. I gather it’s a question of opening two lines of investment, is that right? One investing a specific amount of capital, the other investing the income generated by the first.”
“Well, yes, that’s basically it.” Sara nodded.
“OK. And the capital would be in your name. I mean you would be the person with the legal capacity to authorize the investments.” Again Sara nodded.“And I assume that we don’t want the original capital to be at any risk—I mean that in principle the investments we pick should be sufficiently safe and reasonable to justify the fact of choosing them.”
“Exactly.” Sara smiled, grateful that he’d said “we.”
“And we can be more daring, more . . . unorthodox, let’s say, with the second account—I mean, the capital generated by the income from the original sum.” He raised his eyebrows, and she nodded.
Then he opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk to her together with a pen.
“How much money are we talking about?”
Sara wrote down a figure with eight zeroes and returned the piece of paper to him. He looked at it, looked at her in amazement, looked at the figure again, then whistled, loosened his tie, tore up the paper and threw it into the bin.
“It’s very hot today, isn’t it? Shall we go for a drink? I’m parched.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were sitting at a secluded table on the Paseo de la Castellana.Then Rafa asked her what she wanted to drink. Once the waiter had taken their order, he looked at her.
“So you’re going to fleece the old woman, eh?” He laughed, amused by his assessment of the situation.
“Thank goodness I asked your uncle for someone discreet!” complained Sara. Although his remark had shocked her, it also confirmed that Rafa was clearly up to the task.
“But that’s precisely what I am—super-discreet. And that’s why I brought you here, so no one would hear what we’re discussing.”
They never met at his office again, and she only called him there a couple of times. If she wanted to talk to him, she’d leave a message on his answering machine at home, though mostly he called her, always after eleven at night, when no one apart from Sara was likely to answer the phone. Their conversations were short, usually just long enough to arrange their next meeting.They almost always met in the evening too, for dinner or a drink, when Doña Sara had gone to bed and her god-daughter could leave the house without having to provide an explanation. This was why, in all the years they lived together until her death, the old lady was perfectly happy. Tortured by her arthritis, Doña Sara no longer wanted to go out and it was increasingly difficult for her to move, but she almost always had her god-daughter close by, ready to help her, to read her the paper, to sit with her and watch television.
“See how well things have turned out?” she’d say to Sara occasionally. “I knew it was a good idea to sell all that land. Before, you were always rushing around—to the bank, to the property manager. It was nothing but trouble. But now look how nice and cozy we are, spending all day together.”
Doña Sara never asked about the state of her accounts, but to begin with Sara always insisted on giving her details. Indeed, while Rafa was making her rich, he was also adding to her godmother’s wealth. She soon stopped obsessing about the security of every transaction when she saw how capableVicente’s nephew was. He was such a skilful, shrewd investor, so accustomed to seducing Lady Luck, that no impartial observer would have been able to condemn his client for condoning his daring. Despite the fact that Rafa cultivated a taste for risk that Sara found excessive at first, the truth was that the Villamarín fortune had never been so well managed. Rafa was very good at what he did, with a confidence surprising in one so young, but Sara never discovered anything suspect in his way of working, not even when his first transactions produced profits so spectacular that she decided to watch him more closely. During the autumn of 1990, they constantly kept in touch by phone, and became used to seeing each other about once a week. Later, when Sara simply accepted his brilliance, his skill at predicting the future, and the speed with which he made money, it was he who insisted on meeting occasionally even though he had nothing new to tell her. She always agreed, because she’d honed her role as the model daughter at the same rate as her ambition grew, and therefore she had few occasions to escape, to have fun and do herself up for an evening out. She and Rafa got on very well, as well as they had done when she was still withVicente. Rafa liked to show off, reveling in her admiration when share values went up or down in line with his predictions, and Sara had no trouble flattering him, enjoying the figures as much as he did, and listening hungrily to all the tales he told to amuse her.
“I don’t know what I would have done without you, Rafa. I really mean it,” she said to him one evening, towards the end of a meal she insisted on paying for to celebrate an especially brilliant deal.
“Well, imagine what you could do with me.”
He said nothing more and Sara didn’t attach much importance to his words. Rafa was thirty, single, fairly handsome and a huge flirt; less seductive thanVicente had been when she first met him, but much more fun. Sara noticed that he smiled at waitresses, cashiers, and girls in the street, so she assumed that he extended the same treatment to his female clients. For the first time in years she felt good, she felt young, and she was aware of the effect she had on certain men, who’d turn to look at her in the street or when she entered a restaurant. She’d always been elegant, but until now she’d never had the money to prove this to the world. She also still had a good figure, and wanted to make the most of it. Sometimes she realized that the men looking at her, who were always about twenty years older than her financial adviser, took Rafa to be her lover and this clearly made them even more interested.Yet when she went out with him, she felt like a maiden aunt being taken out by her thoughtful nephew. Until one evening, when she was forty-four, the ambiguous words and double entendres sprinkled throughout Rafa’s conversation made her think otherwise.
“Tell me something, Rafa.You wouldn’t be flirting with me, would you?”
“Well, of course I am! I’ve been flirting with you for months. It’s about time you noticed.”
He was smiling and looked completely at ease, ready to seduce her. She burst out laughing.“But that’s ridiculous!”
“Why?” He suddenly sat forward, leaning his elbows on the table, preparing to do battle.“I find you very attractive, Sara.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“I don’t think so. Unless you had me when you were fourteen.”
“Seriously, Rafa,” she said, already seeing him in a different light,“I’m much older than you. Just leave it.You wouldn’t want to.”
“Of course I would,” he said, prepared to press the issue.“I’d love to. We fund managers have a weakness for millionaires, don’t you know—it’s our ideal sexual fantasy.”
Sara couldn’t help laughing. Nor could she ignore the tingling she was feeling inside.
“But you’ve known me for years.”
“Yes, but it’s not the same now. You may not have realized it, but you’ve become a different woman.” He stopped, and when he went on his voice was deeper, more husky. He tapped his index finger on his chest.“I’ve turned you into a different woman.” Sara smiled despite herself, overwhelmed by the confidence that had turned the boy she had known into a man. “A year ago, when I first saw you again, you hadn’t changed at all. I told you so when I saw you, and I meant it.You were like . . . like a primary school teacher.”
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