The Wind From the East (80 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
“He said he was my father, and I was his son, and nothing could ever change that, and I believed him. He said he wanted to wait for her after she finished work, to talk to her and make her change her mind.That’s what he said.” Juan Olmedo was looking at him with the same expression as before but Andrés could no longer see him, trapped in the repetition of that single thought, the treacherous truth that had completely annihilated him:“It’s all my fault. But he’s my father and I’m his son, and he kept on saying that nothing could ever change that.”
“But it’s not true,Andrés,” said Juan, speaking for the first time in a long while.“It’s not your fault, it can’t be.You’re only twelve years old and he tricked you, that’s all.You didn’t know any better.Your mother is the only father you’ve ever had.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“Of course it is.” Juan spoke softly, slowly. “It’s the only thing that matters.”
Andrés couldn’t reply. He collapsed over the table, clutched his head in his hands and burst into tears. It was a long time since he’d cried like this, until he was exhausted. Not even on that September afternoon, when he was busy keeping his eye on the time as he swam at the pool, thinking he ought to leave if he didn’t want to be late for his father, and the security guard had arrived, looking white as a sheet, and told him his mother had been taken ill and Juan had driven her to hospital. He’d fallen apart when he’d seen her lying there in her hospital bed, pale, with all those tubes stuck into her, so small and alone. He remembered how she’d smiled and opened her arms to him. But even then, he hadn’t been able to shed all his tears. All his feelings of guilt and betrayal had remained locked inside, haunting his days as he rode off on his bike, trying to find his father, and all his nights. And then there was that terrible morning when they finally caught him, when he was arrested and put in prison, and Andrés had thrown his bike into the skip. He wouldn’t have known what to say even if he had found his father.And he didn’t know what to say when he saw his grandmother, looking thinner and more hunched than before, as she hugged him in the middle of the street. He didn’t know what to do, or where to go in all the hours he spent wandering about town, longing for the intensity of pain rather than this deadening numbness. Sometimes, he would even kick a bench or punch a rubbish bin, just to feel something. He needed to be alone because he was not the person he used to be.When he was with his mother, he performed the actions and rituals of a distant normality that now seemed like someone else’s life. She pretended that she didn’t notice, watching him as he ate listlessly, or sat in front of the television and stared at the ceiling, or smiled at the wrong time. But she never said a word.Time expanded and contracted around him, like the cloud of doomed mosquitoes. Had he been four or five years older, he would have left, gone as far away as possible. But he couldn’t do that, so he’d succumbed to paralysis. Until Juan Olmedo rang the doorbell that afternoon, and drove him to the beach, and bought him a Coca-Cola in a bar, and gave him an opportunity to talk.
Andrés had cried until he could cry no more, but he didn’t know whether telling Juan everything had made him feel better or worse. His eyes were swollen and his cheeks felt numb. Outside, it was almost dark, and the dim, yellowish light inside the bar seemed to submerge them both in a miniature sea.
“He’s my father,” he said for the last time, his voice now meek and weary. “And I’m his son. It’s true, whatever you say. But we—you, Sara, me and my mother—I don’t know what we are.” He stopped and looked at Juan.“That’s the problem—I don’t know what we are.”
“It doesn’t matter what we are.” Juan sounded so sure he might have spent all his life preparing this answer.“What matters is
how
we are.And we’re fine. And we’re going to go on being fine.That’s all that matters.”
how
we are.And we’re fine. And we’re going to go on being fine.That’s all that matters.”
Neither of them spoke on the journey back. Juan stopped the car and Andrés got out without saying a word, but as he closed the door, he said goodbye and thank you. He felt exhausted. Somehow he got the key into the lock and turned it. Inside it was warm, and smelled of cooking, and as he came in, his mother called out to him in the absent, sing-song tone she used when she was busy. Andrés went into the kitchen and found her making ratatouille. He put his arms around her, pressed his face against her apron and told her everything.
Perico the teddy bear died, disemboweled by his best friend, at four thirty in the morning. Having committed the crime, Alfonso Olmedo threw the remains to the floor and ran off. His brother Juan was too scared, too confused and too drunk to be able to think, so he sat motionless by Damián’s corpse for some time, unable to decide what to do next. He’d always worried about Alfonso. He couldn’t remember a time when his concern for him had ever disappeared entirely, and yet, as happens to parents of young children, his anxiety eventually became a habit, a duty he no longer paid much attention to. This is why children drown in swimming pools while their families are sunbathing, why they get lost in shopping centers, their mothers not noticing that they’ve let go of their hand for a moment; this is why they become addicted to alcohol or heroin while their parents boast to their colleagues about how well they’re doing at school.
Juan Olmedo dialed the number for the police, but he hung up before anyone answered. His whole body started to shake more violently than before and he broke into a sweat.Then an absolute awareness of his situation emerged from some remote part of his brain. He hadn’t pushed his brother. Damián had fallen down the stairs all on his own, cracking his skull on the bottom step. Juan hadn’t pushed him, but no one knew this, and there was no one else around because it was late, and they had both been very drunk. He thought things over again, slowly this time. Even if Juan hadn’t intervened, even if he hadn’t touched him, Damián would still have died.And Juan would have been calling for an ambulance so that another doctor could certify that Damián was dead and take charge of the corpse, so that he could feel he’d done everything he could after the accident. The accident. He took several deep breaths, then picked up the phone again. Instead of dialing the emergency number, he called the hospital where he worked. He wanted to be on familiar ground, to feel protected and understood, comforted by his colleagues. He felt a sudden, terrible thirst, an overwhelming desire to drink in order to regain control of his body and focus his mind. He knew that one more drink would, for a time, mitigate the effects of all the others he’d drunk earlier, so he swallowed it down fast, without searching for a clean glass or getting ice from the freezer. Only then did he go looking for Alfonso.
He couldn’t remember a time when his concern for his younger brother had ever disappeared entirely. Later, he could not even remember having forgotten about Alfonso. But as he carefully stepped around Damián’s body, getting blood on his shoes so that he left bloody footprints on the stairs, Juan Olmedo realized that he’d have to explain the sawdust as well. Alfonso had reacted very badly to Charo’s death. He’d stopped eating and sleeping, become listless and lost all his hair. There was no knowing how he would react this time. Juan had spent his life watching him, observing him, trying to guess what he was thinking or feeling, what he wanted or feared, but he’d never managed to establish any systematic pattern to his behavior. The specialists treating Alfonso had warned Juan that he never would.Alfonso’s reactions could only be predicted in basic, rudimentary processes of stimulus and reward, but when he found himself in a situation outside these parameters, when he was facing something new and unfamiliar and didn’t know whether he would receive a punishment or a reward, he gave in to the most random impulses, and these were rarely logical. The hospital was nearby, so the ambulance wouldn’t take long to arrive. When Juan entered Alfonso’s room, he was already composing his version of events, the one he knew he must memorize so that he could repeat it later, word for word. But despite his apparent calm, the instinctive, mechanical efficiency that felt as if it belonged to someone else, he couldn’t help feeling deeply moved, and sorry, when he found Alfonso lying motionless, face down on his bed. His brother didn’t look up but as Juan approached he huddled against the wall, cringing as if he were about to receive a blow.
Juan didn’t merely want to reassure him and comfort him. Earlier, as he emptied his glass in one gulp and cursed himself for having smashed Damián’s skull against the step when he was sure that fate had already done the dirty work for him, he realized that the only real risk he faced was the deliberate, simultaneous murder of Perico the teddy bear. This was why he had come in search of Alfonso. He wanted to make him doubt what he had seen, confuse him, convince him that all he’d been doing was examining the wound, and that this was why he’d lifted Damián’s head and held it before laying it gently back down on the step. It shouldn’t be too difficult.Alfonso was docile and obedient—he believed whatever he was told by the people he loved.That evening, however, when he finally turned round and held out his arms, it was Juan who started to cry, and Alfonso who stroked his back and wiped away his tears, while Juan stammered that it was horrible, Damián had fallen down the stairs and he thought he was dead. Then the doorbell rang and the eldest Olmedo brother went to answer, appearing so distraught and incoherent that the doctor, who knew him, wondered for a moment whether he shouldn’t deal with Juan first before seeing to the wounded man.
For Juan Olmedo, that moment—the arrival of the ambulance team, the sound of their equipment as they set it out on the floor, the whispering that was soon replaced by sympathetic looks and words of condolence—remained imprinted on his mind like a milestone, a line, the end of the day. This was how he would always remember it. And he would always remember the following day, the horrendous hangover that felt as if he was wearing a helmet that was far too small for him, the cocktail of analgesics he took in an attempt to get rid of it, and his equanimity, his ability to grasp what was going on around him, what had happened, and what might happen in the future. By then, Dami was with him. He couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there, sitting on the curb outside their old house in Villaverde, wearing shorts and a striped T-shirt, his wavy chestnut hair looking almost golden in the sun. He was holding something, a broken gadget he’d found in the street and was fixing, and he looked up at Juan and smiled, showing his dazzlingly white teeth. Dami was there inside him, somehow slipping through a crack in time and sitting down beside him, lodging his smile in the absolute blank of Juan’s mind.
His mind had been empty, disconnected from the world for several hours. For the rest of his life, Juan would always remember how the cold white dawn of that day had seemed to stretch endlessly until, in the afternoon, he woke up sweating, with a merciless headache, not knowing where he was. He had fallen asleep on a sofa in the sitting room at Damián’s and someone had covered him with a blanket. Dami was looking at him, smiling, forcing Juan to remember. But he never remembered everything. He could recall the doctor offering his condolences, a paramedic holding out a form, and he remembered signing it, nodding as someone told him that in a case like this—obviously a domestic accident—an autopsy would not be necessary. He remembered that he’d carried on drinking.They must have removed Damián’s body before the rest of the household woke up, but he wasn’t sure. He was aware of having spoken to the maids, telling them what had happened, and asking them to clean the stairs before Tamara got up. He could remember—as if in a dream—the deathly pallor, the horrified expression of one of the maids. She was South American and she broke into panicked sobs at the idea of cleaning up the blood. The other maid, who was calmer, must have cleaned it up, or maybe it was one of his sisters, because he remembered seeing his sisters. He must have called them, although he was unaware of having done so.They later confirmed that he had been the one to phone, waking them at around seven in the morning, such an odd hour to ring on a Sunday morning that they had feared the worst before he even spoke.When they arrived at Damián’s, they found Juan asleep in a chair. Paca got him onto the sofa, covered him with a blanket, then shut the sitting-room door and told the maids to let him sleep.“There was nothing else you could do,” she said to him later. He’d apparently told them the whole story when they arrived and was so distraught, so incoherent, that they were worried about him.“Please get some rest, Juanito, or you’ll fall to pieces, and that’s all we need.”Tamara’s voice was what woke him. He wanted to see her and give her a kiss before she left.This was his first mistake.The little girl was surprised to find her two aunts there when she came down to breakfast, and she immediately asked where her father was. Trini said Damián had called them because he had to go on an urgent trip, and he worried Tamara might get bored being alone all day with Alfonso, so he’d asked them to pick her up and take her to spend the day with her cousins. Usually, Tamara would have been delighted at the idea, but this time she was reluctant to accept, and kept asking questions. Her father didn’t usually go away, all his business was in Madrid, and her aunts were acting very strangely, smiling a lot but with reddened eyes as if they’d been crying. Anyway, she always stayed at home with Alfonso and the maids when her father went out, which was happening more and more lately, and he’d never seemed concerned about her before. But she got ready to spend the day with her cousins because she had no other choice. She was almost at the door when Juan appeared, as pale as a ghost, and she realized they’d been lying to her. Going to see Tamara was Juan’s first mistake, but he wasn’t aware of it at the time.
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