The Wind From the East (83 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
It was almost four months since Damián’s death, and three since Juan had received the two autopsy reports. He couldn’t understand what had happened, but he wasn’t going to wait to find out. Nicanor wasn’t at home when Juan called, so after a supper during which he hardly touched his food, he went out to look for him. If he wasn’t on duty, he’d be at one of the three bars where he used to hang out with Damián, places he’d gone to almost every evening for over twenty years. He wasn’t at the first place Juan tried. But as he entered the second, he saw him standing alone at the bar.
“You’ve gone too far this time, Nicanor,” he said as he reached him, tapping him on the shoulder before Nicanor had seen him. “Just like your father used to. What you did this afternoon was illegal. Unlawful detention, I think it’s called.”
“Alfonso came to the station of his own free will,” Nicanor answered calmly.
“In the eyes of the law, Alfonso has no will. His consent has no legal value, and you know it.”
“The thing is, Juan,” said Nicanor with a twisted smile, “I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I’ve been tossing and turning, going over Damián’s accident in my mind—the stairs, his fractured skull, and what Alfonso says about you trying to revive him by bashing his head against the step. It’s all very strange, don’t you think? I couldn’t understand it until I started thinking like one of those detectives on TV.You had the opportunity, Juanito, and you certainly had a motive, because you’ve always been in love with Damián’s wife. And you were having a row with him—you told me so yourself. So I mentioned it to some of my colleagues. I had trouble convincing them, but in the end they saw it my way.They all knew and liked your brother.And now they know that you killed him. I might be able to prove it, or I might not.You never know. But I’m going after you, Juanito.”
“Oh, yes?” said Juan, and realized that he too was smiling, although he didn’t know why. To throw Nicanor off balance, Juan called the waiter and ordered a whisky. Neither of them spoke while his drink was being served.
“I’m going to tell you something, Nicanor: I didn’t kill my brother. And if Tamara finds out, if she hears one word, even if it’s only a rumor, if you ever think of telling her that I killed her father, I’ll kill you.”Then he drank half his whisky in one gulp, feeling the excessive, innate violence that had always surprised everyone, including himself, rise to the surface.“Remember what I said, because I mean it. If Tamara hears any of this, I will kill you, Nicanor. Remember, because I swear I’ve never been so serious about anything in my life.”
He’d finished his drink, put some money on the counter and left. When he was outside, he found he was shaking, and suddenly felt uncontrollably nauseous. He hardly had time to reach the corner and grab the first lamp post before he vomited. He wasn’t deceiving himself—he was afraid.While he was inside the bar his fear had fortified him, sustained him, given him the grave, metallic hardness that had stunned Nicanor. But now fear was making his entire body slack so that he was reduced to a puppet. Still, he was pleased, although he suspected that his display would not be enough to scare off Nicanor.
It wasn’t, but Damián’s friend took over a month to reappear. He chose a bright Saturday in April, the day one of Tamara’s classmates was having a birthday party. Around five, Juan drove her to the party, which was some distance away from Damián’s house, on the Avenida del Mediterraneo. It took him almost an hour and a half to get there, find a parking space, take Tamara to the door, ask what time he should come back for her, stop off at his flat to check on things and collect his post, and then get back to Damián’s. He was thinking of setting out again at around eight, taking Alfonso with him, so that all three of them could go to the cinema afterwards. As he entered the house, he called out to Alfonso, but he wasn’t downstairs.Then he heard his brother screaming. Juan rushed upstairs and Nicanor moved away from the door when he saw him. Alfonso had crawled under the bed and wouldn’t come out.
“Just paying a visit,” said Nicanor, opening his jacket.“As a civilian—no gun. I wanted to see how you all are.”
Juan said nothing; he didn’t even look at him. He went straight to Damián’s room and picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” Nicanor had followed him.
“The police.”
Nicanor disappeared, leaving so quickly that the front door had slammed even before Juan had reached the stairs. Alfonso told him that Nicanor had got very cross with him—as cross as the last time, if not more so—and Juan had assured him that he’d never have to see him again, that Nicanor would never shout at him or hit him again, and that the three of them were going to go away, far away to a place he knew and that Alfonso would like because it wasn’t cold there in winter, and summer lasted almost all year round. It was by the sea, and it was called Cádiz.
The east wind blew until the middle of November, making the autumn warm and gentle, as if it had decided to take pity on them and keep the west wind out until the end of Maribel’s convalescence. In one way or another, they had all taken part in it, yet no one could help her in the final stage of her recovery. Not even Juan Olmedo, who on speaking to her son realized that Maribel must have had a premonition, even before she was stabbed, that Andrés’s new closeness to his father would inevitably lead to her encounter behind the builders’ hut, where he’d tried to convince her he loved her with a knife in his hand. Juan was sure that Maribel would suffer more from the effects of this last wound than the first, and he was impressed by the fortitude with which she’d assumed the burden of Andrés’s pain in addition to her own, continuing to be both a mother and a father to him, never repaying his betrayal with a betrayal, never saying a word to anyone. Only later did he come to understand other things—Maribel’s reluctance to report her ex-husband to the police before speaking to her son, the look of powerlessness on her face after the interview with the policewoman, the indifference with which she greeted the news that the police had caught her ex-husband in a village near Seville. She was neither upset nor pleased by his arrest, and it definitely hadn’t dissolved the nameless tension, the anxiety that Maribel claimed not to feel but which Juan could detect even when she assured him, with a bright smile, that she was fine.The arrest had, on the other hand, enabled Juan to unravel a personal mystery, which he had never mentioned to anyone. His indignation at the policewoman’s brusque treatment of Maribel had not entirely supplanted a strange, impure feeling that had sprung from the suspicion that Maribel did, after all, want to protect her ex-husband, and this feeling wasn’t dispelled even when he saw her sign her statement. When he realized that he was wrong, that the victim didn’t shed a single tear for her attacker, he had to accept that the uneasiness gnawing away at him might be impure, but it wasn’t unfamiliar. He knew its name. He’d lived with it for most of his life. It was jealousy, although he only recognized it once it had gone.
“Do you love her?”
Miguel Barroso had asked him this question out of the blue a couple of weeks after Maribel had left hospital.They were in the bar where they sometimes had a drink after work, on an evening that was no different from any other. Miguel, as usual, did most of the talking while Juan listened, responding occasionally to one of his friend’s remarks, a mixture of professional gossip and depressing tales about his private life. Miguel was terminally bored with his wife of many years. Paula, the anesthetist with whom he’d had an affair the previous autumn, had left him in the spring. Miguel sometimes felt he missed her, but sometimes he was relieved to be rid of her. He told Juan that she’d said she wanted to rebuild their “relationship”: “Those were the words she used, can you believe it?” He’d just confessed that he’d started looking at the older girls at his kids’ school, when he suddenly asked about Maribel. “She’s fine,” said Juan. Then Miguel asked him if he loved her and Juan burst out laughing.
“Don’t be so sentimental.”
“I’m not.” Juan saw that Miguel wasn’t laughing.“Do you love her?”
Juan lit a cigarette, took a couple of drags, and started playing around with his glass, centering it exactly on the beer mat. He took a sip of his drink, and as he swirled the ice cubes around in the glass, the image of Charo, alone in the courtyard, dancing before a cracked mirror, appeared unbidden before his eyes. “No,” he was about to answer, “I don’t love her.” But he did want to sleep with her, and he thought about it a lot every day. He still wanted more. He wanted to go on fucking her in the gloom of a deserted house, with the windows closed and the blinds pulled down. He admired her, and he liked watching her as she spun her web slowly and steadily, playing with her, falling into her traps, observing her reactions. She was uneducated, had no conversation, no passionate experiences to recount, no mysteries to solve, but she was the cleverer of the two when she needed to be, and he enjoyed being with her.
“I don’t know,” he answered eventually.
“What do you mean you don’t know!” Miguel laughed. “Of course you know.” He waited but Juan still said nothing, so he added: “She’s very sexy, that’s for sure.”
This trivial exchange, a fragment of the ongoing conversation that formed the basis of his friendship with Miguel Barroso, in which women were a recurring theme, acquired an importance that Juan Olmedo wasn’t expecting as he sat in the little bar in Punta Candor, listening to Andrés unraveling the tangle of his faith in his father and his own guilt. The skinny little boy, who was so quiet and serious, didn’t know what his mother had asked Juan one afternoon in March, nor what he had offered her in return. Juan recalled her words:“When it’s over, it’s over.” Andrés knew nothing about this, and had anyone told him, he wouldn’t have understood, yet Juan felt that the boy had, without knowing it, been part of their relationship. When Maribel took all those precautions so that nobody would find out about them, when she arranged to meet him at the petrol station three blocks away from her house, or let one of the children sit in the front seat of the car, or walked beside Alfonso when they were in town, Juan had thought she was concerned about her own reputation. It had never occurred to him that she might be trying to preserve Andrés’s admiration for him and protect him from her exhusband’s spite. He’d always been convinced that neither of them could care less about his reputation, but the knowledge that Andrés now despised him—that his father had taught him to despise him—hurt him more than he would ever have expected. “You and I are on the same side,Andrés,” he thought as the boy told him his story,“we’re both good boys, we study hard, we’re vulnerable, and people can deceive us.You’re more like me than like your father.” He would have liked to say something like this, but he didn’t dare. “When it’s over, it’s over.” Maribel hadn’t realized the full meaning of her words when she’d said them, but six months later, when she came out of hospital, she was fully aware of what she was saying when she admitted that he’d been right when he said that what they had started was foolish. But now, this bright little boy had found a way of forcing Juan to define the relationship he was prepared to have with him, and with his mother.“I don’t know what we are,” he’d said, and Juan, as he watched him cry, had had time both to wonder whether the most sensible thing would be to leave Maribel, and to be overwhelmed by a sudden, uncontrollable urge to sleep with her. In the end, he’d told Andrés that what mattered was that they were fine.“And we’ll go on being fine,” he’d added, realizing, as he did so, that he’d just made more of a commitment to this child than he ever had to the child’s mother.
The next day, when he got back from work, he found her sitting on the curb by his parking space.
“What are you doing here?” He was still so moved, so overwhelmed by her son’s confession, and so pleased to see her, that he put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips, even though they were outside and anyone could see them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, not pushing him away or telling him off.“I wanted to thank you for yesterday.Andrés told me everything when he got home. I thought he was never going to tell me.”
Juan glanced at his watch.Tamara would be home by now,Alfonso too.
“Shall we go for a drink in the hotel bar?”
Two days earlier, they’d met in town and he’d told her what Tamara had said about Andrés skipping school, wandering about the industrial estate all day, and then throwing his beloved bike in a skip. She’d nodded slowly, looking as if she wasn’t hearing anything she didn’t already know. “He never tells me anything,” she’d said when he finished. Juan offered to talk to Andrés before he was summoned before the headmaster and, after considering the idea for a moment, Maribel accepted with another nod of her head. “It might be a good idea, if you don’t mind doing it. Maybe he’ll talk to you.” But she didn’t tell him what she already suspected, out of loyalty to her son. Forty-eight hours later, however, she was able to admit that Andrés had been acting very strangely all summer, that she knew his father had been brainwashing him, and as she’d watched him wander about the house, silent and pale as a ghost, she’d realized he was ashamed and was able to guess why. “But I couldn’t convince him that what had happened wasn’t his fault,” she added.
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