The Wind From the East (27 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
But despite what the advertisements claimed, brandy did provide warmth and comfort to women. It protected them, within and without, mercifully blanketing them from their memories, covering their eyes with the grey neutral veil of sleep.When she discovered this, Sara threw herself into its warm embrace with the joyful recklessness of a young girl falling in love for the first time, and, in the absence of other loves, she cultivated it impatiently and tenaciously. Until she saw its true face.Then, her own poverty saved her. People with more interests, more worries, more properties, more prospects than her, would have succumbed to the gentle fires of dissipation, but Sara had nothing but herself, and she couldn’t afford to lose herself like this, drop by drop, waking each dawn with a dry muddy paste filling every recess of her mouth and a thick, solid thirst gripping her between the last drink and the next one. This was why, one unremarkable evening, she discovered she couldn’t meet her father’s eye. Dignity was her first reason to stop drinking.
But difficult lives produce difficult adults, and it was difficult to shake off the memory—and the ease—of the amber-colored liquid. It was comforting, it was cheap, and sometimes it was indispensable. Sara Gómez didn’t want to start drinking again, but she went back to it, time and time again, each time her path seemed unclear and she lost her direction, every time she couldn’t move forward and found herself rooted to the spot. She was familiar with this variety of panic, the extreme weariness that comes from being stuck in a rut. Alone, she might have found a way out, but she wasn’t alone; she was responsible for two exhausted adults who had been ill-treated by life and who deserved, at the very least, a peaceful end.When she faltered, she turned back to brandy to give her the warmth and comfort she needed, until her tongue began to taste muddy once more.Then she would stop, but at the back of her mind she always knew that it wouldn’t be for good.The constant premonition of a relapse didn’t torment her because she’d learned to live with ambiguity the way a fish swims in water, out of necessity, instinct. The little girl split down the middle who changed the way she saw things as easily as she changed dresses, who could see in color and in black and white, had grown into a discreet figure, an ordinary woman, but one who never quite fit in. She had adapted to the emotional chaos of her life as best she could, but beyond this, she no longer expected or aspired to anything. And then, suddenly, everything changed. The gears of the universe shifted, a star changed trajectory, and all of a sudden, the woman without a future saw the light.When Sara Gómez finally understood that she could grasp her destiny in her own hands, she also realized that sobriety would be essential if her plans were to succeed. From that moment on, she had to be much more canny, to think fast, be alert to the smallest detail, and take scrupulous care of her reputation. She bade farewell to brandy with a melancholy kiss and some regret, like leaving a treacherous lover. Yet she didn’t miss it in the frenzy of the fraudulent existence she was about to begin, nor in the explosive events that led to a much better life, a brand-new normality that she would never have dared imagine for herself.
Now, living here by the sea, she discovered that brandy had changed with her. The taste was different—subtler, less harsh—and so was its power. After thirty years of passion and guilt, Sara Gómez had finally learned to drink for pleasure rather than the meager reward of forgetfulness and a long and heavy sleep. Once again she drank alone but only a single glass, never quite full, after dinner—and even then, not every night. The silent ritual of warming the drink in her hands, sipping it slowly, gazing at the sky or reading a book, had become the best moment in many of her days.
The night before, she had suddenly renounced this discipline. She wasn’t entirely sorry, because her body had been magnanimous enough not to make her pay. During the party and particularly afterwards, when all the children had gone home and Juan Olmedo had asked her to stay for one last drink in the middle of the battlefield to which his living room had been reduced, she had been much more aware of what was going on around her than of how much she was drinking. Except for the moment of terror that had paralyzed Alfonso—the sight of a pair of seagulls suspended motionless in the sky—nothing odd had happened. Tamara had seemed happy, calm, and as tired as was to be expected after so many hours of being the center of attention. But Sara couldn’t stop thinking about how anxious Juan had seemed beforehand, and the nervous edge to his voice when he decided to confide in her, in advance of the party—a revelation she had not expected or prompted, but which was delivered with the fluency of a well-rehearsed speech. His dark fears seemed excessive, especially in view of the placid scenes she then witnessed, but Sara knew from her own experience that an excess of caution could be more significant than its absence. Something didn’t quite fit, there was some important detail missing in the gaps between his brief, ordered speech.
“My brother Damián, Tamara’s father, died exactly a year ago,” he’d explained as they walked briskly, with the wind against them, down the town’s main shopping street. “On Tamara’s birthday. She had waited for him all afternoon before cutting her birthday cake, but he didn’t arrive in time. He only got back after midnight and Tamara was already asleep by then, although she’d had a huge tantrum earlier in the evening. Damián had had a lot to drink and his reflexes were slow. I was waiting up for him because I was worried he hadn’t phoned to say he’d be late, nobody knew where he was, and I was angry with him for being in such a state—he was always drunk, he wasn’t eating or sleeping . . . he just kept overdoing it. Anyway, we had an argument, he became very agitated, and then he lost his balance and fell down the stairs. It was a very long, straight staircase with no landings, and he was unlucky, very unlucky, because he cracked his skull on a step. My sister-in-law, his wife, had died seven months earlier in a car crash. I’m worried about how Tamara is going to react to this birthday. I would have preferred not to celebrate it, but she insists on having a party and I suppose she’s right. I think it might be worse, over-emphasizing the fact that this is the anniversary of her father’s death. That’s why I wasn’t listening to you. I’m sorry.”
That morning, Juan Olmedo had called her from work. His niece’s birthday was only a couple of days away, and though he’d been wondering for weeks about what to get her, he hadn’t come up with anything until the previous night, just before he fell asleep. It was a great idea: a flamenco dress. He was sure she’d like it—it was the sort of thing every little girl would like—and it also seemed to be a way of confirming her in her new life, helping her to set down roots in the place where they were now living. A colleague at the hospital had given him the name of a dressmaker who sold the dresses, and he was ringing to ask if Sara would come with him, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to choose properly. “I could have asked Maribel,” he added, “but I’m not too confident of her taste.” Sara smiled and replied that she didn’t have any plans for that afternoon and would be delighted to go shopping with him. She also thought to herself that it would be an excellent opportunity to discuss her ideas about Maribel’s future and Maribel buying a property of her own.
They arranged to meet mid-afternoon in a bar in the center of town. Sara brought the subject up straight away, before they’d even finished their coffee. Juan agreed that although she seemed slightly frivolous and impulsive, Maribel was actually a very hardworking, responsible woman, and that it did seem like a good idea for her to invest the money she’d inherited. But then his attention seemed to wander as they walked along the street, reduced to a series of mechanical nods and grunts of approval. Sara realized that he wasn’t listening.
“Well,” she snorted halfway through the list of possibilities she was weighing up,“I can tell you find this absolutely fascinating.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, meeting her eye for the first time since they’d left the bar,“I’m just slightly preoccupied. I’m sorry.”
So then he told her the story of how his brother,Tamara’s father, had died. After this, neither of them spoke, until the dress they chose for Tamara gave them a comfortably trivial subject of conversation for the way back.
From then on, Sara Gómez had not stopped analyzing Juan’s dry account of Damián Olmedo’s death.Whatever she was doing—having a shower, cooking, watching television—the image of a man falling down the stairs stayed with her, as if it were permanently imprinted on her memory. She went over his account with methodical thoroughness, searching for any crack, any chink that would allow her to pry it open and see what lay beneath. But all the questions that came to mind had immediate, obvious answers.After all, people died every day in accidents in the home, silly, cruel accidents—choking on a plum stone, falling off a roof, electrocuting themselves—and these deaths were so trivial, so brutally reasonable that they didn’t even deserve a mention in the papers. Juan Olmedo had been there when the accident happened, but there was nothing strange in that. Families tended to get together for children’s birthdays, and Juan was probably very close to Tamara, to her parents, because otherwise he wouldn’t have taken her in when she was left on her own.That he had seen his brother fall and die did add a sinister dimension to his story, but it was still within the bounds of logic. If he was there, at the top of the stairs, he wouldn’t have been able to prevent the accident, and if he was at the bottom and saw his brother fall towards him, he wouldn’t have had time to react.When Sara first met the family the previous summer,Tamara had told her that her parents had died in an accident, and that was about all she’d said. Sara had assumed that the child was talking about a car accident, and later Tamara had confirmed that this was the case, adding odd pieces of information. Now Sara realized that she was talking only about the accident in which her mother had died, but even that had a simple explanation. For if her father had arrived home late and drunk on her birthday, if he’d had a row about it with his brother and had fallen down the stairs, the memory would seem like a nightmare to the small child. Perhaps she felt it had been partly her fault and, even if this wasn’t the case, the version of the story in which both parents died together would always seem simpler than the truth; nobody asked too many questions about a car crash. Perhaps it was Juan himself who had advised his niece to tell this half-truth, and Sara would not only have understood it, but would have approved of the strategy. The story had enough ingredients to make it seem credible, yet something made Sara go back to the beginning, sifting all the information once more, wondering where the error lay.
The worries that Juan had provoked burst like soap bubbles when she saw how easily Tamara played the part of hostess at her party. And yet, while she was chatting to Juan in a corner of the sitting room, Sara felt that perhaps the child’s failure to react badly only deepened the mystery—it would have seemed more normal for Tamara to be depressed or withdrawn, for her smiles to seem forced, for her to get upset when blowing out her candles. In Tamara’s cheerful demeanor, there seemed to be no space, no corner for the memory of her dead father.
The following morning Sara hadn’t entirely forgotten her unease, but when she finally managed to get out of bed, at about eleven, she was much more interested in the unusual feeling of well-being that she couldn’t quite place. She opened the bathroom door and an icy draught froze her to the spot for a moment.“That’s what happens when you go to bed drunk,” she thought, realizing she’d left the bathroom window open all night. Although she was shivering, she didn’t feel like closing it because the cold air cleared her head, and the sky, still arrogantly blue so near to December, boasted a bright round sun, like an assurance of spring. She wrapped herself tightly in her bathrobe and, on feeling the fabric against her skin, she suddenly understood. The bathrobe was dry, perfectly dry, as thick and stiff as if she’d just taken it down from the washing line in the middle of August. It was over a month, maybe two, since she’d felt anything like it. Then she knew what the seagulls knew, and understood at last the strange phrase the people of the town used when speaking of the wind which they couldn’t live without in winter. “The east wind blows it all away,” they said, and it was true. Sara returned to the bedroom, opened wide the windows to the balcony, and gave herself up to the wind. It beat against her face, blasted through her hair, danced inside her head and filled her lungs, sweeping away the murky sadness of the shortest days. Everything fled before the formidable force of the wind, like some powerful classical god.
Sara ran downstairs, secured the doors to stop them banging, improvised a series of paperweights from ashtrays and pans, and opened all the windows. She’d forgotten the other face of the east wind, the spiteful devil that made the sky boil, and tempers fray, in the immense cauldron of summer’s most hellish days. As things started to fly about the room despite all her precautions, she thought again of the previous night and imagined the mess her neighbors’ house must still be in this morning. It was as if the wind had the power to sweep away foolish ideas too, because she was suddenly amazed that she’d devoted so much time to something that was simply a tragic accident.The twists and turns of fate were always mysterious—and she should know that better than anyone. If Juan Olmedo ever heard her own story, he’d wonder how she could possibly have come up with such a strange tale.
Once the east wind had had its fun, she went to the kitchen and made herself some coffee. She didn’t want to eat anything because it was already very late. She pictured herself exchanging a few words with the newspaper seller or perhaps with a waiter in a bar if she managed to go for a walk in the afternoon, and as she stirred sugar into her coffee, she pondered the pattern of her Sunday mornings.
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