The Wind From the East (43 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
As she dressed, trying to bear in mind that she would probably be getting undressed twice that evening, she realized that after all that effort, all those years, all those fierce resolutions, she was going to end up just like Señorita Sevilla, in the arms of her boss’s boss, although Vicente González de Sandoval was younger, richer, and more elegant than the owner of the secretarial school. She had sworn to herself a thousand times that she would never play a part like the one she was rehearsing that afternoon. He was a Republican of course, and she was a free, independent woman. It was also true, however, that her godmother and her friends would split their sides laughing if they heard her set out the problem in those terms. As the rejected dresses, skirts, blouses, and bras piled up on the bed, the feeling that her fate was already sealed, that someone else had written the script of her life, seemed stronger than ever. She wondered how many of the women she saw each morning—secretaries, telephonists, receptionists—had got ready for a night out with Vicente before her.“This isn’t his first time,” she warned herself,“it can’t be.”Yet she still felt happy, and nervous, and hoped that something would happen.
Until that day, men had played only a secondary role in her life. She’d gone out with a few—almost always colleagues, or acquaintances—and in her last year at the Robles School she’d almost become engaged to an office worker from a village near Ávila who’d pursued her for a whole year without being discouraged by his lack of success. Eventually his perseverance, the tenacity with which he asked her out one Saturday after another, endeared him to her. He wasn’t much to look at. He had glasses, was balding, skinny, and always wore one of two jackets, both of which were too big for him. Sara gave him the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months, because she was twenty by then, and she hadn’t been out with anyone since Juan Mari. But she found him boring, and despaired because he never seemed to understand the endings of the films they went to see. So she was taken completely by surprise when he attacked her the night she finally agreed to accompany him up to his room,“Just so you can see where I live,” he said. She could have screamed, she could have shouted for help, waking up the other lodgers, hit him, kicked and bit him; she would probably have been a match for him he was so puny, but she felt sorry for him. His skin was cold, covered in goose bumps, he had a few sparse black hairs on his puny chest, and very narrow shoulders, and he wanted to marry her. He was very nervous, he finished almost immediately, and it was all a disaster.Afterwards, as he gathered his clothes and started dressing, he said sorry, and Sara felt like crying, for him and for herself, for how squalid it all was and how incredibly ugly a man’s naked body could be. On Monday, after class, he began to plan a more formal engagement and even started to talk of a wedding. Sara said she didn’t want to see him again and refused to answer his questions.
It had been different only once. She was twenty-two. He was a neighbor of her brother Pablo, who worked for ITT. He was thirty-four, had been married for ten years and was alone in Madrid, working in August when most people were away on holiday. She met him by chance one day, when she went to Pablo’s to water her sister-in-law’s plants. His name was Manuel, he lived in the flat opposite, and she had liked him very much, although she was never really sure why. She had glimpsed him across the courtyard. He was naked from the waist up, with broad shoulders and thick arms, and was holding a bottle of beer. “Hot, isn’t it?” he said, and she replied, “Well, yes, it is hot,” and went on watering the plants, glancing from time to time at the line of hair that went down his belly, past his perfect navel and disappeared into the top of his trousers.“Would you like a beer?” he asked after a while, raising the bottle in the air, and she said yes.They chatted and drank beer on the landing until it grew dark. He was funny, telling endless jokes, but then he began to appear nervous, as if he didn’t know what to do next, how to behave in such a situation. Sara found his gaucheness touching. At last he said, “Well, you probably have to go, don’t you?” assuming she had plans for the evening because it was a Friday. She said no, she was alone in Madrid too, her parents were in Asturias visiting her sister and she had nothing planned. “I’ve just started a new job and I’ve only got a week’s holiday,” she told him, “it’s this week, so I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” “Nor do I,” he said, brightening up. “I did a shift for a friend last week, so we could go for a drink if you like.”They had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They had a great deal to drink in two different bars. He kissed her in the street, with his arms around her, holding her tight against his body, and she liked it.They slept together in a bed that matched the wardrobe and chest of drawers and bedside tables adorned with matching little crochet mats. On the table on Sara’s side there was a framed photograph of three children with a fat woman who looked older than her husband. It was only her second time, but he was a gentle, affectionate lover and didn’t seem to notice her lack of experience. Nor did he say anything when Sara suggested they sleep at her brother’s flat,“Because here,” she added,“with all this,” and she gestured vaguely at the photo by the bed, “I don’t know.”They spent all of Saturday together and most of Sunday, and he helped her tidy the flat before they left.As they parted, on the landing where they’d met, he looked at her very steadily, and couldn’t find anything to say. She kissed him on the cheek and rushed downstairs, but as she got to the entrance, Manuel called: “Hey, wait!” He ran after her and kissed her on the mouth.“Next Saturday I’ve got to go and collect my wife, but maybe . . . Do you have a phone?”“No,” she lied,“I haven’t.”
As she came out of the metro at the Puerta del Sol, it wasn’t quite dark, but Sara felt like she was emerging into a different world, the real world, the only world that was hers. It was as if the time in San Fernando de Henares—her brother’s flat, Manuel’s body, his face, his hands, the way he moved—was all part of a fiction that had just burst like a soap bubble. She wasn’t sure what had just happened or why she’d behaved the way she had, who had taken all the decisions for her, She felt neither ashamed nor pleased, just strange. In time she would come to understand that this episode had sprung from herself, from her own confusion, and was unlike any conscious step she had ever taken before.The favor for her sister-in-law, which had seemed such a hassle, a tiresome journey on a stifling afternoon, had provided her with a rare and precious opportunity to slip into another possible life, the life she might have had if things had been different. Pablo’s neighbor, with his curly black hair, pale eyes, and square jaw that balanced the thickness of his lips, was much more than some random good-looking man who’d caught her eye through a window. From across the courtyard, the stranger looked more like Arcadio Gómez Gómez than his own sons did; not the grey, tired, prematurely aged man who had hugged a lonely, confused little girl every Sunday morning, but the young, strong Arcadio of the photographs, the armed, fierce Arcadio, with a strong body and tanned arms. And her brother’s flat, its terrazzo floors, hollow doors, aluminum windows, narrow corridor, and hideous china figurines, might have been her home had she chosen an employee of ITT, had she been able to live the life she should have led from the very start.
This was what she had loved, this was the dream she had given herself up to in the brown arms of a man who was never simply himself to her, and who never quite made her his in the strange forty-eight hours they spent together. Neither of them thought to switch off Pablo’s alarm clock when they got into his bed, but when it went off, at six twenty-five on the Saturday morning, Sara was already awake. It was the first time she’d spent the night with someone and the proximity of a man’s body, the heat it gave off and the sound of his breathing, weighed down on her.When the alarm erupted, bouncing off the walls of the room, he sat up immediately and shot out of bed, a reflex. Amazed at how beautiful the body of a naked man could be, Sara watched him look around, bewildered, as if he didn’t know where he was. He then turned to her and smiled.
“Oh!” he said, his voice still thick with sleep.“You’re here. Good! I’d forgotten.”
He got back into bed, covering himself with the sheet, put his arms around her and kissed her face, her hair, her neck, and Sara felt his warmth, so pleasant after her sleepless night. She could sense a new greed, a desire growing in her fingertips, in the space between her parted lips, in the hard penis pressing against her belly, and she felt jealous and strangely grateful. She put her arms around him, placed her hands flat on his back and drew him to her, and he took possession of her slowly, wordlessly, with his eyes open, pulling out just in time.Then they kissed for a long while, still looking at each other, as if they both knew how strange and good it was.“We’ve got to buy some condoms,” he said, then added, “Let’s get some more sleep, shall we?” She moved close to him, clung to him. Manuel took her arm and placed it across his chest, as if he were used to sleeping like this. Sara kissed him on the shoulder, once, twice, three times, and as she fell at last into a deep, heavy sleep, she surrendered to the fantasy that this man was her man, this house was her house, and she realized that, however pathetic it might seem, this was the sweetest moment of her life.
Yet never, not even once, did she think of trying to find this man, who asked for bread in a Chinese restaurant, who rested his left arm on his leg as he ate, and who spoke with a thick Madrid accent, again. She didn’t even want to go back to her brother’s house to take the sheets off the clothes line. She’d washed them and hung them out to dry, and was planning to iron them and remake the bed. But by the following Monday, when she left work, she couldn’t believe that it had really happened, because she was scared of seeing him again and didn’t want to prolong the pleasant deception of a life that would never be hers. It hadn’t occurred to her that her sister-in-law would be suspicious; but when Sara came across her sitting at the table at her parents’ house one Sunday in September, it was obvious she was still annoyed.
“I spilt water on the bed,” Sara said, giving the first excuse she could think of, and not daring to meet Pili’s eye. “That’s why I changed your sheets.”
“And that’s why you washed them?”
“Well, yes, so they wouldn’t smell of damp.”
“Of course,” her sister-in-law spat out with obvious contempt.“Right little slut you are!”
Pablo got on very badly with his wife, and he didn’t dare intervene directly, but he started telling off the children for no reason so as to interrupt the conversation. Sara realized that he too was looking at her differently, conspiratorially, almost admiringly, as if he’d never known her before. Sara reflected that this must be the first time her brother had ever really noticed her, but she was grateful to him for providing the distraction.
“Manuel sends you his regards,” he said to her later, in the kitchen, as she was doing the washing-up and waiting for the coffee to brew.“He’s a mate of mine, we work together on the same floor. He’s a good man, so don’t worry, he didn’t want to tell me any of the details. But I got it out of him—it was obvious that something had happened and not just because of the business with the sheets. Apparently, you put all the pots and pans back in the wrong places.You were the only one who had a key to the flat.You could have brought anyone here, of course, with this place to yourself, so why would you bother going all the way over to ours? And Gracia, Manuel’s wife, told Pili that when she got back she found him very odd, in a bad mood all the time and not wanting to do anything, so, what with one thing and another, it didn’t take me long to work it out.The problem is, my wife is good friends with his.They go to the market together, they listen to that serial on the radio every afternoon, they go shopping for clothes, things like that. But I think although they’re suspicious, they don’t know anything for sure.”
“Oh!” Sara said, raising her eyes from the washing-up and looking at her brother. But she couldn’t focus because her eyes were filling with tears.
They heard the clicking of heels approaching down the corridor and her brother, who was nine years older than her—and was probably already involved with the hairdresser for whom he left his wife a couple of years later, to general consternation but the bitter satisfaction of Sara, who detested her sister-in-law from that day on—comforted her immediately.
“Come on, it’s all right,” he whispered quickly, hugging her and kissing her on the temple as if she were a little girl, before turning to intercept his wife.“The coffee’s not ready yet.Will you ask my father if he wants any? I’ll bring it in a minute.”
“You?” said Pili in mock amazement, sharp and shrill as a hen.“You’ll bring the coffee in?”
“Yes, I will,” he replied calmly. Sara went on with the washing-up, not even stopping to wipe away the tears; she couldn’t understand why she was crying, yet the tears kept flowing. Her brother was getting testy with his wife now:“What’s the matter?” he said to her.
“What’s the matter?” she bristled. “Shit! First little miss goody-two-shoes here, and now you, taking the coffee to the table. I can’t cope with all the surprises!”
“Oh, go to hell!” Pablo shouted after Pili had left the kitchen, the sound of her heels receding down the corridor. “You might be getting another surprise some day soon!”
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