The Wind From the East (51 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
She knew it. Charo knew that he was drowning, that he couldn’t walk down the street without seeking out women who looked like her, couldn’t say anything without feeling that his words were for her, couldn’t sleep without seeing her in his dreams.That he dreamed of her even when he was awake, and that nothing mattered to him any more, not her husband, or her future, or her pregnancy, he didn’t care about any of it. It had been more than three months since he’d last been alone with her, only seeing her in the company of others—a hundred days and nights of slow, exasperating despair—when one morning, Charo rang at his door as he was emptying the contents of his pockets onto the sitting-room table. It was a quarter to nine and he’d just got home after his night shift.
“Hello,” she said, as if she were turning up for an appointment and assumed he’d been expecting her.“You can buy me a coffee.”
She was wearing a rather short, low-cut orange dress, gathered beneath the bust. Her legs were very tanned, and her pregnancy hardly showed. She was just entering her fifth month and hadn’t put on much weight. She didn’t throughout the pregnancy, following the diet her obstetrician had prescribed to the letter because she was too vain to do otherwise, although she liked to say she was doing it for the baby. She looked very beautiful, with the firm, fleshy roundness, glowing skin and soft features that characterized pregnancy. She was wearing an orangeyred lipstick, quite unlike the deep murderous crimson of seduction, or the pale pink of motherhood.
“To be honest, I feel terrible,” she announced, reclining on the sofa, her dress spread out over her golden thighs like the corolla of a tropical flower. She controlled her body and her posture with the same wisdom, the same marvelous cunning as before, not succumbing to the shapelessness that pregnancy so often induced in women.“I’ve stopped smoking, of course, so I’m very irritable. Happy, but tetchy.That’s normal, isn’t it? Well, your brother can’t understand it. He says he’s scared of coming near me and that my belly gives him the creeps. Normally I wouldn’t care, really, you know that, but the thing is I’m all on edge, so that’s why I thought,‘Come on, Charito, what do you bet your stomach won’t bother Juan.”
Even though he was stunned, Juan still felt like shouting “Olé!,” “Bravo!,” pulling out his handkerchief and waving it about in her honor, like at a bullfight, the theatre, or a soccer match. He would have called for an encore, she deserved it for being so clever, so daring, so irrepressible. He would have liked to show her in some way how much he admired her performance, but he couldn’t, because his feet carried him towards her and he simply did what he had to. Like a good boy.And that morning, as he discovered that he liked Charo just as much with a thicker waist, Juan Olmedo learned that he had never known what it was to feel truly scared.
It wasn’t a question of what he was doing, but of what he was capable of doing. He, who had so often and so cheerfully claimed he’d be prepared to do anything, sometimes realized it wasn’t a question of mere words. Kneeling on the bed, he pulled his sister-in-law towards him and entered her slowly, his eyes fixed on her bulging belly, which suddenly seemed as soft as a grass-covered hillock, and then he stopped hearing the voice of Elena, the girlfriend he’d left for Charo, and heard his own voice instead: “What the hell are you doing, Juan? Think about what you’re doing. Have you gone crazy or something?” And he felt fear, and pleasure, and more fear, and more pleasure.
“Have you ever had sex with a pregnant woman before?” she asked, because she liked to talk in the early stages of sex.
“No, you’re the first.”
“Well you’re doing it very well.You’re very gentle.”
“I’m always gentle with you.”
He loved her. Dishonest, confused, and contemptible as she was, he loved her, and he wanted her for himself. His love consoled and sustained him; it absolved him of his mistakes and released him from his anxiety. But it did scare him. It terrified him to think of time and limits. He’d gone back to her halfway through her pregnancy and they hadn’t even discussed it, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask her for an explanation, she hadn’t given him any, because there was no need. She’d only had to knock at his front door to create the right situation for him to take all the responsibility, all the blame for what was happening. Her return, her essential display of boldness, loaded the gun, but it was he who had pulled the trigger. Charo simply appeared, sat down in front of him, and looked into his eyes, risking rejection but knowing it would never happen.And when she departed, she left him alone with his misery, the profound indignity of being a mere puppet, the weakness of his intentions, and the humiliating destruction of a desire that is love, but is not good.
He was terrified by his sudden inability to control himself. He couldn’t understand what had happened to him, how he’d got where he was, and yet he also knew that it had only just begun, and that the end was a long way off.The morning before the birth of the baby who was to be his niece, Charo behaved strangely, after surrendering to him with the same eagerness, the same determination with which she used to annihilate him in the days when her waist was narrow and her body docile. Her pregnancy was very advanced, she was in the thirty-ninth week, and he thought it would be better to stop having sex with her at that stage.“Honestly, it’s fine,” she’d laughed,“you should know that better than anyone. Sex is good for you right up to the end because it strengthens the muscles and it can induce labor—that’s what they said at those classes you sent me to.” It was true. Charo hadn’t wanted to do anything to prepare for the birth but he had insisted, and he’d been such a pain about it that she’d finally given in.That morning he didn’t manage to be quite so persuasive because his sister-in-law attacked him with the kind of arguments that he usually used to disarm her, and he couldn’t find a response quickly enough. So he let himself be disarmed by her, and when at the end he saw her lean over her now huge, low belly and look strangely at the fingers of her right hand, and sniff them, and look at them again with the same terrifying curiosity, he realized that of everything that could happen, the worst had already taken place.
She refused to go straight to the hospital. She was quite calm, and so sure of what she knew that she insisted he take her home first to collect her suitcase. “We’ve got plenty of time,” she said, “two hours, I learned that at the classes too.” Juan felt so guilty that he didn’t stand up to her, but as he drove, detached from what he was doing, pressing the pedals and stopping at traffic lights, mostly in their favor at ten in the morning, he could see a single staring eye everywhere he looked—in the sky, on the road, on the windscreen—an eye that was staring at him. He knew of course that fetuses couldn’t see, didn’t know, lacked any awareness or capacity to interpret what was going on around them, but he could still see it, a tiny eye staring at him, accusing him through the hole that had now opened up in its peaceful little world of watery echoes; an elemental world in which she’d swum like a drowsy happy fish until an enemy burst in and destroyed it.
He knew it was nonsense, of course, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Hi, Damián, it’s me.”
Her suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. Juan picked it up and turned round, about to head back to the car, but saw that Charo was going towards the sitting room.
“Right, well, it’s started. My waters have broken. My waters. So I’m going to the hospital. No, I haven’t gone into labor yet, I haven’t got any contractions, Juan says when I get to the hospital they’ll give me something to get them started.What? No, Juan’s here, with me.When I saw fluid coming out, I got a bit scared—I didn’t know what it was, so I called him, and he rushed over.Well, he can drive me to the hospital, I’m sure he won’t mind. OK, I’ll see you there.Yes, silly, love you too, see you in a bit.”
On the way to the hospital, Juan Olmedo started to cry.
“Honestly! What’s the matter with you?” Charo snorted impatiently when she noticed.“Are you an idiot or what?”
Juan Olmedo was crying because it was all so ugly, so sordid, so unfair that an awareness of his love for her could only make it worse. For at this most difficult time, she had gone back to being the person he didn’t understand. He’d never wanted to live like this, in a state of continual anxiety, where all his wishes and actions had come to nothing. He loved her, he wanted to be happy, but everything he had now suddenly fit inside this car and this monstrous, shameful situation.This was where so much love, such lofty ambitions, had got him: to the saddest form of madness.
“Please stop it, Juan. Please don’t cry.” It was the first time he’d ever cried in her presence, and when he looked at her, it was the first time he’d ever seen her cry.“Pull yourself together, please. Shit, don’t do this to me now. Not now.”
They still hadn’t quite recovered by the time they got to the hospital, but the receptionist in A & E didn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t leave me,” Charo said, holding the admissions form. “Please don’t leave me on my own.”
So he went to the room with her and stayed while she changed and unpacked her things. Damián arrived, and he too asked Juan to stay. Juan went into the delivery room with them, and he was the only one to stay with her throughout the labor because he made Damián go outside when he was about to faint.The hospital routine, the familiar smell of disinfectant, warmed him and restored a little of his confidence, the comforting company of a landscape he knew so well. But when he left the building through the main entrance, on the threshold of a night that seemed quite different, his mood had changed for other, more profound reasons. Because, even if he’d known from the beginning that this was what was going to happen, and that it wasn’t advisable to be taken in—even a little—by the sweet, deadly loop of happy endings, Juan Olmedo already knew that the child was his, and he felt, even without wanting to know, that the eye was calling, not accusing him. He was terrified of limits, but also of time, and Juan Olmedo grew tired of denying with his head what he knew with his heart, and succumbed to a surge of pure, foolish joy because, that afternoon, Charo had given him a reason to hope.
For months, carefully, meticulously, literally, he went over everything Charo had said in her hospital bed:“You’re not just the most intelligent of the three, you’re also the best. Nobody deserves to have a father like your brother, I wanted you to know just in case.” Sentences like images that fade slowly in a stack of photographs lying forgotten in a drawer, like an endless prayer repeated until it becomes meaningless. Tamara was growing, losing the blurry, undifferentiated features that make all babies look alike, turning into a dark-haired, unique little girl at the same rate as her mother was going back to being herself, wearing the same clothes, the same blood-red lipstick, and nothing happened, no path opened up to link the closed, parallel compartments in which his split existence unfolded.
Juan Olmedo could not understand that his sister-in-law had chosen him as the father of her child simply because at the time she got pregnant, she liked him better than her husband. This was too brutal, too cruel even for a professional victim, a deluded despot who had never paid the price for placing herself above everything and everyone. He couldn’t accept that hers had been an irrational, arbitrary choice because, apart from anything else, Charo adored her daughter and in her own characteristic, and characteristically egocentric way, she lived for her. Juan had reckoned it would be so, not just because it was natural that Charo would feel this way, but because she’d always been like a surrogate mother to her brother-in-law, Alfonso, and her young nephews and nieces, the sick and the weak. Damián made fun of her, mocking her generosity, her often excessive self-denial when she thought someone really needed her. But this was the light that Charo radiated. Juan Olmedo clung to this thought for a long time, and as he watched Charo play with the child, change her nappies or hold her in her arms, singing her quietly to sleep. Yet all that happened was that time continued to pass.
“She looks adorable.”
Tamara was playing in the sunny garden, piling earth onto plastic plates and feeding it to her doll with a little yellow spade. He and Charo were sitting on the back porch watching her and waiting for Alfonso to wake up from his afternoon nap.Alfonso had moved in with Charo and Damián after their mother’s death and it gave Juan the perfect excuse to call in often after work.
“Yes,” said Charo after a pause. “She really is very cute. Even though she looks like you.”
“That’s not true,” said Juan smiling, quickly recovering from the shock of his sister-in-law’s words—she never mentioned the subject of her child’s father any more.“She looks like you. Exactly like you.”
He was scared of talking about it and he was just as guilty as she was of avoiding the subject. He was scared of what he might say, but also, above all, of what he might hear if he pushed Charo to the limit. In short, he was scared of the word “no.” He absolved himself of blame, reflecting that he had nothing more to say and she knew it, knew that he was there, waiting for her, always, for as long as she liked. He had told her so many times he’d lost count, and he’d lost count of the times she had refused to answer, wrapping herself in an ambiguous silence that meant nothing because it hinted at too many things. But that afternoon it was the beginning of spring, the sun felt good and new, like a surprise gift. Tamara opened her own mouth every time she held the little spade to her doll’s mouth, instinctively imitating what her mother did when feeding her. Juan had left a junior doctor asleep in his bed. He’d slept with her three times in ten days, even allowing himself the luxury of calling Charo to cancel a meeting without any explanation.
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