He felt as if the east wind had dissipated only on the surface, but was still battering him mercilessly inside. He felt anxious, but more than that, confused, uncertain, weighed down by responsibility. He had never had to make so many decisions in such a short space of time, never had such a narrow margin in which to ponder the wisdom of each choice he made. When he realized that Madrid was no longer a good place for them to live, he chose what had, at the time, seemed the best option. Making the most of the general confusion that prevailed at the start of the holidays, they had slipped away discreetly. After all, no one would notice their absence with all the summer migrations.The plan was simple. During his time in Cadiz, Juan had become very good friends with Miguel Barroso, who was now head of the orthopedic department at Jerez Hospital, and Juan had felt sure that Miguel would support his application for a job. It was the main reason he’d moved to this region rather than any other part of Spain, although he already knew he’d like many things about the area—the climate, the light, the people—the same factors that had influenced his choice the first time he moved away. His parents came from a village in the wilderness of Extremadura, but he had only ever visited the area a couple of times, before Alfonso was born, and he had no links there other than a few old songs, odd words slipping quietly from his memory. Juan Olmedo was from Madrid and he knew he would miss it, but his own nostalgia, which had already destroyed his life once, was less of a concern to him than the thought that Tamara might not get used to living so far from home, or the even more worrying possibility that his brother’s mental state might suffer as a result of the inevitable isolation of the first few months and of having to deal with unfamiliar teachers and pupils at a new daycare center. Now that there was no going back, Juan felt that perhaps his choices had been too hasty. Perhaps they needn’t have left Madrid. Perhaps it would have been enough simply to change minor details—a new house, new part of town, new hospital, new school. Perhaps there was no real reason to be so afraid.
The fishing rods weren’t as far away, or as close together as they’d seemed. As he walked past them one by one, he also realized that the rocks he’d had to walk around for some time now were not a natural formation, especially on this beach where the sand was so fine. Molded into smooth, grey, slippery blocks by the imperceptible tenacity of the waves, they formed a perpendicular line into the sea where they met another line of rocks that ran more or less parallel to the beach, interrupting the path of the waves and forming a barrier in the water. Juan recalled that someone had mentioned there was a trap-net site in the area near the housing development, and he now understood why fishermen brought their tackle all this way, so far from the center of town. He watched some children armed with nets and plastic buckets as they jumped from rock to rock and, in the dim light of the dying sun, searched unsuccessfully for crabs and crayfish trapped in the pools closest to the shore. They were ignoring the insistent calls of a woman, assuring them, unconvincingly, that this was the last time they’d be allowed on the beach if they didn’t come out of the water right now, this minute. Juan stopped for a moment and saw that the children hadn’t the least intention of leaving. He walked on, comforted by the familiar elements of this little holiday scene.
The small town the Olmedo family had just moved to was the only aspect of their new life that Juan was certain he had got right. He had decided from the start not to live in Jerez, not only because it was quite a distance from the coast, but because there was no point in leaving one big city to move to a smaller version, an embryo of the same thing.This was why he had also decided against El Puerto de Santa Maria; still too big, too urban, too formal for what he wanted. He’d tried to convince Tamara that the move was an inevitable consequence of his job, a decision taken for him by faceless strangers, a risk that all doctors working in the national health service ran, but he had a feeling she knew this wasn’t true, even though she was only ten.The child’s happiness was so important to him that he had done everything he could to ensure it, providing her with a completely different life from the one she had known so far—a house by the beach, on a private development with swimming pools, gardens, tennis courts, and lots of other children, a school that she could cycle to when the weather was good, and a small, pretty town that was quiet in winter, busy in summer, its population of some thirty thousand inhabitants swelling to over a hundred thousand during the months of July and August; a place small enough that she wouldn’t keep comparing it to Madrid, but big enough that she wouldn’t feel stifled by the size of the streets.
He could have found a cheaper house, but he didn’t even consider it. He could have looked at other towns around the bay, but he didn’t have the time or the inclination. His new boss had recommended this development, and it fulfilled everything he had envisaged for Tamara when he first began thinking about moving. He’d put his top-floor flat in the Calle Martin de los Heros up for sale in mid-April, a few months after having made the last payment on a mortgage he’d taken twelve years to pay off, and by the end of June he’d found a buyer who didn’t need the flat until September. He hoped that the price difference between a square foot of land in the center of Madrid and a housing development on the outskirts of a provincial town would mean he could easily afford a large and attractive house. He was right, and it took him even less time to buy the house than it had to sell the flat. On his first day off in July, he took an early-morning flight to Jerez, where he met Miguel at the hospital, visited the center where he planned to send Alfonso in September and, that afternoon, selected house number thirty-seven from the plans for the development. He’d only viewed the show home, but that was enough.The estate agent was astonished when Juan handed him a check and left quickly, saying he couldn’t afford to miss his plane back to Madrid. In the few minutes it took for Juan to get out his checkbook, note down the amount he was paying as a deposit, and fill in the rest of the check, he told the estate agent he wanted plain tiles in the bathrooms, that he’d rather have all the kitchen units along a single wall, and that he’d be very grateful if, before the decorators set to work, the electricians could be informed that he didn’t want spotlights in the ceilings, just a single light fitting. He assumed, of course, that the house would be finished by the beginning of August.The estate agent, who’d never met anyone who could think of so many things simultaneously, nodded. A little later, when he stopped off at a bar for a glass of anis, as he did every evening on his way home for supper, he recounted the story to all his cronies and none of them had ever heard anything like it.
Though he wasn’t prepared to admit it—even to himself—as he strolled along the deserted beach, Juan Olmedo had fled Madrid. He’d done so mainly for Tamara’s sake, but, that night, their second in the new house, he suspected that he would probably enjoy the benefits of the place before she did. He stopped worrying about the thirty-mile commute to and from work he would have every day after sending Alfonso off on the bus to the daycare center.This sudden acceptance of the small routine inconveniences the move entailed reduced his anxiety over the more serious problems he faced. It was as if the pleasure of taking a solitary evening stroll along the beach were a balm, a promise of future harmony. By the time he turned round to return to the house, Juan was in a much better mood.
On the way back he encountered only a couple of dog walkers and then, as he turned down the path that led from the beach, a woman.The light was so dim that at first all he could see was a cream shape with dark stripes on its upper half. As they walked towards each other, as if their meeting were planned, he could see that she was wearing the type of outfit that people from inland considered nautical: wide-legged trousers and a navy-blue striped top—unmistakable clues to the woman’s origin. Juan Olmedo immediately recognized another recent arrival from Madrid. She was one of those well-preserved women who maintained an appearance of youthful maturity despite her forty-odd years and would probably continue to do so until the first ravages of old age. She had a pleasant, even attractive face, but although she
had beautiful eyes you couldn’t exactly say that she was pretty. This was all Juan had time to notice, but it was enough for him to be sure that they had definitely never met. As she passed him, however, she greeted him in a friendly manner. He greeted her back casually, purely out of politeness, as if the instinct to wish each other a good evening were part of a ritual of recognition amongst equals, fellow exiles from Madrid with a confused notion of seaside elegance. His niece was much more observant and, had she witnessed the scene, would have been able to tell him that the woman, while still a stranger, lived in the house opposite.
I
WEARINESS AND NEED
In the kitchen of number thirty-one, the units ran along two walls. In the middle of the room was an aluminum table and two folding aluminum chairs, which added a functional, almost industrial touch to the decor. The occupant was clearly at home with adapting the suggestions of the glossy magazines to suit her own style. Sara Gómez had always had very good taste, but little time and even less money. Now, the abundant crop of zeros flourishing in her bank statements was producing magnificent results.
Sara had also made her mark at the estate agents’ offices, but for very different reasons than Juan Olmedo. She had arrived after visiting other parts of the coast of Andalusia, evaluating all the houses for sale so conscientiously that by now she could tell at a glance whether a place was worth viewing. Her expedition had begun in mid-March, and as she had no intention of returning to Madrid, the search was open-ended.As she crossed from Malaga into the province of Cadiz, her intention had been to explore the Atlantic coast all the way to the Portuguese border before choosing a place to spend the rest of her life; but soon she was so fed up with traveling, and so discouraged with the results so far, that she settled on a place before she planned to, taking on the challenge of the only house that, in two otherwise fruitless months, had managed to surprise her.
She could easily have afforded one of the more expensive, more luxurious houses she’d been offered on the Costa del Sol, but although she’d liked some of them very much, in the end she found them all too ostentatious. And she didn’t want to live surrounded by foreigners, an anomaly in a crowd of pale-skinned neighbors. If she’d wanted to attract attention, she could have stayed in Madrid and bought herself a house in ElViso. No, what she was looking for was the exact opposite, and she’d found it at last on a secluded development, discreetly luxurious, and inhabited by upper-middle-class professionals; a place where she would easily merge into the background. Located on the outskirts of a popular tourist resort, it lacked the dubious elegance that might attract hordes of Arab sheiks or showy nouveaux riches like the Lopez Ruiz family, bogus cousins she never wanted to set eyes on again. Sheltered from the wind and from prying eyes by walls so high that, from the road, you could only just glimpse the roofs of the houses, nothing betrayed the privileged nature of this secluded enclave; a place that turned in on itself like the leaves of a plant at nightfall, always seeking the center.As she walked around the development for the first time, having visited dozens of similar projects over the last few weeks, Sara was impressed by the intelligence of the layout. It all seemed simple as she walked through it, but secretly labyrinthine when she looked back, and it was impossible to tell from their rather uniform back walls that the houses looked out onto attractive gardens. From outside the complex, there was no hint of how big the swimming pools, the children’s play areas, or the sports facilities were, and to Sara it seemed that they grew larger with every step.The mysteriously elastic quality of the space became even more noticeable when she went inside the show home, a square house on two floors with a large roof terrace. It was so well designed that she had to ask the estate agent for a tape measure in order to measure the rooms one by one before she could concede that their generous size wasn’t an optical illusion. But even this wasn’t enough to convince Sara Gómez.
Having shown her around the house twice, in a viewing so thorough that he noticed things he’d never even seen before although he’d been showing clients around daily for the past six months, the estate agent dared to sit down on the doorstep, just to take a break from this well-heeled client who must be a quantity surveyor at the very least. But Sara seemed quite unmoved by his weariness and continued asking questions, firing the inexhaustible machine gun of her curiosity at his limited knowledge until she’d pinned him against every wall in the house. He’d had to say,“I don’t know” so many times that he ended up simply shrugging to save himself the embarrassment. Nobody had ever asked him why one of the light fittings in the sitting room was not close to the obvious place for a side table, why there weren’t taps for hoses on every terrace, why it had been assumed, judging by the distance between light switches, that all double beds were a meter and a half wide, why all the fitted cupboards had only two drawers, why the unit containing the plate rack had been placed to the left of the double sink, as if all housewives were left-handed, and why such and such a choice had been made in another hundred matters of similarly negligible importance. He was convinced that the woman would vanish into thin air like a bad dream when, having pointed out all the defects of a house whose quality he would have vouched for earlier that morning, she smiled and announced that she had almost decided to buy it. Inwardly awarding himself a medal for being the most long-suffering estate agent in the area, her opponent smiled back, feeling as if he’d overcome the most testing ordeal of his professional life. But she disabused him of this notion immediately and, after informing him that she assumed that he must agree with her that it was vital to examine which way a house faced before making a final choice, she asked him what time would suit him the following day to show her all the available houses on the development.Then, with a compassionate intelligence that he appreciated, she added that she had plenty of free time.
Sara Gómez, buyer, and Ramón Martínez, estate agent, almost became friends in the following weeks. She had rented a furnished flat in the town so as to keep a close eye on the completion of the finishing touches, and she became the person he spent most of his time with from Monday to Friday apart from his wife. Every day she came to the office with some new idea, and he had to admit that they were nearly all good, though they invariably involved him hanging on the phone for an age, finding out names and addresses that he kept so that he could suggest Sara’s improvements to subsequent clients as if they were his own ideas. She was rather amused by this little ruse and although she realized his actions were beneficial to them both, she would reward him every evening by buying him a drink in a nearby bar. He insisted on paying for the drinks every other day, however, and he chased the electricians and decorators so that number thirty-one would be finished even earlier than the agreed date, July 1, 2000.The only thing he couldn’t do for the future occupant of the house was recommend a trustworthy cleaner, but he did well when he suggested she speak to Jerónimo, the gardener, who thought immediately of his cousin Maribel.
Sara’s cleaner was thirty, with a son of eleven, a broken marriage behind her, and a substantial amount of excess weight, pleasingly distributed over an old-fashioned figure. She made the best of her solid, curvaceous body by wearing tight, low-cut dresses, the mere sight of which would have caused anyone who really had been well-heeled all her life to reject her without even asking how much she charged. But Sara wasn’t quite what she seemed, and she found the showy gold rings Maribel wore on every finger—tarnished by bleach and ruining the effect that the woman was aiming for—so touching that she hired her on the spot. She didn’t regret it. Maribel was hardworking and spirited, as capable of using her own initiative as she was of accepting all kinds of instructions without a word. Even the two apparent drawbacks that had caused Sara to have some doubts about her at first turned out to be advantages. Andrés, Maribel’s son, who was forced to waste his holidays accompanying his mother to work every morning, was a lonely, withdrawn child, older than his years. He would sit quietly on a chair, reading a comic, with a toy car or robot clasped in his fist, unti
l Sara, who soon grew fond of him, encouraged him to go out and play in the garden or suggested they go to the beach. In contrast, and refuting the laws of heredity at one stroke, his mother was incapable of keeping quiet. A steady stream of words poured from her mouth as she went about her tasks, and each time she drew breath it was as if she was winding herself up for another torrent. She was the best source of information that her employer had at her disposal, once her ephemeral friendship with the estate agent had waned. From Maribel, Sara could find out about life in the town, what went on, and what kind of people lived there. And it was also Maribel who, on the first working day after the August bank holiday, told Sara that the new arrivals were called Olmedo.
“I’m so sorry, I know I’m late!” she declared in greeting, clicking into the kitchen on her high heels. She found the mistress of the house sitting on one of those peculiar metal chairs that she still hadn’t become used to. “I’ve just come from Dr. Olmedo’s, you know who I mean, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t,” Sara replied, turning her attention to the elusive figure of the boy standing by the door, peering in shyly.“Come on in, Andrés. Come and sit here with me. That’s right. Have you had breakfast?” He nodded.“Sure?You don’t feel like eating something?” He shook his head this time, still saying nothing. Sara took his hand, squeezed it, and readied herself to hear all about their visit to the doctor.“The boy isn’t ill, is he?”
The Wind From the East Page 2