“I’ll sit here with you,” she said, not looking at him.“Is that OK?”
“It’s OK.”
The teacher’s name was Doña Maria. Tamara thought she must be about Sara’s age, and she was short, slight and chatty, and very smartly dressed. She seemed to know almost all the children, including Andrés, by name, and addressed a few pleasant words to each of them:“Don’t you look nice? Haven’t you grown?You look as if you’ve done a lot of swimming this summer. Long hair suits you.” Once she’d finished, she told them they all had to give a special welcome to two new classmates, and she asked Tamara and a fair-haired boy called Ivan to stand up.Tamara had been expecting something like this, but it didn’t make it any easier and she tried to hide her blushing by looking down, as if she were suddenly fascinated by her shoes.When the teacher got on to all the usual boring stuff—the plan for the year, the syllabus for each subject, the things they had to bring in the following week, the dates of exams, and the best way to plan their homework—she felt better, because she’d heard spiels like this so many times before that it was almost comforting, even if it was delivered with an unfamiliar Andalusian accent.
The bell rang at eleven o’clock. Andrés reacted slowly, which surprised Tamara, for she had expected to find herself alone at break time. She was already almost out of the classroom door when she realized he was still sitting at his desk.
“To get to the playground you have to turn left, the way we came in,” he said when at last he made up his mind to join her, taking small weary steps, like an old man.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“No, I . . . I have to do something.”
“Are you going to the toilet?”
He shook his head and set off slowly, turning right. He couldn’t have gone more than five steps when he turned round and saw that she was still standing in the corridor, by the classroom door.
“Where are you going?” she asked, taking his backward glance as an invitation.
“Somewhere.”
“Where?” He didn’t answer, so Tamara followed him.“I’ll come with you.”
“No.”
“Oh, go on, let me come with you. I don’t know anyone here and . . .”
“I said no.” Andrés shook his head firmly. “You can’t come with me, I mean it.”
“Why not?” she asked, stamping her foot.“And why won’t you tell me where you’re going?”
“I’m going to see my grandmother,”Andrés said at last, almost angrily. “She works here. Happy now?”
Tamara blushed for the second time that morning and didn’t even try to think of an answer, as if the fact that Andrés had a grandmother who worked at the school was reason enough for him to exclude her from his plans. Andrés disappeared through a door at the end of the corridor and she went out to the playground. She sat on a bench and watched the other children playing. A quarter of an hour later she caught sight of Andrés, heading towards her holding a large mortadella sandwich and looking apologetic.
“D’you want some?” he asked, sitting down beside her.“It’s very big.”
“Did your grandmother give it to you?” she asked, accepting some, even though she’d already eaten a doughnut.
“Yes. She’s the cook.”
“Do you have to go and see her every day?”
“Yes. But only to get my sandwich. She gets cross with me if I bring one in.Today was different, because she and my mum don’t talk to each other, so I haven’t seen her for at least a month, and that’s why I had to stay longer.” For a while Andrés ate his sandwich in silence and then offered Tamara the last piece. “Do you want it? I’m full. Anyway,” he added, as she finished it off, “you wouldn’t like her. She’s grumpy. She spends all day moaning and pretending to cry.”
Tamara didn’t ask anything else, but she could see that Andrés was now not only friendlier, he looked happier too, as if he was relieved his visit to the kitchens was over.And even he would have had to admit that his grandmother was a very good cook, because the rice with tomato sauce, roast chicken and crème caramel at lunch were all much better than the food Tamara had had at her school in Madrid. She even gave up trying to identify where the depressing smell of beans came from and scarcely noticed it now.After lunch, she and Andrés went out to the playground and joined in a game of tag, although it was called something else here and had slightly different rules. She didn’t run as much as Andrés, but she had a lot of fun, and when the bell went, sentencing them to an afternoon of classes, it sounded familiar, ordinary. The first lesson seemed to go unbearably slowly, as it always did, but the second hour simply flew by. Andrés said goodbye to her at the classroom door, because he had to go and meet two kids who lived next door to him. They were in the same year but another class.“We always go to school together,” he said, “they’re the two I was talking to in the playground, after lunch, remember?” She didn’t, but she said she did, and as she made her way out, she thought she’d been lucky that Andrés hadn’t left her to be with his friends until then, by which time her new school had started to seem less new, and more just like school.
She thought she’d walk home but as she ambled alongside the fence enclosing the school, a grey BMW with a Madrid number plate drew up beside her and honked its horn.Tamara recognized it immediately and already had her hand on the door handle by the time the tinted window rolled down and Sara offered her a lift home.
“How did it go?” she asked, after a kiss from Tamara, who was delighted to see her.“Today was your first day, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it wasn’t too bad, actually. My teacher’s nice.Andrés says she’s really prissy, but she gives high marks, and that’s the important thing.”
“And what about Andrés? Did he introduce you to lots of kids?”
“Yes, well, after lunch we played tag, and that was fun. But a lot of the time I don’t understand what they’re saying to me, because they use weird words and everything they say sounds funny.They don’t say their ‘s’ on the end of words, and they always sound as if they’re singing.”
“You’ll get used to that.”
“That’s what my uncle says, and he thinks I’ll end up speaking like them, but I don’t know. Anyway, when I don’t understand something, Andrés explains it, so that’s lucky, isn’t it? Juan told me this morning that I should leave Andrés alone and not pester him, he’s got his own friends, but we spent most of the day together.Andrés’s best friends aren’t in our class, they’re in a different one, and he didn’t go and find them until the last bell went, just now.”
Sara smiled to herself remembering the advice she and Maribel had swamped poor Andrés with over the last few days, the exact opposite of the speech she could imagine Juan making: “Remember Tamara doesn’t know anyone apart from you,” they’d told him, “look after her, don’t leave her on her own, introduce her to the other kids.” She was relieved that he’d accepted the task, because the last time they’d talked about it she felt she’d pressed him too hard. She was thinking about this when her passenger asked her if she knew that Andrés’s grandmother was the school cook.
“Yes, of course,” she answered, searching in her handbag for the remote control to the gates of the development.
“Right,” said Tamara, and said no more, as if she needed to ponder Sara’s answer.
Sara wondered if a ten-year-old child was capable of drawing conclusions from such information and decided that she wasn’t. She had been surprised when she learned that Maribel sent Andrés to a private school, however close it was to their home, particularly in view of the fact that there were several state schools nearby. She didn’t dare ask Maribel why, but eventually the cleaner told her: it didn’t cost her a penny, because her mother worked there and her contract gave Andrés a free place. Maribel detested being in debt to her mother, but when Andrés started school she had very little money and was doing several jobs, cleaning a couple of offices and houses. She lived from hand to mouth, working different hour
s every day of the week, which didn’t fit in with Andrés’s schedule, so she had no choice but to accept the offer. Her mother would pick Andrés up at eight on the dot, an hour before school started, took him with her to work and gave him breakfast there, then looked after him in the afternoon until Maribel could collect him. “Anyway,” Maribel added, “it’s a brilliant school, it has playing fields, a swimming pool, a lab, it gives them two hours of English a day and loads of other activities, so I’m not sorry—especially now that Andrés is older and he doesn’t need anyone to take care of him, so I don’t have to put up with my mother. I never see her,” she added. “I know she tells everyone that I’m ungrateful, and foul-mouthed, and . . . worse things than that, but I don’t care.Things were bad enough when my husband left me, I didn’t want to go back home and spend the rest of my life there. That was all I needed, at twenty; to have to listen to my mother all day long.The first thing she asked me when she found out that he’d gone was what had I done to make him leave! I think she fancies him, you know. She’s after my husband! I know it sounds weird, but that must be it because otherwise I can’t understand the things she said to me, the things she still says—you can imagine.” Sara didn’t try to imagine anything, although she understood precisely what Maribel was saying. This didn’t prevent her from being disconcerted by the direction that Tamara’s intuition was now taking:
“I asked you because . . . well, I don’t know how to explain it, but I think Andrés is really embarrassed about his grandmother, you know? I don’t understand, because there’s nothing wrong with it, is there? But when we went into class this morning, some kids were laughing at him and then, during break, he wouldn’t let me go with him to see her, and it made me think, well, maybe it annoys him that he never sees his father. Well, of course it annoys him, but what I mean is, he’s got an odd family. It’s like he doesn’t have a father, but then he does, so that makes it even worse. But he shouldn’t care because odd families are normal now.That’s what Juan says, anyway—years ago if your mum wasn’t married it was awful, and if your parents split up that was bad too, but now there’s loads of kids with families like that. Like me, I’m an orphan, I live with my uncles instead of going to boarding school, but it’s OK, nobody says they feel sorry for me, and they don’t call me names or anything like that.” She held her head rigid as she spoke, staring straight ahead at the wall of the car park, but she was gesticulating a lot, as if this helped her find the words she needed.When she finished she turned to look at Sara.“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Tam. I think that what’s difficult about having an odd family is how you feel inside, not what other people think.”The little girl shook her head a couple of times, hesitating, before nodding reluctantly. “And I suppose having an odd family is still complicated, though it used to be much worse, that’s for sure, your uncle’s right about that.”
The last act began in 1963, on the first Saturday in February, at her best friend Maruchi’s sixteenth birthday party. Maruchi dragged her off into a corner of the living room, and whispered that Juan Mari fancied her. At the time, Sara had never wondered why her real mother, Sebastiana, had had four children in just over six years and there was a seven-year gap between her and her older sister Socorrito. But she had begun to notice that Juan Mari was gazing at her with love-struck eyes, a novelty so pleasant that it caused an unsuspected weakness in her own eyes. As she walked into the space that served as a dance floor with Juan Mari, a pleasant boy from Vitoria who was studying to be an industrial engineer, Sara knew nothing of the terms of the agreement that Doña Sara had made with Sebastiana just before holding her in her arms for the first time, when she was only eight months old. Fifteen years later, other arms now encircled her, dancing to a sentimental, hypnotic song—sapore di sale, sapore di mare—and she decided she wanted a party like this on her own birthday, to give Juan Mari—sapore di te—the opportunity to declare his love. Then, at a quarter to ten, as she was saying goodbye to Maruchi amidst nervous giggles, he appeared at her side.Although he didn’t have a car, he said quite clearly,“I’ll take you home,” and the young Sara realized he didn’t need any other opportunity. She walked along the street beside him, her hands in her coat pockets, yearning to put her arm through his, wondering what her life would be like if they were married some day, where they would live, how many children they would have, what they would call them, and she didn’t realize that this was the first time she had ever allowed herself to wonder what kind of life lay ahead of her. At the entrance to her house, he looked into her eyes, blew away the lank fringe that kept flopping over his eye, and told her to wait a moment, because he had something very important to ask her. Sara, who knew the story of Doña Sara’s engagement to Don Antonio by heart, was unaware that her own parents had become engaged at that very door, twenty-one years before she was born. Juan Mari asked her to be his girlfriend, and Sara said yes. He took her hands and she squeezed his back, he kissed her on the lips and she closed her eyes because it was her first kiss. Then they said goodbye, agreeing to meet the following day. He was very happy, and so was she.
Arcadio Gómez Gómez was taken to the prison on the Calle General Díaz Porlier on 16 July 1939. On the morning of the seventeenth, he was tried by a military court. As the following day was a public holiday, he was condemned to be executed at dawn the day after that, 19 July. The execution did not take place on the appointed date, however, because that same afternoon the prison authorities received a phone call. The wife of a glorious ex-soldier, heiress to the fortune of one of the city’s great families, had taken an interest in the prisoner’s fate; so the officer in charge of executions decided to relegate Gómez Gómez’s file to the bottom of a large pile of matters pending—indefinitely—showing an instinctive prudence that would ensure he rose to the rank of general in a very few years. A few weeks earlier, the abc newspaper had published, amongst many other similar items, an article describing how certain residents of the building at number ten on the Corredera Alta de San Pablo had collected five hundred pesetas and given it to the concierge of their building, as a way of recognizing the immeasurable debt of gratitude they owed her for her help during the worst moments of the Bolshevik terror. It was this same old lady (who had effectively risked her life when she stood up to gangs of wild militiamen when they tried to search the building) who saw Sebastiana Morales Pereira in the Plaza de San Ildefonso one morning. Sebastiana lived in one of the attic flats in the concierge’s building and was the wife of a plumber in the UGT, the General Union of Workers.This plumber had become a soldier, then a corporal, then an NCO and even a captain in the Republican army, and had completely disappeared, been swallowed up by the earth. The concierge was struck by the sight of her neighbor stopping dead in the middle of the pavement and, after glancing suspiciously to left and right, bending down to pick up an object that she quickly stuffed into her pocket.The concierge hurried to catch up with her.At first she’d thought that Sebastiana must have found a purse, but now she could see that it was a packet of cigarettes. She put two and two together, and guessed where the missing man was hiding. It was not recorded whether she received any reward for reporting Arcadio Gómez Gómez to the authorities.
Sara didn’t have a front door key.When she rang the bell, at twelve minutes past ten, Doña Sara greeted her, tapping her with her index finger. Her god-daughter responded by hugging her and kissing her loudly on each cheek before apologizing:“I’m so sorry, Mami, but I was enjoying myself so much that I lost track of time. It’s the truth.”This outburst of affection, an unexpected reminder of the loving child Sara had always been before the sour sullenness of adolescence suddenly infected her, mollified Doña Sara more than the flushed look on the young girl’s face. But she shushed her because she knew that her husband, who was already at the table, drumming his fingers on the tablecloth so as to leave no one in any doubt about how much it annoyed him to delay dinner because of this extravagant show of weakness on his wife’s part, would nev
er show any understanding with regard to her god-daughter’s misdemeanors. In his opinion, Sara should still have been eating her meals in the kitchen, however well she had learned to handle a knife and fork.The girl’s stay under his roof was subject to one condition: Doña Sara was Sara’s godmother, but this didn’t mean that Don Antonio was her godfather. Sara rarely spoke to him, and always used the more formal usted when addressing him. She tried to go unnoticed in his presence, because she knew that the grumpy invalid held his wife responsible for anything Sara did wrong, and she feared his reprisals. As the two women had supper with Don Antonio Ochoa that evening, they knew that the best, most prudent tactic would be to say nothing, engulfing the meal in silence. But Sara was so excited, amazed and delighted by the events that had suddenly expanded her life, that she forgot the rules and, breaking one of the long silences that invariably occurred between courses, asked her godmother if she could have a party for her birthday.The air turned thick, as dense as fog, pierced by Don Antonio’s sudden, furious glance, at which Doña Sara flinched and looked down at the tablecloth.“I don’t know, darling, we’ll see.” Sara knew that Don Antonio didn’t like having parties at the house, and she couldn’t fail to notice the glance, but she wasn’t sure just how much anger and disbelief it contained.
Sebastiana Morales Pereira began working as a servant in the Villamarín household in the spring of 1920. For the first week, she cried every night because she felt lonely and frightened, and because she was only twelve years old. Her mother, Socorro, did ironing at a dressmaker’s workshop opposite their home, not stopping even for meals.When her mother had told her she’d found her a position with a very good family, one of the dressmaker’s best clients, Sebastiana had not protested, or even been surprised at the news. Her two older sisters had gone into service at a similar age, and there were still two younger children at home.The eldest son had re-enlisted in the Spanish Legion after doing his military service in Morocco, but there were still too many mouths to feed and not enough pesetas coming into the flat on the Calle Espíritu Santo, where Sebastiana had lived all her life.Though she had left school at eight, Sebastiana had learned to read and write and do simple arithmetic. She took care of the shopping and cooking and looked after her younger siblings until their mother got back from the workshop, almost always late at night and exhausted after spending twelve hours on her feet. Their father was out all day, supposedly looking for work, though all he ever seemed to find were bars selling cheap wine. Perhaps this was why Sebastiana noticed Arcadio Gómez, a good-looking but shy boy, serious and quiet, who worked as a plumber and whom she saw occasionally in his workplace on the Corredera Alta, a dark little room where he and his father kept their tools and collected their messages. By then, Sebastiana had grown up somewhat, and didn’t dislike her position. She was a bright, responsible girl and her mistress trusted her, sending her out on errands almost every day, often asking her to take along her daughter Sara, who was seven years younger than Sebastiana. Sebastiana went to the Calle Espíritu Santo a couple of days a week, to deliver and collect laundry, because she’d managed to persuade Señora Villamarín and some of her friends to send their ironing to her mother, who now worked from home, which allowed her to spend less time on her feet and earn twice as much as before. On all these errands, even when the little girl was with her, she always passed by the Corredera Alta, both on the way there and on the way back, looking out for Arcadio and making sure he looked out for her, until they became formally engaged.The engagement lasted seven years, which was the time it took Arcadio to save the money he needed to move out of his parents’ house, while she collected her trousseau and made her own wedding dress. In 1932, Sebastiana was married at last, wearing a short black dress, with no bouquet but with a gardenia pinned to her breast, just as all the women in her family had done.
The Wind From the East Page 11