Their father, delighted to be moving as he would now be able to get to work by metro (six stops with a change at Bilbao, virtually a stone’s throw away), asked them, at breakfast, if they would be so kind as to not piss him off today. So Juan kept his mouth shut, and worked without a rest all morning, filling and taping up boxes, marking their contents on the outside then carrying them downstairs. For him, the move was a disaster. The beginning of term was barely a week away, and he’d been refused a transfer of his grant because there were no places available in the university entrance subjects he was studying at any school in the district they were moving to. This meant he’d have to travel back to Villaverde every day, and he wouldn’t be able to go home for lunch. In this working-class suburb there weren’t too many students preparing for university. Many of his friends had left school at sixteen and started vocational training or been apprenticed in some trade, and even among those who had stayed on, fewer than half had signed up for the university entrance exams. Of these, only two shared Juan’s ambition to go to the best university in Madrid, the one that rejected the most applicants.This was why they had to study their core science subjects in the morning and return to class mid-afternoon for their optional subjects. It wouldn’t have been a big deal had the Olmedos stayed in Villaverde for another year—just one more year—but now Juan would have to spend all day in the school library, with only a sandwich for lunch, and would arrive home after eleven o’clock at night.
He didn’t dare complain, or suggest they postpone the move to make his life easier.The rest of the family was too delighted at the prospect of the new flat to pay attention to anything else, and when he explained his problem to them, their lack of understanding plunged him into a resentful stupor with eruptions of injured pride. It was this that was secretly driving his frenetic activity. He worked harder, better and faster than anyone else all morning, and yet he was the only one who felt that there was no reward for all this effort.
“Leave the boxes from the kitchen till last,” said his mother when the removal man asked where they should start.“Then I can tidy everything up while you load the furniture.”
Juan looked around him and saw a pile of unmarked boxes on the pavement alongside Damián, who was singing and doing such a convincing impersonation of the kitsch singer Raphael that the removal men were staring at him, amazed.
“Who packed up the kitchen?” asked Juan, although he’d heard the same singing coming from the kitchen all morning. His brother, still holding an imaginary microphone in his right hand, raised his other hand in response.
“Which boxes are they?”
Damián turned round, interrupting his performance and holding out his hands, to find Juan corning towards him with a felt-tip pen.
“Shit!” Damián said.
His mother reprimanded him quietly, “Mind your language, Dami,” as she wiped Alfonso’s nose.
“Well, I was putting them here, but then I went to the girls’ room, and Papa handed me boxes from the living room.”
“So that means you’ve got no bloody idea.”
“Mind your language, Juanito,” muttered their mother, quite oblivious to the rising tension.
“All you had to do was pick up a pen and write K-I-T-C-H-E-N on them.”
“Yes, I know,” Damián said.“But nobody told me to.”
“You shouldn’t have to be told, dickhead.”
Frightened, their mother said nothing this time.
“For Christ’s sake, it’s obvious. Only a fucking moron like you would do this. It’s not rocket science, you idiot.”
“Look, the only idiot here is you.” Damián came towards him, riled by the fact that the removal men had been nodding in agreement with Juan. Their father came between them just as they were about to start fighting.
“Stop that, Dami, your brother’s right. He may not have told you what to do with the kitchen stuff, but I did. And you listen to me too, Juan,” he said to his eldest son, not letting go of Damián.“I’m fed up with that tone of yours, d’you hear me? If you’ve got something to say, say it without wrinkling up your nose, because none of us smells like shit here. I’ve done my best for all of you even if I didn’t get much of an education, understood?”
“Yeah, well it shows.”
The words came out unbidden, as if a mischievous demon-self had slipped them into his mouth, and the world suddenly shrank. His father turned abruptly and took two huge, furious strides towards him. Juan saw him, he must have seen him, but he would always remember the scene in slow motion—his mother hunched, tilting her head to one side, lips drawn in fear, looking like a frightened child before an approaching storm, and Damián’s mouth slowly opening, eyes full of surprise fixed on Juan, and Paquita gaping, frozen. It must all have happened very quickly, in an instant, but that’s not how he remembered it. In his memory, a deep, hollow echo would always surround his father’s disbelieving question and the utter foolishness of his own reply.
“What did you say?”
“I said it shows, that you didn’t get an education.”
The hand made a sound of its own as it flew through the air—ffmmmmmm! —before striking his left cheek. Juan reeled from the slap, staggering as if he were drunk, and while reality suddenly recovered its normal speed and color, the fingers of his father’s hand left a shameful, and as yet pale, imprint on his face. But the worst thing was the pain he felt inside, the first urgent tears that he failed to hold back, and the loneliness that engulfed him, treacherously, suddenly, on that stretch of pavement crowded with people, his own family, a forest of empty eyes all desperately looking at anything but him.
“A good wallop, yes, sir.” Damián was the only one who dared come near him, whispering triumphantly and patting Juan on the back. “A good old wallop. But you deserved it, Juan, you really did.”
Then he left too. Juan stood there a little longer, motionless, feet together, arms hanging by his sides, with a swollen cheek and a vague burning sensation in his ear, jaw, and throat. He was trying to understand, wondering how on earth he could have said such a stupid thing, made such a brutal challenge so calmly, inviting his father’s blow and his own shame. It had been silly, unfair, even cruel of him; it certainly wasn’t what he really thought, and he didn’t know why he had said it. His father shouldn’t have picked on him when he was telling Damián off, he shouldn’t have, because Juan didn’t deserve it—he’d worked solidly all morning, without skiving or complaining. His father’s insistence on balance irritated Juan. He always told the two brothers off together, with a peculiar understanding of justice that made him the most capricious and arbitrary of judges.This wasn’t the first time it had happened, and Juan knew as well as Damián that joint punishments were more ephemeral for being shared, more bearable than those handed out singly.Their father was quick to anger, but had a bad memory. If you rode out the initial storm, harmony returned within ten minutes as if nothing had ever happened.
The day of the move, something changed, although Juan Olmedo didn’t fully realize it at the time. Four years later, as night fell between Quevedo and Bilbao metro stations, he knew that his uncontrolled burst of arrogance, his furious defense of his own merits, always destined to be overshadowed by a Raphael impersonation or the latest joke about General Franco’s funeral, had been the end of his fervent admiration for Damián. He hadn’t felt proud of himself at the time, and he was still ashamed when he thought of it now, but although he should never have been rude to his father, although he had made a poor decision and it had turned out badly for him, the events of the day had been a revelation. For the very first time, Juan had a sense of his own will, his ability to make his own way in life, and it freed him of the temptation to bemoan his fate, to blame his troubles on destiny or on being in Damián’s shadow. From then on, he learned to do without the support of others. And ever since then, he’d been alone.
“Don’t worry about the old man,” his brother had said that night, as they collapsed, exhausted,
onto their new beds, surrounded by piles of unopened boxes.“He’s forgotten it already.”
“I know,” answered Juan. A few hours earlier, he’d helped his father carry the wardrobe up to his bedroom, the last item of furniture leaning, dismantled, against the wall of the apartment building.They got one of the doors safely into the lift, but when they tried to get the other one in, the mirrored panel cracked from top to bottom, although it didn’t shatter completely. It was the only serious mishap of the day, but his father’s tired and sweaty face suddenly looked so defeated that Juan started apologizing: “I’m so sorry about what I said before, Papa, I’m such an idiot. It’s not what I think, really, I don’t know what came over me.”“I’m the one who’s sorry, son, I’m sorry,” said his father.They carried the rest of the wardrobe upstairs without mentioning the subject again.
“Now he’s pissed off with me,” Damián said just before falling asleep. “I told him I want to leave school, and he said there was no way, I’d have to do my exams and then we’d talk about it again.”
When at last he reached Bilbao metro station, where he planned to turn round, Juan’s legs suddenly felt tired and he searched his pockets without conviction. He didn’t find much—a few pesetas, a box of matches from Mingo’s Bar and a crumpled cinema ticket.The thousand-peseta note he’d thrown down on the bar at Conchi’s with the swagger of a cowboy in a spaghetti western was all the money he’d had.
He sat down to rest on a bench, resigned to the fact that he’d have to go home on foot, and suddenly felt scared by just how much he missed her. Charo hated benches, and long walks, but the only money Juan had was what he earned working in his father’s shop on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and it didn’t go very far. Even-handed when he told his sons off, their father was obsessively careful when it came to their weekly pay, and he was not distinguished by his generosity as a boss.Things had been different in the beginning, when he and Charo first started dating—he’d still had his small Christmas bonus and the money he received as gifts. Charo had already turned him down twice, always with the same excuse, that she was too young to have a boyfriend, but always with the same inviting smile that compelled him to try again, in early March, when she turned seventeen.This time she said yes, and he felt as if he was walking on air.The first time he kissed her on the mouth, he found an unexpected softness and sweetness, like caramel. He’d never been as happy as he was then, during the early days. She showed him off proudly to her friends and laughed at anything he said, and kissed him at traffic lights, and put her arms around him out of the blue in the middle of the street. But the time came when he had used up all his savings, and his exams were getting closer, and it occurred to her to wonder why he didn’t have a car, and why he shut himself up in his room every afternoon with his books, and why, at the weekend, they spent all their time just sitting on park benches or going for walks, and having no more than one drink each. She never complained to him about any of this, but Juan could tell what she felt from the weary look in her eyes, the impatient curl of her lips, her curt, lazy answers, and he felt that the prestige of his age and status was quickly deflating, like a balloon whizzing around the room before it emptied completely. This was why, the previous Saturday, in one last desperate attempt to keep her, he had asked Damián to lend him five thousand pesetas so he could take her to one of the biggest and most expensive clubs in town.
“Get off me! For fuck’s sake!” Only a moment before she’d seemed dazzled, delighted by the lights, the mirrors, the dark velvet upholstery, the gilded boxes, and the majestic foyer of the converted old theatre. But now she pushed him away violently, almost as soon as they sat down on one of the sofas. “It’s unbelievable.You’re so serious but then you can’t keep your hands to yourself. Unbelievable.”
“It’s only because I like you so much.” He always gave the same response, and it was terrifying because it was true. He liked her so much that when he wasn’t with her, he saw her everywhere—on the library ceiling, in the windows of cake shops, in his coffee at breakfast every morning, in the section of sky that he could see from the balcony of his room. And when he was with her, he couldn’t take his eyes, or his hands, or his mouth, off her, he was all over her, he couldn’t help it, he just had to touch her, kiss her, hold her in his arms until he could feel the shape of her ribs beneath his fingers. He liked her, more than a lot, more than anything else in the world.
“OK, I like you too, but I don’t smother you. I’m not on top of you all the time like a bear,” she said, rearranging her clothes. She moved away slightly and looked at him. “Just control yourself and don’t paw at me, not here.”
Juan moved a little way from her, grabbed his glass, put his feet up on the table in front of them, and with his shoulders hunched, sat in a pained silence befitting his offended dignity.When Charo got up and asked him to dance, he just shook his head, and did so each time she came over and held out her hand to him. At midnight, the lights were dimmed to a cool white like a misty moon, to signal the start of the slow dances. Charo came to him once more, taking him by the hand and dragging him on to the dance floor, where she let him put his arms around her.
“I’m sorry, Charo,” he whispered in her ear, feeling the shape of her body against his.“It’s just that I like you so much, seriously, I don’t know, it makes me crazy. I can’t help it when I’m with you. Please don’t be angry with me, Charo, that’s all it is, I just like you so much.” He paused and waited for a word, a movement, a signal from her, but he could feel no change in the body moving against his, and impatience prompted his first mistake: “I couldn’t bear it if this ended, if you left me.” She still didn’t react, so he abased himself further:“You’re not going to leave me, are you? Tell me you’re not.”
He’d received his answer that afternoon, on the phone, just as the family was eating dessert. Juan Olmedo glanced at his watch—it was almost eleven. He lit his last cigarette, got up and set off home. It was a very long way, too long for him to be able to sustain the fantasy of a possible future—quiet years of transition until he’d finished his degree and begun work in a hospital, swapped his wages as a part-time baker for a doctor’s salary, and could buy himself a car, and a house; until his real life began and he was somebody at last, no longer the rough draft of a person that he seemed to have been for years.Then she’d realize she’d made a mistake, and she’d come for him, and everything would go back to the way it was before.This thought cheered him for the first stretch of the journey, but he was still a long way from home, his legs weighed a ton, he didn’t even have enough money to take the underground, and Charo had left him. Defeat, like a clean, absolute horizon, crushed all his dreams.
Once, he’d had the world in the palm of his hand. He remembered its weight, its size, its perfect spherical fullness. He remembered the heat of that first June morning, the furious blue of a sky that was a furnace even before the sun had fully risen. He could feel the heat of the pavement, which hadn’t had a chance to cool during the long, sultry fly-ridden night, through the rubber soles of his trainers. That morning, the ten o’clock bus was full of tired, sweaty people, who looked more bored than ever at having to go to work when the holidays were only a fortnight away. But Juan didn’t pay them any attention. Freshly showered and very much awake, he was so nervous he didn’t even notice how stiflingly hot it was inside the packed bus. Holding on to the rail with one hand, a full head taller than most other passengers, he went over the exam questions again and again, wavering between the memory of his euphoria as he handed in his script, and fear of possible disaster, the same deep ambivalence that had been eating him up for weeks.
He wasn’t the last to arrive at the school, nor was he one of the first, though the office door was still shut.Their tutor smiled when he saw them all—a dozen teenagers, rigid with nerves, some on the verge of hysteria—and muttered, “It wasn’t too bad, not too bad at all,” before going into the office with three or four other teachers. Handing over the exam results w
as no more than this, a simple formality, so quick that Juan was almost surprised to find himself standing before his tutor’s desk.
“Congratulations, Olmedo,” his teacher said as he handed over a small white piece of paper bearing Juan’s name, his registration number and another number—an unbelievably, inconceivably, patently absurd, high mark.
“Is this my grade?” Juan asked in disbelief, pointing to the magical number. The teachers all nodded, laughing at his bewilderment. “Nine point seven two? I got nine point seven two?”
The Wind From the East Page 18