“Well,” Maribel said at last, in a rather final tone. “Come on, I’d like to look at . . .”
“No,” said Andrés, sitting down on the floor. He hugged his legs and put his head between his knees. “I’m not going anywhere and no way am I going to wear that stupid outfit. Don’t buy it, I’m sick of . . . of . . .”
He hunched his head even further, feeling the welcoming, almost velvety softness of his worn jeans against his forehead. He didn’t want to cry, and he didn’t want to tell his mother the truth, or say a single word he might regret later. And anyway, his mother wouldn’t understand. Maribel would never understand what the arrival of Sara and the Olmedo family had meant to her son, to his life of cheap T-shirts and his free place at a school for rich kids.The first time the silver BMW, which was so big it barely fit down the narrow streets in the center of town, stopped by the school gates and its door opened just for him, Andrés looked round before getting into the passenger seat and saw instant envy, and shock, in the murky eyes of his schoolmates. It was quite a triumph. There was Alonso, the son of the locksmith who’d made a fortune providing the locks for all the developments in the area, and Medina, whose family now built villas on what had once been farmland, and Solís, who was a real moron and always got bad marks, but whose future was assured thanks to his father’s property company, and Auxi, Medina’s cousin, who’d been boasting about her mother’s expensive new car.There they all were, frozen still, quiet for once.Then Andrés made a bet with himself that things would be different from now on, and they were. So far this term, he hadn’t had to get into any fights he knew he’d lose. Nobody had called his mother a servant, nobody had made snide remarks about her going out every night, nobody had asked where his father was, nobody had laughed at his tatty old rucksack or complained about the school food his grandmother cooked.
And his friendship with Tamara had only added to his new status. Andrés suspected that all the boys in his class had a crush on her, and the girls, though they made fun of her accent and her clothes, would have given anything to be like her.Tamara—who sounded so posh, and was good at English, and was so tall and pretty and trendy and clever, and from the big city—was his, because she never left his side. Andrés couldn’t understand it, but he accepted this unusual piece of luck and did everything he could not to lose it.Tamara was a strange child; she never said or did anything that any normal girl wouldn’t say or do, but there was a solitary air about her even when she was smiling, or playing with the others. He knew her better than anyone else, and he assumed that this was what had made them such good friends, because she was the only person he felt comfortable with. Sometimes, after school, they went into town on their bikes, and they just sat in the harbor and watched the boats; they could stay like that for ages, just the two of them, and they didn’t even have to say a word until one of them realized it was time to go home. Andrés felt that his friend had a secret, but he never asked her because he didn’t want to share his own secrets, and he always said the same—“Don’t know”—when Sara or Maribel asked him about her.
Maribel had been asking him a lot of questions recently, and it made him feel uncomfortable. Andrés loved his mother, loved her very much, but he didn’t like it when she embarrassed him, or forced him to do things that he found embarrassing, like going to the party wearing hideous clothes.Andrés had been eleven for months, and he knew it was silly to attach too much importance to clothes, but he also knew how things were and that it wasn’t his fault.Tamara was like a miracle, like hitting the jackpot, and he didn’t want to risk anyone laughing at him in front of her, because he was old enough to know that you couldn’t always rely on miracles.
“What do you think?”
His mother’s voice made him look up; she was determined to sound as if nothing had happened. Squeezed into a tight, low-cut, purple Lycra dress, its long narrow skirt slit up to mid-thigh, Maribel was turning round, smiling and looking pleased with herself. It was just the kind of dress she liked, the kind that made men stare in the street, that made builders wolf-whistle as she walked past, that made shopkeepers come outside when they saw her looking in their shop window, the kind of dress that made Andrés ashamed to be seen with her. So he pursed his lips and watched unhappily as Maribel tried to smooth the wrinkles out across her hips.
“You don’t like it,” she said at last.
“No,” said the boy.“It’s too small for you.”
“Small?” said Maribel, opening her eyes so wide that her son couldn’t tell if she really did find this hard to believe, or if she was only pretending to be surprised.“What do you mean, small? This is how it’s meant to look—close fitting. It’s stretchy, see?”
“OK, well, it doesn’t look nice on you. It makes your stomach look fat and it’s all creased up at the back.”
And then the thing that Andrés dreaded the most happened. Maribel suddenly went very red and looked up at the ceiling, blinking furiously and muttering to herself, “Maybe, maybe.” Then she rushed back to the changing room, leaving her son feeling even worse than he had when they’d been arguing. He jumped up off the floor as if it were red-hot and, stuffing his hands into his pockets, tried to think of a way to tell his mother that she was very pretty, but she’d look better if she dressed like other mothers, even if it meant her getting less attention in the streets. He couldn’t find her, and when she, looking defenseless and almost childlike, finally found him, she didn’t know what to say either.
“You’re right, you know,” said Maribel, breaking the silence at last. She put the purple dress down on a table.“I had a good look at it in the mirror, and it isn’t all that pretty. Definitely not worth the money.And I was thinking, if you really want that shirt, we could look for a jumper to go with it, one of the ones with a V-neck I was telling you about, in blue, instead of green. But you’ve got to promise you’ll wear it, OK? I want to start saving up for a flat, so we can’t go spending our money on silly things.”
Standing on tiptoes,Andrés stretched up to give his mother a kiss and, as she leaned forward, he put his arms around her neck, as if he wanted to hang on. It wasn’t the first time he’d had the vague feeling that he was the one looking after this adult woman who in turn looked after him, who tucked him up in bed at night and gave him medicine when he was ill. In some of the old westerns he watched on TV, Indian attacks would force the white farmers to ride out, leaving their wives alone to look after the farm and the children. As the men prepared to leave—with a woman in a long dress and white apron always weeping quietly in the background, cradling a baby in her arms—the man of the house would address the eldest son, a boy of Andrés’s age, handing him a rifle and telling him that he would now have to protect his mother.Andrés always saw himself in the brave faces of those children; Andrés’s mother wasn’t holding a baby in her arms, and she didn’t have a husband, but they too lived on the frontier, with one foot in enemy territory, although it wasn’t Indians they had to worry about.Andrés was very young, but he felt that his love for his mother somehow kept her safe, like the rifle in the shaky hands of the boy on the remote farm, the last gun before the wilderness. Beyond this conviction, his moods went up and down like a yo-yo as he defended his mother to his grandmother for things that he secretly disapproved of himself, or forced her, as he had that afternoon, without really knowing why, to give up things that would have made her happy. The most prominent feature of this endless inner confusion was something that Maribel would never be able to understand—his friendship with Sara Gómez, the affection that had become a necessity. Sara had shown him that his mother’s habits were no more than that, and they weren’t important. Every time Sara laughed at his grandmother’s criticisms of Maribel, or when she asked Maribel casually where she’d been on Friday night and whether she’d had a good time, whenever she offered to have him stay at her house so that Maribel could go to a party or a wedding, Andrés admired the supremely casual way that Sara made life seem so simple, and he started to think
that perhaps the world really was more straightforward than he thought.
Sara was also the first to compliment him the following day, when he arrived at the Olmedos’ in his new clothes.
“Wow, Andrés!” she whispered in his ear, after giving him a kiss.“You look so handsome, and so smart!”
Just as Maribel came through the door, wearing one of the dresses Andrés actually liked,Tamara’s uncle said loudly, so that all eyes turned to him:
“Hey, we look as if we’re on the same team!” And it was true, they did—they were dressed identically. Andrés glanced at his mother, and she smiled. He told himself it must be because she was also pleased with his new stripy shirt, blue jumper, and jeans.Tamara looked lovely in her present from Juan—a red polka-dot flamenco dress, with a matching shawl, bead necklaces, combs, bracelets and shoes with slight heels that made her a whole head taller than Andrés, instead of the usual half. But it didn’t matter—he felt good, so good that he dared show off a little in front of the other kids from school who’d been invited to the party, and during tea he ran to the kitchen a couple of times to get glasses and spoons without having to ask anyone where they were. He even switched on Tamara’s games console in the absence of its owner to show off his skills.Time passed by in a flash until, around eight thirty, the doorbell began to ring at regular intervals, gradually reclaiming all the other guests. Andrés already knew that he would probably be the last to leave because his mother would insist on helping Juan to do the washing-up, and he was right. But he was the first to find Alfonso, when the adults returned to the living room and were surprised not to find him there with the children.
Alfonso Olmedo was in the garden, standing almost rigid, with his arms hanging by his sides and his head tilted, eyes fixed on a point in the sky. Andrés saw him through the living-room window and went outside, guessing what was happening even before he opened the door.The wind slapped him in the face like an invisible enemy lying in wait, before sweeping into the room and hurling the discarded wrapping paper against the far wall with a violence that seemed deliberate, almost human. In the yellow light of the street lamps, Andrés immediately saw the impossible sight of two seagulls hanging absolutely motionless in the wind. Wings outstretched, heads straight, beaks shut, the birds looked artificial, like an illustration or a doctored photograph, an image held by an invisible hand in front of the insubstantial sky. But they were seagulls, and they were alive. Alfonso Olmedo knew it, and he jerked his chin in their direction, his eyes wide with fear, as Andrés joined him. The boy placed a hand on Alfonso’s back, telling him not to worry, trying to comfort him.They were standing like this when Juan found them.At first, the scene baffled him.
“It’s the east wind,” explained Andrés, pointing at the sky with one hand, while leaving the other comfortingly on Alfonso’s back. “It’s just risen, but it’s coming. It makes the gulls go mad. See that? They don’t know which way to fly. At first they just go round and round in circles.They go one way, then the other way, then they suddenly drop—it’s like they’ve forgotten how to fly. Sooner or later, they hit the wind head on and they can’t go forward.They keep trying for a bit and then they just keep still and wait for the wind to drop. It’s creepy, isn’t it?”
Andrés looked up and saw in both Juan’s and Sara’s eyes that they agreed, even though neither of them answered.
“It’s sinister,” said Juan at last, as if he had been searching for the right word to describe what he was seeing.
“Yes,” said Sara, frowning. “Poor things.”
“It’s only the wind,” said Andrés, shaking his head.“But it is scary. I’m scared that one day we’ll all end up mad, just like the birds.”
II
THE PRICE OF RIFLES
The following day, a Sunday, Sara Gómez got up late with a feeling of well-being so unfamiliar that, at first, she scarcely recognized it. She sat up in bed and looked round the room suspiciously, as if something—the furniture, her belongings—had been rearranged during the night as she slept; but there was nothing within the four walls of her bedroom that could explain this sudden change. Her head felt heavy and she had that pleasant woolly feeling that comes with a good hangover—the kind that numbs the brutal process of awakening, but without the headaches and guilt produced by a serious binge. She lay down again, curling up in the bed with the covers up to her nose, savoring every last drop of this unexpected and mysterious sensation.
After a fickle and tumultuous love affair with alcohol that had lasted almost thirty years, Sara had reached a state of disciplined abstinence that could be summed up with one basic rule: she never drank when she was alone. But she did allow herself one drink, or two, if she was in the company of others, because that didn’t frighten her. Since she had moved to her home by the sea, these rules had changed a little, yielding to the will of the landscape and the different nature of her solitude.The previous night had been an exception, she told herself, and she hadn’t drunk to excess. This conviction lulled her back to sleep.
Her father had always had a brandy after dinner. Sara couldn’t remember the point when she began to feel envious, but by the time she decided to join him, she was already smoking at home and bringing in a wage at the end of every month.When her mother first saw Sara with a glass of brandy in her hand, she covered her face with her apron: the universal gesture she used to express indignation, joy, shock, surprise, sadness. But her husband saw nothing wrong in Sara drinking. Arcadio knew his daughter better than Sebastiana did, for in her face, in the firm set of her mouth and her determined brow, in the particular way she lifted her head as if scenting a threat, he could see himself and the man he had once been. So, every time he refilled his own glass, he poured a little into Sara’s and frowned in silent response to his wife’s endless, droning complaints that drinking was for men; men, not young girls—even the advertisements said so.
But despite what the advertisements claimed, brandy did provide warmth and comfort to women. It protected them, within and without, mercifully blanketing them from their memories, covering their eyes with the grey neutral veil of sleep.When she discovered this, Sara threw herself into its warm embrace with the joyful recklessness of a young girl falling in love for the first time, and, in the absence of other loves, she cultivated it impatiently and tenaciously. Until she saw its true face.Then, her own poverty saved her. People with more interests, more worries, more properties, more prospects than her, would have succumbed to the gentle fires of dissipation, but Sara had nothing but herself, and she couldn’t afford to lose herself like this, drop by drop, waking each dawn with a dry muddy paste filling every recess of her mouth and a thick, solid thirst gripping her between the last drink and the next one. This was why, one unremarkable evening, she discovered she couldn’t meet her father’s eye. Dignity was her first reason to stop drinking.
But difficult lives produce difficult adults, and it was difficult to shake off the memory—and the ease—of the amber-colored liquid. It was comforting, it was cheap, and sometimes it was indispensable. Sara Gómez didn’t want to start drinking again, but she went back to it, time and time again, each time her path seemed unclear and she lost her direction, every time she couldn’t move forward and found herself rooted to the spot. She was familiar with this variety of panic, the extreme weariness that comes from being stuck in a rut. Alone, she might have found a way out, but she wasn’t alone; she was responsible for two exhausted adults who had been ill-treated by life and who deserved, at the very least, a peaceful end.When she faltered, she turned back to brandy to give her the warmth and comfort she needed, until her tongue began to taste muddy once more.Then she would stop, but at the back of her mind she always knew that it wouldn’t be for good.The constant premonition of a relapse didn’t torment her because she’d learned to live with ambiguity the way a fish swims in water, out of necessity, instinct. The little girl split down the middle who changed the way she saw things as easily as she changed dresses, who could see in color
and in black and white, had grown into a discreet figure, an ordinary woman, but one who never quite fit in. She had adapted to the emotional chaos of her life as best she could, but beyond this, she no longer expected or aspired to anything. And then, suddenly, everything changed. The gears of the universe shifted, a star changed trajectory, and all of a sudden, the woman without a future saw the light.When Sara Gómez finally understood that she could grasp her destiny in her own hands, she also realized that sobriety would be essential if her plans were to succeed. From that moment on, she had to be much more canny, to think fast, be alert to the smallest detail, and take scrupulous care of her reputation. She bade farewell to brandy with a melancholy kiss and some regret, like leaving a treacherous lover. Yet she didn’t miss it in the frenzy of the fraudulent existence she was about to begin, nor in the explosive events that led to a much better life, a brand-new normality that she would never have dared imagine for herself.
Now, living here by the sea, she discovered that brandy had changed with her. The taste was different—subtler, less harsh—and so was its power. After thirty years of passion and guilt, Sara Gómez had finally learned to drink for pleasure rather than the meager reward of forgetfulness and a long and heavy sleep. Once again she drank alone but only a single glass, never quite full, after dinner—and even then, not every night. The silent ritual of warming the drink in her hands, sipping it slowly, gazing at the sky or reading a book, had become the best moment in many of her days.
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