The night before, she had suddenly renounced this discipline. She wasn’t entirely sorry, because her body had been magnanimous enough not to make her pay. During the party and particularly afterwards, when all the children had gone home and Juan Olmedo had asked her to stay for one last drink in the middle of the battlefield to which his living room had been reduced, she had been much more aware of what was going on around her than of how much she was drinking. Except for the moment of terror that had paralyzed Alfonso—the sight of a pair of seagulls suspended motionless in the sky—nothing odd had happened. Tamara had seemed happy, calm, and as tired as was to be expected after so many hours of being the center of attention. But Sara couldn’t stop thinking about how anxious Juan had seemed beforehand, and the nervous edge to his voice when he decided to confide in her, in advance of the party—a revelation she had not expected or prompted, but which was delivered with the fluency of a well-rehearsed speech. His dark fears seemed excessive, especially in view of the placid scenes she then witnessed, but Sara knew from her own experience that an excess of caution could be more significant than its absence. Something didn’t quite fit, there was some important detail missing in the gaps between his brief, ordered speech.
“My brother Damián, Tamara’s father, died exactly a year ago,” he’d explained as they walked briskly, with the wind against them, down the town’s main shopping street. “On Tamara’s birthday. She had waited for him all afternoon before cutting her birthday cake, but he didn’t arrive in time. He only got back after midnight and Tamara was already asleep by then, although she’d had a huge tantrum earlier in the evening. Damián had had a lot to drink and his reflexes were slow. I was waiting up for him because I was worried he hadn’t phoned to say he’d be late, nobody knew where he was, and I was angry with him for being in such a state—he was always drunk, he wasn’t eating or sleeping . . . he just kept overdoing it. Anyway, we had an argument, he became very agitated, and then he lost his balance and fell down the stairs. It was a very long, straight staircase with no landings, and he was unlucky, very unlucky, because he cracked his skull on a step. My sister-in-law, his wife, had died seven months earlier in a car crash. I’m worried about how Tamara is going to react to this birthday. I would have preferred not to celebrate it, but she insists on having a party and I suppose she’s right. I think it might be worse, over-emphasizing the fact that this is the anniversary of her father’s death. That’s why I wasn’t listening to you. I’m sorry.”
That morning, Juan Olmedo had called her from work. His niece’s birthday was only a couple of days away, and though he’d been wondering for weeks about what to get her, he hadn’t come up with anything until the previous night, just before he fell asleep. It was a great idea: a flamenco dress. He was sure she’d like it—it was the sort of thing every little girl would like—and it also seemed to be a way of confirming her in her new life, helping her to set down roots in the place where they were now living. A colleague at the hospital had given him the name of a dressmaker who sold the dresses, and he was ringing to ask if Sara would come with him, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to choose properly. “I could have asked Maribel,” he added, “but I’m not too confident of her taste.” Sara smiled and replied that she didn’t have any plans for that afternoon and would be delighted to go shopping with him. She also thought to herself that it would be an excellent opportunity to discuss her ideas about Maribel’s future and Maribel buying a property of her own.
They arranged to meet mid-afternoon in a bar in the center of town. Sara brought the subject up straight away, before they’d even finished their coffee. Juan agreed that although she seemed slightly frivolous and impulsive, Maribel was actually a very hardworking, responsible woman, and that it did seem like a good idea for her to invest the money she’d inherited. But then his attention seemed to wander as they walked along the street, reduced to a series of mechanical nods and grunts of approval. Sara realized that he wasn’t listening.
“Well,” she snorted halfway through the list of possibilities she was weighing up,“I can tell you find this absolutely fascinating.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, meeting her eye for the first time since they’d left the bar,“I’m just slightly preoccupied. I’m sorry.”
So then he told her the story of how his brother,Tamara’s father, had died. After this, neither of them spoke, until the dress they chose for Tamara gave them a comfortably trivial subject of conversation for the way back.
From then on, Sara Gómez had not stopped analyzing Juan’s dry account of Damián Olmedo’s death.Whatever she was doing—having a shower, cooking, watching television—the image of a man falling down the stairs stayed with her, as if it were permanently imprinted on her memory. She went over his account with methodical thoroughness, searching for any crack, any chink that would allow her to pry it open and see what lay beneath. But all the questions that came to mind had immediate, obvious answers.After all, people died every day in accidents in the home, silly, cruel accidents—choking on a plum stone, falling off a roof, electrocuting themselves—and these deaths were so trivial, so brutally reasonable that they didn’t even deserve a mention in the papers. Juan Olmedo had been there when the accident happened, but there was nothing strange in that. Families tended to get together for children’s birthdays, and Juan was probably very close to Tamara, to her parents, because otherwise he wouldn’t have taken her in when she was left on her own.That he had seen his brother fall and die did add a sinister dimension to his story, but it was still within the bounds of logic. If he was there, at the top of the stairs, he wouldn’t have been able to prevent the accident, and if he was at the bottom and saw his brother fall towards him, he wouldn’t have had time to react.When Sara first met the family the previous summer,Tamara had told her that her parents had died in an accident, and that was about all she’d said. Sara had assumed that the child was talking about a car accident, and later Tamara had confirmed that this was the case, adding odd pieces of information. Now Sara realized that she was talking only about the accident in which her mother had died, but even that had a simple explanation. For if her father had arrived home late and drunk on her birthday, if he’d had a row about it with his brother and had fallen down the stairs, the memory would seem like a nightmare to the small child. Perhaps she felt it had been partly her fault and, even if this wasn’t the case, the version of the story in which both parents died together would always seem simpler than the truth; nobody asked too many questions about a car crash. Perhaps it was Juan himself who had advised his niece to tell this half-truth, and Sara would not only have understood it, but would have approved of the strategy. The story had enough ingredients to make it seem credible, yet something made Sara go back to the beginning, sifting all the information once more, wondering where the error lay.
The worries that Juan had provoked burst like soap bubbles when she saw how easily Tamara played the part of hostess at her party. And yet, while she was chatting to Juan in a corner of the sitting room, Sara felt that perhaps the child’s failure to react badly only deepened the mystery—it would have seemed more normal for Tamara to be depressed or withdrawn, for her smiles to seem forced, for her to get upset when blowing out her candles. In Tamara’s cheerful demeanor, there seemed to be no space, no corner for the memory of her dead father.
The following morning Sara hadn’t entirely forgotten her unease, but when she finally managed to get out of bed, at about eleven, she was much more interested in the unusual feeling of well-being that she couldn’t quite place. She opened the bathroom door and an icy draught froze her to the spot for a moment.“That’s what happens when you go to bed drunk,” she thought, realizing she’d left the bathroom window open all night. Although she was shivering, she didn’t feel like closing it because the cold air cleared her head, and the sky, still arrogantly blue so near to December, boasted a bright round sun, like an assurance of spring. She wrapped herself tightly in her bathrobe and, on fee
ling the fabric against her skin, she suddenly understood. The bathrobe was dry, perfectly dry, as thick and stiff as if she’d just taken it down from the washing line in the middle of August. It was over a month, maybe two, since she’d felt anything like it. Then she knew what the seagulls knew, and understood at last the strange phrase the people of the town used when speaking of the wind which they couldn’t live without in winter. “The east wind blows it all away,” they said, and it was true. Sara returned to the bedroom, opened wide the windows to the balcony, and gave herself up to the wind. It beat against her face, blasted through her hair, danced inside her head and filled her lungs, sweeping away the murky sadness of the shortest days. Everything fled before the formidable force of the wind, like some powerful classical god.
Sara ran downstairs, secured the doors to stop them banging, improvised a series of paperweights from ashtrays and pans, and opened all the windows. She’d forgotten the other face of the east wind, the spiteful devil that made the sky boil, and tempers fray, in the immense cauldron of summer’s most hellish days. As things started to fly about the room despite all her precautions, she thought again of the previous night and imagined the mess her neighbors’ house must still be in this morning. It was as if the wind had the power to sweep away foolish ideas too, because she was suddenly amazed that she’d devoted so much time to something that was simply a tragic accident.The twists and turns of fate were always mysterious—and she should know that better than anyone. If Juan Olmedo ever heard her own story, he’d wonder how she could possibly have come up with such a strange tale.
Once the east wind had had its fun, she went to the kitchen and made herself some coffee. She didn’t want to eat anything because it was already very late. She pictured herself exchanging a few words with the newspaper seller or perhaps with a waiter in a bar if she managed to go for a walk in the afternoon, and as she stirred sugar into her coffee, she pondered the pattern of her Sunday mornings.
“The truth is, I’m bored,” she said quietly, even though her neighbor couldn’t hear her or absolve her for all her suspicions. “That’s all it is . . .”
In October 1963, Sara Gómez Morales began to attend classes far removed from the prestigious schooling of her recent past. She remembered the torments of algebra and compared that to learning shorthand, which she viewed as a pastime, a simple technique to be mastered through hours of practice. She felt similarly about typing, although the typewriter seemed alien to someone accustomed to using only a pen and paper. That summer she had learned many other strange things: working out how much bleach was needed to wash white clothes without damaging the fabric or turning it yellow, for instance. Ironing a jacket through a wet cloth. Knowing exactly when a sauce made from tomatoes was ready, the moment when the flesh had given up its juices but the oil hadn’t yet risen to the surface. Cleaning anchovies, removing the head and backbone without damaging the flesh. Beating the doormat with that giant wicker carpet beater. Cleaning the grouting between the old, dull tiles, applying a foul-smelling liquid with a little brush, and later, once it was dry, spreading it over the tiles with a cloth in an attempt to restore some of the shine stolen by the years, rubbing until her arms ached.
Sara learned how to do all of this with the same determination, the same sharp stubbornness with which she had sweated over math problems, muttering under her breath that those two bloody trains that left Madrid and Barcelona at the same time and passed through Calatayud thirty-five minutes apart wouldn’t get the better of her. This sense of pride, this unconditional self-belief, was the only thing she had, the only aspect of her life that wasn’t given to her by other people. It defined her and was both a flaw and a virtue, changing the course of her life one fine morning in July. Sara had returned from the walk she took every day on the pretext of buying bread, to find her room tidied, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe and her bed made.
Until then, she’d lived with her parents like a guest, a visitor, the natural successor to the little girl from another home who came only for Sunday lunch. For a fortnight they had all played their part in this fiction. She emerged from her room only at mealtimes and nobody else went in there. Dirty clothes piled up on the bed with open books, biscuit wrappers and half-eaten bags of chips.That morning, her mother had broken the unspoken rule by tidying her room, and Sara didn’t even have to wonder why she flushed with shame at the thought of it. But the room, with its sloping floor, now seemed bigger, more comfortable and more welcoming than before. At that moment, Sara Gómez Morales finally confronted her destiny. Everyone had treated her gently but she had only managed to survive the confusion of her precarious existence by learning to be hard on herself.When her godmother had said goodbye to her at the door to the house in the CalleVelázquez, there had been no mercy, and there would be none now either. Sara thought of the room in her dolls’ house that was a mirror image of the one she used to inhabit, a world created for a little girl whose only sin had been to grow up. And once again she felt the anger she’d felt on a night a lifetime ago, the night she turned sixteen, when she suddenly understood not only why she could no longer fit her legs under her desk, but also why she would never have another desk made for her. Doña Sara had grown tired of playing mother and didn’t deserve to see her shed so much as a tear.What Sara could not allow now was that her own mother, who never even had the chance to teach her to play, should treat her like the young lady she no longer was.
Her mother was in the kitchen, chopping onions, garlic and parsley on a wooden chopping board. Sara went and stood beside her, not knowing what to say, where to start.The seconds passed slowly.The garlic was chopped so finely it was almost a paste.The knife reduced the onion to tiny pieces, and Sara silently envied the happy unconcern of the blade. She couldn’t bring herself to risk either humiliating her mother by thanking her, or offending her by asking her never to clean her room again. Then, Sebastiana turned and scraped the contents of the chopping board into a frying pan, wiped her hands on her apron, and smiled.
“Hello, dear,” she greeted her daughter in a bright voice. “How are things going?”
“Fine,” answered Sara.“What are you making?”
“Beef stew, for lunch.”
“Lovely! Are you adding potatoes?”
“Yes, but not till later,” said her mother, looking away, glancing at the pan, as if confused by this sudden curiosity and her daughter’s exaggerated enthusiasm.“Potatoes are softer than meat, so they cook quickly. If I put them in now, they’ll go mushy. So that’s why you have to wait until almost the end. Half an hour is plenty.”
“Oh,” murmured Sara,“I didn’t know that.”
Neither of them could find anything more to say. Sebastiana washed her hands, and once she’d dried them thoroughly, she washed the chopping board and dried it with the same excessive care she had applied to her fingers, cuticles and nails. Sara realized how ill at ease her mother was, but her own hands were empty and she wouldn’t find a knife in any drawer that could cut through the tough, invisible membrane that separated them, keeping them at a polite, cautious distance from each other. They had never learned to talk to each other and both could feel the weight of the air above their heads, pressing down on them like a plunger.Then Sebastiana put her hand to her forehead and smiled.
“The washing!” she exclaimed, relieved to have found something to say at last.“I’ve got to hang out the washing, I forgot.”
“No, Mama,” Sara said quickly, looking round for the washing basket, which was on a chair. She grabbed it before her mother could get to it. “I’ll do it.”
She opened the window and found a little basket of pegs on the ledge. She struggled with the pulleys until she realized that clothes were only hung beyond the knot. She was determined not to make any more mistakes after that.“It’s easy,” she told herself every time she pegged an item of clothing to the line. Easy.” She worked slowly, taking care over every movement, thinking she mustn’t let anything drop down into the courtyard. S
he took a shirt from the washing basket and turned it upside down, then the right way up, then upside down again.
“Mama,” she said at last, “how do you hang shirts—by the shoulders or by the hem?”
“By the hem. And it’s better if you peg it at the seams, because that way the peg marks don’t show quite as much and it’s easier to iron.”
Sara hung out the shirts correctly but almost everything else was wrong, though she did manage to pair up all the socks and hang out the entire basket without anything falling into the courtyard. When she’d finished she felt quite pleased with herself, not realizing that taking twenty-five minutes over this simple task was ridiculous.
“Right,” she said as she closed the window and turned around, holding the washing basket, not really knowing what to do with it. “That’s done.”
And then she fell silent. Her mother was standing very near, looking at Sara with moist eyes, wringing her apron. Sara couldn’t bear the tremble in her mother’s eyes, the veiled tears dancing in her pupils.
“Don’t cry, Mama.” Sara threw down the washing basket and went to her, choking back violent sobs.“I’m so sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry, dear?”
The Wind From the East Page 21