“We didn’t know anything.We believed whatever they told us—the Party, the ones who had an education and were good at giving orders. They knew.They told us we had to resist, so we did, that we had to wait, so we did, that anyone who wanted to would be able to leave Madrid in time. They deceived us, they treated us like idiots, and that’s what we were—complete idiots.They made sure they got out in time, of course; Casado first of all, and fast. He handed us over to them on a plate. I can still hear him:‘General Franco has given us guarantees,’ he said over the radio,‘anyone who hasn’t shed blood need not fear reprisals.’ Had I shed blood? No. Well, they sentenced me to death two days after capturing me, that’s what they did. How was I to know? I didn’t learn to read until I was thirty.”
Six days later, in the middle of the afternoon, Sara Gómez Morales rang at the door of the Ochoa household, where everyone recognized her immediately. But she was no longer the same girl—the carefree, capricious teenager they all remembered. She was an impostor, determined never to trust anyone again and never take a single step, for the rest of her life, without anticipating even the most trivial consequences. This resolve had led her by the hand into her godmother’s presence, keeping her pride intact, but secretly squirreled away in an inner sanctum so deep that it was safe from lies, treacherous promises and hypocritical smiles. Even if it meant shriveling up inside, daily swallowing the bitter pill of resignation and humiliation, she would not be overcome. When all was said and done, rifles didn’t simply appear, you had to earn them, snatch them from the enemy, know how to steal them or save up to buy them, and if this was the price to pay, she’d pay it. But she would not be humble, she would not be meek, she would not be stupid. There was only one possible path if she was going to advance: she had to arm herself.This was the only conclusion Sara reached after thinking and thinking. If her mother was right, so too was her father. She had to end up being one of the ones who had an education, who were good at giving orders, the ones who knew, and that meant, for a start, getting a good job and earning lots of money.“After that, we’ll see,” she promised herself whenever she had any doubts about her plans. “We’ll see.” And she thought of Socorro, of Sebastiana with all those children, their anxiety as the end of each month approached, and she gritted her teeth and repeated it to herself, like an order, a mantra—“We’ll see.”
“I thought I’d do a short course—to become a bilingual secretary, for instance, so that I can use my French.Then, once I’ve started work, I can learn English, and do other courses. I like studying and I’m good at it, but I wanted to know what you think.”
She was repeating—with small, well-chosen variations—what Doña Sara had told her mother about her plans for Sara’s future. Even before she’d reached the end of her speech, Sara saw that she’d got it right.
“Well, that sounds very sensible, darling. I’m so glad to have you back, to have you here again.You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed you.”
While her godmother’s eyes showed emotion, Sara no longer cared whether this was genuine or not.There was to be no room for compassion and she kept her lips tightly shut to suppress any sudden outburst. Instead, she opened her own eyes wide to respond in kind, and discovered that this quiet deception did not affect her, or so she thought. She was wrong, but mistakes, like people, mature slowly.
“My friend Loreto—you remember her, don’t you?” Doña Sara went on with the gratuitous magnanimity of those who don’t need to fight to win their wars, and Sara nodded.“You’ll pay for this, you bitch, you’ll pay for it all,” she thought, sitting on the edge of her chair decorously, discreet and attentive as would be expected of a young lady. “Her sister is married to the owner of a chain of academies across Madrid.They prepare their students for Civil Service exams, and offer shorthand and secretarial courses.The main school is in the Calle Espoz y Mina, very near to where you live. It’s a bit late so they might not be taking any new students, but I’m sure Loreto would do me a favor and get you a place.You could do a three-year course, and be fully qualified by the end of it.Then we could look for a good position for you.What do you think?”
Doña Sara looked at her with an expectant smile, her hands folded in her lap. Sara had come to know the meaning of that smile very well, an expression of indulgent generosity, a woman who felt very pleased with herself. The last time she had seen it was when her godmother had agreed to allow her the party shoes in yellow silk, an expression that said she was bestowing a gift and demanded overflowing gratitude in response. Sara faithfully observed the rule. Afterwards, she went to say hello to Don Antonio, who barely answered, and passed by the kitchen to say goodbye to the servants. Then she ran down the stairs, rushing to get outside as soon as possible.When at last she breathed in the warm, soothing breeze that fluttered through the tree tops, her whole body hurt.“I’ll get used to it,” she told herself,“I’ll get used to it eventually, no doubt.” And though her legs felt weak and shaky, she forced them to move and hurried down into the metro.
She thought she’d come through the worst, the period of shipwreck. She had plans now, another refuge to build, a purpose to cling to with the hope and desperation she would need. But reality still lay in wait for her, and it was ugly, even more so than the vulgarity of mentioning money, the price of things, in an intimate family conversation.
The Robles School of Shorthand,Typing and Secretarial Skills occupied the first floor of a building so old it had forgotten every vestige of its past splendor.The huge, labyrinthine apartment, the result of successive chaotic additions to a small, original nucleus, had one central corridor that branched off into other, smaller corridors, some of which ended abruptly in a blank wall. On either side of the corridors, there were countless old doors, all of them uniformly covered in layer after layer of thick white gloss paint, like geological strata.These doors opened onto tiny rooms, grandly designated classrooms.They contained an odd selection of furniture, often including six or seven different styles of chair in a single row, almost all of them with a little attachment on one side that served as a desk. Some were made of wood, others of plywood with a synthetic laminate, or of plastic, a few of them folded, and some had a little rack beneath the seat for books. Señor Robles, whom Sara did not see once in the four years she spent there gaining her qualification as a bilingual secretary, re-used desks thrown out by schools, paying only a little more for them than the rag-and-bone men would.The typewriters were so old that you could only manage, and then not always, to produce letters on the page by viciously pounding the keys. They were always being sent to be repaired, and even so it was a rare one that didn’t have a broken key or two.The official explanation was that it was good for the students to learn on difficult keyboards so that they’d do even better when they worked on comfortable modern typewriters, but this argument didn’t explain why the ceiling lights always had a blown tube, or why the French teacher, a woman in her fifties with a red nose and an accent slurred with anis, spoke the language worse than Sara did.
However most of the students couldn’t have cared less about any of this. Apart from the occasional enterprising office worker investing his spare time with a view to a promotion, the Robles School fed mainly on girls of Sara’s age, from lower-middle-class families who were trying to provide some training for their daughters, but could not afford to send to them to university (although this wasn’t always the case for their brothers). The girls didn’t mind that much. Almost every week, one of them dropped out, having started a course just to try it out or to avoid speeches like the one Sara had had from her mother. Many of them would have preferred to be working as trainee hairdressers or make-up artists or in a clothes shop, the three points that delimited the unvarying triangle of their interests.They all knew how to put their hair in curlers, how to iron it, how to pin it up, and they wore a lot of make-up even to class, with thick black lines ringing their eyes, pastel eye shadow on their eyelids, and skillfully applied false lashes like a row of insect legs. Short
skirts were in fashion, and theirs were extremely short. Knee-high boots were in fashion, and theirs were extremely high.They subscribed to a singular aesthetic in all aspects of their appearance and behavior, and Sara stared apprehensively at their nails, long and curved as razor shells, with deep-red polish that chipped as the week wore on, their bouffant hairdos stiff with lacquer, their dozens of necklaces, their cheap, showy plastic earrings. She listened to them talking in loud piercing voices, slapping themselves suddenly on the thighs as they laughed, repeating the same expressions of amazement or amusement, “Oh, my God, take a look at her, can you believe what she’s wearing?” On Mondays, a kind of general conclave was held in the corridors, where they exchanged gossip about dances and boyfriends, the two things that seemed to determine their happiness. Sara felt more like an alien than ever, and she sensed their distrust, the hostility and contempt that rose to the surface in their glances, the whispers as she passed. But she couldn’t make friends with the swots either, dull, timid little things who applied themselves to their studies in the hope of one day resembling their idol, Isabelita Sevilla.
Señorita Sevilla had an impressive collection of plastic hair bands placed strategically on her head so that they accentuated the architectural magnificence of her hairdo. At the front, there was a chestnut fringe, furiously backcombed, and behind it a dome of short hair so hollow, so bouffant, that it looked like a meringue straight out of a recipe book. Señorita Sevilla was the typing teacher, and the kind of woman who would rather go out naked than carry a handbag that didn’t match her shoes.At the Robles School, this second-rate lady, who was proud of her small waist and never admitted her age, was taken to be the acme of refinement and good taste, even though she occasionally let slip disastrous errors in grammar.This weakness never compromised her prestige because the only student who noticed had no one to talk to, no one she could laugh about it with. Señorita Sevilla, though she would never know it, was also the very model of the averagely well-off, averagely capable, averagely attractive, averagely educated, averagely elegant, averagely single, averagely contented woman that Doña Sara Villamarín de Ochoa had envisaged her god-daughter might become, an average future of plastic hair bands and six different pairs of shoes as the grand prize in a lottery of the unexceptional.
But Sara Gómez Morales was not, and would never be, an average woman. Reality was ugly, very ugly, and life more wretched than hard. This was the most important thing she learned at the Robles School of Shorthand,Typing and Secretarial Skills, along with the knowledge that if she didn’t watch out, she’d end up like Señorita Sevilla.As for the rest, she passed all her exams and practical assessments with amazing ease.The shorthand teacher—and virtual director of the school, whose proprietor, if the rumors were to be believed, was also her lover—held Sara up as an example to the other students.This status made Sara’s relationship with her classmates even more complicated, but she didn’t care.
In less than a year, Sara Gómez Morales had gone from a well-to-do adolescence, to being ejected from the social class in which she had grown up, from the rigors of revolutionary frenzy, to a cold and calculating, lifelong desire for revenge. She’d pondered each critical step taken, her reasons, the advantages and risks of each choice. She’d even succeeded in controlling her own feelings, and yet one day everything suddenly seemed to pall, and she felt she no longer cared about anything.Time dragged, and the years passed by imperceptibly. She was determined to be successful, and she managed it easily, on the modest scale of successes that were within her reach. By the time she started her third year at the Robles School she was already working in the afternoons, managing the books of several shops in her district.Then she found out how much classes at the school cost, and was shocked at how tiny the outlay that her godmother had portrayed as a privilege actually was. She telephoned Doña Sara to tell her that she no longer needed to make the payments, and was amazed that she did not feel more triumphant at what should have been the first major victory of her life.
Her other victories didn’t make her any happier.At the age of twenty she got a job in the offices of a pharmaceutical laboratory, a modern company that didn’t pay a great salary but gave her a few hours off in the afternoon so that she could continue her studies. This was when she began to flirt with brandy. She bought a television set for her parents, enrolled for the first year of English at one of the official language schools, changed jobs, did a few odd courses in advanced book-keeping, drew up her own savings schedule, got an advanced qualification in tax law. She spent all her weekends at home, had no friends, either male or female, went to the cinema alone, studied hard, and drank quite a bit. She took a short course in customs regulations, had the kitchen at the flat in Concepción Jerónima redecorated, got a job as an accountant for a shipping agent, started earning more money than Arcadio Gómez Gómez had ever dreamed of, did up the bathroom, turned twenty-five, redid the floors throughout the flat, obtained an official qualification in English, realized that it wasn’t sensible to invest a single penny more in a rented flat, and began to admit certain things to herself:
That the necessarily fabricated love that bound her to her parents could not fill all the gaps in her life.That she was fed up with her mother continually asking about her colleagues at work and inventing imaginary boyfriends for her at the slightest opportunity.That she was just as fed up with her father living her life for her, overwhelming her with useless advice and suggestions that only seemed to confirm he would have done it all much better himself.That her father and mother were poor uneducated people who understood nothing, neither what she liked, nor what she wanted to achieve, nor what she hoped to do.That her godmother had been right, that her relationship with Juan Mari had not been serious but that now, when she was old enough to cultivate nostalgia, she missed her adolescent fantasies of life with him, missed the exaggerated elegance of the details.That although she hardly ever went to visit her godmother in the Calle Velázquez—and even then, did so reluctantly—she liked seeing the furniture, using the things, breathing the air of the apartment. However much she berated herself afterwards, she couldn’t rid herself of this weakness. This was why she didn’t have a boyfriend, or any friends, and went to the cinema alone, studied hard, and drank quite a bit. She had no one to talk to. She would always be in limbo, neither a lady nor an office worker, neither her godmother’s Sara nor her parents’ Sari, none and all of these things at once, everything and nothing, with an endless burden of dissatisfaction imprinted on her brain.
Sometimes, the ugliness of the world bore down on her, but she still found the strength to fight it. Sometimes her hidden pride, appeased, beaten down by routine, rose in her throat, burning the roof of her mouth and forcing her to see that what she had was not enough. Each of the modest diplomas gained from correspondence courses that her mother insisted on framing and hanging on Sara’s bedroom wall, resigned to not being allowed to hang them in the dining room, was a product of these unpredictable rages, of this furious crippled ambition. But nothing was as strong as the fever that took hold of her in the summer of 1974.
Sara was twenty-seven years old and she told herself that enough was enough. She did it in under a month, twenty-two days from first looking at job ads in the paper to moving into her office in the accounts department of a large construction firm. She enrolled for an economics degree at the Open University and made a down payment on a flat still under construction, on a rather pretentious development by the Plaza de Castilla.Then she joined what had once been her father’s trade union. With her cold, meticulous, arithmetical mind she immediately stood out at meetings where temperatures, blood, words and promises were all overheated. Perhaps this was why Vicente noticed her immediately. She noticed him the moment he walked through the door of the warehouse where the meeting was being held that day.
Vicente González—in fact his full surname was González de Sandoval, but he always cut off the more aristocratic-sounding second half—was eight years older than Sara an
d the only son of one of the largest shareholders in the company.With a PhD in economics, he was a Marxist by conviction, but with plenty of supporting arguments. When he’d finished his degree, he’d tried to sever all links with his family, whose history, politics and business both embarrassed and disgusted him. He managed this successfully thanks to a temporary teaching vacancy at the university where he’d done his degree. He’d grown his hair and a beard, rented an attic flat in Argüelles, shacked up with an aspiring actress from Cordoba who sang in a bar, and for a time had fun and was satisfied with his life. He was also involved in organizing the student uprisings of ’68.Arrested and tried, he was sentenced to two years in prison, the leniency of the sentence owing something to the true length of his surname.The court, however, did not take into account the allergic asthma he had suffered from since childhood and which seemed to take him, with every attack, to the brink of death. He had a terrible time in prison, so terrible that after three consecutive asthma attacks, he was released on health grounds, and confined to house arrest at the family home for the remainder of his sentence. He no longer felt like doing anything foolish and his mother welcomed him with open arms. She made him shave off his beard and cut his hair, gave him his old room and lovingly fed him hot soup and fish with potatoes.Vicente had almost forgotten the taste of fresh fish. And María Belén, his childhood sweetheart, came to keep him company every afternoon with a self-abnegation that would have moved a dead man.As he was still alive but reluctant to discuss the matter, it was she who told him one day that she knew everything and forgave him and that they’d have to start thinking about a date for the wedding.Vicente doubted she knew everything—in particular the prodigious capabilities with which the actress from Cordoba had seduced him. But he agreed, persuaded partly by the fish dinners, partly by the conviction that he had no choice. They were married in 1971, in church, and three hundred and fifty guests attended the reception at their country club. By then,Vicente was already a senior executive in his father’s construction company. In 1972, his first child was born, the umpteenth Vicente González de Sandoval. In 1973, he began to suffer from insomnia, and seriously wondered if he was going mad. By 1974, the year he met Sara, he thought of himself as an amoeba, a germ, a bug, but above all a complete and utter fool. A few months earlier, his wife had told him she was pregnant again and that with luck it would be a girl so she could call her Begoña, after her grandmother.That same day, he’d bumped into a quantity surveyor in the corridor who knew him from his old days of political activism at university.Through this man, he started to forge links with the union leaders at the firm, who welcomed him warmly, aware of the benefits such a contact might provide.Vicente didn’t dare ask to join the union because he was afraid he might be refused, but he quietly attended their meetings and, always in private, passed information, made suggestions, and felt that at least he was being useful.
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