The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  By the time their sixty minutes were up, Sara Gómez had calmed down enough to search within herself for the cause of the uneasiness that had almost ruined the day. Her investigation began and ended in the same familiar place: Christmas always put her in a bad mood. Having resorted to a wide variety of tactics for sweetening this troublesome time over the years, she’d eventually opted for simply ignoring the whole business. But this hadn’t worked much better than trying to celebrate it on her own, or eschewing solitude to stay at her sister Socorro’s, or being consumed with sadness at a smart hotel in a village in Castille, where she’d had to eat in a dining room full of single diners, all the other fools from Madrid who’d had the same stupid idea as herself.This was the main reason that she’d submitted so meekly to all of Andrés’s and Tamara’s whims. Self-interest lurked beneath her generous self-denial whenever Juan or Maribel asked her not to pay the children so much attention, when she insisted that she loved taking them to the cinema and driving them around. She hoped that the children’s company, their energy and enthusiasm, their endless capacity to want things, would protect her from her feelings of desolation, the thick sense of failure that flooded her being when the sound of the first Christmas carol forced open the floodgates of her memory. She didn’t hate Christmas, she didn’t have a reason to hate it, or anyone to hate it with—it just put her in a bad mood. A really, really bad mood. Such a bad mood that it took her a whole morning to realize that it wasn’t Alfonso Olmedo’s fault that in more than fifty years she hadn’t found security, a home to return to, with her hands empty or full of gold, when Christmas came around once more.

  Apart from anything else,Alfonso was perfectly behaved. He did as he was told and didn’t wander off even once. And Tamara kept a close eye on him the whole time, as if, despite Sara’s attempts to hide her feelings, she knew what was at stake for them all that morning. But later, when Sara rushed to take the only free table in the burger bar,Alfonso immediately sat beside her, with the innocent passivity of one who is used to having everything done for him, and Tamara said she and Andrés would go and get the food. In the few minutes she was away, the only mishap of the day occurred. It made Sara very nervous, but later on she felt pleased that she had been there, because only then did she begin to think of Alfonso Olmedo as a complete being, a person separate from his brother and his niece, a pair of eyes and a voice that had their own story to tell.

  The scene seemed perfectly normal, when suddenly Alfonso pushed back his chair and tried to hide behind it. Sara scrambled to grasp what had happened, what had changed, what new element had been introduced into the monotonous landscape of plastic tables and brightly colored signs. But however much she tried, she wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint anything had Alfonso not grasped her arm and whispered a strange word into her ear, a name that sounded quaint, almost funny, like the name of a character in an old-fashioned comedy.

  “Nicanorrr,” he said, extending the last syllable out like chewing gum, in a way that would have been comical if he hadn’t looked so afraid. “Nicanor, Nicanor.”

  “Who?” asked Sara. She didn’t dare raise her voice and the question emerged as a nervous whisper. She looked around, bewildered. She didn’t understand what was happening; all she knew was that Alfonso was becoming very agitated.“What is it? What do you mean?”

  “Nicanor,”Alfonso repeated, as if he thought Sara should understand, and grew increasingly frustrated when he saw that she didn’t.“Nicanor, Nicanor,” he said again, and then suddenly, more precisely: “That uniform—see that? It’s Nicanor.”

  She looked towards the front of the restaurant and suddenly began to understand. A pair of policemen, one young, fair-haired, and solid, the other older, almost completely bald and fatter, had been waiting for food for quite a while. Apart from the waiters, they were the only people in uniform in the place, so she guessed Alfonso must mean one of them. Sara turned back round to look at Alfonso and was alarmed to see how pale he was, beads of sweat running down his forehead. Instinctively, she put out a hand to stroke his face.

  “The policeman?” she said quietly, still stroking Alfonso’s cheek.“You mean one of those policemen, don’t you? You know him and his name is Nicanor. Is that right?” He nodded, not looking at her, his eyes fixed on the two men in their blue uniforms.“Which one is it? The fair-haired one?”Alfonso shook his head, and Sara corrected herself. “No, the other one, the taller one—he’s Nicanor.”

  “Yes. I don’t like him. Juanito doesn’t either. He’s bad, Nicanor, he’s bad, he does tests on me, he hits me, he does tests on me. I hate tests, I hate them.”

  “He hits you?”

  “Bam, bam.”Alfonso started waving his hand from side to side, insisting on sound effects. “Bam, bam, this is what he does, bam, bam.”

  “What’s happening?” asked Tamara, rushing up with a tray. She dropped it down on the table and put her arms around her uncle.“What’s the matter, Alfonso?” She turned to Sara, looking more frightened than Sara or Andrés had ever seen her.“What’s happened to him?”

  “I’m not altogether sure. It started when those policemen came in. He seemed very anxious, even frightened, and started saying that one of them was called Nicanor, and that he knows him. I don’t know, maybe he’s seen him at the daycare center, or maybe he looks like one of the security guards there.”

  “No, it’s not that,”Tamara said, shaking her head vigorously. She didn’t stop to explain, but turned back to her uncle. “Look, Alfonso, listen to me.That’s not Nicanor, do you understand? Nicanor isn’t here, Nicanor lives in Madrid, and we’re not in Madrid.We live here now and we’re very far away, very, very far away. Don’t you remember?” But Alfonso, clinging to his niece, didn’t seem ready to understand. “What d’you bet it isn’t him? Look, he’s coming this way.You see, it isn’t Nicanor, is it?”

  Alfonso looked up now. He stared at the policeman, who was searching for an empty table, and then he flushed.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Tamara gave him three kisses—one on the forehead and one on each cheek—and squeezed his hand.Then she sat down beside him and proceeded to eat two hamburgers in a row, as if nothing had happened. Alfonso took a little longer to recover, but did so eventually. Meanwhile Sara decided to follow Andrés’s example. He had watched the entire scene wide-eyed, not daring to intervene or ask any questions. After some ice cream, they decided to return to the tank of balls before going home. Tamara let Alfonso go on ahead with Andrés and walked beside Sara, taking her hand.

  “Nicanor isn’t someone at the daycare center,” she said. “He was a friend of my father’s and he’s a policeman.We never see him now.Alfonso was very scared of him, because he always had a gun and a billy club, and he’s really horrible. Alfonso must have got confused.”

  “Of course,” answered Sara, sensing behind Tamara’s poorly concealed anxiety the weight of a lie she repeated, not for the sake of it, but because it was best for everyone. Sara didn’t mention the incident again, but from that moment on, she watched Alfonso Olmedo with greater interest.

  At the end of the holidays, Alfonso went back to his daycare center, Tamara and Andrés went back to school, and Sara missed them even more than she had in September. This time, though, she didn’t feel as lonely. And not just because the children, now almost always accompanied by Alfonso, seemed to have decided that Sara’s timid invitation to tea on the first Sunday in January was extended indefinitely, or because that first afternoon they each arrived with a present—a cup, vase, and ashtray, all decorated by hand—making up for Father Christmas’s amnesia towards her over the previous decades.That Christmas ended with something more than the certainty that long, silent Sundays were a thing of the past. From now on, whenever she grew tired of her plans for Maribel’s flat, Sara could amuse herself by imagining myriad different stories about Juan Olmedo, and she no longer felt guilty about it, or blamed it on her boredom.The stories and silences of the house opposite bound her to its occup
ants by an invisible thread, keeping her awake, and keeping her company.

  The year began with a stroke of luck for Dr. Olmedo. Although he’d never played the lottery regularly, he’d sometimes joined in at the hospital in Madrid, where there was always some older and astonishingly efficient nurse who took charge of buying the tickets. His winnings had been minimal so far and at first it seemed that this would also be the case in Jerez. But then, in the NewYear draw, the Rehab Department won one of the big prizes.The money was divided up amongst all the patients and staff, as well as some of the nurses and doctors in other departments. Juan Olmedo was one of them, and received two million pesetas.

  He was delighted although it occurred to him that the sum he’d won was a little awkward. He didn’t say so, of course, and outwardly he seemed as happy as was to be expected, paying for the meal the next time he went out to dinner with Miguel Barroso and a few other colleagues, and buying two large trays—one of cakes, another of canapés and savory tarts—as a treat for the rest of the staff.This last ritual, an essential precaution to ward off the misfortune that might be hitching a ride on the tail of luck, was a kind of tribute to his mother. Though never wealthy, she had always carried loose change in her purse out of superstition, to give to anyone she saw begging in the street.When Damián began to do well in business, she often told him that if he didn’t share some of what he earned, he’d end up with nothing sooner or later. Her prediction had come true, although not in the way she’d expected. When he died, Damián was richer than ever, having discovered that his true vocation was earning money.

  Juan didn’t really know what to do with the two million pesetas. Had he won a tenth of the amount, he would have spent it on something trivial; had it been ten times greater he would have had no choice but to invest it. But two million—too much money to fritter away on expensive dinners—was a derisory sum to invest, particularly when the single beneficiary of this modest amount, and any interest it might yield, would one day be a very wealthy woman anyway.Tamara’s parents had died without leaving a will, but circumstances had turned Juan into his niece’s guardian and, in that capacity, he had had a meeting before leaving Madrid with Damián’s lawyer and tax adviser in order to make plans for Tamara’s inheritance. After looking carefully at the state of his brother’s businesses, he decided not to sell Tamara’s interest in any of them. He didn’t know whether the other partners were trustworthy or not, but he certainly trusted Antonio, an old friend from the area where they grew up whom Damián had gradually made into a kind of general representative on his behalf, thanks to an initial recommendation from Juan. Many years earlier, when all three of them were still in their twenties, Juan had helped Antonio to come off heroin, and then asked Damián to give him a job. Juan knew that in his radical transformation into a respectable man,Antonio had not forgotten his past. Following Damián’s death,Antonio advised that it would not be a good idea to dispose of the chain of bakeries, and another of cafés, as they’d been more or less running themselves for years and were as dependably profitable as slot machines.And he promised Juan he’d watch over Tamara’s interests as if they were his own. Juan knew the value of Antonio’s word, so he accepted, even before Damián’s legal advisers supported the decision. He sold only a few properties—Damián’s cars and two plots of land that hadn’t yet been built on in a development in El Escorial.

  Juan did, however, keep the two houses in which Tamara had lived with her parents, and where it was conceivable she might some day live with her own children. The house in Estepona, with a small garden and its own tiny swimming pool, was only a bungalow, but it was worth a lot of money because it was on a luxurious estate, a sort of private club for millionaires with services provided so that it had all the advantages of a hotel.The company that ran the estate also operated as a rental agent, letting out the properties for weeks, months or years at a time, when they were not being used by their owners. Juan handed them the keys to his brother’s house and soon saw from the bank statements that it had become one more source of income.

  The house in the Colonia Bellas Vistas in Madrid, on the other hand, remained closed. Antonio took charge of paying a gardener and getting a cleaning company to go in every six months to keep the house in good condition. It was the kind of house that Juan, and all the other teenagers in the Estrecho district, had sworn they would one day live in.The street of houses, all with gardens, was separated from the rest of the world by railings that constituted much more than a boundary. Initially these houses were planned as holiday homes in the days when Madrid stretched only as far as Cuatro Caminos. But by the middle of the twentieth century, the unrestrained advance of the cranes had turned what had once been an outlying district into an area as central as any that could be reached by metro. Since then, the street, with its leafy gardens, ancient acacias, plane trees, and vine-clad pergolas that absorbed the coolness from the earth beneath, had been like an island, an oasis immune to the noisy eruption of blocks of flats that soon surrounded it on all sides.

  Within the wrought-iron railings, not all the houses were the same. Some had been knocked down many years earlier and the plots of land on which they stood divided into two or three, with smaller houses that bore little relation to the ambitious proportions of the originals.At first Damián had bought one of the smaller houses, waiting patiently for almost ten years until he could afford to buy something bigger: a magnificent place built over three floors with a Swiss chalet-style exterior that had been the whim of the banker who built it in the twenties, together with many other unusual decorative features, such as the fabulous mahogany staircase—one long, straight flight of stairs—that would eventually claim Damián’s life.

  After Damián’s dramatic fall, Juan moved into one of the guest bedrooms until he came to a decision about Alfonso’s and Tamara’s futures, accepting from the start that their fate would determine his. In the months after Tamara’s tenth birthday until the summer of the following year, he had plenty of opportunity to appreciate the privileged life that the occupants of such a house enjoyed, but he never felt comfortable there.When he gathered the rest of the family to tell them that he was thinking of closing it up, selling his own flat, and moving to a small town on the coast, his two sisters couldn’t understand. Paca, the sister who was most like him, felt his forehead as if checking for a fever, and asked him if he was delirious. Leaving such a beautiful, pleasant home, taking Tamara out of school and Alfonso away from his daycare center, and embarking on a totally new life in a remote town, would have seemed like madness even if Juan had some experience of running a home. “I know you, and this is ridiculous,” she warned him, “absolutely crazy.” Their other sister, Trini, was as ambitious and mercenary as Damián, but had had a very different life from him. She weakly agreed with Paca for the time it took her to analyze the situation and assess how she could use it to her benefit, then suddenly changed sides and backed Juan, suggesting that she and her three children could move into the house in Bellas Vistas to keep it in good condition until Tamara was old enough to decide what to do with it.“Closing up a house like that is as good as abandoning it,” she added, “that’s obvious.” Juan knew just what Trini was capable of—her divorce had been a long, sordid legal battle with a man who was even more crafty, selfish and, if possible, more money-grubbing than her. So Juan refused to let her move into the house from the start, and his younger sister called him all the names under the sun, swearing that she’d never speak to him again. Paca burst out laughing when she heard this and, after Trini had left, slamming the door behind her, warned Juan that the main risk of his plan was that, if he really was going to live by a beach, Trini would sooner or later come to stay and spend the whole summer scrounging off him.

  This proved to be an accurate prediction: on Christmas Day in 2000, Trini phoned Juan, after only four months of not speaking to him.“We really miss you,” she said in a theatrically emotional tone that didn’t actually sound entirely false. “Are you thinking of comi
ng to visit us? No? Well, let’s see if we can come to you, when the children are on holiday.” Juan assured her they were welcome to stay, and tried to sound as if he meant it. He was happy to have his sister and her children enjoying his home as long as they didn’t take advantage of what was still, in a way, Damián’s hospitality.

  He had been so rigidly scrupulous about not using any of his brother’s money, that there came a time when he realized it might actually be detrimental. But if, outwardly, he seemed to relax his standards, it was mainly to avoid questions he didn’t want to answer.

  “I’m sorry, Juanito, but I don’t understand,” said Antonio one day, reflecting the views of Damián’s other financial advisers.“I can see why you do it for Alfonso—he’s your younger brother, so he’s your direct responsibility, you might say—but Tamara? She’s not your daughter, she’s Damián’s, and she has plenty of money, even though she’s only ten. So why should you pay all her expenses? It doesn’t make sense.”