It had been different only once. She was twenty-two. He was a neighbor of her brother Pablo, who worked for ITT. He was thirty-four, had been married for ten years and was alone in Madrid, working in August when most people were away on holiday. She met him by chance one day, when she went to Pablo’s to water her sister-in-law’s plants. His name was Manuel, he lived in the flat opposite, and she had liked him very much, although she was never really sure why. She had glimpsed him across the courtyard. He was naked from the waist up, with broad shoulders and thick arms, and was holding a bottle of beer. “Hot, isn’t it?” he said, and she replied, “Well, yes, it is hot,” and went on watering the plants, glancing from time to time at the line of hair that went down his belly, past his perfect navel and disappeared into the top of his trousers.“Would you like a beer?” he asked after a while, raising the bottle in the air, and she said yes.They chatted and drank beer on the landing until it grew dark. He was funny, telling endless jokes, but then he began to appear nervous, as if he didn’t know what to do next, how to behave in such a situation. Sara found his gaucheness touching. At last he said, “Well, you probably have to go, don’t you?” assuming she had plans for the evening because it was a Friday. She said no, she was alone in Madrid too, her parents were in Asturias visiting her sister and she had nothing planned. “I’ve just started a new job and I’ve only got a week’s holiday,” she told him, “it’s this week, so I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” “Nor do I,” he said, brightening up. “I did a shift for a friend last week, so we could go for a drink if you like.”They had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They had a great deal to drink in two different bars. He kissed her in the street, with his arms around her, holding her tight against his body, and she liked it.They slept together in a bed that matched the wardrobe and chest of drawers and bedside tables adorned with matching little crochet mats. On the table on Sara’s side there was a framed photograph of three children with a fat woman who looked older than her husband. It was only her second time, but he was a gentle, affectionate lover and didn’t seem to notice her lack of experience. Nor did he say anything when Sara suggested they sleep at her brother’s flat,“Because here,” she added,“with all this,” and she gestured vaguely at the photo by the bed, “I don’t know.”They spent all of Saturday together and most of Sunday, and he helped her tidy the flat before they left.As they parted, on the landing where they’d met, he looked at her very steadily, and couldn’t find anything to say. She kissed him on the cheek and rushed downstairs, but as she got to the entrance, Manuel called: “Hey, wait!” He ran after her and kissed her on the mouth.“Next Saturday I’ve got to go and collect my wife, but maybe . . . Do you have a phone?”“No,” she lied,“I haven’t.”
As she came out of the metro at the Puerta del Sol, it wasn’t quite dark, but Sara felt like she was emerging into a different world, the real world, the only world that was hers. It was as if the time in San Fernando de Henares—her brother’s flat, Manuel’s body, his face, his hands, the way he moved—was all part of a fiction that had just burst like a soap bubble. She wasn’t sure what had just happened or why she’d behaved the way she had, who had taken all the decisions for her, She felt neither ashamed nor pleased, just strange. In time she would come to understand that this episode had sprung from herself, from her own confusion, and was unlike any conscious step she had ever taken before.The favor for her sister-in-law, which had seemed such a hassle, a tiresome journey on a stifling afternoon, had provided her with a rare and precious opportunity to slip into another possible life, the life she might have had if things had been different. Pablo’s neighbor, with his curly black hair, pale eyes, and square jaw that balanced the thickness of his lips, was much more than some random good-looking man who’d caught her eye through a window. From across the courtyard, the stranger looked more like Arcadio Gómez Gómez than his own sons did; not the grey, tired, prematurely aged man who had hugged a lonely, confused little girl every Sunday morning, but the young, strong Arcadio of the photographs, the armed, fierce Arcadio, with a strong body and tanned arms. And her brother’s flat, its terrazzo floors, hollow doors, aluminum windows, narrow corridor, and hideous china figurines, might have been her home had she chosen an employee of ITT, had she been able to live the life she should have led from the very start.
This was what she had loved, this was the dream she had given herself up to in the brown arms of a man who was never simply himself to her, and who never quite made her his in the strange forty-eight hours they spent together. Neither of them thought to switch off Pablo’s alarm clock when they got into his bed, but when it went off, at six twenty-five on the Saturday morning, Sara was already awake. It was the first time she’d spent the night with someone and the proximity of a man’s body, the heat it gave off and the sound of his breathing, weighed down on her.When the alarm erupted, bouncing off the walls of the room, he sat up immediately and shot out of bed, a reflex. Amazed at how beautiful the body of a naked man could be, Sara watched him look around, bewildered, as if he didn’t know where he was. He then turned to her and smiled.
“Oh!” he said, his voice still thick with sleep.“You’re here. Good! I’d forgotten.”
He got back into bed, covering himself with the sheet, put his arms around her and kissed her face, her hair, her neck, and Sara felt his warmth, so pleasant after her sleepless night. She could sense a new greed, a desire growing in her fingertips, in the space between her parted lips, in the hard penis pressing against her belly, and she felt jealous and strangely grateful. She put her arms around him, placed her hands flat on his back and drew him to her, and he took possession of her slowly, wordlessly, with his eyes open, pulling out just in time.Then they kissed for a long while, still looking at each other, as if they both knew how strange and good it was.“We’ve got to buy some condoms,” he said, then added, “Let’s get some more sleep, shall we?” She moved close to him, clung to him. Manuel took her arm and placed it across his chest, as if he were used to sleeping like this. Sara kissed him on the shoulder, once, twice, three times, and as she fell at last into a deep, heavy sleep, she surrendered to the fantasy that this man was her man, this house was her house, and she realized that, however pathetic it might seem, this was the sweetest moment of her life.
Yet never, not even once, did she think of trying to find this man, who asked for bread in a Chinese restaurant, who rested his left arm on his leg as he ate, and who spoke with a thick Madrid accent, again. She didn’t even want to go back to her brother’s house to take the sheets off the clothes line. She’d washed them and hung them out to dry, and was planning to iron them and remake the bed. But by the following Monday, when she left work, she couldn’t believe that it had really happened, because she was scared of seeing him again and didn’t want to prolong the pleasant deception of a life that would never be hers. It hadn’t occurred to her that her sister-in-law would be suspicious; but when Sara came across her sitting at the table at her parents’ house one Sunday in September, it was obvious she was still annoyed.
“I spilt water on the bed,” Sara said, giving the first excuse she could think of, and not daring to meet Pili’s eye. “That’s why I changed your sheets.”
“And that’s why you washed them?”
“Well, yes, so they wouldn’t smell of damp.”
“Of course,” her sister-in-law spat out with obvious contempt.“Right little slut you are!”
Pablo got on very badly with his wife, and he didn’t dare intervene directly, but he started telling off the children for no reason so as to interrupt the conversation. Sara realized that he too was looking at her differently, conspiratorially, almost admiringly, as if he’d never known her before. Sara reflected that this must be the first time her brother had ever really noticed her, but she was grateful to him for providing the distraction.
“Manuel sends you his regards,” he said to her later, in the kitchen, as she was doing the washing-up and waiting for the coffee to brew.“He’
s a mate of mine, we work together on the same floor. He’s a good man, so don’t worry, he didn’t want to tell me any of the details. But I got it out of him—it was obvious that something had happened and not just because of the business with the sheets. Apparently, you put all the pots and pans back in the wrong places.You were the only one who had a key to the flat.You could have brought anyone here, of course, with this place to yourself, so why would you bother going all the way over to ours? And Gracia, Manuel’s wife, told Pili that when she got back she found him very odd, in a bad mood all the time and not wanting to do anything, so, what with one thing and another, it didn’t take me long to work it out.The problem is, my wife is good friends with his.They go to the market together, they listen to that serial on the radio every afternoon, they go shopping for clothes, things like that. But I think although they’re suspicious, they don’t know anything for sure.”
“Oh!” Sara said, raising her eyes from the washing-up and looking at her brother. But she couldn’t focus because her eyes were filling with tears.
They heard the clicking of heels approaching down the corridor and her brother, who was nine years older than her—and was probably already involved with the hairdresser for whom he left his wife a couple of years later, to general consternation but the bitter satisfaction of Sara, who detested her sister-in-law from that day on—comforted her immediately.
“Come on, it’s all right,” he whispered quickly, hugging her and kissing her on the temple as if she were a little girl, before turning to intercept his wife.“The coffee’s not ready yet.Will you ask my father if he wants any? I’ll bring it in a minute.”
“You?” said Pili in mock amazement, sharp and shrill as a hen.“You’ll bring the coffee in?”
“Yes, I will,” he replied calmly. Sara went on with the washing-up, not even stopping to wipe away the tears; she couldn’t understand why she was crying, yet the tears kept flowing. Her brother was getting testy with his wife now:“What’s the matter?” he said to her.
“What’s the matter?” she bristled. “Shit! First little miss goody-two-shoes here, and now you, taking the coffee to the table. I can’t cope with all the surprises!”
“Oh, go to hell!” Pablo shouted after Pili had left the kitchen, the sound of her heels receding down the corridor. “You might be getting another surprise some day soon!”
“Oh, yes?” called his wife, stopping to shout back.“You watch out, you might get a surprise yourself!”
Sara heard her mother, asking them to calm down, as usual.
“No problem! Where do I sign?” Pablo went on yelling, despite his mother’s pleading, also as usual.“No such luck! No such bloody luck!”
The sound of Pili’s heels faded, and Sara could now hear the children’s voices.The coffee was ready. Pablo, surprisingly calm after the row, took a tray, and placed the coffee cups and sugar bowl on it.
“Is there anything you want me to tell him?” he asked his sister, almost in her ear.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.“What would be the point?”
He shrugged, as if conceding she was right, but as he was about to take the tray to the dining room, she whispered,“Well, remember me to him. Because I do remember him.”
She’d remember him for a long time, never forgetting the feel of his wide, rough-skinned fingers, their instant, analgesic heat when he touched her face, her clothes, her body, fingers that were stronger, more powerful than the confusion of a little girl; she never forgot their warm intimacy between unfamiliar sheets. For years she reproached herself for not having returned to San Fernando, to Manuel’s body, on the Monday that convinced her that nothing had happened, or in the days that followed, prolonging the dream of a fragile love, irrevocably condemned to die.
But she was never truly sorry that she hadn’t gone back to see him again.Whenever she felt tempted to respond to the understanding look that she got from Pablo across the table several Sundays in a row, she tried to picture her brother’s small, cheap flat in the suburbs, to hear his outbursts of barely contained rage, to imagine the rows that were becoming more serious, louder, more ferocious. She imagined the mute presence of the plants her sister-in-law didn’t buy in any shop, spider plants and geraniums and money plants that multiplied through shoots and cuttings, changing hands on the stairs, at the market, in the changing rooms at the beer factory where she worked as a cleaner, spontaneous gestures of basic courtesy in a world that was barely decent, a landscape of tired figures, young men who no longer looked young, young women who looked old, and endless children, shrieking, running, crying, constantly demanding. Perhaps there weren’t all that many of them, it just seemed like it as they slept in bunk beds that didn’t leave enough space to open the doors of tiny bedrooms with paper-thin walls, the ceiling lamp shaking as they charged about cramped flats on boring, wet Saturday afternoons. This was how Pablo lived, and how his neighbor no doubt lived, moving between weariness and disappointment, between monotonous resignation and the temptation to snatch a little pleasure, a glimmer of happiness anywhere, at any price. Sara knew about this kind of life; Socorro told her about it often.
“I’ve put him on a diet,” she’d say with regard to her husband, and Sara felt sorry for her brother-in-law, Marcelino, who’d have to get ten thousand pesetas from his mother’s pension on the first day of every month if he ever wanted to have sex with his wife again. “Don’t be silly, Socorro,” Sara said to her,“you can’t do that to him!”“Oh, can’t I?” she’d reply. “And why not? What else can I do? Can you tell me? It’s what women have always done, it’s the only thing that works, the only thing I’ve got . . .” “What about you?” asked Sara. “I mind less than he does,” her sister said,“and anyway, I just put up with it.”That was the beginning of the end, putting up with it, until good intentions disappeared, and anger was more sustaining than supper when a very young, very tired man got home late in the evening to find two cold fried eggs covered with a plate and a wife, also very young and very tired, who wouldn’t open her legs for him. “Your loss,” the men would mutter, and Sara sympathized, but she sympathized with the women too, they worked as hard as their husbands and still they had to put up with them shouting because they’d drunk three beers in a row and the fourth wasn’t already chilling in the fridge; women who’d got married before they were twenty because they were sick of doing it standing up in a bathroom, or lying on the ground in a dark corner of their local park, and who’d got pregnant two, three, four times before they were thirty, watching their husbands broaden, fill out, and stay young, growing more attractive, while they themselves went from splendor to collapse, stretch marks, sagging flesh, the same shape as the bread rolls they ate in the street, women who had only one weapon and used it so much the rope finally snapped. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get a meek one, like poor Marcelino, who ended up doing everything Socorro told him, and was passably happy, and made her passably happy, but sometimes they turned out bad-tempered, like Pablo, who summed up his philosophy of life in a single sentence, “I’m going to do what I bloody well like and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.” And behind the door there was always another, younger woman, a girl, who was prepared to do all the things a lawful wife didn’t have to do, who never said no to anything, who learned fast, and caressed and flattered them, excited them, sucked them off, and let them suck anything they liked, for as long as they liked, until they realized that not only was it cheaper than going to a prostitute, but that if the girl was so devoted, it must be because she was crazy about them, because she really loved them. So then it started all over again, from the beginning, but with an extra person, an odd one out—the lonely, wrecked wife who didn’t read books or newspapers, who didn’t have a TV, or any idea that in the other half of the world there were women like her claiming as their right the duties her husband had demanded of her in vain for years, a woman who never could have guessed what young female students in Salamanca called liberation, a woman like her sister-
in-law, Pili, who went to her mother-in-law’s to cry, and cried until she was empty. Sara felt that, however much she had come to hate her, however many books and newspapers she herself had read and would go on reading, Pili’s tears were heart-breaking, but no more so than the words of her brother, when he looked her in the eye and spoke to her straight.“I’m thirty-three years old,” he’d say, “and all I’ve done all my fucking life is get up at six thirty in the morning and work like a slave, so what do you want me to do now, eh? What do you want me to do?” So when Vicente González de Sandoval, with his slender fingers and carefully clipped nails, said that his story was sordid and ugly, Sara smiled and felt like adding,“You have no idea.You’ll never really know what a sordid, ugly, sickening story really is,Vicente.”
Everything else was easy. When Vicente came to pick her up to take her to the restaurant where his friend was celebrating his last night as a bachelor, he arrived on time, and she saw that he was wearing very different clothes—jeans, a checked shirt and a suede jacket—from the suit and tie she was used to seeing him in at the office. She was pleased by this, and even more by the fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off her legs as she got into the car.“You look great, Sara!” he told her.The bride and groom were saying farewell to their single status with a joint dinner, as befitted a modern couple who would be getting married in church the following morning in an almost clandestine ceremony (with only their closest family present, no confetti, white dress, veil, or bouquet) as a way of keeping their respective families happy.The couple welcomed Vicente and Sara without surprise because, as she later found out, they hardly knew Vicente’s wife, and they were used to seeing him alone, or with a different girl each time. The comfortable combination of indifference and friendliness that Sara sensed in them, and in most of the guests at the dinner, helped to put her at her ease, to rise above the inevitable, occasional little smiles from a few back-biters.Vicente couldn’t keep his eyes off her even when he was eating, enveloping her in an exclusive, tyrannical attention that Sara would have hated in another man, making sure she never ran out of wine or cigarettes or anything else, during the entire meal.That evening, he embodied the man that Sara had been yearning forever since her fateful sixteenth birthday party.
The Wind From the East Page 33