This more than made up for any gaps, any hesitations or uncertainties. “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” she thought as Vicente kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone, with a longing that tensed his delicate fingers as he held her; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” as he whisked her out of the restaurant, kissing and embracing her so that they swayed and staggered; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” as he pounced on her in the car and his hands explored her body; “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him,” when he suddenly stopped and looked into her eyes, and said he was dying to have sex with her, but that he couldn’t take her anywhere more comfortable, or discreet, or pleasant than a hotel. “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend like him, always.” It was a profound truth, the most brutal and humiliating and purest truth she possessed. So that night, and many other nights, she behaved like a vulgar tart from the suburbs and said yes to everything, to be what he wanted her to be, whenever, wherever, however he wanted, repeating over and over to herself that he was the boyfriend she’d always wanted. And for a long time, that was enough.
But it wasn’t enough, because Vicente González de Sandoval was a weak man, though it would take her years to find out.
At first, he seemed quite the opposite, a wise man, a prince, someone with the power to control reality and subject it to his wishes.
“Why didn’t you bring me here the other day?”
The apartment was small but had magnificent views, on the top floor of a building in the Calle Bailén, almost at the Plaza de España.
“Because I didn’t know it was empty,” he said, taking off his jacket and dropping it on the sofa. “It belongs to my grandmother. She owns the whole building, but no one lives here at the moment. I went to see her and asked if any of the flats were empty. I said I wanted to use it as an office, that I couldn’t work at home because of the children.” He took off his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and smiled.“We agreed I’d return it to her whenever she needed it, but I don’t think she ever will. She’s loaded.”
This wasn’t true. His grandmother was very rich indeed, but neither that apartment nor any other apartment in the building belonged to her, or any other member of his family.This was another classic ingredient of this classic story. He’d looked in the papers, called an estate agent, gone to see the apartment, liked it, paid a deposit, and for years, without Sara knowing, continued paying the rent by direct debit from a bank account his wife knew nothing about. He’d never felt the need to do anything like this for any of the other women he’d had affairs with since marrying María Belén, and this part of his story was true, although he’d looked only at furnished flats so as not to spend more than he had to, just in case things went sour, in case he suddenly went off Sara the way he’d gone off all the others.
“And the furniture?”
“It was already here.”
“It’s hideous.”
“Yes,” he said, putting his arms around her, holding her tightly and kissing her on the mouth. As he gazed down at her, Sara had a feeling that she was going to fall hopelessly in love with him.“I’ll make sure I tell my grandmother off.”
The sheets on the bed were new. They felt stiff and rough, though not unpleasant, because they had never been washed, and the creases from being in their packaging were still visible. Sara noticed this, because she nearly always noticed everything. He undressed her like a greedy child at his own birthday party, not yet resenting the poverty of her responses, her inability to return what she was receiving, her need to remain in control at all times. The others Sara had been with had not minded, Manuel had not minded, but Vicente would come to find it painful.
“Did you buy them?” she asked, lifting a corner of the sheet, when Vicente collapsed beside her, convincing her that everything had gone well because he seemed so happy. She had enjoyed his weight upon her, his smell, and felt the same need to possess him and to give herself to him, that she had experienced many years earlier one August in a borrowed bed. It wasn’t exactly pleasure, but it was the most intense thing she’d ever felt for a man, with a man.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“Did you come here specially to make the bed?”
“Of course,” he said, and she laughed and clung to him as she’d failed to do earlier, when he was moving inside her.
Perhaps it was this, her interest in such a trivial detail, the disproportionate reaction to his answer that enlightened Vicente in that instant. Perhaps, in such a brief space of time, he managed to link Sara’s excessive delight now with her urge to take the little bottles of shampoo from the hotel bathroom that first night.And then there were all the strange questions he couldn’t make sense of:“Where did you live with your parents before you got married?”That was the first.“In the Calle Montesquinza,” he’d answered.“Which school did you go to?”“To El Pilar.”“Ah!” she’d sighed, inexplicably relieved, and on she went, her questions becoming more and more mysterious: “Where did you hang out when you were at the university?”“I don’t know, around Moncloa, I suppose, like everyone else.” “You didn’t happen to meet a civil engineer from Vitoria whose name was Juan Mari García de Ibargüengoitia, did you?” “No.” “Or a very pretty girl called María Pilar Gutiérrez Rios whom everyone called Maruchi?”“No.”“Did your wife go to the Sagrado Corazón?” “No.”“Does the surname Villamarín sound at all familiar? Or Ochoa?” “No, why should they sound familiar? Why are you asking me such bizarre questions?”“Oh, I don’t know, just because.”
“You’ve never told me why you’re my equal and my opposite, Sara,” he said looking into her eyes, their noses still almost touching. “Why you’re my reflection in a mirror.”
Sara moved away from him and leaned against the headboard. She took a deep breath and, staring at the ceiling, told him everything. It was the first time she’d told anyone her story, and it would be the last. She’d thought she wouldn’t know where to start but she started at the beginning, with a frightened little girl called Sebastiana the day she started work at a big apartment in the Calle Velázquez, just after her twelfth birthday.After that, her words seemed to flow of their own accord, to issue from lips that felt numb, her tone neutral as she tried to defend herself from her memories. He let her speak, without interrupting or moving closer to her. Sara could hear his breathing when she paused, when she forced herself to pause, but talking soon became painful, making her throat feel tight and her mouth dry.“I need a drink,” she thought, but she desperately wanted to get to the end of this story and didn’t dare interrupt it now.Then she began to talk about herself, the extra piece that never fit into any jigsaw puzzle, her confusion, her bitterness, her anger. She’d never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her, and she certainly didn’t want him to, so she chose indirect routes, apparently trivial details, ordinary words. She talked of the white child-sized furniture, the silk dress, the washing line, the collection of colored hair bands, the bunch of old photos, faded, yellowing images, torn and dog-eared. But even then, her tactic didn’t work, and she wept silently throughout.
When she was finished, she turned to look at Vicente and thought she saw a trace of compassion in his eyes. He sat up, cleared his throat, and turned to pick up the phone on the bedside table.
“Hello, it’s me, is my wife at home?” he said, in his confident, efficient tone.“No, don’t disturb her, just tell her I won’t be coming home this evening because I’m still in Segovia.The meeting went on longer than expected, so I’m staying overnight.Yes, yes, I’ll explain it to her tomorrow. Thank you, goodbye.”
He replaced the phone on the bedside table, sank back into the bed and put his arms around her, his embrace both protective and vulnerable, its strength contradicted by the childlike impulse to place his cheek against hers and press hard, so that she could feel his cheekbones.
“Sara, Sara,” he murmured. He seemed deeply moved, even guilty somehow, and made no attempt to hide it.“My God, Sara.”
By now, she believed he could be her salvation, and she was convinced he would be as long as they both played the same game. From that night on, until the weariness of repetition changed the rules,Vicente González de Sandoval spent a lot of money pleasing Sara Gómez Morales, buying her beautiful, useless presents, always choosing the most expensive things, taking her by the hand to visit all the most luxurious places, from the most vulgar and ostentatious to the most refined and exclusive. He managed to surround every peseta he spent in a clean, transparent veil, a simple token of his love, and he never used his generosity to bargain, never asked for anything in return. He liked to look at her, to watch her enjoy the things she couldn’t afford, gradually discovering her inexhaustible skills, the proficiency of her fingers, her eyes, her palate, the assurance with which she distinguished real silk from synthetic, genuine Armagnac from cheap Spanish brandy, and he enjoyed provoking her, tempting her, taking control of her will, her memory, her emotions, whenever he caught a gleam in her eye as they passed a shop window.
“Do you like it?”
It could be something small, insignificant even—a pen, a handkerchief, a diary—or something very expensive—a piece of jewelry, a crocodile handbag, an evening dress—but he always enquired with the same interest, the same adorable, mischievous look on his face, and she always answered in the same way, shaking her head, with the same silly, childish, carefree laugh, her hands sunk into her coat pockets as if she were trying to pierce the fabric with her knuckles.
“Do you like it?”
Vicente ran his tongue over his teeth, stood behind Sara and put his arms around her. He looked closely at her face reflected in the window while his fingers slid inside her blouse or skirt, going further, further every time until, eventually, she leaned against him and closed her eyes, tilting her head and offering him her neck. He kissed it, or licked it slowly until he reached her ear, and asked for the third time:“Do you like it? I’ll buy it for you.”
Sometimes, by this time, the people inside the shop had noticed them. Some watched them, amused, whilst others were shocked. And if they were in a luxurious place, with thick carpets and plush sofas, and she detected the slightest suspicion in the shop assistant’s eyes, she trembled at the thought of the things Vicente would say as he wrote out the check.
“It’s amazing,” he’d mutter, clicking his tongue, as if he were talking to himself,“how horny spending money makes you, my dear.”
And she loved the disarming little postscript he added a second later. “Your father never warned me about this. Had I known, I would never have married you.”
They left the shop almost choking with laughter, and Sara gave herself up to the happiness coursing through her body, the salty, sharp tingle under her skin, the sudden sparkle in her eyes, and the crackle of the expensive wrapping paper that seemed to hold out the promise of a new, easier life.The inebriation of all these pleasant sensations was unaffected by the flashes of common sense that occasionally struck Sara out of the blue.Vicente lived in El Viso, a smart residential area away from the bustle of the center of town, so that protected them, made them invisible, another anonymous couple amongst thousands of others. But sometimes he would let go of her arm and make her hurry past certain restaurants, certain shops or entrances to apartment blocks. He gave no explanation, and she never asked why, because this was just the first chapter, the first stage in their story.Vicente always used that word on the few occasions when she’d dared speak about what was happening to them: “It’s just a stage,” he’d say,“this is a stage.”And she believed him, because deep down it didn’t yet matter to her, because what he gave her, what he allowed her, was enough.This was why she coped easily with being alone at weekends, in her single woman’s bedroom now suddenly full of pretty, often expensive, objects that were hers and yet still seemed to belong to someone else. But when her jewelry box and her wardrobe and the bathroom shelves spoke up, asking her what she was doing, what she was really playing at, not realizing the true price of things, she thought of Vicente and smiled, and it all made sense because he made it make sense.
“It isn’t a waste,” he said one summer afternoon, as the sun lazily caressed the tops of the skyscrapers in the Plaza de España and filtered between the slats of the blinds, painting her body with stripes. For once, she had spoken to him of her doubts. “It’s a calculated investment. I’m investing in you, your pleasure, in your happiness. I love you, Sara, and it’s much better if you’re happy with me, because I need you to love me back.”
Maybe, if nothing had changed, if external reality had not invaded the narrow confines of the capsule in which she spent her time with him, Sara would have recovered her ability to calculate, the essential detachment she’d gradually relinquished, almost without noticing it, as Vicente taught her at last to take off her clothes with joy. But the dictator’s death foreshadowed the first signs of weariness in a love story that still seemed full of color and nuance. In the spring of 1976, when Vicente applied to join the Socialist Workers Party, Sara felt reality give her a push.And while the whole country entered a state of turmoil that felt like an extension of her own private passion, she came to believe that there was only one way forward. She wanted Vicente at the very center of the rest of her life. She had laid to rest her dream of a rifle and, with a faith, a hope that belied what she said aloud, she observed the fervor with which Vicente embarked on the various stages of his political career.The wind was now blowing in her favor, in favor of this young generation who were invisible until only a few months before, but who now—suddenly—had immense power and could stir the stagnant waters, explode the stale air, with their words and their actions. Things were changing so fast that nobody, not even they, understood the full extent of their success. It all seemed so genuine, so moving, so necessary, that she didn’t pause to consider the elegant, discreet words that Vicente chose when he introduced her into his new world. Instead of keeping her hidden, he placed her right in the foreground, suiting both him and his ambitions. Sara also thought herself favored, because of her story, the tragedy of her family, and she liked to hear her lover repeat the dates and names, the anecdotes and reminiscences that Arcadio Gómez Gómez had retrieved for him around the table at the flat in Concepción Jerónima, stories she’d heard a thousand times by the time she agreed to introduce Vicente to her parents, but that took on a new shine when she heard them uttered with the smiling, authoritative gravity ofVicente’s voice. So she became accustomed to being the companion of a married man who, apparently, was not known to be married by anyone in the party, and she spent more time with him than his own wife, accompanying him on trips, sometimes long, sometimes short, on which she encountered people who became friends and who assumed they were putting off having children until Vicente was a member of parliament.
Then one day Sara couldn’t conceal her nausea in front of a simple cup of coffee.They were in the restaurant of a five-star hotel in Athens, and by then Vicente was an MP. She was unaware that something else had changed too.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You don’t think you might be pregnant, do you?”
“Of course not.That’s ridiculous.”
It was the spring of 1982, and by then the surveyor who had surprised her by inviting her out of the blue to a bachelor’s dinner had been married for over seven years. Sara was thirty-five.
“I’ve told her about us,”Vicente said a couple of months after the 1977 elections, which was when she’d chosen to talk to him about their situation. She didn’t dare cross the line between asking for something and demanding something, she issued no ultimatums, and didn’t put any pressure on him, because she had calculated that there was no need.And yet, despite all her calculations, she saw him go white, look suddenly small and fragile, shrink visibly inside his shirt collar, when he revealed he’d already told his wife, but then said nothing more.
“And?” Sara said after a pause.
“Well, she knows.”
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“And?” said Sara again, her voice fearful, thin as a thread.
The Wind From the East Page 34