The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  As she sat down, Tamara saw that Andrés was very pale. His father tapped him on the leg and then gave him a little shake, as if demonstrating that he wasn’t about to give up despite Andrés’s lack of enthusiasm.

  “So, what would you like to drink?”

  The big fat woman collapsed on top of him, grabbing him with both hands. “Get off!” he said, pushing her away, not looking at her. She straightened up and crossed her hands over the tiny expanse of her skirt, all the time staring at Andrés.

  “What’s the matter?” his father said a moment later. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I’ll have a Coke,” said Tamara quickly.

  “Me too,” said Andrés reluctantly.

  But his father ordered fries as well, and when they arrived, he couldn’t resist the temptation of grabbing a few from the plate himself.

  “The bike’s going well, isn’t it?” the man said. He turned to look at Tamara:“It used to be mine. I gave it to him as a present.”

  “You were going to chuck it out,” said Andrés slowly, staring at the fries.

  “So what? It was still mine. I was going to chuck it out but I gave it to you instead.”

  “You didn’t want it,” said Andrés, still not looking up, his face now suddenly bright red.“So that’s not really a present.”

  His father glared at him, but just when Tamara thought he was going to start shouting, he burst out laughing, a sharp, high-pitched laugh like a madman’s.

  “You’re just as touchy as your mother, kid. Just the same, a right little prickly pear.” He gave a strange rat-like smile.“How is she, by the way? Your mother—haven’t seen her for ages, or rather, she hasn’t seen me for ages. At least, she pretends she can’t see me.” Andrés went a little redder, but didn’t say anything or look up. “Seems like she’s a bit full of herself lately, and it’s starting to piss me off, I can tell you.” (“She isn’t your wife any more,” Tamara thought. “It’s none of your business.” But of course she didn’t dare say it aloud.) “Seems like she’s been going round looking at flats, with that old bitch in the BMW.” He paused, leaned forward suddenly and grabbed his son’s chin, forcing him to look up. “Speak to me, for fuck’s sake!”

  “What?” Andrés shouted back. Pleased to have got a reaction at last, his father leaned back in his chair.

  “Is it true she’s going around looking at flats?”

  “Yes!”Andrés spat out, his face scarlet.“She’s looking, so what? We’re going to buy a flat.”

  “Oooh!” his father said, raising his eyebrows with a look of mock amazement. Tamara began to feel scared of him. “And with whose money, might I ask? Because I don’t think she’ll have enough with what they got from that land at La Ballena. I mean, taking money from your own mother. I couldn’t believe it when your grandmother told me. How much did she get in the end—two million pesetas? Three?”

  Andrés didn’t answer.

  “I’m speaking to you!”

  “She’s going to buy a flat with her own money,” Andrés said after a moment,“With what she earns from her work.”

  “Right. She’s going to get a mortgage, is she? Well, I’m happy for her,” he said, looking at the woman beside him and nudging her with his elbow.“She must be working really hard now. Day and night. Especially at night, because we don’t see her in the bars around the port any more, and you know how keen she used to be on bars . . .”

  “She’s at home with me at night, OK?” Andrés stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair, sniffed loudly and pulled at the hem of his T-shirt. “She’s with me. At home.With me.”

  Then he turned and ran out of the bar. Tamara jumped up and followed him.

  “Leaving so soon?” they heard the man call after them. They didn’t answer.

  But the handsome man was fast and by the time they’d got on their bikes, he was standing in front of them once more with his indestructible smile, waving a finger, now not even bothering to raise his voice.

  “You tell your mother to say hello to me when she sees me in the street, OK?”

  His words, sounding more like a threat than a recommendation, floated after them as they cycled to the stationery shop, and they were still hanging in the air on the way back, when Andrés, without a word of warning, shot out in front of Tamara and guided her through the maze of identical streets. She thought they seemed to be going a very long way round and realized Andrés must be looking for a safe route, a way to get back to the Paseo Maritimo without passing the bar. She didn’t complain; in fact, she wished they’d taken this route on the way there. Andrés took a right turn as they reached an area of beaten earth surrounded by an asphalt track, which was the sports ground for the school next door.The baskets and goals at either end were deserted. It was quite late by now, so there weren’t any kids in the sand pit or on the swings. Tamara couldn’t understand where Andrés was going, but followed him once around the track, until she grew tired. She stopped, propped her bike against one of the basketball posts and sat on the ground beneath it. From there, she watched him pedal around the track, once, twice, three times, going faster and faster, until he too started to grow tired and slowed down.

  As she watched him,Tamara found herself suddenly thinking about her own father. She didn’t do this often, perhaps because she didn’t have to concentrate to remember him, perhaps because his image wandered in and out of her memory in the same way he’d wandered in and out of her life, always making it better, happier, more fun. She adored him, not in the way she loved her mother, yet in some ways more, because she’d always felt a different kind of love for him, a shiny, noisy, explosive kind, like a bunch of balloons, or a present wrapped up and tied with ribbon, like the pleasure of waking up early and knowing you could go back to sleep again because it was a holiday. When her mother died, Tamara missed her with an intensity so absolute, so radical, so closely linked to each and every one of her daily actions, that she surprised herself thinking that in some ways she’d always lived alone with her mother. It was her mother who put her to bed at night and got her up in the morning, made her breakfast and put out her clothes, took her to school and collected her, gave her a bath and sat next to her at the kitchen table while she had supper. And her mother arranged things so that she seemed to be there even when she wasn’t, because there were times when she went out a lot in the afternoons, or the evenings, but she’d taught the maids how to do things exactly as she did.With her father it was different. Like a fairy godmother, or the genie in the lamp, he was rarely there, but he might appear at the door to her room at any time, for no reason, without warning, making it seem like the sun was shining even if it was night.

  Papa worked a lot, this was what Mama told her and it was what he told her too.This was why he was almost always away from home, having meals at restaurants and so on, even at the weekends. But when he got home, he always had something for her—big, expensive presents, small ones—and he sat on her bed and told her jokes that would go down well when she told them at school, or taught her how to imitate the sound of a banjo with your mouth, or how to make a little figure out of toothpicks. Papa was like a big kid, a protective, generous friend, the solution to all her problems.“If the princess doesn’t want to eat her vegetables, then she doesn’t have to. If she doesn’t want to go to school, let her stay at home. If she doesn’t want to get dressed, why should she?” Tamara smiled as she remembered this.“Bring it here, I’ll fix it for you.” And he did. Straight away. And then he lifted her up in the air and gave her a quick kiss before he left. He was her father, and he was the best. Until everything went sour.

  Perhaps this was why she didn’t think about him often, why her memory greedily kept him for itself, refusing to share him with her conscious mind. Because one day everything did go sour. She almost stopped loving him then, because he started to behave strangely, doing things that were sometimes horrible and unfair, things that made him seem ugly both inside and out, like a different man from the one he’d alway
s been. She almost stopped loving him, but one night, when neither of them knew how little time they had left, Papa came into her room at midnight and, finding her awake, lay down beside her and kissed her and said sorry. He didn’t explain, he didn’t say why he was sorry, and she didn’t ask. She just kissed him back, curled up in his arms and fell asleep, and then he had rewarded her forgiveness with a secret.

  Andrés was still cycling round the track, more and more slowly now. In the fading light of the afternoon the outlines of buildings began to blur, and Tamara felt an icy shiver down her spine, as if frozen needles were slowly piercing each vertebra. But it wasn’t the falling night that made her shiver—it was the familiar icy touch of the secret. So she stood up, vigorously brushed the dust from her trousers, grabbed her bike and waited for Andrés to come level with her, then cycled one last time round the track with him.

  “I’m going home,” she said.

  “Can you get back on your own?”

  She nodded, and waved as she cycled off. On the way home, she decided not to tell Juan she’d met Andrés’ father, because she didn’t feel like having him look at her with those eyes that sometimes saw right inside her, because she didn’t want him to try to explain the world to her with words that seemed to be about someone else’s father, but ended up judging her own father harshly. She knew it was best not to talk about Papa in front of Juan, not even to mention him. She didn’t know why, she just knew. Juan had never discussed it with her, but he thought that, at the end, when everything went sour, her father had shown himself as he really was, not the other way round. She’d never heard Juan say this, but she knew he thought it, and that he was wrong.

  Juan was a good person and she loved him. She’d always loved him, but with a different kind of love to the one she’d felt for her mother, and without the passion she’d felt for her father, and always much less than he seemed to love her. She knew this too, and the certainty cheered her up, bolstered her when she thought of all that she’d lost, because Juan was all she had left. So she’d decided not to say anything to him, but he was waiting for her at the entrance to the development, worried because she was so late—it was a quarter to nine—and when he asked her where she’d been, it didn’t occur to her not to tell him the truth.

  “We bumped into Andrés’s father, and he bought us a Coke, and it got late.”

  He didn’t say anything at first, just walked beside her, not looking at her, simply staring up at the sky.

  “Had you met him before?” he asked.“Andrés’s father?”

  “No, I’d never seen him before.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Very, very handsome,” she answered, and Juan laughed.

  “Seriously, he’s unbelievably handsome. Andrés really looks like him. But an uglier version. I mean, at first I didn’t notice, but then looking at them together, I don’t know, they kind of look alike. It’s a pity, isn’t it? Because Maribel’s pretty too, but Andrés . . .”

  For reasons Tamara didn’t really understand, Juan always stood up for Andrés even when nobody was criticizing him.They’d reached the house and Juan went into the kitchen to start dinner.

  “Andrés isn’t ugly.”

  “Yes, he is,” she said. “I mean, he isn’t hideous or anything, he’s just thin—his legs look like sticks—and his hair stands up even though he combs it down with cologne, and his face looks like a bird. I don’t know, I don’t think he’ll look like his father when he grows up.”

  “You never know,” said Juan, facing away from her, keeping an eye on the potatoes.“People can change a lot over the years.”

  He passed by the baby unit to get the results of the newborn’s check-up and then went straight in to see Charo. She was looking scrubbed and calm, smiling, her hair tidy. Her white nightdress—all frills and pale pink ribbons, chosen after she’d found out the baby was a girl—suited her.As he admired this perfect vision of new motherhood, he smiled too, realizing it was the first time he’d ever seen her in bed with clothes on.

  “Have you been to see her?” she asked.

  “Yes. She’s doing brilliantly.Very healthy, and very cute.”

  “What about Damián?”

  “He’s gone to fetch Mama. He won’t be long.”

  Just then a nurse wheeled in a transparent plastic crib. Inside, a tiny, dark-haired baby lay asleep, all bundled up.Their attention immediately switched to her.

  “Isn’t she lovely?” said Charo after a moment, once the nurse had left.

  “Yes,” said Juan. “But I can’t understand why you and Damián have given her such an awful name.”

  “It isn’t awful!” said Charo, sitting up abruptly, but the movement hurt, so she lay back against the pillow carefully.“It’s—exotic.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Well, of course it is! What would you have called her then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Juan, and he thought a moment. “María, probably. Or Inés. Or Teresa. Or Almudena.”

  “Like the patron saint of Madrid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t we posh all of a sudden!” she said and Juan laughed. “You’d never know you came from Villaverde Alto. Anyway, you should have told me before, you know. I mean, there’s plenty of reason to take your opinion into account.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good godfather even if I haven’t chosen her name.”

  “No,” said Charo, eyes wide, her smile fading a little now.“In the end, we decided that Nicanor’s going to be her godfather.”

  “But Damián said—”

  “Yes, Damián wanted you to be the godfather, but I made him change his mind. It would be too much, wouldn’t it, if you were her godfather?” she said, looking away, focusing intently on the edge of the sheet. She tugged at the fabric several times before looking at him again, her expression serious, wary.“It’s enough that you’re her father.”

  Juan Olmedo’s initial reaction was not to believe what he’d just heard. Then, he experienced the same amazed, guilty, foolish feeling he’d had one afternoon, many years ago, when he was so bored he took out his old chemistry set and didn’t read the instructions properly. He’d absentmindedly mixed two acids with the contents of a white bottle without checking to see what it was and the test tube had exploded. Shards of glass had flown at his face while a greenish stain with burning edges spread across the wall. His father had gone mad and made him repaint the wall, but nothing could get rid of the tiny scar beneath his right eye that reminded him every morning of the day he nearly blinded himself.

  “It can’t be true,” he said to himself, “it can’t be.” But it was—it was true. Somehow, he knew straight away that it was true. He suddenly felt cold, hollow, the rush of his cowardly blood emptying his veins. When he was able to speak again, his mouth felt dry.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or tell you to go to hell,” he said, but Charo was the only one of the two to laugh.

  “You can do what you like, nothing you do will change things,” she said, pointing at the crib.“She’s yours, Juanito.”

  “You can’t do this to me.You have no right to do this to me,” he said, his eyes as hard as he could make them. She looked calmer now, as if her confession had eased her mind.“No right.”

  “That’s true,” she said.“I had no right. But it isn’t true that I couldn’t do it. I could, and I did. I’m absolutely sure the baby is yours.There’s no way that she isn’t. If you like, I can fill in on the details.”

  “No, thanks, I’ll pass on that.”

  “As you wish.”

  Juan looked around the room, before standing up and walking to the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “None of your business,” he said. He made an effort to speak calmly, and slowly, pronouncing each word carefully.“I can’t accept this, Charo. I don’t have to accept it and I don’t intend to. I don’t want to hear any more about it. Not now, not ever.”

  “Look at
me, Juan,” she said. Her voice was both firm and despairing, and he had to obey. “Look at me, and look at her, and think a little. Go on.You’re not only the best one of the three, you’re also the most intelligent—look at your daughter. She doesn’t deserve to have a mother like me and a father like Damián, no one deserves that. Don’t you read the papers? Everything is inherited from the parents, everything.Your height and the color of your eyes, how fat or thin you are, whether you have a talent for painting or music, your voice, your will power, your brains, everything. It’s all genetic—your personality, your tastes, even how good or bad you are.”