“That’s a load of nonsense, Charo.You haven’t got a clue.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, sitting up again, this time not giving in to the pain.“It’s all true. I’ve read about it, I’ve discussed it with people who know about these things. I found out about it.”
“You’re crazy,” Juan muttered.“That’s what this is, a psychotic episode. I can’t think of any other explanation.You must be stark raving mad.”
“No!” she shouted.“I know what I’m doing. I even talked to a geneticist. I was scared of Damián, to tell you the truth. I don’t know why, because he hasn’t got a clue, but I thought it might occur to him . . . But the geneticist told me that for the time being you can’t tell who the father of a child is if the two men being tested are brothers.The genes are too similar, or something like that. If Damián gets suspicious, which he won’t, but anyway if he does, the test would be positive, the same result you’d get if you were tested.That’s what the geneticist told me. So there.” She lay back now and went on:“In ten years’ time they’ll probably be able to tell. So remind me and we can have a test done, just so that you can be sure.”
“You’re a fool.”
Under other circumstances, he would have been surprised at his choice of insult, and at the contempt with which he uttered it, but he’d spoken without thinking, without weighing his words. He walked back to the bed with steps so weary they seemed to sap his remaining strength. He sat in the armchair beside it, looked at his sister-in-law, and felt pleased when he saw terror in her eyes. He’d spent his life being afraid of her and this was the first time Charo had ever been afraid of him.
“You’re a fool,” he said again, and this time he was aware of every syllable. “I’ll never rest easy. Never again. But in ten years’ time, this child will have a father, and that father will be my brother. I’ll be her uncle, a nice man who comes to lunch every so often and gives her birthday presents. And that’s it.That’s what’ll happen. It’s what’s right, and it’s for the best. Don’t you forget it, because no geneticist in the world can change it.”
“Yes,” said Charo, and she smiled again, with a gentle, enigmatically content expression he didn’t even try to comprehend. “That’s true, but the child is still yours.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“No. But she’s yours, Juanito.”
“So what?”
“Nothing. Just that she’s yours.”
“What I don’t understand is . . .” He tailed off. He didn’t feel like talking, but he had to go on.“What I don’t understand is why you told me. If all you wanted was for the child to be mine, you could have achieved that without saying a word to me. It would have been less risky, wouldn’t it? Better for you.”
“Juanito!” said Charo, laughing.
“What?”
“I know exactly who you are, what you are. I know what you’re capable of, and what you’re not capable of.You’d never blackmail me, you’d never do anything that would be detrimental to me or the child.That’s why I wanted you to know. I was going to tell you before the birth, but as this morning you got so . . . well . . .”
“But why did you tell me? That’s what I don’t understand.Why?”
“Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case.”
At that moment Damián, with a radiant smile and a huge bunch of flowers, appeared in the doorway. Juan looked away, because he realized it hurt to look at him.
“Oh, just look at her!” cried his mother, going straight to the crib and picking the baby up without asking for permission.“She’s adorable, absolutely adorable. Look at her, Dami, isn’t she gorgeous? Look at her eyes, and her mouth, isn’t she lovely? You know who she looks like? Come here, Juanito.” He didn’t move, so his mother took the baby over to him. “She looks just like you did when you were born. Can you believe it? Absolutely identical. I could be looking at you, thirty years ago.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mama,” he said.“She looks just like her mother.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true. But she also reminds me of you when you were born. Come on, hold her for a bit.”
“No.”
“What’s the matter with you?” asked his mother, surprised. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of holding a baby—you’re a doctor.Take her, I want to put the flowers in water.”
“Let her father take her.”
“Come on, you take her, darling, don’t be silly. Just for a second.”
“Yes, Juanito, hold her,” said Charo, her hand in her husband’s, staring at Juan with a foolish smile.“You’re the only one who hasn’t held her yet.”
He shouldn’t have held her, he shouldn’t have let his mother, with the foolish nonchalance of the ignorant, put her in his arms. He would never have felt how light she was, how incredibly tiny, he would never have known the powerful call of her smell, the extraordinary perfection of her features. He shouldn’t have held her, at least not so soon, but he found himself holding her and he turned away from the others to look at her. Standing at the window, in the white, artificial light of the street lamps, they were alone together, he and the beautiful baby. She had black hair, darker than her mother’s, just like his, grey eyes, perfectly drawn lips, tiny hands, and she had been in the world for barely two hours. “She’s my niece,” he thought, “my niece, my niece.” But he wasn’t sure that this silent, private incantation would work. He stroked her face with the tip of his index finger and she screwed up her face. He shouldn’t have held her. He turned, still holding the baby, to face the others again. Charo had just applied lipstick—pale pink like the ribbons on her nightdress—and she blew him a silent kiss.
“Well,” he said, not looking at anyone in particular, and clearing his throat in an attempt to make his tone sound distant, professional, “this baby’s got to go back into her crib right now. Newborn babies can’t control their body temperature properly until they’re about twelve hours old.” He put his daughter in the crib and covered her, tucking in the blankets carefully.“You mustn’t keep picking her up or she’ll end up getting hypothermia.”
Five minutes later, when he was back outside, he knew what was going to happen. He’d known it five minutes ago, as he quickly took his leave of his mother and brother, and kissed Charo on the forehead, just to annoy her. He’d known it the second he heard the revelation that was still causing turmoil in a part of his mind he’d been unaware of until then. But he had an even greater need to tear himself from the sweet, evil loop of happy endings, the trap into which he’d allowed himself to be lured by his sister-in-law’s revelations.This was what his life was reduced to—an unbearable succession of tugs that tensed the string of his will without ever actually snapping it.
It hadn’t been like this at first.At first, Charo had erupted into his life like an explosion of fireworks, a furious flurry of colored streamers, a calendar where every day was a holiday. She made up for everything, absorbed everything, justified everything. Elena had burst into tears when he told her he was leaving her because he was in love with another woman. She had burst into tears in a huge, brightly lit, crowded bar, but he didn’t care. He made himself look apologetic, maintained a focused, temporary silence, paid for their drinks before leaving and walked home from the Circulo de Bellas Artes, because he felt relieved. He was no less sensitive, no worse a person than before, it was just that nothing mattered. As he reached Callao, he went into a cake shop, bought himself a cake, and ate it as he walked along the street. Nothing mattered, nothing except the messages on his answering machine, the doorbell ringing, Charo.
He should have known; he should have been afraid of her. He knew her almost as well as he knew his brother, and he should have remembered the taste of anger, the logic of betrayal, the persistent poison of the telephone, but he didn’t. She’d understood that he was the best and that was enough. She’d agreed, and he allowed himself to believe that he was responsible for what was happening. And wh
en Charo curled up beside him, anchored him to the bed by laying an arm and a leg across his body, and when he was alone afterwards, in a room where every object retained the precise memory of her skin, her voice, her laugh, he reflected that her situation was more difficult than his, and that he had to be reasonable, flexible, patient. He took pleasure in his own quiet superiority. He was the most intelligent of the three, he always had been. So, with an emotional faculty not entirely devoid of reason, he perceived Charo’s weakness, the fragile root of her vanity, but he could never have imagined the direction it would take.
“This needn’t change anything.”
He felt as if a mirror had shattered and each and every shard had pierced him. He could find nothing to say.
“It was an accident,” said Charo, looking at him as if she couldn’t understand why he was so upset by the news. “I wasn’t trying to get pregnant, it just happened. In a few months’ time the baby will be born, and we can carry on as before.There’s no reason why it should make any difference to us. It’s completely separate from our relationship.”
“But I thought we weren’t typical lovers.” Juan formed the sentence in his head and blushed furiously at the thought of saying it aloud. “I thought we had a serious, stable relationship. I thought your marriage was just a problem to which we’d eventually find a solution. I thought we’d end up living together, I want us to live together, I want to marry you, I love you.” He completed the speech in his head, like the fool he was and always would be.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.
“Nothing.”
He’d just remembered—too late—that he couldn’t trust her.This was the main conclusion he reached the first time he slept with Charo, after cheerfully acknowledging that he was exhausted. He couldn’t trust her, he reflected, he couldn’t believe anything she said, but there was nothing he wanted more, needed more, than to believe her. He couldn’t trust her because she was never straight, because she took back half of what she gave, because she managed her secrets and her silences with cold calculation. She came and went from his home, his life, leaving behind invisible particles of a confused spirit that thrived on vague resentment and on the unbearable arrogance of the victim. Because, although she had no argument to justify her constant demands of the world, nothing of what Charo had, of what was happening to her, ever measured up to what she believed she deserved.
Juan had given a lot of thought to the elaborate dissatisfaction Charo wrapped around herself like a cloak, a second skin that isolated her from the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Being the local princess could make for an unhappy future, he concluded, and he shifted the blame onto Damián for his wife’s chronic disappointment. He pictured scenes with Charo in her modest room, one of many siblings, looking at herself in the mirror she had to share, admiring herself, awarding herself a future as dazzling as her eyes, and the almost painful perfection of her body. Hooking Damián would have seemed like a triumph, a glistening road to glory. Instead it turned out to be a narrow, rough, bumpy lane. Juan pictured Charo now too, trapped in a comfortable routine made up of identical, average days, the modest destiny of the trophy wife of the Bread King of Northern Madrid, a marginal, small-time magnate who would never appear in the Society section of a newspaper or magazine. He was very rich, that was for sure, and getting richer by the day, but he was a dull, mediocre man, with a mediocre future and mediocre ambitions. This was where Juan located the origins of Charo’s endless, universal complaint: a princess cheated of her future.
“Of course, I wasn’t able to go to university . . .”
The first time she said this, Juan reacted as if she were joking:“What do you mean, you weren’t able to? You weren’t interested.You didn’t even try.”
“Well, I’m not so sure about that.”
Juan realized she was serious, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret her picturesque version of the past.
“I wasn’t very happy as a child. My parents didn’t love me.They didn’t pay much attention to me.”
“How can you say that? I don’t think it was like that. I never noticed it, nobody else did.”
“You don’t have a clue, but it’s true.They never forgave me for being prettier than my sisters.”
“Charo,” he began, becoming impatient with her self-deception, which seemed to distort her, rather than her past.
“Don’t look at me like that. Do you think I’m a fool? I know exactly what I’m saying, and I’m right, even though you all always contradict me.”
He tried to argue back, to make her see reason, but she always found the pea under the mattress, the stone in the shoe, a new argument with which to sustain her role as victim.
“Actually, it was your fault I married Damián,” she said one day.“You didn’t fight for me.”
“Don’t say that, Charo.”
“It’s true.You didn’t.You didn’t try to win me back, you just disappeared.”
“I left so I wouldn’t have to see you. I couldn’t bear to see you without being able to kiss you.And I couldn’t bear you not taking any notice of me.That’s why I left.”
“Right.Very convenient, isn’t it?”
This was the price he had to pay for his partial, inadequate possession of her; his part-time ownership of a woman who felt arbitrarily and endlessly wronged and who would never accept responsibility for anything that happened to her. He tried to understand her—fervently, unconditionally, desperately, the way he loved her. He tried to find any thread to guide him along the secret paths of her labyrinth, to find a solution to her unhappiness, or at least a reason for it. Charo’s happiness was important to him because he loved her. He still loved her, still felt he’d do anything for her, always. He felt dizzy, with a black, amorphous panic when he thought he might end up despising her one day.
That day came, after many traps and silences and lies. But before this, Juan Olmedo learned new things about himself, although they weren’t things that he particularly liked. When Charo told him she was pregnant, he said that he couldn’t go on like this, he realized it had all been a mistake, right from the beginning, and that this new development not only changed everything, but made him see that they should never have even begun. He pronounced every word with the calm, clear voice of someone who believed everything he said. But she was unfazed.
“You can’t leave me, Juan, you can’t.We’re in this together.You might not think so, but we’re locked together.You can’t leave me.You’ll never be able to.” She paused and smiled.“I bet you won’t.”
She stood, calmly picked up her bag, and went to the door, closing it quietly behind her, leaving him alone, to learn what it was to be truly alone.
He knew the nature of this solitude wouldn’t make up for the brutal destruction of all his dreams but, for a time, the certainty that he’d done the right thing brought some harmony to his life. Over the past two years, in all his plans and projects, he’d managed to view the figure of Damián from the most convenient angle: from a distance. Juan, who had thought of everything, hadn’t thought of his brother. Charo’s husband was a hindrance, a loose end, an annoying but residual inconvenience, a cretin who didn’t deserve her.This man, whom he had once loved and who had been such a big part of him, had gradually disappeared like a snowman in springtime. It had seemed fair. Juan had seen her first, he’d loved her first, he’d suffered more, and one of them had to lose out. It should have been Damián, but it would be him, Juan, again.Always him. Juan Olmedo now knew he would never be reconciled with his brother. He didn’t want to be, but stepping aside from his future with Charo and their accidental daughter who had united them once more—at least in the mind of her mother’s lover—restored some harmony to his life. For a time.Too short a time.
She knew it. Charo knew that he was drowning, that he couldn’t walk down the street without seeking out women who looked like her, couldn’t say anything without feeling that his words were for her, couldn’t sleep without seeing her in his
dreams.That he dreamed of her even when he was awake, and that nothing mattered to him any more, not her husband, or her future, or her pregnancy, he didn’t care about any of it. It had been more than three months since he’d last been alone with her, only seeing her in the company of others—a hundred days and nights of slow, exasperating despair—when one morning, Charo rang at his door as he was emptying the contents of his pockets onto the sitting-room table. It was a quarter to nine and he’d just got home after his night shift.
“Hello,” she said, as if she were turning up for an appointment and assumed he’d been expecting her.“You can buy me a coffee.”
She was wearing a rather short, low-cut orange dress, gathered beneath the bust. Her legs were very tanned, and her pregnancy hardly showed. She was just entering her fifth month and hadn’t put on much weight. She didn’t throughout the pregnancy, following the diet her obstetrician had prescribed to the letter because she was too vain to do otherwise, although she liked to say she was doing it for the baby. She looked very beautiful, with the firm, fleshy roundness, glowing skin and soft features that characterized pregnancy. She was wearing an orangeyred lipstick, quite unlike the deep murderous crimson of seduction, or the pale pink of motherhood.
The Wind From the East Page 38