“Wait. It’s just that it was so hot.There you are. Sit here, in this armchair, it’s very comfortable.Would you like something to drink?”
“A coffee? But only if there’s some already made.”
“It’s all right, I can make some. It won’t take a minute.”
Sara escaped to the kitchen and focused on the simple, methodical task of brewing the coffee as a way of calming herself, but she only half succeeded. By the time the steel lid of the coffee pot began to tremble, she still hadn’t been able to guess what might have prompted her godmother’s visit that afternoon. Many years had passed since their regular contact—first weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly visits that maintained the sham of a relationship between them—had disintegrated into an irregular routine of phone calls, always from her godmother to her, and ending with a promise to visit that Sara had never kept.Their final phone conversation had ended abruptly, and Sara believed it would be their last. In the autumn of 1982, her godmother had offered to speak to Vicente on her behalf, to force him to acknowledge paternity of the child Sara was expecting, hinting that this exchange between social equals would be more successful than any Sara herself might undertake. Sara had told her to go to hell, then hung up. End of story.Yet here she was, almost three years later, sitting in Sara’s living room.
“What lovely coffee, darling,” said Doña Sara after her first sip, with her accustomed, fixed smile, so imperturbable it might have been painted on.
“All coffee’s good nowadays,” thought Sara. But she said nothing, because her godmother’s anachronistic comment, endlessly repeated by an older generation who were used to coffee made with chicory, reminded her that she had before her not the great lady of the past, but a bewildered old woman, overcome by age like any other. Her godmother had always had a rather bird-like face, her nose curved like a beak, with a pointed chin and bulging eyes, but she was no longer the majestic eagle with a predatory stare and backcombed hair who used to receive her in silence, pointing to her watch with her right index finger, but an old owl, the skin on her face wrinkled, soft and trembling, like a curtain flapping in the wind. She was seventy years old, had sunken eyes, and even her willing smile could not mask her weariness.
“I came to see you last week but you weren’t in.Your neighbor said you were probably at work. I thought of leaving a note with the concierge, but as you don’t have . . .” She paused, but Sara didn’t fill the silence. “I was very sorry to hear about your mother, Sara. I was very fond of her, as you know.You should have called me. In the end I found out from the mother of one of the girls who works for me who knew her. Anyway, there’s nothing to be done now. My husband died too, did you know that? Eighteen months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. But he was in a very bad way. He was in a lot of pain and the left side of his body was completely paralyzed. He’d been bedridden for years, and he couldn’t speak any more, he could only grunt. Sometimes we understood him straight away, sometimes we didn’t, and then the poor man would become exasperated. Because he was all there, you know.That was the worst part—he was aware of everything. I think he wanted to die. He’d been wanting to for years. He just wished it was all over, but it wasn’t, he didn’t die, and nobody could do anything for him.”
“I’m very sorry, Mami,” said Sara. Unexpectedly moved by the suffering of the bitter, disagreeable old man, she’d unconsciously called her by the name she had used when she was a little girl who hardly ever saw her mother but who, without ever quite knowing why, never called her godmother “Mama.”“It must have been very difficult for you.”
“It’s always been very difficult for me.”And for a moment her eyes filled with tears. “You don’t know how difficult.” She recovered quickly and started searching for something in her handbag.“Well, let’s not dwell on such unhappy matters.We’ve had quite enough of that lately, the two of us, haven’t we? Look, I’ve brought you a birthday present. It isn’t new, but I hope you’ll like it. I would have liked to buy you something, but I’m rather reluctant to go out these days. I often feel dizzy when I go to the department stores.And I’ve spent so many years at home, not going anywhere, always at Antonio’s beck and call, that I wouldn’t know which shops to go to. I’ve grown old. But what can you do?”
As she spoke, she rummaged in her bag, removing things one by one, piling them in her lap. Sara counted two glasses cases, a packet of pills, a purse, a wallet, two key rings, a headscarf, a handkerchief, a pair of leather gloves—ridiculous in summer—a bottle of aspirin, and a handful of loose, crumpled papers; a chaotic collection of items that seemed to tumble from her grasp. She held them strangely, as if she couldn’t quite grip them or straighten her fingers.
“Here it is!” she announced at last, holding up in her claw-like hands a small, square box covered in navy-blue silk that had lost its sheen with age. “I may be wrong, because my memory isn’t too good these days, but I seem to remember you used to love these.”
Sara got up to take her gift, looking closely at the hand holding it out to her.
“Yes,” said Doña Sara in answer to Sara’s unspoken question. “I have arthritis. My bones, my joints all ache, my fingers, my knees. I’ve spent my life looking after an invalid, fifty years to be precise. Fifty years of thinking about all the things I’d do, all the places I’d go, how happy I’d be once the poor man finally died, and now it turns out I’m an old crock too, and that’s the truth.”
Sara looked into her eyes before opening the box. Inside she found a pair of long, antique gold chandelier earrings.They were inset with tiny pearls and finished off with two large pearls in the shape of teardrops. Doña Sara had remembered correctly—Sara had always loved them. And as she looked into the old woman’s eyes, she understood—“You’ve been a good daughter to your parents,” her godmother’s eyes said, small and moist like those of a frightened animal, “you took care of them till the end.” She no longer had the energy to pretend. “I need you now. Take care of me and we’ll both benefit from it.” This was what Sara Gómez Morales saw in her godmother’s eyes.“These earrings are nothing compared to what I could give you.”This was the key to the mystery of the unexpected visit; Sara had guessed it. She suddenly felt very hot again, and then very cold, but her wonderful capacity for calculation intervened, forcing her to wait, to stay calm, not to say anything until Doña Sara had said all the words she had intended to say.
“They’re lovely, Mami.You were right. I’ve always loved them.” She went over and kissed her on the cheek.“Thank you.”
“I’m glad you like them, darling. I . . . I often think about you. I know that many years have passed and a great deal has happened. Life is complicated, and yours hasn’t been easy, but then nor has mine. But although we’ve grown apart and haven’t even seen each other for a long time, the fact is you’re all I’ve got, Sarita.That’s why, when I found out that your mother had died, I started to think.You don’t need me, that’s quite obvious. You have a flat, a job, a salary coming in every month. But I’m alone now in that huge apartment with nothing to do all day, no one to talk to, or go for a walk with, or to the theatre. I love the theatre, as you know, but I never go nowadays because I don’t dare go alone, so I thought . . . If you’d like to come back to live with me, Sara, I’d be much happier, I’d feel safer, with someone I love, someone I can trust, not like all those horrible nurses who looked after Antonio and forgot about half the things they were supposed to do. And it would mean you could stop working. I wouldn’t bother you much.We could go out for a while in the morning . . .”
“But I can’t leave my job, Mami.” Somehow realizing the significance that this conversation would have for her future, Sara interrupted her in time, at the point that seemed most advisable for her own interests, and leaving aside any other kind of emotion.“I’m poor, as you know.”
She knew Doña Sara would blush at this, so she wasn’t surprised when she saw her cheeks turn red. She also knew that her god
mother would now struggle to get out the words she had prepared, but she did nothing to make it any easier for her.
“Well . . . I . . . I could compensate you in some way, of course.We could come to some arrangement.”
“So,” said Sara, leaning back in her armchair, lighting a cigarette and looking straight into Doña Sara’s eyes,“you’re offering me a job.”
“No, no, darling, no.” Her godmother closed her eyes and rubbed them. She looked even more lost, helpless.“I . . . Well, yes, it depends on how you look at it.”
“I can only look at it one way, Mami. I have to earn my living.”
Doña Sara said nothing. With her clumsy, bent fingers she collected all the things in her lap and put them back into her bag. Once she’d finished she looked at Sara.The uneasiness of her speech contradicted the wide, conventional smile:
“Speaking of money is always so unpleasant, isn’t it?” Her god-daughter smiled on hearing this outrageous maxim again, after all these years. Not perceiving the irony in her expression, Doña Sara went on, encouraged: “I simply can’t. I’ve never been able to. But I understand, really I do. Look, I’m going to the seaside the day after tomorrow.To a sanatorium that’s like an old-fashioned spa.A wonderful place on the Costa del Sol. It’s the best thing I can do for my joints—plenty of rest, lots of massages, thermal baths, exercise, but with a physiotherapist making me do all the exercises, not those dreadful balls all the doctors here seem so keen on. I never go to Cercedilla now. I can’t—that huge house, and the nights are so cold, even in summer.Whatever they say about mountain air, being by the sea suits me much better. I’ll give you my phone number at the hotel.You could come to visit me, spend a few days there. I’m sure you’d like the place, although if you have something else planned we could talk after the summer. I . . . well, I’ll have a word with the man who manages my finances. I’ll give him instructions to agree on something with you.Whatever you want, darling. As far as that’s concerned, there is no problem, you can rest assured.”
“All right. I’ll think about it, and I’ll let you know at the beginning of September.”
“Please do agree, darling.” And for the first time in her life, Sara saw need in her godmother’s eyes.“Please.”
Then she stood with some difficulty and went to leave, shuffling her feet, taking short, quiet steps in which nobody would have recognized the woman she once was.
“Would you like me to drive you home?”
“No, there’s no need.The chauffeur is waiting for me at the door.”
“I’ll come downstairs with you anyway. I’ll see you out.”
Once she was back upstairs, Sara sat down in the same armchair as before and prepared to examine the situation with a cool head. But she felt too agitated to sit still, so she got up and, taking a pen and paper, she sat at the dining table that occupied the other half of the room. She placed two sheets side by side, intending to make a list of the pros and cons of this new move, this return to a lost world, a journey in the opposite direction to the one that had begun twenty-two years earlier when she saw the true face of a treacherous reality. But she didn’t write a single word. As she filled the pages with increasingly complex geometrical patterns that tangled around each other, creating an erratic, chaotic maze, her powerful, arithmetical mind weighed up all the arguments.
Nobody had ever hurt her as much as the defenseless, decrepit, lonely old woman who had just shattered the unwanted peace of her life. But she was fed up with working, fed up with getting up at a quarter past seven in the morning and not having lunch until four in the afternoon, fed up with clocking in at three in the afternoon and not having supper till eleven at night, fed up with traffic jams in the mornings and traffic jams in the evenings, fed up with doing courses at the weekend, fed up with her paltry salary, fed up with cooking on a Sunday so she could fill the freezer with meals in plastic containers, fed up with having to get a loan every time she needed to replace an electrical appliance or her car broke down, fed up with always being tired, fed up with having to choose between eating and sleeping, between sleeping and having fun; in short, fed up with being fed up.Wrapping herself in the immaculately soft skin of the prodigal daughter and returning to the house in the Calle Velázquez wasn’t like signing a declaration of peace—it was giving in, handing over her weapons, bowing down, kissing definitive humiliation on the lips. But she was no longer leaving behind great dreams or battles, tiny seeds that would one day sprout like a touching miracle before her castaway’s cabin. She’d be leaving behind a tiny flat, a tiresome and not very well-paid job, a grey life, a flat, monotonous horizon; pride that didn’t put food on the table, the damp gunpowder of a toy arsenal, and a balcony full of spider plants, geraniums, and money plants that were part of an endless chain of gifts that had no price, small gestures of courtesy in a world that was only just decent. Her life was better than her parents’, than her brothers’ and sisters’ lives had ever been, but she was still in the same half of the world as them: in the land of small, hard-won pleasures, the uglier side of reality.
“I still have time,” she told herself,“I still have time.” But every morning she had more and more trouble getting out of bed, and every Saturday sacrificed to yet another spreadsheet pierced her like a thorn. She no longer had the comfort of the fierce intransigence she had at sixteen, the fervor that had sustained her during the hardest times, the absolute determination that helped her to keep her head held high and her hands busy. She no longer believed in miracles, only in the modest life she’d been able to scratch out for herself as she slid back down to the bottom, falling over the same cliff time and time again. Because she had tried. Tenaciously, tirelessly, desperately. She’d tried but she could count her victories on the fingers of one hand. A diploma in English. A collection of framed certificates. A small treasury of pretty things, often expensive, sometimes very expensive, always wrapped in the precise, unbearably intense memory of the cold mornings, the rainy evenings, and the caresses that had brought them to her. A spectacular collection of photos taken in some of the most beautiful places on the planet—Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan in the background, the pyramids at Giza, three columns of the Temple of Poseidon at sunset at Cape Sounion, the brightly painted tin facades of shanties against the murky immensity of the Río de la Plata, the Kaiser’s old palaces on Unter den Linden, the Malecón in Havana. It was her booty and it was all as useless as spoiled milk.
She didn’t retain any love for her godmother, but after all these years she no longer hated her. She still knew her very well though, and she knew the rules and regulations that governed her life, her house, and the way she looked at the world. Sara had seen fear in her godmother’s eyes and she was sure that, if she accepted the offer, that fear would give Sara the kind of power that perhaps no one had ever had over her godmother before, a power that Sara herself had never experienced. She knew it would suffice simply to be there, not to leave, to take her to the doctor, to the theatre once a week, in order to reconquer time and space, an acceptable level of freedom, and all the leisure and comfort in the world.
This may have been the factor that tipped the scales, because during the August holidays she didn’t leave Madrid as she usually did, and she felt that every minute of this precarious, finite period of rest compelled her towards another, longer one with seemingly limitless boundaries. Perhaps it was this, but she didn’t think she’d made a definite decision yet, when, one morning, she came across a strange photograph on one of the back pages of the newspaper.A young woman, probably under thirty, was posing for the photographer holding a bunch of white feathers in her hand. She was wearing a rather flamboyant but elegant white dress—short at the front, long at the back—and her hair was done in a high knot adorned with long, stylish feathers. Had Sara seen her in a magazine or Sunday supplement she would have taken her for a model and moved straight on, but she was in the newspaper, standing between the President and Vicente González de Sandoval, who in turn was standing besi
de the Minister of Finance. Sara read the caption and grimaced.
“Well!” she said aloud. “Their children will certainly have very long surnames!”
Then she went straight to get a bottle of brandy, half filled a glass, drank it in one go and told herself she didn’t care.“What difference does it make to me?” she thought as she refilled her glass. “Absolutely none at all.” She looked at the photo again and read the caption carefully.The woman was very beautiful and above all had a spectacular figure, with long, perfect legs like exclamation marks. She was twenty-eight, and there was a double “s” in the first half of her surname.You never get a double “s” in Spanish. It doesn’t exist.When Sara found herself with an empty glass in her hand, she refilled it.Vicente hadn’t wanted to accept her rejection of him. He’d looked for her, called her, chased after her for months. He wanted to live with her, so he said, but Sara hadn’t believed him. In the beginning, the only thing she’d asked of him was not to lie to her, and she had believed she’d never ask him for anything more. He said he’d be honest with her, but he’d done nothing but lie. He’d told too many lies. She was sure he’d never leave his wife, and now it turned out he’d married someone else.And not any old person, but a cover model with a double “s” in the first half of her first surname. Sara Gómez Morales had short, simple, common surnames, with not a double “s” in sight, because in Spanish surnames usually end in a “z” and only contain single “s”s.There is no double “s” in Spanish, or at least there hasn’t been for centuries.When she finished the brandy, Sara moved on to whisky. But there wasn’t much of it, so she had to resort to the anisette with which she used to drink a toast with her mother at Christmas.
The Wind From the East Page 44