He wasn’t trying to behave like a gentleman. His attitude was cold, thoughtful, calculating. It wasn’t in his interest to rush things, to extend this rather surprising relationship—a surprise that he was enjoying—into other areas beyond those where it had originally blossomed. He didn’t want to be Maribel’s boyfriend—he wanted more. He wanted to continue fucking her in secret, with the windows closed and the blinds down, in a place with rules but no name, the private refuge of his bedroom. But it wasn’t enough, he wanted more. He knew he couldn’t have it all, that it was impossible, and that is why he was hooked. Without realizing it, he’d become obsessed with this mysteriously common woman—the more common, the more mysterious she was—who, when she took off her clothes, shed a skin, her name, her memory, everything that she knew and everything she would rather not have known. He’d become addicted to a Maribel who didn’t really exist. She needed him so that she could emerge, new and radiant, from the lusterless armor that kept her hidden from the eyes of others and kept her intact for him, because she was simply a part of him, the best part. She couldn’t save him, but she could occasionally make him forget what he knew. Because he was hooked, he was convinced the best thing to do was endure, so that’s precisely what he did. He forced himself to imagine the kind of conversation he might have with Maribel at a hypothetical dinner, where he might take her afterwards, the kind of horrendous bars she’d like, how many meters she’d stay away from him while she checked the tables for anyone she knew who might tell her mother, the look of terror on her face on hearing the word “hotel” (one of those places where you had to give your name, address and identity card number before they’d give you a room), the sad, ugly way they’d part without having found each other, him returning home irritated and with his nerves jangling. Juan made himself imagine all this, and put the phone down again. He put it down, even though he didn’t want to, even though the persistent voice of the obvious whispered a different story in his ear, an account of the evening that awaited him—helping Tamara with her homework, dealing with Alfonso, cooking supper, eating supper, watching TV, going to bed early. Even though that same voice asked whether he wouldn’t rather see Maribel, drive her somewhere far away, stop the car in the middle of the countryside, throw himself on top of her, he hung up. He hung up, and went home feeling irritated, his nerves jangling, still wrestling with his indecision.
But the first time he invited Maribel out to dinner, he forced himself not to think about anything, either what would happen or how she would interpret it, the consequences of his invitation. Nothing. He didn’t even try. It was the last Thursday in July, it was raining, and he couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Have dinner with me tonight, Maribel.” She was still smiling, quietly enjoying his anxiety.“Please.”
“OK,” she said at last.“But what can I do with Andrés?”
That afternoon, Juan Olmedo had only a very short siesta.Afterwards, he drank two cups of coffee and spent almost three hours designing and assembling the largest Scalextric track the children had ever seen.At nine o’clock, when he came downstairs, showered and dressed to go out, the children were still organizing their first serious competition. Juan had a couple of test runs and when he’d finished, he looked at his watch, then at Andrés.
“I’m going out for dinner,” he said in a tone that progressed from casual to conspiratorial. “Your mother asked me to drop you off home on the way, but I’m thinking that would be a bit of a bore for you, wouldn’t it?”
“A big bore.”
“Well, why don’t you stay here tonight? Give her a ring.” Andrés’s eyes lit up as if a hundred-watt light bulb had been switched on behind them, and Tamara rushed up to give Juan a big hug. He kissed her back and tried to look serious.“The babysitter will arrive soon. Maribel made a potato omelet before she left, it’s in the kitchen. Be good and don’t go to bed too late.You can carry on playing tomorrow, OK?”
A quarter of an hour later he picked up Maribel at a petrol station about three blocks from her house.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To El Puerto, to eat crayfish.”
But instead of pressing the accelerator, he turned to look at her in the fading light of the summer evening, the afternoon’s rain now a distant memory. He was used to seeing her dressed up, but when they’d gone out for a meal before, they’d always had the children with them, and Sara had often come too.That evening, Maribel looked much more extreme, more vampish. She was wearing a dress he’d never seen before—tight and black, with a long, split skirt and a neckline that was dangerous rather than daring, a deep V that showed off her admirable cleavage. She was wearing dark red lipstick that seemed familiar to Juan, even though it was nothing like the shade Charo used to wear, and thick black eyeliner.
“What’s the matter?” she asked after a moment.“Why are you looking at me like that?” She knew why. “We agreed that I could choose where to go, didn’t we?”
“Of course.”
El Puerto de Santa Maria was packed full of cars, people, children yelling and chasing each other, carousels with their music at full volume, street mimes, clowns, and stalls offering all sorts of items from the mundane to the extraordinary. Maribel walked slowly, looking at everything with a radiant smile, her eyes shining like those of a little girl. But Juan observed from the start how she was also keeping a scrupulous tally of the men looking at her as they passed, although she pretended not to notice. He enjoyed this little performance, although he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. He also liked to watch her eat, closing her eyes for a moment before her first bite, as if she sincerely wanted to be reconciled with the crayfish she was about to devour, sighing with satisfaction as she ate, discreetly sucking the heads although it wasn’t a very elegant thing to do.
“You can say what you like about grilled sardines,” she insisted after she’d finished the last crayfish,“but there’s no comparison.”
“I’m a man of simple tastes, Maribel.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, looking mischievous, knowing.
Juan could find no answer to this, and simply laughed.
“So what are we going to do now?” she asked, rummaging around in her bag.
“Well, I don’t know. Go and have a drink somewhere?” He didn’t dare go any further.
Maribel opened a small, golden compact and, holding it in one hand, she reapplied lipstick with the other.
“Would you like to come back to my place?” she said, not looking at him, her eyes focused on the reflection of her lips in the tiny mirror.
“Of course,” Juan heard himself say in a tiny, stifled voice.“Of course I would,” he said again, more firmly.“Your place or wherever.Wherever you’d like to take me.”
But she wouldn’t let him drive right up to her house. She made him pull up a few meters from the petrol station where he’d picked her up earlier.
“Park here,” she said and started to get out, Juan stared at her, confused. “Wait ten minutes and then walk there.You know the way, don’t you?”
“Maribel,” he caught her arm and she turned. “Are you serious? There’s no one around.”
“That’s the deal,” she said, suddenly very serious. “I always keep my side of the bargain, now you’ve got to keep yours.”
“OK,” said Juan, letting go of her arm.“Would you like me to cover my face with my shirt before I ring the bell?”
“No,” she said, and laughed.“There’s no need for that.”
She left, and Juan Olmedo sat wondering whether Maribel’s concerns were justified—all the meticulous precautions, the permanent state of alarm about what her neighbors, her in-laws, her mother, her ex-husband might think. It was a subject she didn’t like to talk about, and she refused to see sense even when Juan tried to reason with her. “No, they can’t do anything to me,” she’d say quickly, “I know they can’t, but they can talk about me, and I’d rather they didn’t, that’s all. I know it’s no big deal but I
’d prefer it if they didn’t go around saying,‘Poor little Maribel, silly little Maribel.’ It’s not much to ask, is it?” “No,” Juan would always agree, “it isn’t, but . . .” He could never finish the sentence because he realized that nothing he could say—“You’re over thirty, you’re independent, you’re separated from your husband, you can do what you like, it’s none of their business who you sleep with”—would make her feel better, or stop her hearing their remarks in her head—“Poor little Maribel, she’s gone and got herself involved again, silly little Maribel, she’s found another one to take advantage of her.” He understood, but he persisted, pointing out her insistence on calling him “usted,” the way she always hung back and walked beside Alfonso when they went anywhere in town, sitting in the back if there was ever anyone else with them in the car, the ridiculous need for so much secrecy. He found it all touching, but above all hugely exciting, and as he sat in his car, glancing at his watch and discovering how exasperatingly slowly ten minutes could pass, it occurred to Juan Olmedo that perhaps Maribel was deliberately exaggerating her fears in order to keep him dangling at the end of a rope she’d learned to manipulate so wisely.As Juan jumped out of the car, he didn’t realize that this was the first time he’d ever suspected any hint of a planned strategy in Maribel’s actions. Before the night was over, he would find it incredible that he’d ever doubted it.The fuck he’d been looking forward to for over ten hours was memorable, but what Juan Olmedo would never forget was what happened afterwards.
“I’ve been thinking . . .”
Maribel had got out of bed naked and gone to the kitchen—“Let’s have a drink, shall we?”—leaving Juan alone in her tiny bedroom with rough, white walls in which the showy Empire-style bedroom suite barely fit. A disparate army of soft toys that Andrés had won for his mother at fun-fairs over the years filled every available surface, although the place of honor was reserved for a doll in a First Communion dress. Maribel came back with a glass in each hand and a well-prepared speech.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, handing him a drink and getting back into bed, “but for the last few days I’ve been thinking that, because of the holidays—which I really need, because I’m knackered—but as Andrés is at your house all day . . . Well, it’s no wonder, is it? I mean, compared to this place, you have the pool and the garden and everything, so it’s not surprising he’d rather be there. He was over at your place all the time last summer. Of course I didn’t take any time off last year because I’d only just started my new job.Well, anyway, I can’t really take proper holidays. That’s how it is when you’re a single mother, you’ve still got to do the shopping and washing and cooking every day. So that’s why I was thinking—please don’t take this the wrong way—that I’m just as happy to cook at your place for all five of us as I am to cook here for just me and Andrés. Just as happy.And that way I wouldn’t have to argue with him all the time, and you’d have one thing less to think about, and the kids would get proper meals.Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking.”
She’d said all of this with her eyes fixed firmly on the bottom of her glass, but when she finished, she had no choice but to look up at Juan. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a childishly candid expression on her face.As he stared at her, Juan Olmedo felt like getting up and shouting “Bravo!,” producing a handkerchief to wave in her honor as they did at bullfights. But he just smiled and sat up, intending to convey his admiration for her little show.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, but this time she didn’t know the answer.
“Because I really admire you, Maribel.”
“You admire me?” She looked disconcerted, almost scared.“Why?”
“Because you’re a good person.And because you’re very good to me.”
“Yes, well, I thought . . .” She was blushing furiously now.“I know you like going to the beach in the mornings—people from Madrid always do, I don’t know why; I prefer the afternoons.We could take turns, with the kids, I mean.”
“I don’t think I’ll be spending much time at the beach this year, Maribel.”
She burst out laughing and then, as if she felt more confident now, she was more direct:
“The thing is, I don’t think I could take a whole month without being alone with you.”
He took the glass from her hand, put it on the bedside table, and lay down, taking her with him.
“What are you going to tell your mother if she finds out?” he asked, putting his arms around her and kissing her.
“That you’re paying me overtime.” She laughed.“I have it all worked out.”
“So I see.”
This was how the pleasantly chaotic summer holiday began for Juan Olmedo, ending with his lover almost bleeding to death on a pavement. For a whole month, they lived well, and together, an odd couple living an odd existence with odd hours, in the gloom of a house with its blinds down, where people had their siesta in the morning and lunch in the afternoon, and nights stretched on until everyone was on the verge of collapse, simply in order to take advantage of the time, when even Sara, an obstinate night owl, would have given in. Sometimes, by the time they were alone together on the porch, they were so tired, so sleepy, that Juan only just had the energy to get up, walk to the car and drive Maribel home. One of those times, at around three in the morning when even the garden hammock was looking attractive, he felt so torn between desire and laziness that he had a brilliant idea.
“Let’s go to bed, Maribel.”
“What?” she said, as if she hadn’t understood.
“Let’s go to bed.”
“Now?” she said, eyes wide.“Are you crazy?”
“The kids are fast asleep.Your son’s sleeping in Alfonso’s room at the end of the corridor, and Tamara doesn’t even wake up when her alarm clock rings, so let’s go to bed, come on.” She didn’t dare move. Knowing what she was like, he arched his eyebrows and decided to force things.“What, would you prefer the hammock?”
“No, please, not the hammock,” she said, laughing.
“Well, then. Let’s take off our shoes and creep upstairs. We can lock the door and we’ll set the alarm for ten, or nine if you like. No one here will wake before eleven at the earliest, Alfonso’s always the first one up, and he just heads straight for the TV without bothering anyone.”
Maribel seemed convinced by his arguments and the following morning Juan’s predictions came true so accurately that at ten thirty they both left the house, having had a shower and breakfast without anyone even knowing she’d slept there. Juan went to knock on Tamara’s door and said he was off to the street market, he wanted to buy some new trousers.The little girl responded with a grunt and told him to let her sleep. Maribel needed a red zip and a small frying pan, and she asked if he’d mind taking her into town. Juan said of course he wouldn’t.
“And you don’t mind about last night, do you?” she asked as they got into the car.
“What do you mean?”
“Well . . . that I stayed in your house overnight and all that.”
The Wind From the East Page 49