Damián was unconscious. “He’s probably dead,” thought Juan, and Damián’s version of the story, his indifference, his lack of emotion, his contempt would all die with him. It was difficult to survive such a fall. Dr. Olmedo put out a hand towards the victim’s head, grabbed it by the hair, lifting and tilting it towards him, and what he saw confirmed his suspicions. He’d heard right: there had been a crack as Damián’s head struck the bottom step. But the impact hadn’t affected the back of the neck—it was the base of the skull which was now inflamed, with blood pouring from it. A deadly blow, especially if there was internal bleeding as well. And Damián’s version of the story would die with him, so that Charo would live again in Juan’s memory just as he had loved her, bittersweet and salty, bitter and sour, sweeter still if she needed to be. It would be difficult to survive such a fall. Difficult, though not impossible.Almost nothing was impossible. Reviving the dead, maybe, finding a way of turning back time. Juan held his brother’s head, and told himself that Damián was dead, dead, dead. He could have taken his pulse, but he was dead. He could have tried to revive him, but he was dead. He could have checked to see if he was dead, but he was dead, and Charo would live again after having died twice, once when her lover’s Audi crashed into a granite cliff on a cold, sunny April dawn, and again in the words Damián had spat at him that dreadful night.Then, Dr. Olmedo laid his brother’s head back on the step and in that instant his mind, or his memory, threw back at him the things Damián had said that evening: “I’d kill her right now, kill her even though she’s already dead, that would do, that would be enough.” Juan Olmedo had thought he would do it gently, but instead he dashed Damián’s head hard against the step that had killed him, killing him again. He could have checked to see if he was still alive, but he didn’t. It was impossible to survive such a fall. There had been a loud, unmistakable crack. Blood flowed obediently from the wound, down the corpse’s neck, staining his shirt.The world would be a much better place. Damián was dead and his version of the story had died with him.Then it started to rain. It seemed impossible, but it was raining, a fine rain that landed on Damián’s clean blood and on his brother’s dirty hands, a downpour of tiny, dry particles, covering everything. As he struggled to understand where it was coming from, Juan Olmedo looked up. His brother Alfonso, eyes very wide, pajama top buttoned up wrong, had grabbed Perico, the teddy bear he’d had since he was four, and couldn’t sleep without, and was banging the toy’s head against the handrail on the first floor. Sawdust was flying out of the bear’s body, but Alfonso, oblivious, went on bashing it against the rail, again and again.
“Damián’s fallen down the stairs,” said Juan, looking at Alfonso, and he was amazed at how firm, how steady his voice sounded. “I’m trying to revive him.”
“Revive him,” repeated Alfonso,“revive him.”
And he went on bashing the teddy bear against the handrail until there was nothing left.
Maribel’s recovery was going well but then, two days after her operation, her mother burst into the hospital, wailing and weeping so uncontrollably that a nurse stopped her and made her sit down when she emerged from the lift.The nurse sent a colleague to fetch Dr. Olmedo because she didn’t dare leave the woman alone.When Juan arrived, he saw a woman who was much younger than he’d expected—she must have been about Sara’s age—with an attractive face, her hair dyed black, wearing high-heeled sandals and a tight dress in a large flowery print that her daughter would have liked. He held out a hand and introduced himself. She grabbed his hand and kissed it quickly, repeatedly, until it was covered in lipstick smudges. Maribel often kissed his palms once her lipstick had worn off, and Juan was relieved to note this difference. He withdrew his hand as soon as he could and, suppressing the urge to speak harshly, he attempted to sound neutral and professional.
“I’m sorry, but your daughter doesn’t want to see you,” he said.
“Why not?” She leaned over and took her head in her hands, tensing her fingers as if she were about to tear her hair out.“I didn’t know anything about it, I swear! I’ve only just found out. If I see that bastard, I’ll tear his eyes out. Please, Doctor, please, I just want to see her, just for a moment. I’m her mother!”
The people in the waiting room had been staring with interest through the glass partition for some time, and some had even come to the door.A patient in a wheelchair pretended to be looking at the prices on the vending machine, and a couple of nurses stopped in their tracks, as if awaiting the rest of the scene.
“Wait here a moment,” said Juan, gently guiding her to a chair.“Please calm down. I can’t let you in to see her in this state.”
Maribel was awake, sitting up in bed with the television on, reading a magazine. She smiled when she saw him.
“Your mother’s out there. She’s been kicking up a terrible fuss. I’m surprised you didn’t hear her from here. Look what she did to my hand.”
Maribel raised her eyes to heaven, then closed them for a moment, and tutted.Then she wearily took Juan’s hand and wiped it on the sheet until all the lipstick had disappeared.
“I knew it. I knew she wouldn’t want to miss this,” she said.“She loves this kind of thing—hospitals, operations, patients . . .”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. Seeing that her mother’s arrival was affecting Maribel less than he’d expected, he dared give her his opinion: “But I think it would be best if you let her in to see you.”
Maribel nodded, resigned.
“All right, let her in, but would you mind staying too? I’d rather have someone else with me.”
As he left the room, Juan realized Maribel had addressed him as “tu” again. Since she’d been in hospital, since she’d dug her nails into his arm while a nurse stuck a drip into her, she’d stopped using “usted.”“You do the stitches, Juan,” she’d said,“please, you do it.”“No, I can’t do it, and I wouldn’t be allowed to either,” he’d answered. “This isn’t my field, and anyway doctors never treat patients they have a personal relationship with.” At the time, he was still so agitated that he hadn’t noticed the change in the way she addressed him. But now, as he walked down the corridor to fetch Maribel’s mother, he wondered what it all meant, and instinctively felt that the ex-husband’s knife had changed everything in some vague and as yet indefinable way.The brief, tense meeting between Maribel and her mother confirmed this impression. Maribel remained calm, while her mother, seeing that her display of grief was having no effect, switched to remorse. Maribel, who was gradually growing stronger in her hospital bed, had broken down only once, when her son came to see her for the first time.
As Juan expected, Sara had ignored his advice and, instead of ringing a babysitter and going home to rest, had stayed with the children herself. They had even ended up, all three of them, sleeping in Juan’s bed.As she opened the door to Maribel’s hospital room, Sara glanced at Juan, her eyebrows raised in warning, and he realized why immediately. Andrés was even paler than his mother had been when she was stabbed. He stood, frozen, motionless, at the door. Maribel, who still felt weak and couldn’t move without severe pain, reacted immediately when she saw his small figure, his face as blank as a robot’s. She opened her arms and called to him, but he didn’t move and even, for a moment, looked away, staring at the corner of the room. Maribel burst into tears and then Andrés ran to her and huddled against her. She turned her head to one side, a grief-stricken look on her face, and made room for the child beside her on the bed.When Juan left the room with Sara and Tamara, Andrés was crying even more copiously than his mother. Half an hour later, he had calmed down but still clung to Maribel, while she looked anxious, scared by his reaction.
Her mother’s visit, on the other hand, hardly affected her. Juan was pleased to see how detached, how firm Maribel was with her, and how casually, even affectionately she spoke when she said she thought she ought to leave with Juan when a nurse came to fetch him.As he walked the woman to the lift, he realized the rel
ationship between mother and daughter would never be the same, because one of them had almost died, and the other had once sided with the man who had tried to kill her.The shedding of blood had shifted the balance of power forever. Juan wondered whether something similar wasn’t about to happen in his own relationship with Maribel. He had been pleased that she’d suddenly started addressing him as “tu,” but it also worried him more than he would dare admit. While part of him welcomed this sign of normality, another part feared it.And there were other aspects of his life, and Maribel’s, that had changed.
It was inevitable. He knew he had to do it but he still waited till the last minute, the day before Maribel was due to leave hospital, after Sara had told him how Maribel’s replacement (one of her cousins, a girl called Remedios, whom Juan had only seen once) was getting on.
“You see, Sara,” he began, not knowing how he would continue, as he walked her to the door. “There’s something you should know, because, well, I’m sure you’ve already guessed, Maribel and I . . .”
“I know,” said Sara, smiling. “I’ve known for some time. I saw you one evening at a restaurant in Bajo de Guia, doing rude things with prawns.”
Juan burst out laughing.
“And you didn’t say anything?” he murmured, sounding amazed, as if he couldn’t believe how discreet she’d been.
“No. I thought it was none of my business. It’s up to you, you’re both grown-ups. But,” she said, taking Juan’s arm and squeezing it briefly, “there’s something else I haven’t told you, and I think you ought to know. It might be nothing but, at the end of July, a policeman from Madrid called Nicanor turned up at the development, asking questions about you. Ramón Martínez, the man from the estate agents, talked to him.” Juan nodded, trying not to show any emotion. “Anyway, Ramón found it a bit odd because the man kept badgering him with questions, but didn’t explain why. It was as if he was just checking where you were, you and Alfonso, but didn’t want you to know he’d been there. Ramón didn’t like the look of him at all, but he didn’t mention it to you because he doesn’t know you very well.Which is why he told me. I’ve given it a lot of thought, but it never seemed the right time to tell you. I don’t know if it’s important or not, but with this happening to Maribel, and the police being involved, well, I thought I ought to tell you.”
“Right,” said Juan, pacing up and down and searching his pockets for cigarettes, as if he’d forgotten he was in a hospital and wearing scrubs.
Sara took a pack of cigarettes from her bag and offered him one.They went outside and he lit up.
“It’s an old story,” he said at last.“Nicanor thinks I owe him something, but he’s wrong.” He looked at Sara, put a hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. But thanks anyway, for being so discreet—well, for everything. And thank Ramón from me.”
Sara walked back to her car and Juan finished his cigarette.There had been two autopsies: the initial one had been requested by Nicanor through police channels after the doctor who examined Damián’s body discounted an investigation into the cause of death, and then another one, of which Juan, as closest relative of the deceased, was only informed when he received the reports in the post.The opinion of both pathologists had been the same, and was conclusive. And judges would never accept the testimony of a mentally disabled man. Nicanor knew this as well as Juan did, he knew there was no case to be brought, which was why he hadn’t taken any official steps, only visits and muttered warnings. Juan Olmedo knew better than Nicanor—an orthopedic surgeon with clinical experience knows more about falls and their consequences than anyone—but when he went back to the hospital he looked dazed and there was an unbearable tightness in his chest.There had been two autopsies, two pathologists’ reports, one accident and one mentally disabled man. He repeated this over and over to himself like a mantra, but it didn’t help. Nicanor’s perseverance, his stubbornness, worried Juan because he could find no rationale behind it.A long time had passed since Damián’s death, over a year, almost two, and it seemed incredible that while his own life had changed so radically, Nicanor’s continued to be anchored to the tragedy on the stairs. It seemed impossible that, in this time, nothing had happened to interest or inspire him more than the dead end of suspicions he would never be able to prove.As he drove home from the hospital that afternoon, Juan remembered finding Nicanor, more distraught than anyone, in Damián’s kitchen only a few hours after the accident. He had to admit that there was something noble, even admirable, in the loyalty of this grim, silent man who always followed one step behind his brother like a shadow. He seemed to have no life of his own, neither a wife, nor children, nor a family, nor interests, no goal or purpose in life other than his work and his endless devotion to Damián Olmedo. Despite being surrounded by all sorts of people—colleagues, neighbors, friends from his youth, girlfriends—Nicanor hadn’t found anyone new to protect and admire, no one to depend on the way he had depended on Damián for over twenty years. Perhaps the righteous fantasy of vengeance and the excitement of the hunt had filled the immense hole that Damián’s death had left in his life. Perhaps Nicanor Martos thought of Juan Olmedo every night before falling asleep, as faithfully as a spurned lover. Perhaps he would never tire, because hating Juan, threatening him, stalking him, scaring him, was his only remaining link to Damián.
That night, Juan Olmedo couldn’t sleep, but in the early hours of the morning he managed to convince himself that Nicanor’s visit wasn’t a new development—it was simply another stage in the vicious circle in which Damián’s friend had become trapped ever since Juan had made his one and only mistake, a simple slip. His brother was dead and buried, they couldn’t exhume the body without his knowledge, and it would be of no use, because another autopsy would only give the same results as the first two. Nobody, maybe not even a pathologist, knows as much about accidental deaths as an orthopedic surgeon.Alfonso was now living with Juan, who was his legal guardian, and any meeting or interview, whether official or otherwise, could only take place with his prior, written permission. This hadn’t happened, and would never happen, because there was no point, so Nicanor’s recent visit had to be just another of his veiled threats.“I’m after you,” he’d said to Juan the penultimate time he saw him. “Oh, really?You don’t say!” Juan had replied, in a cocky tone like the one El Canario would have used. Nicanor had done nothing, because he knew there was no case to be made, all he could do was harass Juan, threaten him, first in Madrid and now perhaps here too. Juan hadn’t gone into hiding, he’d traveled over six hundred kilometers and found himself in the same place he’d always been. It was mid-September. If Nicanor had managed the impossible and found evidence where there was none, Juan would have known about it by now. The police didn’t take the month of August off.
Juan got up with a headache and a feeling he knew well: not exactly fear, more a state of active alert, a particular way of keeping his eyes wide open. As he walked to the car, turned on the engine, and set out on the familiar route to Jerez, he berated himself for not having been more open with Sara the previous afternoon. But then he realized that the impassive front he’d adopted, out of sheer surprise, would have been more convincing than a lengthy explanation full of half-truths. Anyway, Sara could be trusted. Juan Olmedo wouldn’t have been able to say why, but he was absolutely certain she could be trusted. Perhaps this was why he felt so intensely weary of silence—he would have liked to talk—but he never brought the subject up again.
This was easy, because he didn’t see Sara until that evening and by then many other things had happened. After her last check-up, Maribel was allowed to leave hospital in the late morning. Beforehand, she’d announced two things: that she didn’t want to have lunch at the hospital, and she didn’t want to leave before him. By the time Juan managed to get away it was already four o’clock and she’d been waiting for several hours in her room. He would never know how much the news that Nicanor was still dogging his steps influenced what he f
elt when he saw Maribel, in a T-shirt and skirt that looked too big for her, collapsed rather than sitting in an armchair, one hand placed over her wound as if trying to protect it. Her feet were swollen and she was resting them on top of her sandals, waiting until the last moment to put them on. She had dressings on both arms, and her hair was tied back. She’d been in hospital for nine days and had lost a great deal of weight, enough to make her face seem more angular, her cheekbones and jaw more prominent than before. Dressed and ready to leave, it was much more noticeable how pale Maribel’s cheeks had become, how dull her eyes, but when she saw Juan she gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to contain all the other smiles she had ever given him—the mother, the horny girl, the grateful lover, the cunning spider, the cautious libertine, the confused child, the wise old woman, the generous cook, the conspirator, the nocturnal seductress, the conscientious worker, the wounded wife, the dying lover; all the women that Maribel had been for him and through him. Juan Olmedo recognized all these women in the woman now smiling up at him, and he recognized himself in the man who went to meet her. He felt a sudden, unfamiliar urge, somewhere between the desire to possess her and the need to take care of her, and it was only then, seeing her so fragile, so helpless now that she was out of bed, that he stopped thinking about Nicanor. He told himself that without Maribel, without the opportunity to feel useful, good, generous, essential, everything would have been worse.
The Wind From the East Page 53