“How did it go?” asked her godmother. She was in the sitting room watching a film, but she paused it when Sara arrived. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Sara said quickly, pretending to be fed up. She collapsed on the sofa and crossed her legs.“Well, I saw a couple of things I liked, but they weren’t right for a wedding. It’s difficult, isn’t it, a wedding at the end of October? If I get a suit, I might be too hot. If I get a dress, I might freeze. So I can’t make my mind up.”
“I told you,” her godmother said, delighted to have been right. She started the film again.“This time of year is terrible for buying clothes.”
Sara didn’t set the date for the wedding she’d invented until she knew the date on which the contracts were to be signed.When she was given a morning appointment at the notary’s office, she told her godmother that the wedding was going to take place in a registry office, and she even bought herself a new suit for the occasion. It was very elegant—a white jacket with black edging, and a black lace skirt—too elegant for going to the notary’s and then to the bank where she’d opened a new account, into which she’d be paying the income from the flats, but nobody remarked upon it. Nor did the estate agent comment as he counted twelve million pesetas paid over in cash. Afterwards, as it was only two in the afternoon, she went—alone—to a restaurant she’d been to many times with Vicente. She told herself she chose it simply because it was nearby, and because a woman her age, alone and in such a smart outfit, wouldn’t attract attention there. Many of the waiters had changed, but the maitre d’ recognized her and the cloakroom attendant came to say hello.
“How are you, Señora? How lovely to see you! How many years has it been? We do still see your husband in here, but only very occasionally. He said you were well, but I must say you look better than well, and so elegant.”
“Thank you so much.” Sara smiled, playing for time. She told herself it was foolish, but still she continued: “Actually, I was supposed to be meeting him here, but I just called and he said he didn’t think he could make it, he’s been held up. He’s always so busy.”
“Yes, we see his picture in the paper sometimes.”
“Not on his wedding day,” thought Sara.Yet she was in such a good mood that she kissed the attendant on both cheeks again before going to her table and left a thousand-peseta tip in the cloakroom tray, even though she didn’t have a coat.The girl was simply making conversation no doubt, but the thought thatVicente might have remarked to her, even once, that Sara was well, that he’d be bringing her for dinner one of these days, caused such violent, sudden emotion that Sara spent the next week fantasizing about calling him.
She did eventually call him many months later, but for very different reasons, when her accumulation of wealth had acquired such a frenzied pace that simple arithmetic came before any emotional considerations. And yet, she hadn’t pushed her godmother down that road. Sara hadn’t even allowed herself to wonder if the episode of the money that came looking for her—that fell into her lap, making her sixteen-year-old self rush downstairs and look into her eyes—might somehow be repeated. When she got back to Doña Sara’s the morning she’d been handed twelve million pesetas, and found the table laid for one, the only thing she knew was that she was not going to feel guilty about taking the money.That was the only thing she’d decided.
Her godmother had already gone to stay by the sea. A little over a week earlier she’d become fed up with waiting for the buyers of the Cercedilla house to sign the contract. She seemed so desperate to leave Madrid that Sara had encouraged her to change her travel arrangements. She’d been trying to convince her godmother to make the journey by car, as she did every year, but Doña Sara had flatly refused, as she also did every year. Doña Sara liked trains. So, reluctantly taking a maid with her instead of her god-daughter, she had left by train—a day after her chauffeur, with all the suitcases, made the same journey by road, arriving in plenty of time to collect her at Malaga station, drive her to Marbella, and help her to settle in. Usually the chauffeur would return to Madrid the following day by train, but this year Doña Sara didn’t want him to leave until Sara had arrived, because the maid who was with her couldn’t drive, and she didn’t like relying on taxis. It was a ridiculous arrangement that was repeated in reverse in September, but Doña Sara had become a capricious old lady who did not allow anything to thwart her wishes, and who never spared any expense—or the efforts of others—on making her life more pleasant.“I mean, I won’t be around for much longer,” she’d say when her god-daughter tried to make her see reason. That afternoon Sara had her own reasons for opposing Doña Sara’s plans. She should have been leaving to join her godmother by the sea, but instead, Sara phoned her and told her that some errors had been found in the Land Registry entry for the house they’d just sold. She said they had to be corrected, and promised that the process of doing so would only delay her departure by twenty-four hours.
Sara kept her word, but only after dealing with the promises she had made to herself.Although it was very hot, she didn’t have a siesta and after lunch she shut herself in the only room in the apartment that she hadn’t set foot in since returning to live there, almost four years before. Occasionally, when she went down the corridor, she’d found the door open, so she knew that the furniture was still there. However she hadn’t expected it to look so old, so worn, the once-white lacquer now dirty and yellow, as if it had grown weary of the passing of time.When she lay down on the bed, she had to curl up her legs, but soon found a comfortable position. She had to close her eyes in order to see. Her godmother would sit on a tiny little chair to tell her a bedtime story. She never chose Sara’s favorites—stories about princes and princesses who ran away from wicked stepmothers and ended up kissing each other by the bedsides of their children. Instead, at her own bedside, there was a woodcutter and his wife: poor, hungry wretches who conspired in their kitchen, and rose at dawn the next day to take their children into the forest. Sara didn’t like these stories, but her godmother ignored her complaints.“Wait and see,” she’d say,“it will all end well.”The end was a goose that laid golden eggs, a cauldron full of diamonds and gold coins, treasure hidden inside a chocolate house, the pathway home.“Wait and see.” Sara didn’t like these stories, but her whole life could be summed up in them. She would never be a princess, no handsome prince would ever kiss her on the lips to wake her from the dream she’d always preferred to real life. But now she was like Jack, who swapped his cow for a handful of beans, or even Gretel, so prissy, so blond, as odious as her brother, who tricked the old witch and so made their fortune.“Wait and see,” her godmother would say, and fate had forced Sara to follow this advice:“Wait and see.” She had waited, this was the ending, and it was a happy one. For once, Sara agreed with her godmother.As she emerged back out into the street in the mid-afternoon, her body felt more agile, flexible, younger.Yet she carried inside her all the women she had been before, and the burden of a loyalty that could not be destroyed—she owed these women more than she owed anyone else.
The young man in the estate agent’s nearest to her old address spoke easily of money, never complaining how unpleasant it was. He didn’t think Sara would have much problem finding a buyer for her old apartment—he had a few clients looking for a flat in that area himself—but he didn’t believe they would find someone willing to pay cash.“People here only have what they earn, you know,” he said, and Sara nodded: “Of course.”As she was leaving, she said the place where she’d be spending the summer had no phone, so she’d ring him once a week instead. By the third time she called him, the property had been sold.
She did nothing apart from the obvious, made no plans other than deciding the best area of Madrid to buy in, the size and features of the one large or two small apartments on which she would spend the contents of the two bags that had spent the last few weeks at the bottom of her wardrobe. For the time being, this would be all. She was satisfied, her life continued to be comfortable and plea
sant, her work just as well paid. She earned much more than she spent, slept at least nine hours a night, and wasn’t prepared to take any risks. But the sale of the Cercedilla house hadn’t only been profitable for her. Doña Sara didn’t spend a single second of her holiday discussing the matter, but Doña Loreto, who liked to think she was very sharp and could sort out other people’s lives, brought up the subject at their first get-together after the summer holiday.
“I’m delighted for you, my dear. It’s wonderful. Such a piece of luck,” she said to Doña Sara before even tasting her coffee.Then she turned to Sara:“How much clear profit was made from the sale?”
“Well,” said Sara, frowning as if she was working it out, and assuming that Doña Loreto was no expert in tax law,“after expenses, capital gains tax, and all that sort of thing, almost eighty million.”
“Goodness!” Doña Loreto looked at her friend, smiling from ear to ear. “Over seventy million more in the bank, and one less headache in Cercedilla! How I envy you, Sara. If only I had property, instead of a half-share in a company that my sons-in-law keep interfering in. If I were you, I’d sell the lot, all of it, really I would. Money in the bank at a good rate of interest, and that’s the end of your worries. Wonderful! I mean, you don’t have any children to leave it to, so what’s the point in saving? You can’t take it with you.”
“That’s true.” Doña Sara nodded in agreement, while Sara felt the blood rushing through her veins.“You can’t take it with you, I mean.”
Doña Sara felt the same distaste for country properties as she did for unfaithful husbands, and for the same reason. Doña Loreto knew this, and so did Sara, because she’d heard Doña Sara say it so many times—“I hate the countryside.” It seemed a trenchant declaration when delivered to a child, but many years later Sara finally understood that it was the product of a bad experience.When he was first married, still strong and vigorous, Don Antonio Ochoa often used to leave home without warning. At first he would only be away for one night, and would return with flowers, chocolates and an amusing story that laid all the blame on one of his friends, and was usually incredible enough to be believable. Later on, his absences became lengthier—almost always two or three days, even a week occasionally—and he would offer no explanation when he returned.There was no need. His wife never knew who he was with, but she always knew where he was. Don Antonio only stopped being unfaithful to her when his body chose, not fidelity, but impotence.Yet he still took pride in being a landowner, and he genuinely liked the countryside more than anything. At the apartment in Calle Velázquez, lost amongst the drawers, were photos of a handsome man—the body that Sara had only ever seen lying down, or slumped in a chair—upright in hunting boots, with his shirt open, a hat and a happy smile, standing on some crag overlooking a huge plain planted with crops, beside a vineyard, or with a flock of sheep, a sheepdog at his heels.This was why he stayed away so long. He liked to take his conquests to his estate near Toledo, but he also took care of the estate and looked after the other properties—the land in Salamanca that his wife had inherited from her mother, and the estates in Ciudad Real that were part of her family fortune and were the most valuable. This was why Doña Sara hated the countryside.
“The thing is, I like spending time with you,” she told Sara at dinner that evening, “and I think maybe Loreto’s right about all those properties being a headache, even though you manage them.The less you have to do, the more time you’ll be able to spend with me. And it’s true, I don’t have any children to take care of the estates once I’m gone.What will my nieces and nephews do with them? Sell them, of course. And if I leave you the estates, what will you do? Well, probably sell them too. Anyway, I don’t care about that land, I haven’t visited any of it in years, not even the Toledo estate, which is closest.You know I hate the countryside. I think Loreto’s right.”
The first course was Swiss chard, which neither of them liked, but which was still served once a week because it had always been served, and because it was good for you.As she listened to her godmother, Sara swallowed a mouthful with difficulty and wondered why she didn’t feel nervous. She ought to, yet she felt calm, alert. She could almost hear the cogs and gears, the humming of the machine in her head, above the old lady’s weak voice.
“I don’t know, Mami,” she answered after a while, once she’d decided which persona to adopt, which would be most appropriate. “Selling everything like that, all at once. It’s a bit frightening, isn’t it? Why don’t you think about it some more? Property is a secure investment, because it never goes bust.”
“No, but roofs cave in, and sometimes there’s hail in April, or it’s hot in January.”
Sara smiled. Her godmother, who had a poor memory, had managed to list the three disasters that had occurred over the past two years. Sara could not, however, agree with her so easily. Faithful to the role she had chosen, and therefore sensible and conservative, she remained firm.
“We can think about it anyway—see what we have, check out the market.We need to take things slowly, don’t you think? We should consider the consequences before doing anything.”
Sara hadn’t planned this. After all, she’d been a good, honest, conscientious worker all her life.
“What consequences could there be?” asked her godmother, intrigued.“Fewer problems and more money in the bank, as Loreto says.”
Sara closed her eyes briefly, put her napkin on the table, sat back and crossed her arms before replying. It wasn’t easy for her to continue because she’d just realized that she needed to measure every word, to tug carefully at the gold thread she had just found by chance.
“Well, it’s not as simple as that.Your financial situation would change overnight. Doña Loreto knows nothing about tax—why should she?— but land isn’t taxed in the same way as capital, Mami. Owners of farms get subsidies, advantageous credit terms with low interest rates, they can defer tax if the harvest has been poor or worse than expected, and of course they can claim a large part of their expenses against tax—wages, costs of machinery, repairs, things like that.You know all this already, or it should sound familiar, because I’ve told you about it several times. Money in the bank, on the other hand, has no tax breaks. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
At this she stopped, though she was no longer playing for time. She knew exactly what she was going to say next, but she wanted to check the old lady’s reaction first. It was entirely as she expected.
“So what could we do?”
“Well, we’d have to do something else with the money, find other investments, choose funds with tax advantages, and we’d need to keep changing our strategy as your capital increases. If you decide to sell all of it, and sell it quickly, we’d have to take more risks. Otherwise, the Revenue could claim over half of the profit.”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed the old lady. Sara had won the first round. Now furious, as befitted a wealthy Spanish lady who hadn’t paid a penny in tax during the forty years of the dictatorship, Doña Sara clenched her fists, banged them on the table and leaned forward. “Absolutely not! Do whatever you think is best.”
“Well. Let’s not be hasty,” Sara said, as she tried to calm the storm she’d just unleashed.“First, we need to consider what we’re going to do, and how we’re going to do it. But if you do decide to sell, I think it would be a good idea to look for another stockbroker, someone who’s less conservative than Don Ricardo.”
Sara couldn’t possibly use Don Antonio’s stockbroker, but she didn’t know who else to go to, or more precisely, she knew that the only person who could help her was the one person she didn’t want to ask for a favor.That night, as she went to bed, she discounted the idea. She continued to discount it every night and every morning that autumn, while she had meetings with managers and tenants, agricultural experts and town clerks, so as to divide up her godmother’s country estates into lots to be sold, the best ones quickly—such as the land with good water, very valuable in a province as dry as Ciudad Real—t
he others more slowly. She discounted the idea all winter as well, when the owner of the neighboring land decided to buy the plots she was selling in Salamanca, thus creating the largest livestock farm in the region. And in March, when Doña Margarita’s son made an offer, low but irresistible, for the house where Doña Sara’s husband had conducted many of his adulterous escapades, Sara pushed aside the idea yet again. Every night as she went to bed, and every morning as she got up, she thought about it again, decided to go ahead, then forbade herself to do so; yet right from the start she knew there was no one else she could turn to. Her social life, which had never been very active, except in the good times she wanted to forget, had dwindled to nothing. Finding a business partner through one of the intermediaries she’d met as her godmother’s financial representative would not only mean she ran the risk of being reported to the police, but also, in the least bad scenario, of being blackmailed for the rest of her life. She couldn’t see another way, couldn’t make up her mind. Meanwhile, time was passing,
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