By the spring of 1990, the banknotes were piling up in the bottom of her wardrobe at such a rate that, on occasion, she opted to forego some of the undeclared money that she had so far reserved for herself. The money was no longer the problem.While she struggled with the idea of calling Vicente, Sara Gómez Morales, without the crutch of her past, began to wonder what she really wanted to be. Before her stretched two different paths. One led to being a wealthy and fairly honorable woman, a sort of luxury version of Señorita Sevilla.The other would turn her into a seriously wealthy fraudster. For the past few months she had been viewing apartments again in her spare time, although she was now looking for something different—a very large, old apartment, cheap enough that she could buy it using the rent from her other two apartments, and so dilapidated that the refurbishment would absorb all the money accumulating at the bottom of her wardrobe.The plan was to add value to her investment, and then eventually sell it off and start all over again.This was the safest, least nerve-racking path, and the one that most involved Vicente. But without completely abandoning this scheme, she chose the other path.
When at last she sold the house in Toledo, Doña Sara divided the money up between her nephews and nieces, and paid the gift tax out of her own funds.“I never liked that house,” was all she said. She bought Sara a new, very expensive car—her first BMW—but she didn’t give her any money. Sara had been expecting this. However fond Doña Sara was of her, however much she needed her and preferred her to Amparo and her brothers, Sara would never inherit the shawl, only the fringes. Children of servants are only fostered, never adopted, because blood is thicker than water, and rules are rules. She wasn’t going to cry over it at this stage but, beyond her own feelings, the situation of her godmother’s current accounts was becoming unsustainable. Sara would have liked to let another summer go by, to give herself longer to reflect, rein in her ambition or prepare herself better inwardly, but she didn’t have the time. She’d wasted almost a year. If she waited until September and the transaction was delayed for some reason, the tax year might end with no income declared.And now there was much more at stake than her prestige in managing Doña Sara’s finances efficiently.
He wasn’t in the phone book, of course.As she dialed the party headquarters, Sara’s hands felt clammy, her legs were shaking, and when she spoke her voice suddenly sounded halting and childlike.The first person she asked for, however, was at his desk, and he remembered her.“I don’t think I can get hold of him right now,” he told her,“but I’ll be seeing him in a couple of hours—we’re having lunch together—so leave me a number he can contact you on.That’ll be the best thing.” He was lying, but ten minutes later the phone rang, and it was Vicente González de Sandoval, not his secretary.
They agreed to meet the following day, at two thirty, in a restaurant that was new to her, a big place that must once have been the cellars, or coach houses or even the stables of a palace. The walls were exposed brick, the windows small and high up, and ceiling fans cooled the air, lending the place the air of a grotto in an eighteenth-century garden. The teak furniture was in a vaguely colonial style that lightened the classical look of the rugs, and there were plenty of large lustrous plants cleverly placed for maximum effect. The glasses were Portuguese blue glass, the plates white, and there was no cutlery to be seen. The place suited Vicente’s taste for pared-down luxury, one more station on the journey that Sara had enjoyed with him for a while. She was sure he’d been thinking about the place the day before as she tried to explain, hesitantly, a little incoherently, that she’d like to meet up with him to discuss something too important to talk about on the phone.The asphalt outside was so hot it seemed about to melt beneath the merciless June sun, but as she entered the restaurant, Sara was shocked by more than just the change in temperature.The echo of another time, another place stopped her dead in her tracks for a moment by the bar.Then she saw him. He was sitting at a table at the back, looking over some papers, and wearing small reading glasses—something he’d never needed when they were together. He was fifty now, with grey hair and a weary look—the only man she’d ever loved. For a moment, she felt as gauche and naive as a sixteen-year-old, but just as she was about to run from the restaurant, he looked up, saw her, removed his glasses and stood up. She smiled involuntarily as she walked over to him.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. He kissed her on both cheeks—real kisses, his lips touching her face as he put an arm around her waist and held her against him a second longer than necessary, so that she became very aware of his embrace.“I’m well. And you?”
“Hm.” He frowned and shrugged, then he laughed. “I suppose I’m well too. Sit down. I’m so pleased you called me, I really wanted to see you.”
The courtesies continued with a conversation on the possibilities of the menu, which led to a quick summary of their respective lives. Vicente’s children were well—the eldest was already at university whilst the youngest was about to start. Sara’s parents were both dead, and she was living with her godmother again.Vicente raised his eyebrows when she told him this.
“I saw your wedding photo in the paper,” she couldn’t help saying, and even added:“Your wife’s stunning.”
He smiled wryly.
“She certainly is stunning. But she’s no longer my wife.We divorced a couple of years ago. But, of course, the photographers weren’t interested in that.”
“Oh,” said Sara, trying to keep any hint of bitterness from her voice, to remain detached and light-heartedly ironic. “There I was thinking you’d never leave María Belén, and it turns out you’ve left several women on the trot.”
“Well, yes, that’s how it goes,” he said.“You can get used to anything—getting divorced, getting married, getting divorced again.”
“So, any day now you might be getting married again?”
“I don’t think so.” He paused, looked at her, and laughed. “Marriage has always ended up being rather expensive for me. Although my girlfriend’s rather keen on having a wedding, that’s for sure.”
“I suppose she’s very young.”
“Not that young. She’s thirty-six, although she doesn’t seem it. Because of the way she acts, I mean.”
“And she’s stunning?”
“Well, fully dressed she’s fairly normal, but without her clothes she’s impressive.” Sara laughed and he looked at her.“What about you?”
“Oh, I can’t think about that sort of thing nowadays. I have other plans, which is why I called you.”
“I was crazy about you, Sara.”
He said it firmly, quietly, with the same voice he would have used to order a bottle of wine—a much graver tone than the urgent, anxious voice he’d used when he said,“I’m crazy about you, Sara,” after every row, after every parting and every inevitable reconciliation.“I’m crazy about you, Sara, and you know it.” Sara tried to smile, to appear composed, and wondered why everything had to be so difficult. Again she felt tempted to rush out, but that would have seemed ridiculous, so after folding her napkin yet again and taking a few sips of wine, she managed to collect her thoughts, and reminded herself of the reason she was there.
“I . . . I need to ask you a favor,Vicente. A very big favor.” He abandoned the nostalgic pose of the rejected lover and sat up straight in his chair.“Before I begin, I have to warn you, it’s quite a delicate matter—definitely risky for me, but possibly dangerous for you, because of your position and your political career. If you can’t help me, you must tell me—I’ll understand.”
“I’m getting excited,” he said. Sara couldn’t help laughing at this and it released all the tension that her words had created.“What’s up?”
“I need a stockbroker or a financial adviser for a rather special piece of business. The person would need to be very capable, very discreet, absolutely trustworthy and above all, not in the least bit curious. They mustn’t ask questions, or pass on any gossip. And they must be prepared
to run certain risks, possibly even to operate on the fringes of illegality.”
She said it all in one burst, not daring to look up from her plate.When she did, she found him looking very surprised. But he was also grinning and his eyes shone like those of a little boy who’d got to pick the hand containing the present.
“I’m getting more and more excited,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Are you bankrolling a guerrilla army or dealing with the Mafia or something?”
“No, no, nothing as exciting as that. I told you I’m back living with my godmother again.You remember that whole story, don’t you?” He nodded, and she went on:“Well, she’s quite elderly now and she doesn’t have any family, apart from three nieces and nephews who only visit occasionally, but they will inherit her fortune when she dies. However, I’m looking after all her business interests—everything, including managing her assets, because I’m her legal representative. She’s very wealthy. Extraordinarily wealthy. So, let’s just say that I have an opportunity to inherit some of her money.”
This revelation wiped the smile offVicente’s face. He pushed his plate to one side, sat back and looked at her with an expression she found hard to interpret—a slight, sad tension around his lips, as if the past, his story and Sara’s, all the years during which they’d never managed to live together, and all the intervening years, had suddenly landed on the table.
“What’s the matter?” Sara asked, unable to stand his gaze.
“Nothing.” He shook his head, quickly recovering his composure. “You know that I’ve always thought you were clever and strong, capable of anything. But I wasn’t expecting something like this. Not from you.”
“Have I shocked you?” He shook his head again, but she insisted.“Are you disappointed? Do I seem despicable?”
“No.” He took Sara’s hand and squeezed it. “In fact, it’s good to see you like this. In a way, I find it reassuring.”
She removed her hand, but didn’t stop to reflect on his words.
“Are you going to help me?”
“Of course I am. I know someone who might do. Is that all you need?”
“Yes, that’s everything.” She smiled and she would have liked to force him to smile too, to convince him that everything was over between them.“Thank you,Vicente.You don’t know how grateful I am.”
“No, but I’d like to.”
This was bound to happen. Sara looked into his eyes and everything around her began to grow dim, everything merged into the background, the plants, the furniture, the music, leaving her on her own in a sudden void, a blank space filled only with the two dark eyes looking at her from across the table.
“I was crazy about you, Sara,” he said, and his voice sounded as it used to.
She wasn’t sure how she avoided the trap, where she found the strength to stop her hand from advancing across the tablecloth towards his, but then she glanced at her watch, gave a small cry of alarm, and said it was late and she had to leave. He did nothing to hold her back, but cupped her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. “I can’t, Vicente, really I can’t.”And it was true.At that moment, she didn’t want anything—neither money, nor power, nor revenge—as much as she wanted him, but she knew the price she’d have to pay, the terms and mechanisms of her poverty.Ten years ago she would have returned home in tears.That afternoon she couldn’t cry, but it was even worse. She felt so sad, so shriveled up inside, that she told her godmother she wasn’t feeling well, and spent the afternoon in bed, her fists clenched and her eyes open, empty of any sign of life apart from a single obsessive thought—the unbearably clear memory of his body on top of hers.
The following morning she felt no better. She was just sitting down to lunch when a maid came to tell her she had a phone call. From the voice, it sounded like a very young man. She didn’t recognize the name—Rafael Espinosa—when he introduced himself. But he said he’d been given her name by Vicente González de Sandoval, and he wanted to make an appointment to meet her, whenever it was convenient. Moved by the speed with whichVicente had kept his promise, Sara took down the address and agreed to meet the young man in a couple of days’ time.When she saw him standing in the reception of a firm of investment managers that occupied an entire floor of a skyscraper in the Azca district, it took her only a moment to recognize him.
“Do you remember me?”
The last time she’d seen him he was a teenager, a scruffy boy with long hair and a permanent grudge against the world, who slouched and swore with every other sentence. Now his hair was short, he wore highly polished shoes, a deliberately showy tie, a suede jacket, and very clean, pressed jeans—a small concession to rebellion.
“Wow, Rafa! You’ve really changed!”
“Well, you look just the same.”
He was the youngest son of Vicente’s elder sister, and his favorite nephew, maybe because he played the same role in the next generation as Vicente had played in his own. He was also the only member of Vicente’s family that Sara had ever managed to meet. In those days he was a far-left activist and his views were much more radical than his uncle’s, with whom he was always arguing, after ordering twelve-year-old malt whisky or the most expensive dish on the menu:“You can fucking afford it!”Vicente would find it all highly amusing. Sara liked him too; she enjoyed listening to him, because he held up a mirror in which she could see a young economics student, more passionate and naive than the man she’d fallen in love with, and because she herself was sometimes the subject of the reproaches the boy hissed at his uncle—“What about you? Look at you, for fuck’s sake—you’ve got a hot girlfriend like this, but you still stay married to that posh bitch. Some example you set for the working classes!” Once the boy had left,Vicente would tell her that Rafa had a huge crush on her, but she’d never believed him. Maybe this was why she was so pleased to see him again, and felt much more confident than she’d expected as she followed him down the corridor. He closed the door to his office carefully after offering her a seat.
“Right, let’s see.” He sat down at his desk, immediately adopting a serious, professional manner in keeping with the framed certificates from universities at home and abroad that were displayed on the walls. It was clear that he’d also been radical when it came to reinventing himself. “Vicente didn’t say much. I gather it’s a question of opening two lines of investment, is that right? One investing a specific amount of capital, the other investing the income generated by the first.”
“Well, yes, that’s basically it.” Sara nodded.
“OK. And the capital would be in your name. I mean you would be the person with the legal capacity to authorize the investments.” Again Sara nodded.“And I assume that we don’t want the original capital to be at any risk—I mean that in principle the investments we pick should be sufficiently safe and reasonable to justify the fact of choosing them.”
“Exactly.” Sara smiled, grateful that he’d said “we.”
“And we can be more daring, more . . . unorthodox, let’s say, with the second account—I mean, the capital generated by the income from the original sum.” He raised his eyebrows, and she nodded.
Then he opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk to her together with a pen.
“How much money are we talking about?”
Sara wrote down a figure with eight zeroes and returned the piece of paper to him. He looked at it, looked at her in amazement, looked at the figure again, then whistled, loosened his tie, tore up the paper and threw it into the bin.
“It’s very hot today, isn’t it? Shall we go for a drink? I’m parched.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were sitting at a secluded table on the Paseo de la Castellana.Then Rafa asked her what she wanted to drink. Once the waiter had taken their order, he looked at her.
“So you’re going to fleece the old woman, eh?” He laughed, amused by his assessment of the situation.
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