“I think he’s always been in love with you, Sara.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Then she started to cry, and wept for a long time, convulsively at first, as if she wanted to drown in her own tears. Bewildered by the explosion of a grief he would never understand, her lover put his arms around her and kissed her like an older brother, as if he knew they would never share the same bed again.
“Would you like me to buy your share and then sell it in your name?” he asked when she’d calmed down.
Sara shook her head. It no longer made any sense to try to escape, to keep on running. She was exhausted, and nothing mattered any more. Her father would forgive her. He’d always been very forgiving of those who knew, who gave orders, who’d had an education. On the appointed morning, Sara again put on the lace skirt and white jacket with black edging that she’d bought three years earlier.
Her heels clicked resolutely down the empty corridor. When she opened the door of the office where they were waiting for her, she found half a dozen men, all rather similar, smartly dressed, though not as smartly as her. She already knew some of them, although she had trouble recognizing them.The rest she’d never seen before, but they all looked at her closely as they greeted her. Sara realized they were wondering whether she really was worth the price Vicente was about to pay for her. He seemed to be in no doubt.
“You look wonderful, Sara,” he whispered as she sat down next to him.“Whatever they say, younger lovers do a lot more for women than they do for men.”
“Perhaps.”
Just then, the notary entered the room. While he spoke, and passed round documents for everyone to sign,Vicente kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye. His head was bowed, and he kept drawing on a sheet of paper—a sign of nerves that was unusual in him, no doubt disconcerted at finding a different woman from the one he had expected.
“Are you going to consider my proposal?” he asked after signing the contract, then passing it to her together with a pen.
“Yes,” she replied, passing it on to the next buyer with a smile. Only then did she look at Vicente.“Yes. Now, I can consider it.”
She would have preferred a different kind of defeat, for their reunion to be bitter or insipid this time. Instead it was a victory, and that was even worse. She wasn’t like other women, so this aged lover rejuvenated her more than any other.That afternoon the pleasure she felt inVicente’s arms was identical to the pleasure she’d felt in the days when she still had hope. Only the pain afterwards changed, becoming wider, more muffled, like a constant dull ache rather than the sharp stabbing of an open wound. Sara would have preferred defeat, but since cutting him out of her life, eleven years earlier, she had never desired a man as much as she desiredVicente that afternoon, had never received or given as much, and yet it was no longer enough. She would have preferred to tell herself a different story—the tremulous epilogue to a romantic passion, a flame that can never be extinguished, a love more powerful than time, than money, than power. Perhaps this would have been an opportunity to change their story, but she wasn’t even going to try, and he knew it.
“How you despise me, eh, comrade?”
She stroked his face, kissed him on the lips, and tried to smile.
“Less than I despise myself,Vicente,” she said. “But I’ll never have to go back to being an accountant.Whatever happens, I’ll never have to do that. I owe that to you, and I’m grateful.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, so it took him a moment before he went on:
“This is how things are done. It’s nothing new. It’s ugly and unfair, I know, but it’s nothing new and it’s never going to change.You’ve always been on the side of the losers. It’s time you changed sides.”
She held him close, clinging to him like a castaway to driftwood.
“You don’t understand anything,Vicente,” she said.“But it’s not your fault.”
By the time Doña Sara Villamarín Ruíz, widow of Don Antonio Ochoa, died two days before her eighty-fifth birthday,Vicente González de Sandoval had married for the third time and had a two-month-old son. His party had been in opposition for several years, but his previous lover hadn’t rejected his marriage proposals because of that, and he knew it. Their relationship had simply died of weariness, unable to bear the weight of so many other relationships, so many endings that were all the same ending, so many stories that were all the same lie.Yet they still saw each other from time to time. He loved her. She loved him too. They remained loyal to each other until the end. So when her godmother’s will was read and Sara found that she had been left a derisory sum compared to the amount she had been promised, she simply laughed. Sitting beside her, Amparo López Ruiz looked at her suspiciously, confused by Sara’s reaction. Sara couldn’t stop laughing. She was still laughing as she said goodbye to Amparo and her brothers at the door to a house that was no longer her home and that she would leave that very afternoon. She had toldVicente she was leaving Madrid, that she’d send him a card occasionally, and not to look for her. He promised he wouldn’t, and never did.
Tamara knew that Andrés didn’t love his father.They’d never talked about it, but she’d seen Andrés with him—the man who was so handsome when his son was so ugly, puffing himself up like a prize turkey; the boy shrinking gradually, as if every word he heard from his father oppressed him. “You couldn’t love a father like him,” thought Tamara, as Andrés pushed his heavy, old bicycle that still looked tatty despite several coats of inexpertly applied metallic paint. He never wanted to talk about his father to her, so Tamara assumed he didn’t want to talk about him to anyone.
But Tamara also knew that Andrés loved his father. She’d known it right from the beginning, months before she’d even met his father. She’d guessed it from Andrés’s silences, from his expressions, and from a few things he’d said: quick, jumbled confessions that seemed to have no meaning. But words always mean something, and Andrés’s words conjured a dark, fleeting, mysterious figure. At school, if a classmate mentioned that his father had got a promotion or a new job, or bought a new car, and the rest of the class immediately began talking about their fathers, only he and Tamara remained silent.Tamara no longer had anything to tell, but Andrés always found an occasion to whisper in her ear later, when no one else was around, that his father knew a lot about engines, and could sail a boat, and used to have a horse. She accepted these confidences with unconditional trust, without asking what engines or horses had to do with the conversation they’d listened to earlier, and she pictured Andrés’s father as a kind of modern bandit, a cunning smuggler or a pirate. So, although he was frightening, she wasn’t impressed by his boasting or his threats. But she could tell that Andrés was ashamed of him, of his twisted vulgarity, his sinister posturing.Yet she was also certain that Andrés loved him, because you can’t not love your father, whatever he’s like.
Tamara knew a lot about love and shame. She noticed that Andrés was often rude to his mother, and told her off, as if she were the child and he the adult; that he berated her for silly things like getting home late, or drinking too much wine, or not dressing like a mother should.Tamara disapproved of this and she told him so. “You don’t know how lucky you are. If your mother died suddenly, like mine did, you’d be sorry.” Andrés became angry, but he soon got over it. She and Andrés did talk about Maribel. All of his complaints about her grew out of his love for her, his absolute dependence on his mother, which gave shape to his life. Tamara knew that you were lucky if you could depend like that on a father or a mother. She depended utterly on her uncle, and nearly always kept any reproaches or complaints to herself, although they were usually so trivial—what to watch on TV, what to eat for dinner, not wanting to wear wellington boots when she went out to play in the rain—that she soon forgot about them. But however much he loved her, however good he was to her, Juan wasn’t her father. Tamara attached a lot of importance to this because she’d been unlucky, she’d had to learn at a very y
oung age what love and shame were.
“Are you awake?”
She hadn’t been able to sleep, but didn’t reply. It was one of those nights when it felt as if the walls of the house were shaking. Nobody else seemed to notice, but she could see it so clearly that she had to close her eyes when the walls started to sway and bulge, and the air became thick with a premonition of the dust that would rise when the ceilings toppled in on them. Then the shouting would suddenly stop, and in the unhealthy silence that followed,Tamara opened her eyes and found that everything was the same as before—the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the clothes she was wearing, and the thick fog inside her head.
“Are you asleep?” whispered her father again.
“No,” she said quietly.“I’m awake.”
The fog never cleared. It was there when she got up in the morning and it was there when she went to bed at night, dominating her dreams. It was the fog that made her mother appear in the bathroom mirror and she’d brush Tamara’s hair for a long time, kissing her and fooling around just like she used to.The fog killed her again every day at a quarter to eight, when the maid came into her room to wake her.Tamara couldn’t see it, but she knew it was fog, and that it was damp and thick and dirty.
“I’m sorry,Tam,” said her father as he lay down beside her. He felt for her in the dark and hugged her tightly.“I’m sorry.”
She loved him very much, as much as before, when he was always happy and full of fun. She couldn’t stop loving him even though he was always cross now, in a permanent bad mood that seemed nothing like sadness.Yet she knew he was sad, consumed with grief, and that it made him shout and lose his temper over the slightest thing. It made him behave horribly towards her in a way he never used to, to hit Alfonso, and fire the maids, and hardly eat, and drink too much, and forget everything, and have parties with loud music and lights switched on in the house at four or five in the morning, parties that woke her and Alfonso up. But they didn’t go downstairs.They’d done it once, at the beginning, and found lots of strange people lying on the sofas, a woman dancing naked, another rushing from the sitting room covering her mouth with her hand, a row of white stripes on the glass coffee table, and her father laughing, looking quite unlike himself, as if he was wearing a mask. She had been so scared and ashamed to see him like this that she’d tried to get away before he saw her, but she couldn’t get Alfonso to move. He’d stood there, rooted to the spot, holding her hand, staring at the naked woman.Then her father noticed them, told them to come in, and began introducing them to everyone, until Nicanor came over and said that was enough, he ought to let them get back to bed. After that night, whenever they heard music downstairs, Alfonso would always rush to his room and they’d both hide under the covers and pretend to be asleep. But they couldn’t sleep, because her father didn’t know how to be sad any other way, because he couldn’t control his pain, and turned it into the thick dirty fog that now filled his daughter’s head, replacing all that she had lost.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel bad, really bad. But I love you,Tam. I’m so sorry I’ve got like this.”
One evening, it was the soup.The maid, who was new, had found an open packet of soup with pasta letters in the cupboard that was almost past its expiry date, so she’d decided to use it. But the master of the house didn’t like soup with pasta letters, he liked ordinary noodle soup: “I loathe this kind of soup, I really can’t stand it.” He could have left it at that; instead he tipped the contents of his bowl onto the floor and then threw the bowl down for good measure.“But it’s all just pasta,” said the maid in a terrified voice, “letters or noodles—what difference does it make?”This made the master of the house so furious that he flung a full bowl of soup at the wall and started shouting, which made Alfonso burst into tears.Tamara had simply closed her eyes and waited for the house to come crashing down on top of her. She didn’t know exactly when they’d started living on shifting sands, because she didn’t know if the things that were happening were real. She didn’t know how to get rid of the fog in her head that made her life seem cold and dirty.When her mother died,Tamara felt as if she’d lost everything, but she didn’t realize she was losing even more than she thought.
“I’m sorry,” her father kept saying.“I’m sorry.”
She loved him very much, but she was terrified of him. She put out her hand and stroked his face, put an arm around his neck and kissed him. Everything was so difficult now. She used to sit on his lap, ruffle his hair and tickle him. Now, every morning when she got up, she’d tiptoe to the top of the stairs, and if she heard him walking about or talking on the phone, she’d go back to bed for a little while, and didn’t go down for breakfast until she heard the front door slam.That summer they hadn’t left Madrid. Her father had said he didn’t feel like going away, and she hadn’t complained because at the house by the beach—which was small and only had one floor and a tiny garden with hardly any trees and stuck-up foreign neighbors—there was nowhere to hide. At the beach they’d always be together—Papa, Mama, and Tamara—sunbathing, splashing around, swimming to the red buoy, walking to the bar, having a siesta in the same bed.That was why it was best they stayed in Madrid all summer, in the big house with three floors, where she could get away quickly, quietly, always upstairs if he was downstairs, always downstairs if he was upstairs. Her father didn’t seem to notice that she was avoiding him. She knew she was avoiding him, and she knew she was scared of him, but she couldn’t control her fear.All she could do was wait for the thick dirty fog and her father’s terrifying sadness to disappear.
“Mama didn’t love us, you know,” he’d said and started crying just like Alfonso did when he was being told off.“She was going to leave us. When she killed herself, she was going to leave us. She went off with other men. She didn’t love us.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Mama was bad,Tam, she was very bad. And she didn’t love us.”
“She loved me, Papa,” she said firmly, and he didn’t say anything.“She did love me.”
You can’t not love your father.Tamara knew this. Even if he was horrible, and did horrible things, and said horrible things that slipped like an icy draught into your ears, you couldn’t stop loving him. Even if one day he fell down the stairs and disappeared, and a thick dirty fog filled your head, flowed down your throat into your stomach and down your arms and legs until you became a stone, a frozen hollow statue of yourself. Even if the pain of this loss carried within it a seed of relief—instant, odious relief—the promise of a life without shouting or fear.You can’t not love your father, you can’t stop yourself loving him, you can’t stop suffering for him,Tamara knew this.
Andrés knew it too, she was certain of it.Andrés had to know, because the fog that had gradually left Tamara, without her realizing it, over the past year, was now inside him too—she could sense it in Andrés’s head, in his anxious face, the fog of love and shame. But at a certain point, her own experience stopped being enough, stopped helping her to understand what was happening. Andrés had been less lucky, and yet much more lucky, than her. His father had gone beyond shouting and anger, silence and fear, and done something truly horrible, but his mother was OK, she was still alive and would soon be ready to return to a normal life, something Tamara had lost forever.
They had all suffered with Maribel, including Tamara. The reappearance of violence, blood, uncertainty, and all the words—accident, injury, prognosis, emergency—that she’d never wanted to hear again, had plunged her back into her deepest fears, where all sounds became screams, all shadows appeared to be threatening, all strangers were murderers. Before all this happened,Tamara had grown very fond of Maribel. She’d always liked her because she behaved like a mother—she talked and worried and smiled and kissed like a mother, and she was there, with a meal on the table, a fridge full of food, and plenty of Band-Aids at the ready. She could solve almost any problem around the house in ways that Sara and Juan couldn’t, and w
hen they were all together, which was almost always, she didn’t differentiate between her and Andrés.This was why Tamara had been the only one who wasn’t amazed or bothered by the fact that her uncle sometimes went out with his cleaner. She’d never understood why Andrés always complained that Maribel wasn’t like other mothers.And she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t happy now that the worst hadn’t happened and Maribel was still alive. It was true that his father had run away, that the police had searched for him and caught him and that he was now in prison, awaiting trial. But it was also true that Andrés had never lived with his father, and that he’d always avoided him if he saw him in town, pedaling away on his bike like a maniac.Tamara pondered all of this but couldn’t understand, however much she tried.
They didn’t see each other so often now, and things felt different. In the first few weeks of September, while Maribel was recovering at home, Andrés had refused to go to school. “I’m staying at home to help my mother,” he’d said to Tamara. She had thought it slightly odd, but all the adults—Juan, Sara, the teachers at school—said he was right, and that he had to recover too, give himself time to get back to normal. But when he came back to school, he was a different Andrés. He didn’t say or do anything that the other kids didn’t do, but he always seemed separate, alone inside himself, as if he didn’t care about anything. He ate, spoke and moved about mechanically as if he were following instructions he didn’t understand. It was the thick dirty fog.Tamara recognized it and hated it, but she didn’t know how to make it go away.This was important, however, because, sensing the fog in Andrés,Tamara had looked inside herself and realized that it was no longer there. She’d overcome it, somehow managed to get rid of it without even noticing. She was very absent-minded ; she often left her espadrilles behind at the beach, her books on her desk at school, bags of sunflower seeds on the counter where she’d put them down while searching in her purse for the right change. But now, she didn’t have to retrace her steps to remember where she’d left the burden of her worst times—it was there, in Andrés’s eyes.
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