“Just paying a visit,” said Nicanor, opening his jacket.“As a civilian—no gun. I wanted to see how you all are.”
Juan said nothing; he didn’t even look at him. He went straight to Damián’s room and picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” Nicanor had followed him.
“The police.”
Nicanor disappeared, leaving so quickly that the front door had slammed even before Juan had reached the stairs. Alfonso told him that Nicanor had got very cross with him—as cross as the last time, if not more so—and Juan had assured him that he’d never have to see him again, that Nicanor would never shout at him or hit him again, and that the three of them were going to go away, far away to a place he knew and that Alfonso would like because it wasn’t cold there in winter, and summer lasted almost all year round. It was by the sea, and it was called Cádiz.
The east wind blew until the middle of November, making the autumn warm and gentle, as if it had decided to take pity on them and keep the west wind out until the end of Maribel’s convalescence. In one way or another, they had all taken part in it, yet no one could help her in the final stage of her recovery. Not even Juan Olmedo, who on speaking to her son realized that Maribel must have had a premonition, even before she was stabbed, that Andrés’s new closeness to his father would inevitably lead to her encounter behind the builders’ hut, where he’d tried to convince her he loved her with a knife in his hand. Juan was sure that Maribel would suffer more from the effects of this last wound than the first, and he was impressed by the fortitude with which she’d assumed the burden of Andrés’s pain in addition to her own, continuing to be both a mother and a father to him, never repaying his betrayal with a betrayal, never saying a word to anyone. Only later did he come to understand other things—Maribel’s reluctance to report her ex-husband to the police before speaking to her son, the look of powerlessness on her face after the interview with the policewoman, the indifference with which she greeted the news that the police had caught her ex-husband in a village near Seville. She was neither upset nor pleased by his arrest, and it definitely hadn’t dissolved the nameless tension, the anxiety that Maribel claimed not to feel but which Juan could detect even when she assured him, with a bright smile, that she was fine.The arrest had, on the other hand, enabled Juan to unravel a personal mystery, which he had never mentioned to anyone. His indignation at the policewoman’s brusque treatment of Maribel had not entirely supplanted a strange, impure feeling that had sprung from the suspicion that Maribel did, after all, want to protect her ex-husband, and this feeling wasn’t dispelled even when he saw her sign her statement. When he realized that he was wrong, that the victim didn’t shed a single tear for her attacker, he had to accept that the uneasiness gnawing away at him might be impure, but it wasn’t unfamiliar. He knew its name. He’d lived with it for most of his life. It was jealousy, although he only recognized it once it had gone.
“Do you love her?”
Miguel Barroso had asked him this question out of the blue a couple of weeks after Maribel had left hospital.They were in the bar where they sometimes had a drink after work, on an evening that was no different from any other. Miguel, as usual, did most of the talking while Juan listened, responding occasionally to one of his friend’s remarks, a mixture of professional gossip and depressing tales about his private life. Miguel was terminally bored with his wife of many years. Paula, the anesthetist with whom he’d had an affair the previous autumn, had left him in the spring. Miguel sometimes felt he missed her, but sometimes he was relieved to be rid of her. He told Juan that she’d said she wanted to rebuild their “relationship”: “Those were the words she used, can you believe it?” He’d just confessed that he’d started looking at the older girls at his kids’ school, when he suddenly asked about Maribel. “She’s fine,” said Juan. Then Miguel asked him if he loved her and Juan burst out laughing.
“Don’t be so sentimental.”
“I’m not.” Juan saw that Miguel wasn’t laughing.“Do you love her?”
Juan lit a cigarette, took a couple of drags, and started playing around with his glass, centering it exactly on the beer mat. He took a sip of his drink, and as he swirled the ice cubes around in the glass, the image of Charo, alone in the courtyard, dancing before a cracked mirror, appeared unbidden before his eyes. “No,” he was about to answer, “I don’t love her.” But he did want to sleep with her, and he thought about it a lot every day. He still wanted more. He wanted to go on fucking her in the gloom of a deserted house, with the windows closed and the blinds pulled down. He admired her, and he liked watching her as she spun her web slowly and steadily, playing with her, falling into her traps, observing her reactions. She was uneducated, had no conversation, no passionate experiences to recount, no mysteries to solve, but she was the cleverer of the two when she needed to be, and he enjoyed being with her.
“I don’t know,” he answered eventually.
“What do you mean you don’t know!” Miguel laughed. “Of course you know.” He waited but Juan still said nothing, so he added: “She’s very sexy, that’s for sure.”
This trivial exchange, a fragment of the ongoing conversation that formed the basis of his friendship with Miguel Barroso, in which women were a recurring theme, acquired an importance that Juan Olmedo wasn’t expecting as he sat in the little bar in Punta Candor, listening to Andrés unraveling the tangle of his faith in his father and his own guilt. The skinny little boy, who was so quiet and serious, didn’t know what his mother had asked Juan one afternoon in March, nor what he had offered her in return. Juan recalled her words:“When it’s over, it’s over.” Andrés knew nothing about this, and had anyone told him, he wouldn’t have understood, yet Juan felt that the boy had, without knowing it, been part of their relationship. When Maribel took all those precautions so that nobody would find out about them, when she arranged to meet him at the petrol station three blocks away from her house, or let one of the children sit in the front seat of the car, or walked beside Alfonso when they were in town, Juan had thought she was concerned about her own reputation. It had never occurred to him that she might be trying to preserve Andrés’s admiration for him and protect him from her exhusband’s spite. He’d always been convinced that neither of them could care less about his reputation, but the knowledge that Andrés now despised him—that his father had taught him to despise him—hurt him more than he would ever have expected. “You and I are on the same side,Andrés,” he thought as the boy told him his story,“we’re both good boys, we study hard, we’re vulnerable, and people can deceive us.You’re more like me than like your father.” He would have liked to say something like this, but he didn’t dare. “When it’s over, it’s over.” Maribel hadn’t realized the full meaning of her words when she’d said them, but six months later, when she came out of hospital, she was fully aware of what she was saying when she admitted that he’d been right when he said that what they had started was foolish. But now, this bright little boy had found a way of forcing Juan to define the relationship he was prepared to have with him, and with his mother.“I don’t know what we are,” he’d said, and Juan, as he watched him cry, had had time both to wonder whether the most sensible thing would be to leave Maribel, and to be overwhelmed by a sudden, uncontrollable urge to sleep with her. In the end, he’d told Andrés that what mattered was that they were fine.“And we’ll go on being fine,” he’d added, realizing, as he did so, that he’d just made more of a commitment to this child than he ever had to the child’s mother.
The next day, when he got back from work, he found her sitting on the curb by his parking space.
“What are you doing here?” He was still so moved, so overwhelmed by her son’s confession, and so pleased to see her, that he put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips, even though they were outside and anyone could see them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, not pushing him away or telling him off.“I wanted to thank you for yesterday.An
drés told me everything when he got home. I thought he was never going to tell me.”
Juan glanced at his watch.Tamara would be home by now,Alfonso too.
“Shall we go for a drink in the hotel bar?”
Two days earlier, they’d met in town and he’d told her what Tamara had said about Andrés skipping school, wandering about the industrial estate all day, and then throwing his beloved bike in a skip. She’d nodded slowly, looking as if she wasn’t hearing anything she didn’t already know. “He never tells me anything,” she’d said when he finished. Juan offered to talk to Andrés before he was summoned before the headmaster and, after considering the idea for a moment, Maribel accepted with another nod of her head. “It might be a good idea, if you don’t mind doing it. Maybe he’ll talk to you.” But she didn’t tell him what she already suspected, out of loyalty to her son. Forty-eight hours later, however, she was able to admit that Andrés had been acting very strangely all summer, that she knew his father had been brainwashing him, and as she’d watched him wander about the house, silent and pale as a ghost, she’d realized he was ashamed and was able to guess why. “But I couldn’t convince him that what had happened wasn’t his fault,” she added.
“Last night, we cried together, and I sat hugging him for a long time. But then this morning he had breakfast and went to school without a word.” She glanced at her watch, indicating that she had to leave. “He’s having a terrible time, much worse than his father.That’s what makes me angry.”
Then, unusually, she took a note from her purse, picked up the bill from the table and paid for the drinks. Juan allowed her to pay without saying anything, and followed her out. As they got back to the development, he offered to give her a lift home.
“It’s OK, I can walk,” she said, but then, as if she was worried she might have offended him, she quickly added: “But if you don’t mind dropping me off, that would be great.”
Juan Olmedo realized that Maribel had changed. It was as if the suffering she’d endured in the last few months had made her view her life in a new light, more objectively.What she’d said to him when she came out of hospital was true: she’d done a lot of thinking while she was there, and the result was plain in her face, her actions, and in encounters such as this one—over an hour and a half during which she hadn’t smiled once, hadn’t made any suggestive hints, hadn’t shown the least sign of desiring him. Surviving is never easy, he knew this.And suddenly, he was scared. Before realizing that it was ridiculous, before remembering that he’d once thought he didn’t find her attractive, and that it was she who had changed his mind, he was scared that it would be Maribel who would decide that the most sensible thing to do was to leave him. As he drew up outside her building, he looked up and saw that the lights were on in her apartment.
“Andrés is home, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing up at her windows and giving him one of those smiles that made him feel entirely naked.“I’m sorry too.”
He fell on her, kissing her neck, feeling her breathing grow ragged. He pressed his face against her throat, her shoulder, her neck, and smelled the faint hint of her morning cologne beneath the stronger scent that her body exuded after a day’s work. Unsurprisingly, he discovered that his desire had rewarded—or punished—him with a ferocious erection.
“Right now,” he said, straightening up and trying to appear composed, “I’d give anything to fuck you, Maribel.”
“Oh, yes?” She laughed and, turning in her seat, she reached for the bulge in his trousers.“And what’s anything? A month’s wages?”
He laughed at the prosaic nature of her calculations, and decided to be generous.
“A year’s wages.”
“Wow!” She increased the pressure of her hand and he thanked her with a grunt.“That’s a good deal.”
Then, while Juan gently removed her hand, regretting that neither his age nor the circumstances enabled him to surrender to her, Maribel leaned in and kissed him.Though they were outside her house, although all the street lamps were on, although anyone might see them, she kissed him just as she would have had they been alone.
“Why did you tell me that?” she asked as she got out of the car.
“Well, just so you’d know.”
Some forty hours later, when she slipped into his bed quietly, waking him up after his night shift, she behaved as if she would never forget it. This was exactly what he’d hoped for, and welcomed, as she moved over his body. He didn’t understand that Maribel had realized before him, as usual, that his earlier show of sincerity was the mirror image of the smiles she used to seduce him, the first deliberate public act of seduction in which Juan had taken the lead. Before, he’d expressed his desire many times, but it had always been Maribel who made things happen, who had created the right mood, who’d pushed him with her words, with a movement of her eyebrows, with the curve of her lips.
The second gesture Juan Olmedo made in that direction was much more conscious, and was an even greater surprise, although Juan wasn’t quite sure what had prompted him to do it. Maybe it was because the care Maribel took to appear unaware, to hide from him her new confidence as a coveted object, excited him just as much as her caution at the beginning. Or because none of what he’d said or done until then had come anywhere near the commitment he’d made to Andrés with her in mind. Or because at a certain point, he realized that he, Sara, and Tamara were all so worried about the boy that Maribel seemed to have lost her privileges as the victim. Or because he still felt terribly uncomfortable in his role as the immoral, opportunist boss, and couldn’t resist the temptation to be the fairy godmother for once. Or because he felt like testing her, seeing what would happen if he took away her pink housecoat and mop, and made her sit beside him in the car, driving across an open landscape, without locked doors or lowered blinds. Perhaps it was simply that he didn’t feel like leaving her behind in this small town, going back to Madrid with Tamara and Alfonso but without her, and sleeping alone in a hotel bed.
“Have you ever been to Madrid, Maribel?”
They were in bed, listening to the wind whistling through the blinds. It was an unpleasantly cold day towards the end of November. It was way past lunchtime, but neither of them seemed prepared to confess they were hungry as they huddled beneath the covers.
“No, of course I haven’t,” she replied.“We were going to go there on our honeymoon, but a week before the wedding my ex disappeared and didn’t come back for three days.When he did, he said all his money had been stolen, so we didn’t go anywhere.”
Juan stroked her face before continuing. His sister Trini was about to get married for the second time. This was the reason that she’d never come to visit, despite telling him on several occasions that she would. Paca, who’d spent a week with them in August, before the knife had turned everything upside down, told Juan that Trini had found a new boyfriend, someone she’d met at work. He was separated from his wife, had no children, and let Trini boss him about. “She says she’s thinking of getting married again,” Paca had said in a tone that made it clear she didn’t believe the wedding would ever happen. Juan had also assumed that his younger sister’s boyfriend would escape while he still could, but then at the end of October,Trini called to announce that she would indeed be getting married on the second Saturday in December. “We set the date with you in mind,” she said,“it’s during the bank holiday so you have no excuse. I’m dying to see you all.” It was over a year since they’d last seen each other.When he left Madrid, Juan had promised to come back for Christmas, but he knew it wouldn’t be possible. After three months of a special schedule with no night shifts, he knew he wouldn’t be able to take any extra days off. At Easter he had just started seeing Maribel so he didn’t even consider going up to Madrid, and in the summer Tamara had refused to go and visit their relatives in the city.“But it’s so nice here in summer,” she’d said.“Let them come to us—that’s why we live beside the beach, isn’t it?” On the other hand, she
seemed delighted when he told her about the wedding.Andrés was at their house, studying for a test the following day. “You’re so lucky, going to Madrid,” he said, staring at his feet.The rest followed naturally. Juan still felt indebted towards him, he knew the boy wanted to go to Madrid even more than he wanted a new bike. Juan was always answering his questions about the place and one more passenger wouldn’t make any difference. He was planning to go by car and stay in a hotel, because Trini would be too busy to put them up and there wasn’t room at Paca’s. It certainly wasn’t worth opening up Damián’s house just for four nights. Juan glanced at Tamara before asking him.“Would you like to come with us,Andrés?” He hadn’t seen such a lively expression on the boy’s face in a long time. He was hoping for a similar reaction from Maribel, but things didn’t turn out as he’d expected.
“Would you like to come with me to Madrid?”
“Me?” She moved away from him quickly, sat up in bed and looked at him in disbelief.“To your sister’s wedding?” He nodded, and she shook her head.“No way. Have you gone crazy? I can’t go.”
“Don’t you want to?” He looked astonished.
“No, I . . . Of course I’d like to,” she said and lay down again. She let him put his arms around her to warm her up.“I’d love to go to Madrid with you, but I can’t.”
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