The Wind From the East (34 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
“I’m not going to have any children.”
“You don’t know that, Juan.You can’t know, nobody does. And your circumstances might change for the worse.You might become ill, have an accident, fall into a depression, I don’t know.Then you’ll need money, and you’ll be sorry you spent it all unnecessarily. Please listen to me. Pay for Tamara’s school fees out of her own money, at least.Aren’t the mortgages on the Madrid house and the house by the beach still being paid out of her inheritance? Well, this is the same: a direct investment in her future. If you’re worried that people will think you’re taking advantage of the child’s money, you’re wrong. I’d like to remind you that her income is considerably greater than yours.”
“That’s not it, Antonio, that’s not it at all,” said Juan, shaking his head stubbornly.
“Isn’t it?”Antonio looked skeptical, unwilling to believe otherwise.“So what is it, then?”
Juan didn’t want to answer Antonio’s question, so he ended up agreeing to award himself a kind of allowance, a modest amount equivalent to Tamara’s school fees augmented by ten per cent.The first day of every month, he received a transfer to a bank account opened specially for the purpose and from which he never withdrew a single peseta. Month after month, term after term, all the money he didn’t want to spend would accumulate, until Tamara finished school. He considered paying his lottery winnings into this account instead of spending them, but in the end he decided that this would be no better than buying a new car, a state-of-the-art music system, or a huge flat-screen TV. He preferred not to mix his own money with Damián’s, not even in the clean anonymity of nameless numbers.
But his brother was with him, wherever he went, asleep or awake, even when there was nothing around to prompt the memory. He had never walked along a beach in winter with Damián, but the sea brought him back, and so did the wind flattening the tops of the palm trees that you wouldn’t find in Madrid, and the stealthy doodle of a lizard scurrying across a white wall, shaded by bougainvilleas, in the garden of a house that his brother had never seen. Any movement, any landscape, any gesture could summon the presence of a strong, agile boy, swift and good with his hands, smiling; Dami, as they called him in those days, aged ten or eleven, sitting on the curb outside the house in Villaverde Alto, legs crossed, holding something in his lap, head tilted to one side and the sun glinting reddish-gold in his curly, chestnut hair.This was how Juan pictured him wherever he went: always sitting on the curb, oblivious to the wheels of the cars and the feet of the passers-by, in shorts and one of the stripy T-shirts he and Juan jointly owned before either of them thought he had the right to anything of his own. Dami the magnificent, the best, repairing his mother’s coffee grinder, or trying out a card trick, or holding some piece of junk that he’d found in the street. In his memory, Juan went up to him slowly and stood beside him. His brother looked up and, recognizing him, smiled with his whole face, his eyebrows, his eyes, his chapped lips, his dazzlingly white teeth.And across the years, the oblique, perverse laws of love and resentment, Juan still took delight in that smile. Damián was dead but his smile would break as rhythmically as the tides as long as Juan was alive to nourish it with his memory and his guilt.
Juan didn’t want to picture Damián, didn’t want to remember him as he was when he loved him more than anyone else, but he never managed to shut his eyes in time, as Dami stood up and showed him the gadget he’d just made.The world would have been a better place without him, Juan thought as he heard the distant, innocent echo of his own childish voice, admiring Damián’s inventiveness with fervent devotion. The world just had to be a better place without Damián, Juan repeated to himself as he watched him wipe his hands on his trousers and fell into step beside him, his own arm around his brother’s neck.The world would be a better place without Damián. Meanwhile, the two Olmedo boys returned home, the clever one and the foolish one, the good one and the bad one, arm in arm, letting go only at the foot of the stairs, Dami always getting to the front door first.The world wasn’t a better place without Damián. As he turned to look at Juan, and smiled again, and waited for him before ringing the bell, Juan tried desperately to manipulate the image, to superimpose a frown on Damián’s smooth brow, trouble in the clear, bright, hazel eyes, a thin, disgusted mouth on the cool, parted lips, elements that should have slipped easily over his brother’s features as they expressed him more truly than the lively, naive boy’s smile that tormented Juan but that he could never quite erase. He could clearly remember the face that Damián had created for himself over the years, the face he deserved in the end: the double chin, the veins in his neck that bulged when he raised his voice, the permanent dark rings from all those late nights, the bloated cheeks on mornings when he had a hangover, the way he breathed in quickly through his nose when he was nervous, and the slack lips, the lower one always drooping, folded over itself like an old man’s, even when he looked pleased. Juan clearly remembered all these details, summoning them easily to his memory, but he could never quite banish the image of the little boy sitting on the curb, who looked back through the eyes of the man he became.
When Damián slipped and fell down the stairs, Juan composed a sentence that he would never get to say out loud, but that would have a decisive effect on the rest of his life. It was not, however, an answer to the question Damián had asked the moment before he lost his balance and found only air instead of the top step:“D’you think I care?” he’d shouted at Juan, the veins in his neck rigid, his face red, his lips curling with contempt. “I’ve always known, I’ve always . . .” Juan Olmedo never answered Damián’s question, nor did he ever manage to complete his brother’s unfinished sentence. None of this worried him at the time, as he was absorbed by a single, obsessive thought: the world would have been a much better place if his brother Damián had never lived.This was what Juan was thinking the moment his brother died. And when it was all over, when everything around him seemed to start again, he sometimes repeated a variation of that sentence—“The world would have been a much better place without you.” He didn’t say it to himself, but to the image of a child in shorts and a striped T-shirt, sitting on the curb.
Dr. Juan Olmedo knew the theory behind this phenomenon, the reason his mind clung only to the good memories, the perverse mechanism of nostalgia that made him forget what he knew and brought to the surface things he barely remembered, when everything was as it should be and Dami was the best brother in the world, his other half. He couldn’t behave as if he felt guilty, because allowing himself to do so would be to forsake Alfonso, and his niece, the child whose happiness was so important to him. But he knew guilt was there, lying in wait for him, and that the only intelligent thing to do was learn to live with it.At first, he thought this would all pass, that the removal lorries would complete the work accomplished by time and distance. But this didn’t happen. In the almost absolute calm of that dry, mild winter by the sea, Dami was still with him, endlessly winning the race. Juan had a feeling he would become accustomed to his mute, smiling vigil, just as he had grown used to so many other things in his life.
Charo finished applying her lipstick and examined her face in the little compact she was holding. Looking pleased with the result, she turned round in her chair to face him.
“Well?” she said. Juan had never seen her with her war paint on. Before he had time to ask her what she meant, she continued:“Are you going to take me to the cinema or not?”
His sister-in-law’s lips, perfectly outlined with a very dark pencil and filled in with a color more dangerous than red, deeper than crimson, glossy yet almost brown, caught his gaze like the inner petals of a carnivorous flower.
“Well, I don’t know,” he stammered.“If you’d like to go.”
“I would, very much,” she said with a smile he found confusing, because on any other woman’s face its meaning would have been unambiguous. “I’d really like to,” she said, pronouncing the words a little more deliberately than necessary.
“Yes, go on, Juanito, take her to the cinema,” said his mother who was gathering up the tablecloth, wearing her Sunday best.“You can drop me off at Aunt Carmen’s on the way. She’s asked me to go over for coffee with Alfonso.”
Juan looked at his mother, trying to appear calm, and then looked at Charo suspiciously, like an adult trying to surprise a small child who has been too quiet for too long. She had just put her cigarettes in her bag and was taking out her sunglasses, looking so casual it seemed impossible that she could have planned this in advance. He was getting used to never knowing how to behave around her.The most sensible thing would be to go straight home, alone, but as he was trying to summon his strength, she called out:
“Well? Are we going?”
“Do you know which film you want to see?”
“Of course I do,” she answered with another equivocal smile. She gave a tiny laugh. Just then, Alfonso came into the sitting room, smelling of cologne, his face freshly washed, and wearing a pristine grey flannel suit.
“Don’t I look handsome?” he asked.
“Very handsome,” said Charo. She went to put her arms around him and kissed him lightly, delicately, as she would later kiss her daughter when she was born.
All four of them squeezed into the lift, and it seemed to Juan that Charo was pressing against him a little more than was necessary, although she kept her back to him. He listened as she chatted to Alfonso in the high-pitched, bright voice that she used to get his younger brother’s attention, and felt, or thought he felt, his sister-in-law pressing her bottom directly against his right thigh. Scenes like this had occurred regularly since Juan had returned to Madrid, almost a year before. Over the months, certain words, smiles, glances from Damián’s wife had completely thrown him, from one Sunday to the next. Sometimes, he felt like the still center around which Charo turned and turned, her eyes bright with the eager greed of a little girl gazing at a prized toy in a shop window every morning on the way to school. He enjoyed it, but the price of these fleeting stabs of pleasure was much too high. Because a moment after each auspicious gesture from his sister-in-law, often a movement so insignificant that nobody except him seemed to notice, Charo would leave with Damián, going back to the house where they lived, sleeping and waking together in the same bed, while the only thing Juan went back to was the certainty that he was a gullible fool, and the insidious memory of his past humiliation, a hideous wound that had never healed.
On their way to the car, they passed Mingo’s Bar. Looking as weary as ever, the proprietor was wiping a table with a dirty cloth. He called out a perfunctory greeting and they answered. Juan glanced to his right and saw the rare threat of Charo’s dark-red lips, the outline of her breasts beneath a tight, black, low-cut T-shirt. Juan looked down at the pavement and was taken back to another time, another hot afternoon, not in April this time but towards the end of September, on the verge of a languidly warm autumn. He remembered the heat. Over the past few weeks, café tables had been put away and then set out on the pavement again according to the whim of the thermometer, as if the cruel summer Juan had spent without her was determined to last forever. It was then that he saw them together for the first time: Damián and Charo sitting next to each other, part of a group in which Juan recognized several of her friends, members of the gang she couldn’t do without but whose friendship he had never sought, and some of Damián’s friends, including Nicanor.And it was Nicanor who looked round and stared at him, smiling in vicarious but unmistakable triumph, snarling like a guard dog, as if he was the one most pleased by Juan’s defeat. Juan shouldn’t have stopped, he should have just kept on walking, have passed by without looking round and gone home, but Charo was wearing a low-cut, white T-shirt, and she was very pretty, and very tanned, and Juan couldn’t help himself. He stopped in the middle of the pavement, slowly took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, then a cigarette from the pack, and finally a lighter from another pocket, just so that he could keep watching them and make sure it was really true. Charo with Damián. He couldn’t take it in. But he was to feel even worse when Damián, catching sight of him at last, hugged Charo’s body tightly and slid a hand down over her breast, squeezing it from below, pushing it up inside her T-shirt, all the while staring straight at Juan, with a black eye and an even more crooked smile than usual. She let Damián fondle her then realized that he was staring at something. Following the direction of his gaze, she saw Juan, standing there on the pavement. She wriggled out of Damián’s embrace as quickly as she could, sat up straight and pretended to be listening to the conversation to her right. She was blushing, but far from this making Juan feel any better, it only increased his fury. He had always treated her with as much respect as his painfully intense desire for her allowed, only to discover, now, that she seemed to enjoy having his brother touch her breasts in public, proving to himself once more that he was an absolute and utter fool.
By the time he got home, he felt worse than he ever remembered having felt in his life. Juan knew that Damián’s cocky display of triumph—so typical of him—was a way of getting back at him, a response to the punch that had thrown him to the ground a couple of days earlier. But knowing this didn’t do Juan any good. Quite the opposite. At this point in his life, knowledge seemed to have turned against him like an enemy.
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