The Wind From the East (84 page)
Read The Wind From the East Online
Authors: Almudena Grandes
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
“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.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because I can’t, because I . . .” She was going to say something, then changed her mind in mid-sentence.“What would your sister say?”
“Well,‘Nice to meet you,’ I expect.”
“No, I mean your other sister.”
“She already knows.” Maribel closed her eyes. Juan smiled. “She knows all about us. She always asks after you when we talk on the phone.”
It was true. When he’d introduced them, Juan had simply said that Maribel was Andrés’s mother, but Paca, his favorite sister and the only sibling with whom he still got on as an adult, realized immediately that there was something between them, so he told her the truth—that Maribel was both his cleaner and his lover. Paca had put a hand on his shoulder and raised her eyes to heaven, shaking her head. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Juanito? Why can’t you get together with a normal girl? There are thousands of them out there!” Juan took a moment to answer.“Maribel is a normal girl,” he said, smiling calmly. His sister said nothing more. He’d asked her not to tell anyone, not even her husband, and she’d said, “Who do you take me for?” He realized she’d crack and tell someone sooner or later, because it was far too juicy a secret to keep to herself for long. But he realized he didn’t care.
“Right,” said Maribel nervously.“ But she’ll have told everyone.”
“No, she won’t.”
“Yes, she will.”
“No, I’m sure she won’t have told anyone.”
“Anyway, if the kids were smaller, we’d have an excuse.You could say I was there to look after them. But they’re too old for that, nobody would believe it.”
“Maribel.”
But she wasn’t looking at him. She’d moved out of his embrace again and was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. She was strangely sad all of a sudden.
“Maribel,” he said again, shaking her gently so that she’d look at him. “In Madrid, nobody knows you. Nobody knows you’re my cleaner.”
She turned towards him and took his face in her hands.
“But I know it, Juan,” she said.“I know.”
At that moment, Juan Olmedo guessed what would happen sooner or later. As she kissed him, and climbed on top of him, and tried to console him, he guessed that they didn’t have much time left, that sooner or later he’d have to choose—ask her to find another house to clean, or to move into his and find herself another job.And when his prick reacted for him, his stomach tensed, he gripped her hips and entered her body, finding it as soft and warm as he remembered all those times during the day when he found himself thinking about sleeping with her, and went over it in his imagination, trying to find a trace of what love had once been for him.“I’m not in love with you,” he thought, but her body was soft and warm, and it could speak, sing without words, lull him with an inner music, a humble, luminous harmony, and not even the most stupid of men would give up a woman who possessed such strange powers.“I’m not in love with you,” he thought again, as he kissed her, made her roll over and do things his way, but not even then did Charo come to his aid, he couldn’t picture her dancing in front of the mirror, or putting on lipstick, or asking him to come closer, to risk his life for her. When he opened his eyes, all he saw was Maribel.
She enjoyed it more than he did, and the intensity of her pleasure was enough to make him feel miserable. But it didn’t change his view of things. He couldn’t prolong this situation indefinitely, he’d known that right from the beginning. He didn’t want to leave Maribel, he couldn’t think of anything more stupid, but he knew that the woman who woke up beside him every morning and started getting dressed, pulling any old underwear out of the drawer, would be different. He’d never lived with a woman but he was too old to ask for another pack of cards. He was forty-one years old and he knew the alternatives, the white coats with whom he’d never had much luck, the road to Sanlúcar which he could no longer be bothered with. He didn’t have much time left, and whatever happened in the end, it would all be his fault. He held Maribel in his arms and closed his eyes. He knew that sooner or later he’d have to choose between two mistakes, and he didn’t know which of the two would be worse. Maribel chose that moment to speak.
“I’ve been thinking, well, the thing is, I’d go anywhere with you. So if you still want to take me, I’d like to go to Madrid with you.”
Juan Olmedo said nothing. Not even that he admired her a little bit more every day. He had little time left, but he was prepared to make the most of it.
An Ending
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