The Wind From the East (87 page)

BOOK: The Wind From the East

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Juan squeezed Sara’s hand now, deeply moved.

“Are you saving my life?” he asked, and she laughed.

“Well, at the moment I’m just inviting you to lunch.”

Juan closed his eyes and nodded. When he opened them again, he smiled, and Sara was smiling too.

“All right then,” he said. They stood up and hugged. “I’ll bring the wine.”

“Great,” she replied.“That’s just what I expect men to do.”

She told him to go on ahead—Maribel would be worried and the children would be wondering where he’d got to—but she wanted to tidy herself up a little first, before they went out to dinner. However, once she was alone, she opened all the sitting-room windows and went out into the garden.The east wind rushed into the house with the energy of an impatient lover, making the curtains dance.

Outside on the porch, Sara gripped the rail with both hands, closed her eyes and gave herself up to the wind, which swept through houses, dried sheets, and cleaned the air, cleansing the blood and the murky sadness of the shortest days.The east wind lashed her face, danced inside her head, and filled her lungs with the regular rhythm of an aerial tide that sharpened the meaning of the verb “to breathe.”The weight of lead, the chemistry of rust, the velvety poison of moss all fled before the formidable force of the wind, like the powerful breath of a classical god, and, this evening, Sara Gómez Morales felt that it was blowing through the other half of her life as well.

She wasn’t outside for long, maybe only five minutes, but when she went back inside, she found a house that felt different, new, clean; a house that retained the spirit of the wind. She thought of what the townspeople said, and smiled. Because the east wind blows it all away.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Almudena Grandes achieved international fame when she won the XI Sonrisa Vertical Prize for her first novel,
The Ages of Lulu
, at the age of twenty-nine. Since then, every one of her books has increased her wide readership:
I’ll CallYou Friday
,
Malena is a Tango Name
,
Models of Woman
,
Atlas of Human Geography
, and
The Wind from the East
. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages and adapted into three movies.

First North American edition February 2007.

Originally published in Spain as
Los Aires Dificiles
by Tusquets Editores, SA 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

The publication of this work has been made possible through a subsidy received from the Directorate General for Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com

In Canada: Publishers Group Canada, 559 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 1A9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grandes, Almudena, 1960-

[Aires dificiles. English]

The wind from the east / Almudena Grandes; translated from the Spanish by Sonia Soto. -- 1st North American ed.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-583-22956-9

I. Soto, Sonia. II.Title.

PQ6657.R32A4713 2007

863’.64--dc22

2006032336