The party was a huge success, from start to finish. Not only did everybody who was invited turn up, but at the last minute some college friends of Juan Mari’s arrived, making the number of girls and boys almost even. Sara received many presents, but her favorite came from her boyfriend, who gave her a pair of round black sunglasses with very dark lenses, like the ones the Beatles wore on tour. She was also given several records, so the dancing started straight away, though Juan Mari’s friends, victims of the culinary torture at their halls of residence, were still wolfing down the food. At first, the owner of the record player, a boy from Alicante called Ramón who seemed particularly hungry, looked after the music; but once he’d found a dancing partner, he put a shy, sad-looking boy in charge, telling him which records to play.At first they all danced together in large groups but around eight thirty, as the maids finished clearing away the cake plates and Doña Sara ran out of excuses for being there, the owner of the record player returned to his original station and put on some slow records. Juan Mari took Sara by the hand and led her to the middle of the room without a word. They had been going out for almost four months by then, so he didn’t need to ask her to dance. She put her arms round his neck and clung to him, resting her head on his shoulder.They danced like this for one song, then another, then another, but then some prankster turned out too many lights at once, giving the mistress of the house a reason to return. Juan Mari got nervous and he suddenly let go. But the sound of Doña Sara’s heels, as she advanced in a zigzag switching on lights as she went, was so familiar to her god-daughter that Sara was the only one who remained calm. Moving a step away from Juan Mari, she made him put his arms back round her waist and went on dancing, albeit in a slightly less intimate fashion.When her godmother approached, Sara gave her a kiss and said, “Mami, I’d like to introduce you to my friend.”
Arcadio Gómez Gómez wrote to his wife every week, and every week he received a letter back. He didn’t have much to say, but he told her everything that was happening to him until, in mid-1945, he began to cough up blood.This he kept silent from Sebastiana.The other news that did not reach Sebastiana was that around the same time as lung disease was sapping the last vestiges of her husband’s strength, the legendary fortitude of a Spanish gentleman was collapsing in spectacular fashion.The process was slow, painfully slow. It began with a few failures in his much lauded sexual potency, but as his condition deteriorated, Don Antonio Ochoa—who could still walk with a single crutch—gradually reduced the frequency of his extramarital adventures until he had eliminated them completely, not because he wanted to, but because he was afraid of looking ridiculous. He didn’t know what was happening to him. His doctor understood as little about the cause of the illness as he did about its progress.“All I know is that it attacks the muscles,” the doctor said many times, “weakening them until you lose the use of the body part they control. But it’s like Russian roulette—you never know what will be next—a finger, a thigh, maybe even your face.” Nobody ever dared mention the penis, but when the tingling spread to the lower abdomen,Antonio Ochoa realized his days as a “Spanish gentleman” were numbered. At the age of thirty-four, Doña Sara’s husband had to make the most of the rare opportunities his treacherous body presented him with, and in the end he would have been satisfied simply with getting his wife pregnant. But he didn’t succeed. By early 1945, he was permanently in a wheelchair, and the couple’s attempts at lovemaking became more and more infrequent, ceasing entirely just after the summer.Antonio Ochoa Gorostiza suffered deeply, and somehow his own shame made Doña Sara’s company unbearable, with the result that he agreed to anything she asked as long as she left him alone. Sebastiana grew used to seeing her mistress crying, spending the afternoons staring out of the window, a crumpled handkerchief clutched in her hand. As for the master, he never left his study. She didn’t understand what was going on, but then, in January 1946, she stopped caring when she received a letter from Arcadio saying that he had been ill for over a year. Don Esteban, the battalion commander, was aware of new measures to give special pardons to prisoners of war who had served half their sentences in hard labor, and he was prepared to request one for Arcadio. At a rate of three days of prison for every day of labor, in the seven years Arcadio had been there, he had redeemed almost two-thirds, but his original death sentence required additional guarantees. Don Esteban had signed one guarantee. If Doña Sara’s husband would sign the other, he could be free by the beginning of April. That afternoon, Sebastiana wept even more than her mistress. Doña Sara read the letter, went into Don Antonio’s study without knocking, and returned a minute later with the document signed.
Sara had not dared tell her godmother that she had a boyfriend, but she assumed that Doña Sara must have guessed from all the comings and goings and phone calls of the last few months. When her godmother decided to make a final appearance at the party just before ten o’clock, just as the tumult of guests thronged into the hall in search of their coats, she was sure that Doña Sara knew everything. Her godmother took advantage of the general confusion to sidle over to Juan Mari, who had stayed behind in the sitting room, obviously intending to leave last. Sara glimpsed this dangerous encounter out of the corner of her eye and hurriedly abandoned her duties as hostess. By the time she reached them, her godmother had discovered that Juan Mari’s second surname was Ibargüengoitia, the same as her husband’s fourth surname, and she was about to establish that they were related, unquestionably if remotely, via a village in Alava and a shipping company in Bilbao. “Imagine,” she said to Sara.“What a coincidence! This boy’s mother must be Antonio’s second cousin, there’s no doubt about it.” Juan Mari was nodding, embarrassed. “Amazing,” said Sara, for the sake of saying something. Then, thankfully, Ramón returned to ask Juan Mari to help him carry the records, and the uncomfortable trio dissolved amid polite goodbyes.The look of relief on Juan Mari’s face was unmistakable. Sara told herself that her godmother hadn’t done anything any other mother wouldn’t do, and she decided she would have to talk to her that very evening. But Doña Sara got in first, as soon as the last guest left.“Are you happy?” she asked her. “Very,” Sara answered as she took off the pearl earrings and necklace, “it went fantastically well.” “You must be exhausted,” her godmother replied, putting her arm around Sara’s waist and walking her along the corridor. “Look, I tell you what, put on something comfortable and come to my sitting room. I need to talk to you.”
When Arcadio Gómez Gómez got out of prison, he was ill and weak, but he still had his pride.The city he found on 6 April 1946 was quite unlike the city he remembered and he soon realized his fears about his wife’s ambiguous allusion to “old friends” contained in her first letter were correct. Many of his comrades in the union were dead, quite a few others were still in prison, but some had been lucky enough to disappear just in time in the colossal confusion of defeat. Of these, most would have sworn that they never knew him if they happened to bump into him in the street, and the new Arcadio, a man sick of feeling alone, of being scared, hungry and exhausted, would not have dared reproach them for it. But a few were true to their memories, and had helped his wife and children as much as they could. Now they helped him in the only way they knew how—Arcadio had been free barely a month before he found a job. “We’re through the worst,” he told Sebastiana then, “everything’s going to be fine now, you’ll see.”They would both have liked to sever all links with their unfortunate past, but it seemed advisable that Sebastiana should continue working for Doña Sara, on the same terms, for at least a few more months. Former convicts didn’t tend to find jobs so easily, and the friends who had called upon every distant acquaintance to find work for an excellent, experienced plumber, who’d just arrived from a village in La Mancha looking for a better life, didn’t deserve to run any more risks. And with two wage packets, they were finally able to move down from the attic room to a third-floor flat with four rooms, where the boys could have a separate bedroom from the girls for the first time. Life was still difficult, but it seemed to have stabilized at a tolerable level of difficulty when, in mid-September, Sebastiana found that she was pregnant again.The news was a complete disaster. Speechless, stunned, unable to react, Arcadio simply felt guilty as his eyes followed his wife round the room. Sebastiana, on the other hand, couldn’t keep still, pacing around the flat with the desperation of a caged beast, whimpering and cursing under her breath, “This was all we needed, just what we needed.” The pregnancy progressed despite the expectant mother’s dismay. She was inconsolable. She did her sums over and over again, but she could see only two possible options: either go through the same hell as she did when Socorrito was a baby, taking her to work, leaving her in her basket in a corner of the kitchen, unable to go to her when she cried; or take her daughter Sebas, now aged eleven, out of school and have her look after the newborn baby, turning her into a poor wretch like her mother instead of the hairdresser she wanted to be.There was no point in sending her eldest son out to work, because his wage as an apprentice would not make up for the loss of her own; nor could they move back to the attic flat, as there would now be seven of them.There was another solution, but it was Doña Sara, not Sebastiana, who thought of it. “Look,” she said one autumn morning as they were having coffee at the kitchen table, “I’ve had an idea, but above all I want you to remember that it’s just that—an idea. I know you’re indebted to me, but I want you to listen and think about it, and I don’t want any decision you make to be influenced by your husband’s situation, or your own, or anything I might have done for you both in the past. I’m mentioning this first of all because I don’t want to have anything weighing on my conscience.”
Sara took off her clothes, had a quick shower and put on a white piqué dressing gown, going over in her head all the calm assurances she intended to give her godmother—that Juan Mari was a wonderful boy, that he treated her with all the respect and dignity a respectable girl could wish for. But when she reached the door to the little sitting room, she could see that her godmother was behaving oddly, and she knew that Doña Sara would be the first to speak. Sara feared the worst, although at this point she had no real idea of what that word could mean. “Now, darling, I have something to tell you. I probably should have told you before but . . . I don’t know . . . it’s difficult.” Her godmother sounded hesitant and couldn’t look Sara in the eye, her gaze fixed on a napkin that she slowly twisted in her hands. “Now, darling,” she continued after a moment, sighing, “when you were born, Spain was a very different place than it is today.We’d had a war. Afterwards, the situation was very bad—the harvests had been lost, cities had been destroyed, people were hungry and would do anything to survive. In those days, your mother used to work here—well, you already know that.When she became pregnant, it wasn’t that she didn’t love you, Sara, of course she loved you, and so did your father, but things were difficult for them.They already had four children, they didn’t know how they were going to give you what you needed, feed you, educate you, help you to get on in life. Anyway, we’ve talked about this before. By that stage I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have children, but I did have this big house, and the means to look after you, and to pay for your education—you know this too.What you don’t know is that—well, my husband and I never legally adopted you.Your father wouldn’t have agreed to it and it wasn’t exactly what we intended. We . . . we came to a kind of agreement that best suited all of us. I undertook to make a lady of you, and what I’m trying to tell you is . . . well, I’ve fulfilled my part of the agreement. In two weeks’ time, you’ll be finishing school. There’s no point in you continuing with your studies because . . .That’s why when I saw you with that boy—Juan Mari, isn’t it?—well, I started thinking. I’m sure it’s not serious yet, at your age these things are never serious but . . . It’s probably my fault. I should have told you all this a lot sooner. The fact is that you have to prepare yourself, Sara, because this evening’s party was a kind of farewell.When term ends and we leave for Cercedilla, you’ll go home.” As she said this, she raised her head and looked at her god-daughter. Sara, for her part, seemed to be staring at something far away, a point in the distance, a vague shadow on the horizon. “Home?” she asked after a while. “Yes,” said Doña Sara, “to your parents’ home.Your home, darling.”
That afternoon in the autumn of 1946, Sebastiana Morales Pereira left her employer’s house with dry eyes. Her veins felt as cold and heavy as lead, and her mouth was filled with a metallic taste that was familiar: Sebastiana had listened and learned, and would never forget the taste of fear. She recognized it again as she walked along the street, taking small steps, mired in loss, defenseless against the sadness that made her ears ring, the roots of her nails ache, the soles of her feet seem frozen. There was always some new sadness to encounter, and only a dirty old rag to fight it with. Doña Sara had said that she was going to be absolutely honest with her—her husband, Don Antonio, would not hear of her legally adopting the child, so her intention wasn’t to keep it forever, only to bring it up, give it a good education, equip it with the means to do well in life, and return the child to them having turned it into a gentleman, if it was a boy, or a lady, if it was a girl. Her words were convincing, which was why Sebastiana repeated them to herself so many times, walking round and round the Puerta del Sol like an idiot, not daring to go home.The words were convincing, but she still hadn’t found a way of swallowing them by the time it grew late and she simply had to return home.When she got there,Arcadio was waiting at the front door, worried, Socorrito in his arms. Seeing him there, as serious as ever, still very thin, his hair now grey and with the cough that he couldn’t shake off, Sebastiana realized that she loved this man more than the child she didn’t yet know growing within her. But still, remembering the smell of a newborn baby, its softness, the strange peace that filled her when she withdrew to suckle it alone in the gloom of her bedroom, she felt as if she was suffocating, and decided not to say anything to her husband until after supper, once the children had gone to bed. Only then did she sit facing him: she took his hands, looked him straight in the eye, and started talking.The words sounded good, but Arcadio didn’t wait to hear them. “Out of the question!” he said straight away, banging his fist on the table. “It’s absolutely out of the question, do you hear me? I don’t care that they haven’t got children of their own! I don’t know how you could even consider something like this.” She wanted to cry, but she’d resolved not to burden her husband with her tears. So, because of this, and because she couldn’t tell him the whole truth, forcing him to share her worst anxiety—Doña Sara’s words that hung like a sword above her head—she looked into his eyes with an intensity that made him fall silent and then, for the first and last time in her life, she spoke disrespectfully to him. “How can I consider something like this?” Sebastiana Morales Pereira hissed in a whisper, her lips tight, emphasizing every word with her eyebrows, punching the air with her white clenched fists, but not daring to raise her voice in case the neighbors heard.“What’s the matter with you, have you gone mad? Where have you been all these years, Arcadio, in prison or on the moon? In case you haven’t noticed, you don’t give the orders any more, do you hear me? You’re not the one in charge, that all ended years ago. You take orders now, like me, like all of us—get it through your head.We’re like pigs at the slaughterhouse, tied up with a knife to our throat—that’s how life is for us now, for you, and me, and there’s nothing we can do about it,Arcadio.We have no choice.” As Arcadio looked at her, she saw his infinite helplessness, the uncertainty of a child lost in a crowd, the foreboding of a final, decisive defeat, and she covered her face with her apron, turned, and ran away to the kitchen to escape the appalling humiliation in his eyes. Children are the only wealth the poor have.When he was alone,Arcadio Gómez Gómez remembered Don Mario as he’d last seen him, at the front at Teruel, as sickly as ever, so thin he was lost inside his uniform, with his glasses that were always dirty and carrying a rifle that weighed more than he did. Arcadio remembered Don Mario’s joy, his enthusiasm, the fervor with which he believed in the offensive that would cost him his life the very next day. Children are the only wealth the poor have. Arcadio Gómez Gómez swallowed his pride and a void opened up inside him. He closed his eyes, leaned his forehead on his knees, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and wished that he too had been killed at Teruel, like Don Mario.