On 21 June 1963, a taxi took over a dozen suitcases and boxes containing most of Sara Gómez Morales’s belongings from the Calle Velázquez to the Calle Concepción Jerónima. She followed, with the rest of her things, in a second taxi.When she arrived at her home, her parents embraced her with an intensity that did nothing to mask their uncertainty, even fear. Their daughter responded to every movement, every embrace, every kiss, mechanically, meekly, and with the same coldness that had frozen Doña Sara’s blood half an hour earlier, as she took leave of her god-daughter at the front door with the two marble lions. “Come with me,” Sebastiana said to her now,“we thought you’d prefer the boys’ room, it’s bigger than your sisters’ room. I didn’t mention it to you last Sunday because I wanted it to be a surprise, but your father’s repainted it, and he’s laid a new carpet—blue, it’s your favorite color, isn’t it? I hope you like it.” Sara had never realized that the floor of the room sloped, but that morning it was the first thing she noticed as she stood on the new carpet. She said nothing. Her mother supposed aloud that she must want to unpack and Sara nodded, but when she was alone she sat on the bed and did nothing, didn’t even move, until they called her for lunch. She was exhausted. She had no tears left, or fear, or rage, or pity, or bitterness, or hatred, or nostalgia. She felt dried up, shriveled, as if she’d been boiled vigorously in her own confusion until all that was left was a mannequin of skin and bone.Three days passed in this way. Mid-morning on the fourth day, her father knocked on the door and entered determinedly. He sat beside her on the bed and told her an old story. It was murky, cruel, absurd, barbarous and true. It was the story of a girl called Sara Gómez Morales. Her story.
This west wind is really getting into my bones . . .The first time she muttered these words under her breath, Sara Gómez smiled to herself; yet this sign that she had at last begun to decode the mystery of the winds did nothing to lessen the crushing sadness of an autumn afternoon. In summer, with the shutters half closed to stop the sun reaching into the living room, the sound of children laughing as they splashed around in the pool, and the friendly heat—making rain seem welcome and silence miraculous—it would have been different. In summer she would have been delighted by this modest progress, but now she was worried about a more pressing lesson she needed to learn—the way to govern time. Neither the calendar, nor the barometer, nor the capricious tyranny of the hour change that suddenly brought darkness, were of any use. It was the ticking lethargy of the clock that she needed to master; the sickly, ailing motion of the minute hand as it measured each and every passive moment. Over the last few decades, as she devoted herself to planning her future in minute, obsessive detail, making sure every element was under her control in order to secure the life that should always have been hers, it had never occurred to her that the success of her scheme might also carry this risk. She had not reckoned on the fact that, if her plan worked—and it had—time would become her enemy, and that clocks would administer her punishment with frugal, aimless cruelty.
Since that spring so long ago when she had quarreled for the last time with Maruchi over a record player, Sara had not had any friends. The universal distrust with which she had armed herself during that long taxi journey from the Calle Velázquez to the Calle Concepción Jerónima had prevented her from ever running such a risk again. But this lack of friends didn’t worry her, because she always had so much to do, and there were plenty of agreeable, even likeable people around with whom she could exchange a pleasant word. Before she disappeared without a trace, Sara Gómez had had many acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues, and distant relatives with whom she occasionally went shopping or to the cinema, although she invariably would have been just as happy to go alone. She didn’t miss the capacity for surprise, faith, or joy that she had suppressed, because she knew that the distrust that had hardened inside her was also the key to her strength; the thick, solid, indestructible beam that kept her upright when she most wanted to collapse.The only constant in the torturous path of Sara Gómez’s life had been her resolute intention to keep going, always keep going; yet now, the certainty that spring would unfailingly follow winter was no longer enough.This sudden, unforeseen helplessness was a challenge to the choices she had made, a question mark over the route she had taken. But when she tired of laughing at destiny’s joke, when she resigned herself to accepting loneliness and the slow hostility of clocks as one more requirement of the difficult peace she had made with herself, when she understood that she had always kept going because she was looking for a place to stop, only then did she begin to let go of her old ways of thinking. Until that moment Sara had lived for revenge; now she had to learn to survive the consequences of vengeance. Her goals had changed, and with that, her life, and the rhythm of her days, her pleasures and her needs. She had sensed something of this towards the end of the summer: as Andrés and Tamara counted down the remaining days of their holiday, she was surprised to find that she was missing them already.And although she hadn’t been aware of any change in herself, the old, hard, leathery scales on which she had depended for survival were gradually peeling away and floating silently, light as feathers, to the ground.
The discovery that distrust no longer served her did not make the clock hands move any faster, but it restored to her—even though it was too little, too late—a way of seeing, of relating to others without calculating beforehand all the possible consequences of every word she said, every gesture or movement she made. At fifty-three, she was too old to recover her innocence, but she could still joyfully regain her curiosity.
It was Maribel who began to help her see things in a different way. When she took her on, Sara had not factored in that she would be spending so much time with Maribel, Monday to Friday, chatting, and she felt a little uncomfortable, even ridiculous, when she realized that Maribel thought her new employer rather odd.After all, here was a middle-aged woman living alone in a large, though not huge, house with no dogs, no invalids to care for, and no children, yet she employed Maribel to clean it for four hours a day.The truth was that, from the outset, Sara tried to make as much mess as she could and, more than once, after clearing up and taking her glass or plate to the kitchen, she would go and put it back again. She found it more difficult to get used to leaving towels on the floor when she got out of the bath, but even then she didn’t consider renouncing the sentimental need that compelled her to adopt such luxuriously lazy ways.This inner evolution led to other changes, to small pockets of trust that allowed other people in—first Andrés, then Tamara, and finally Maribel herself.
The west wind got into their bones, and the gloomy sky bore down on the coast, the fields, the houses, daubing everything with a dirty shade of grey-brown. Sara could feel the clouds—although it never actually rained—spread a fine film of water over every surface, on eyelids, in mouths and throats. She had no desire to do anything, and even essential tasks seemed laborious.The palm trees and swimming pools, the whitewashed walls and the bougainvillea, the refreshment stalls on the beach with their palm roofs and the forgotten bicycles all seemed to share the general air of despondency, the discord of the south awakening to a day that seems more fitting to the north.And yet, the day it really did start to rain, Maribel arrived humming a rumba and wearing a smile so broad it barely fit on her face. She placed a strange package on the table, a large round object that she had covered with a plastic bag to protect it from the rain.
“This is for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes. It’s a present.”
“A present?” Sara carefully removed the plastic bag and uncovered a wicker basket containing African violets of several different colors—purple, pink, fuchsia, white, blue. “They’re lovely, Maribel! Thank you so much. But I don’t know why—”
“Wait a second,” Maribel interrupted, holding up her hand.Without even taking off her raincoat or putting down her bag, Maribel sat opposite Sara and continued, “You’re not going to believe this! I couldn’t believe it either but something
very
good has happened and I want to celebrate. You see . . .” She paused, took a deep breath and slowly let it out before she went on: “My grandfather, my father’s father, had some land on the outskirts of town.You know the old road to Chipiona, near the Playa de la Ballena. It’s a big piece of land with good soil, but it’s quite far away, so that’s why nobody’s wanted to farm it since he died. Before, when I was little, it was lovely. My grandfather went there by donkey every day, and he grew potatoes, pumpkins, melons, tomatoes, peppers and carnations—he always grew carnations, and he sold them at a good price. He gave us the ones with snapped stems, so we always had loads of flowers in the house. Well, the thing is, when he died nobody wanted to go on with it. Farming doesn’t pay much, you know, and his children had jobs, and my cousins, well, they didn’t want to farm it either.Anyway, the land just lay there, going to waste.Then at the beginning of the summer a builder from Sanlúcar turned up and said he’d like to take a look at it. He went there a lot, and took people to measure it, and dug some holes to see what was underneath, and then he said he wanted to buy it. He offered fifty million pesetas, can you believe it, for that little piece of land we thought wasn’t worth anything—fifty million! Of course he wants to build on it because it’s near the beach—a little inland, but pretty near, about ten minutes’ walk at the most. And you know how much they’re building round there, they’ve built a whole town in a couple of years.Anyway, I didn’t want to get my hopes up because my dad, God rest his soul, he would have got twelve million, and I thought my mother would keep it and that she wouldn’t give me a penny.Well, yesterday my sister told me that’s not what’s going to happen.We’re going to split my dad’s share between the three of us, because it turns out my grandfather had made a will. I had no idea, but he had, because he got married twice, and when he met my grandmother he was a widower and already had a young son, José, who’s always been like my uncle, like my father’s brother, and a brother to the other two, even though he had a different mother.We’ve never talked about it in my family because he called my grandmother ‘Mama,’ and my grandmother always said he was her eldest son, and everybody was happy. But my grandfather made a will just in case, and it’s all quite clear. He didn’t leave the land at La Ballena, which wasn’t worth much then, to his children but his grandchildren—and not in equal shares, because the will said it had to be divided into four parts, one for each son, and these parts were then divided up amongst their children in equal shares. Just think,” she looked at Sara with wide eyes and a smile that showed all her teeth,“nobody even remembered.”
“So you’ll be getting four million,” Sara said.
“Well, yes. And because my grandfather died years ago, we don’t have to pay any tax or anything. So, what do you think? I’d have given anything to see the look on my mum’s face when the notary told her that no, the papers for the sale couldn’t be signed because the land didn’t belong to her. Anyway, in two weeks’ time we have to sign and they’ll pay us part of the money.We’ll get some more in January next year, and then the last part in March. Isn’t it incredible?”
“No, not incredible, Maribel.” Sara burst out laughing. “It’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you, and for Andrés, of course.What do you think you’ll do with the money?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet. But I’m taking Andrés to Disneyland Paris, that’s for sure, or to the other one in Florida, it’s bigger. Then maybe I’ll get myself a car. I’d have to learn to drive, of course, but that’s no big deal, is it? And, I don’t know, I haven’t had time to think what else.”
Maribel couldn’t have known that Sara had too much time on her hands and too little to think about, but she would soon find out.There were many things she didn’t know about her employer’s past, including the way apparently trivial things, such as plants bought in shops or the rough reddened skin of Maribel’s gesticulating hands, had an effect on her. Then there were more substantial things, such as the glow that surrounded Maribel as she sat in the kitchen that morning, wondering aloud what to do with the money, bewildered by this sudden stroke of luck facing a woman who had spent her whole life waiting for an opportunity. She would never know this, and yet this woman, whom she barely knew, would change the course of her life in a way her grandfather’s will alone would never have done.
That day, Sara thought a lot about Maribel. She went on thinking about her the following day, and the one after that, and the one after that. She realized that the money, which her cleaner had not yet received, was starting to oppress Maribel, to obsess her, prompting her to devise ways of spending it as quickly as possible. Sara knew the feeling—the banknotes burning a hole in your pocket, the churning of your insides when you’ve never had anything before, when luck suddenly fills your hands with a perverse generosity—because with the gift bestowed by good fortune comes the impulse to squander it and nostalgia for the time when your pockets were empty. She was used to taking an interest in others, waiting to see how they reacted, taking care of them, but she had always kept her opinions to herself. She had never been close enough to anyone to try to influence their life.Yet Maribel’s bewilderment and anxiety, as she listed ever more foolish choices, totally lost in the deluge of advertisements on TV, moved Sara so deeply that one morning, as she listened to Maribel wondering whether to have electrolysis or buy her son a jet ski, Sara decided to intervene. She reminded herself that she had always thought her cleaner a bright woman, and she wanted Maribel to prove her right.