Sometimes, the ugliness of the world bore down on her, but she still found the strength to fight it. Sometimes her hidden pride, appeased, beaten down by routine, rose in her throat, burning the roof of her mouth and forcing her to see that what she had was not enough. Each of the modest diplomas gained from correspondence courses that her mother insisted on framing and hanging on Sara’s bedroom wall, resigned to not being allowed to hang them in the dining room, was a product of these unpredictable rages, of this furious crippled ambition. But nothing was as strong as the fever that took hold of her in the summer of 1974.
Sara was twenty-seven years old and she told herself that enough was enough. She did it in under a month, twenty-two days from first looking at job ads in the paper to moving into her office in the accounts department of a large construction firm. She enrolled for an economics degree at the Open University and made a down payment on a flat still under construction, on a rather pretentious development by the Plaza de Castilla.Then she joined what had once been her father’s trade union. With her cold, meticulous, arithmetical mind she immediately stood out at meetings where temperatures, blood, words and promises were all overheated. Perhaps this was why Vicente noticed her immediately. She noticed him the moment he walked through the door of the warehouse where the meeting was being held that day.
Vicente González—in fact his full surname was González de Sandoval, but he always cut off the more aristocratic-sounding second half—was eight years older than Sara and the only son of one of the largest shareholders in the company.With a PhD in economics, he was a Marxist by conviction, but with plenty of supporting arguments. When he’d finished his degree, he’d tried to sever all links with his family, whose history, politics and business both embarrassed and disgusted him. He managed this successfully thanks to a temporary teaching vacancy at the university where he’d done his degree. He’d grown his hair and a beard, rented an attic flat in Argüelles, shacked up with an aspiring actress from Cordoba who sang in a bar, and for a time had fun and was satisfied with his life. He was also involved in organizing the student uprisings of ’68.Arrested and tried, he was sentenced to two years in prison, the leniency of the sentence owing something to the true length of his surname.The court, however, did not take into account the allergic asthma he had suffered from since childhood and which seemed to take him, with every attack, to the brink of death. He had a terrible time in prison, so terrible that after three consecutive asthma attacks, he was released on health grounds, and confined to house arrest at the family home for the remainder of his sentence. He no longer felt like doing anything foolish and his mother welcomed him with open arms. She made him shave off his beard and cut his hair, gave him his old room and lovingly fed him hot soup and fish with potatoes.Vicente had almost forgotten the taste of fresh fish. And María Belén, his childhood sweetheart, came to keep him company every afternoon with a self-abnegation that would have moved a dead man.As he was still alive but reluctant to discuss the matter, it was she who told him one day that she knew everything and forgave him and that they’d have to start thinking about a date for the wedding.Vicente doubted she knew everything—in particular the prodigious capabilities with which the actress from Cordoba had seduced him. But he agreed, persuaded partly by the fish dinners, partly by the conviction that he had no choice. They were married in 1971, in church, and three hundred and fifty guests attended the reception at their country club. By then,Vicente was already a senior executive in his father’s construction company. In 1972, his first child was born, the umpteenth Vicente González de Sandoval. In 1973, he began to suffer from insomnia, and seriously wondered if he was going mad. By 1974, the year he met Sara, he thought of himself as an amoeba, a germ, a bug, but above all a complete and utter fool. A few months earlier, his wife had told him she was pregnant again and that with luck it would be a girl so she could call her Begoña, after her grandmother.That same day, he’d bumped into a quantity surveyor in the corridor who knew him from his old days of political activism at university.Through this man, he started to forge links with the union leaders at the firm, who welcomed him warmly, aware of the benefits such a contact might provide.Vicente didn’t dare ask to join the union because he was afraid he might be refused, but he quietly attended their meetings and, always in private, passed information, made suggestions, and felt that at least he was being useful.
Sara knew from the start why she had noticed him. He was tall and sturdy, but had a slightly pallid look that suited him, softening a heavy brow, large nose, and thick neck that hinted deceptively at peasant stock. In fact, this quiet man, who observed everything with curiosity, possessed the same innate elegance, the same silvery, luminous quality as the gentlemen Sara had not seen close up since she was a child; the brilliance that went beyond the labels and the impeccable cut of his clothes, manifesting itself instead in his way of sitting, lighting a cigarette, putting out a hand to refuse something with the wordless courtesy of one who has always had plenty of everything. She asked about him and heard his story, and after that she looked at him with tenderness. He, who already looked at her so insistently, responded by moving ever closer, until one day he was sitting next to her.
“Why do you stare at me so much?” she whispered, without turning her head, her eyes fixed on the speaker.
“Because I like staring at you,”Vicente answered with a certainty to which Sara could find no response.
Later, after the meeting,Vicente followed her to the door of her office without saying a word. Sometimes, Sara laughed at his mutely stubborn courtship, and then he laughed too, like a little boy, because he had the audacious, jubilant feeling that the good times had returned at last.
“Well,” she said when they reached the end of the corridor. “Here we are.”
“Who are you, comrade?” he asked jokingly, for the first time using the word that would become an ironic, though sincere, code between them.“Where did you spring from?”
Sara breathed out, leaned against the door and looked deep into his eyes. She had an answer to his question; she had spent weeks thinking about it.
“I am your opposite,” she said.“Your equal and your opposite. Like your reflection in a mirror.”
The first time, they went to a very smart, very expensive, very discreet hotel, near the airport.As they were leaving, Sara noticed a little cardboard box sitting unopened on a shelf in the bathroom, containing two plastic bottles of shower gel, two of shampoo and two of cologne, two tiny soap dishes, a small sponge, and a miniature sewing kit.“My mother would just love this,” she thought and put out her hand to take it. But, just in time, she remembered that ladies never took anything from hotel rooms. As she walked down the corridor, she longed for the box of toiletries, and felt sure that Sebastiana would have been delighted with the gift, opening all the little bottles, smelling them, closing them again, placing them in a prominent place in the bathroom, dusting, touching, smelling them every day; but Sara also felt darker, more complex emotions, a deep indefinable nostalgia for a time that had not quite passed. Sara had been out with several men, she had even slept with a few, but she hadn’t really liked any of them, not the way she liked this man, an impossible choice. The intensity of those hours stung her skin and her eyes, softened every one of her muscles, every drop of blood, every bruised fold of her memory. Perhaps the small things her mother so loved would make sense one day. But perhaps there wouldn’t be another chance.
When she reached the lift, she pretended to search for something in her bag, then asked Vicente for the room key, making the first excuse that came to mind: “I’ve got to go back, I think I’ve left my earrings in the room.” She rushed back, and it didn’t occur to her that he might have noticed she hadn’t been wearing earrings that afternoon. She’d just taken apart the little box so that she could fit it and its contents into her bag, when she saw his reflection in the mirror. He was standing in the corridor, next to the bathroom door, watching her in silence. She blushed, not knowing what to say. A second went by, then another, and another, and neither of them spoke.ThenVicente went to her, put his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth for a long time.
Years afterwards, when it was too late to change anything, Sara Gómez Morales, with her prodigious talent for calculation, realized that it was that moment, precisely that moment, that had been the origin of the principal, most serious, and only truly important error she had ever made in her life.
The east wind blew for eight days and eight nights—too much and too long for anyone to preserve even the vestige of a happy memory of its arrival.When it went, it left a clean, peaceful world, days of sun and calm, and air that was kinder than the daytime dew that permeated everything when the west wind blew.
“Looks like we’re going to have a good winter,” said Maribel one afternoon. She’d let Sara drag her out to take a look at some of the new apartment blocks being built in the area.“Mild and dry.That’s the thing about the east wind: it’s quite unbearable, but you couldn’t live without it.”
Sara, who felt slightly married to the wind herself, was amused by Maribel’s conjugal resignation, but she didn’t say anything. She would soon discover that Maribel was right, however. For Sara too, that winter would be better than the autumn.
After all, life, like an old, disloyal friend, had made her an expert at change. Her ability to adapt had been honed throughout her youth, her middle age and beyond, in a long succession of settings, real and fictitious, public and private, in which she had never been able to settle for long. This time the process was different. Now she had arrived, alone, objectively and irretrievably alone, in this ghost station on a disused track; abandoned to its fate except, perhaps, as a home for the poppies that might one day flourish amongst its dusty sleepers.This was why, admitting that she was bored, and without disavowing the bitter taste of disappointment, Sara accepted the small destiny of wild flowers and, that winter, learned to live again. Once she had managed to assimilate the stillness, to become reconciled to the slowness of clocks, everything began to seem easier.
She grew used to doing everything slowly, without counting the minutes, and her days began to acquire a modest stability, an almost ritual serenity that eventually affected her peace of mind too. Reading without keeping count of the books she had got through in the week, getting hooked on the most frivolous TV programs, becoming a regular customer of the video shops in town, making the most of the mild climate by going for walks on the beach, setting herself the goal of reaching a specific rock, and turning round once she’d got there without even pausing to enjoy the silent company of the crabs, shutting herself in the kitchen occasionally with a book of complicated recipes and spending much more time than was reasonable making an irresistible cake and then eating it all on her own for tea, and enjoying it.All these milestones were significant in themselves, like rooms used for the first time that had not yet been fully explored, in a life that only then began to feel different from all the others she had known. Sara Gómez finally began to relax.When she accomplished the feat of letting a whole Sunday go by without speaking to anyone and not feeling bad about it, Sara understood that this move had been as complete as the final one would be. Death would find her by the sea, caught between love and hatred of the winds.
In the midst of her new indolent lifestyle, Sara did allow herself one exception—a task that had nothing to do with her own needs. She was determined to turn Maribel into a property owner because, regardless of any altruistic impulses, it was a more entertaining project than any book, TV program, or film. Poring over specifications from developers and then picking them apart word by word, suggesting endless improvements to the plans, and covering reams of paper in calculations had always been one of her favorite pastimes. Everything else was put on hold. But then, on 14 December, at ten to five in the afternoon, the front doorbell rang insistently, proving that she still couldn’t rely on every day being identical to the one before.
“Hello,” said Andrés. He was wearing his school tracksuit and trainers, and was twisting the sleeves of his anorak apologetically.
“Hello,” said Tamara, who was dressed the same as Andrés and looked just as nervous.
“What are you two doing here?” asked Sara, glancing at her watch, surprised and even a little alarmed, though the children’s anxious faces didn’t seem to show any signs of a disaster.
“We’re off school in the afternoons now.”
“Today, and tomorrow, and all next week.”
“We’ve already done our homework.”
“Yes, so we thought . . .”
“Because my uncle won’t get back from work till six thirty . . .”
“And you’ve got a car . . .”
“We wondered if you’d like to go for a drive.”