“I tell you something, Sara,” exclaimed Doña Loreto, pointing at her friend’s god-daughter.“With such a treasure here, why are you still paying my layabout son-in-law, when all he’ll do is spend the money on that tart of his!”
“Oh!” Doña Sara’s jaw dropped.“I never really thought about it.”
“Well, it’s time you did, my dear. It really is.”
After that, Doña Margarita started talking about her impending cataract operation and they moved on to the subject of surgery, something they all found fascinating. Nobody mentioned Santi again, but at breakfast the following morning, Doña Sara raised the issue.
“I’d like to know your opinion, dear. About what Loreto said yesterday, I mean.What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Mami. I’m not too keen on Santi myself, as you know. He’s unpleasant and he’s conceited. And I can understand Doña Loreto and her daughter, because it must be awful, but I also feel slightly sorry for him too. It’s as if he’s gone from being an angel to a devil overnight.”
“But he can’t be trusted any longer.You must agree with that.A grown man who abandons his family and runs off with some twenty-four-year-old slut is not someone you can trust.”
Sara looked at her godmother and realized that nothing she could say would change her mind. Such were the rules of her world, the weapon of women of her class, a tried-and-tested, time-honored tactic, like the sexual abstinence her sister Socorro had imposed on her husband in order to get what she wanted.They were all in agreement on paying one another and keeping their wealth amongst themselves so that not a single peseta would leave the reduced circle of their acquaintances, but there were requirements and rules for remaining within this charmed circle. In this case, the money belonged to Señora Villamarín, and her friend Loreto’s son-in-law had committed a terrible breach of their code.
“Maybe.” Sara paused, reflecting that, in the end, Santi was still a bloody fascist.“No, he’s not to be trusted.You’re right.”
“Would you be able to . . . I mean, would you be able to manage it all on your own? The taxes and the properties and Antonio’s company shares . . . well, all of it?”
“Of course I would,” said Sara, smiling.“With my eyes closed, Mami. It’s really not that difficult. I mean, we’d have to hire someone to deal with all the paperwork, because if I did it I wouldn’t have time for anything else. But I could take care of it all—taking the decisions, thinking up a strategy so that you’d pay as little tax as possible, managing your investments and the income from your properties, dealing with the banks, dealing directly with your stockbroker. I could definitely do everything that Santi does.That’s what my job has always involved.”
“And you could pay yourself whatever you thought appropriate, you know that.”
“No, no, no.” And for the first time since she’d lived with her godmother again, it was Sara who blushed when money was mentioned.“I already earn enough. Really, Mami, you’re paying me quite enough. I have plenty of spare time and I enjoy this kind of work. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Doña Sara took her hand, squeezed it and kissed her.
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you’re doing for me, darling. Never.”
But it didn’t stop her trying. From that day on, Sara became her head and her eyes, her hands, her voice, and her memory. By mid-September Sara’s signature was authorized for all her accounts, and she had a power of attorney so wide that the notary, after demonstrating his objectivity by congratulating her on a series of decisions he’d thought extremely wise, read it aloud twice to make sure that the old lady understood how fully she was placing herself in her god-daughter’s hands once she’d added her shaky, distorted signature to the papers. From then on, Doña Sara rewarded her with expensive, extravagant gifts, and began to talk aloud of Sara’s inheritance.
When she was a child, Sara had been sure that the apartment would one day be hers. Doña Sara was old, her husband was even older, and there was no other child on the scene. Children ended up inheriting the house they’d grown up in, it had always been so, it was the logical, reasonable, and natural thing. Amparito and her brothers, who lived in Oviedo, would sometimes come to stay for a few days at Christmas, or at Easter, but her godmother always treated them as visitors, outsiders, strangers passing through Madrid. But then afterwards, when it all ended, Sara realized that the López Ruiz children, those “cousins” of hers, would be the only happy heirs of their aunt’s fortune. Reality, ugly and harsh, lurking on street corners around the Puerta del Sol, sank its teeth into her once more. Sara never, not even after she went back to live at the CalleVelázquez and saw how much her godmother still despised the fatuous, conceited Amparito, had any doubt as to the future heirs of theVillamarín fortune, the immense wealth whose control now lay in her modest but capable hands. Her godmother’s promises, far from dispelling this conviction, only secured it more firmly.
“I think it’s best if we don’t mention any of this to Amparito, don’t you agree?” she said to Sara one day when they sat down together, at Sara’s instigation, to deal with financial matters. “I mean, she’s so stingy, and she’s always thinking about her wretched inheritance. If she finds out, we’ll never be rid of her. Anyway, now that you’re living with me again . . .” Doña Sara looked into her eyes with warmth, and a combination of gratitude and trust born of long-standing affection. “I’ll do what I have to do, dear.You won’t end up in the street, far from it, you can be sure of that.”
Sara blushed and could think of nothing to say. At the time, towards the end of 1987, she had no idea of the course her life would take soon afterwards. She’d always been an excellent worker, honest, conscientious, and responsible, and her commitment to managing her godmother’s assets had not had the slightest detrimental effect on the conditions of her job. Certainly it now took up more of her time, but she preferred her new role to the monotonous routine of lady’s companion, in which she had begun to feel she was wasting her talents. She’d never be able to leave Doña Sara. She’d go on supervising her exercises until the end, even though they were now producing increasingly insignificant results. When Doña Sara felt like going out, Sara still took her to the cinema and the theatre, and had tea with her and her friends in the afternoon. But when Sara had a more urgent meeting, she’d send her godmother out for her walk with one of the maids, and she often stayed in her study doing paperwork in the afternoon while Doña Sara watched television. Her godmother never complained, because she never felt neglected—quite the contrary. Just as Sara’s relationship with her parents had changed, so Doña Sara’s relationship with her god-daughter gently and easily became the exact opposite of what it had once been. Sara accepted full responsibility for the old lady’s fate, and realized that this new situation was better for her.
She was forty by then, but still too young to be living like an old lady herself.This was the main advantage of the change—it freed her from the feeling of lethargy, of becoming fossilized, that had overcome her sometimes in her spare moments as her life slowed down, her own pace slackening to keep time with an elderly and infirm woman.The new demands of the job made her feel young again, interrupted the stultifying routine, and gave her life momentum, restoring a familiar sense of satisfaction as she accomplished each task brilliantly. Her days gradually filled with small appointments, duties that varied depending on the time of year and the day of the week: visits to the banks, drawing up quarterly statements, meetings with the managers who ran Doña Sara’s country properties—farms in the province of Salamanca, a large estate in Toledo, two in Ciudad Real—working lunches with the solicitor, the agent, the stockbroker. These were occasions when she could do herself up, buy clothes, go to the hairdresser, put on make-up, even flirt with men who often ended up staring at her with a captivated smile before expressing their admiration for her ability, and who occasionally went a little further, risking a proposition that, more than occasionally, Sara decided to accept. None of these mild flirtations turned into anything serious, but she had to admit they were entertaining.
The only person who was unhappy with this new turn of events was Amparito.Although she hadn’t been informed of the legal arrangements that had turned Sara into her main rival, she sensed that there had been a change that was detrimental to her interests, and she responded by increasing the frequency and length of her visits to her godmother. Doña Sara complained constantly of how tiresome Amparito had become and the visits bothered Sara too, until she found a solution in a dry, withering reply that guaranteed a lasting, if tense, truce between the two of them.
“Look, Amparito, to me this is a job like any other,” she told her the umpteenth time that Doña Sara’s niece wondered aloud what Sara might be taking from the house. “Move in here if you want, and take care of your aunt yourself.You only have to say the word and I’ll pack my bags right now and go back to my flat.You decide—whatever suits you better. But as long as I’m living here, there’ll be no more of your stupid allegations.”
And she meant it. She was an excellent worker, honest, conscientious, responsible, with hands as clean as her conscience. But none of what occurred subsequently could have happened had Sara Gómez Morales—self-sacrificing, disinherited, poor but admirably capable of taking care of herself and anyone else—not completed the final stages of a metamorphosis that returned her to all she’d been taught before she left that house, together with everything she had learned outside its privileged walls. Difficult lives produce difficult adults, and Sara knew the price of things only too well. Sara Gómez Morales had been nothing, but now she was prepared to be everything all at once.All she needed was an opportunity. And life came to meet her after the last frost of 1988.
When a maid rushed in and told her to hurry to the living room in the faltering, urgent tone of true emergencies, she feared that her godmother had had a fall, hurt herself, or had a serious accident. Instead she found her sitting on the sofa, holding the phone, weeping, shaking her head and saying repeatedly, “What are we going to do, dear God, what are we going to do?” Sara gently took the receiver from her and heard on the other end of the line the voice of Victoriano, the gardener at the house in Cercedilla, who’d been taking care of everything since the housekeepers died a few months apart, in the same year as their master. This was how Sara found out that the roof of the house, a country mansion that the grandfather of Doña Sara’s godmother had built in the first half of the nineteenth century to use as a hunting lodge, had collapsed spectacularly, taking with it the attics and the floor of a good part of the second story.
“Don’t worry, Mami,” said Sara, sitting beside her godmother and trying to comfort her once she’d hung up.“I’ll go and take a look at it this afternoon. I’ve agreed to meet Victoriano there at five. I’m sure something can be done.”
Sara had happy, luminous memories of the huge house surrounded by ancient pinewoods as far as the eye could see, its large gardens, swimming pool and tennis court; she’d spent the best summers of her life there. But she hardly recognized the wondrous paradise of her childhood memories in the abandoned ruin, standing there humiliated and forgotten. It had been over fifteen years since anyone last lived there, over fifteen years since anyone had turned on a tap, switched on the lights or the boiler or the cooker.Victoriano, who was very old and stooped, had done little more than occasionally prune the hedges closest to the main building, and had ignored the rest of the garden.The paths had disappeared, the rose bushes had died, and weeds thrived between the dirty, sparse remains of the gravel.
“I don’t know what to say, Mami,” she confessed to her godmother when she arrived back in Madrid, just in time for dinner.“It’s a complete ruin. It’s not just the roof that needs repairing.The staircase is so rotten it’s dangerous, the plumbing doesn’t work, and as for the electrics . . . it’s still the old wiring that’s covered with cloth, and that has split in so many places it will mean one short-circuit after another. Everything needs attention, even the garden. It will cost you a fortune, but I don’t think you have any choice.”
Doña Sara closed her eyes despondently before opting for the easiest solution:
“What if I sell it?”
“As it is now?” asked Sara. Doña Sara nodded.“You wouldn’t just be selling at a loss: you’d be giving it away. I thought about it on the way home—you know I find it easy to think while I’m driving.” She paused and tried to sound more gentle, because she could see her godmother was upset and she knew that what she was about to say would upset her even more. “Look, first of all, I don’t think anyone is going to pay you what that house is really worth. People don’t tend to have such incredibly large houses any more. Particularly in a place like Cercedilla. But if you are going to sell it—which is what I think you should do, because you know what the weather’s like in the mountains and if you don’t live in it once you’ve done it up, you’ll be back in the same position in ten years’ time—you’ve got to sell it as a grand old mansion, not a ruin.With this sort of project, you’ll always get the money you spend on building work back, no matter how long it takes, and however much it all costs. If you do the house up, it gives you the chance to find some impulsive millionaire who’ll pay you a reasonable sum for it. If you sell it as it is, it’ll be the millionaire who gets a bargain, because after paying you a pittance, he’ll have the work done himself and end up with an incredible house that’s worth double what he paid for it.”