“I know, I know, it’s just that . . .” Maribel was looking at her, shaking her head, then turned her gaze towards the window. “I don’t want to think about it right now, not yet. I need to get this right and I have to discuss it with my son first. It is his father.”
“No, at this point, he isn’t his father.”
“Of course he is!” Maribel sat up and looked at her, wide-eyed with amazement. “He’ll always be his father, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“No,” the woman said again, wearily, giving a speech she must have repeated a thousand times. “Now he’s your attacker, and that’s all. Do you understand? That’s the only thing that matters. And, as I told you, he’s on the run. He’s not at his place of residence.This is very serious. I’m not sure you realize quite how serious it is.”
She was absolutely right, but listening to the way she spoke and her offhand tone, Sara felt that it would almost make you want to side with the enemy. Sara could detect the first signs of weakening in Maribel. Having been so strong during the worst times, she was now on the point of cracking, about to give in faced with the impatience of a woman who seemed entirely without compassion. Sara wondered if Aguirre was always so insensitive, whether she was still so hard-faced when she was out of her too-tight uniform.The woman didn’t know how to combine the essential ingredients for her job in the right amounts: her authority suggested simply hostility, her inexperience was disguised as superiority, and her inability to judge the right tone made her sound contemptuous and made the victim feel like a criminal. Just then, Juan Olmedo came into the room and he glanced questioningly at Sara. Maribel had been unlucky, very unlucky, once again.Andrés was still so young, and he was so lost, so confused, so determined not to cry, that Sara couldn’t help picturing his small, dark, fleeting form as she listened to Maribel.
“You’re right, you’re absolutely right, I know, but I’d like to think about it, and talk to my son. It may not seem important to you but . . .”
“But he almost killed you!” Aguirre raised her voice, showing that she still had a little more patience to lose.“Two days ago he tried to kill you and now you’re telling me this? How could I possibly understand? I’m sorry about your son, but he’ll have to face up to what’s happened sooner or later. Really, I don’t understand you—you, or all the other women like you. I just don’t understand.”
“But all I’m asking for is a little time. I’m not intending to forgive him—I’d never do that, I swear.”
“Sometimes I think you all deserve what happens to you.”
This was too much. Sara wondered if she’d heard correctly, and from Juan’s shocked face she realized she had. She couldn’t decide if it was worse that the woman had expressed her opinion aloud or that she had resorted to using such tactics. If this was part of some cunning police strategy, it definitely yielded results, because Maribel burst into tears.Aguirre was busy writing notes, so Maribel had to tug on her sleeve to get her to look up.
“Why aren’t you listening to me?” Maribel said, but the woman didn’t answer.“Why don’t you want to listen to me?”
“Look,” the policewoman said, looking at Maribel at last.“I haven’t got all day.”
This really was the final straw. Sara was no longer in any doubt about what she’d heard, and she tried to think of a way of intervening to end the ordeal. She would have liked to give Aguirre a piece of her mind, but Juan intervened first. He moved so fast that before Sara knew it, he’d grabbed Aguirre by the shoulders and pushed her against the wall.
“Listen, I couldn’t give a fuck how busy you are, d’you hear me?” The veins in his neck stood out as he shouted, but he didn’t look as if he was about to lose control. “Don’t you dare speak to her like that! Don’t you ever speak to her like that again!” He was calming down now, but kept the woman pinned to the wall. He went on, his voice back to its normal volume.“You may have forgotten, but this is a hospital.And in this room, the absolute priority—the single, absolute priority is the recovery of the patient.This woman has already suffered quite enough without you coming in here and making her cry. I will not allow you to stay here one moment longer. So, please leave, now.”
Sara smiled inwardly—visible satisfaction would have been unseemly. And it wasn’t simply a question of the delight of the spectator witnessing a desired outcome, the ending she’d hoped for, for each character. There was something else, a mysterious feeling of solidarity that Sara couldn’t yet define, a sense that she was sharing something more than this small victory with the wounded woman who had now closed her eyes, as if mortified at being the cause of such a scene, and with the man with a grim face, still magnificent in his fading anger, silently watching the intruder who was bending to gather up her papers that had fallen to the floor.The whispering that had been going on for some time behind the door now stopped, and the door opened timorously as the children peered in.Tamara’s eyes were huge, startled, and Andrés’s were also wide open and tense, like the fists of one condemned always to expect the worst. In the eyes of these clean, well-fed, well-dressed children, Sara could recognize the identical gaze of other children—dirty, ragged, and undernourished—but who were just as alone, and just as frightened.
“What’s happened?” asked Tamara in a tiny voice, pronouncing every syllable carefully.
“Nothing.”
Sara smiled and opened the door wide, but she didn’t let them in. Instead, she went out into the corridor with them, and suddenly all the images, all the fragments of different stories, joined together in her imagination in an extravagant fictional plot—the adventures of a group of humans lost in space, abandoned together on a strange planet with a hostile but breathable atmosphere.This was how she had felt, how Alfonso probably always felt, how the children were probably feeling now, and Maribel, and Juan, about the arrival of a stranger whose surname was Aguirre and whose first name they would never know, but who, by the simple fact of existing and being as she was, had awakened in them an absolute, violent need to get rid of her. She was the key that made Sara Gómez Morales, who had never been anything completely and never had a home to return to, understand that she belonged to them, to Juan and Maribel, to Alfonso, and to the children, and they all belonged to her, because something more crucial than love, than fear, more than pleasure or the need to live together, had united them at that moment, in that place, making them strong as long as they were together.
“Nothing’s happened, don’t worry,” Sara repeated, sitting down on the bench. Alfonso was crying very quietly, as he always did when he heard shouting, and she took his hand.“Maribel’s very tired and that’s to be expected, isn’t it? She doesn’t want to talk, and nobody should force her to. She needs to rest, but that policewoman kept firing questions at her.”Andrés and Tamara now sat down, as if accepting Sara’s explanation even if they didn’t entirely believe her. “That’s why Juan got cross. But he’s calmed down now—you know what he’s like.”
Then the door to Maribel’s room opened, freeing Sara from the need to lie.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the policewoman was saying to Juan, as he saw her out.“I may have gone too far, you’re right. But compassion doesn’t help in this job, that’s what my boss is always saying.Anyway, I’ve not been having a good day.”
“I’m sorry too,” said Juan. Now that his anger had subsided, he looked as sorry as she did.“But you really shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It’s been very difficult and we’re all very tired.”
This exchange of apologies appeared to be the end of it, but in fact it was a beginning, for Sara as well as for Maribel.The following morning, Maribel asked to have a moment alone with Andrés, and after a long talk in which she still didn’t quite manage to get through to her firmly closed-off son, she denounced her ex-husband in the afternoon, giving her statement to two policemen whom Juan described as much more sympathetic, and therefore more efficient, than the ill-tempered Aguirre.
By the time Andrés Niño González, alias Mr.Tasty Bread, was arrested in a small town in the province of Seville in October, having been on the wanted lists for over a month, Sara was able to identify her feelings more clearly. She couldn’t forget that simple chance had brought them all together, apparently selecting them at random to be the crew of this unexceptional, earthbound spaceship—two neighboring houses by the sea.They were all survivors—they had survived a mortal wound caused by a knife, a death, a loss, a threat, the implacable misfortune of their own birth.They all had a secret, and each private secret fed their common bond, the source of the force that united them.
Sara was able to sleep again, but every morning, when she went out into the garden, she looked up at the sky. Often, she found it clean, calm, at peace with the winds.At other times, it had clouded over, or was misty. Still, it was always familiar. She never found anything worrying or strange in the blue expanse. Meanwhile, with the return of autumn, the children went back to their respective homes, and to school, Alfonso to his daycare center, Maribel to work, and Sara to her leisurely routine of identical days in which she no longer felt alone. But still, every day when she got up, she looked at the sky, checked the direction of the wind, its nature, called it by its name, without knowing why, and waited.
The only original feature left in the apartment building was its facade. Everything else had been completely restored or renovated, including the lift, which had a mirror. As she went up to the third floor, where she’d agreed to meet the estate agent, Sara looked at herself and saw not one, but two faces, both of them alike. She was forty-two, and her hair was short, and she was also sixteen, with long chestnut hair, the ends made golden by the sun of many afternoons spent walking around Madrid. Then, as now, it was the end of summer. Then, as now, Sara Gómez Morales was herself, and another person.
“I think apartments on the upper floors of a building are much more pleasant,” the estate agent said, as she raised the blinds. Light flooded the spacious living room that had moldings on the ceiling and a brand new wooden floor.
It was smaller than the apartment Sara had just sold, but much more expensive.The Calle Hermosilla was in that other half of the world, the exact opposite of her old district, in a different reality that would now be hers.
“This is the master bedroom. It has built-in wardrobes and an en-suite bathroom. If you’re thinking of renting it out, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding tenants. It’s ideal for a young couple with a child.”
“Is the flat above the same?”
“Yes, exactly the same.Would you like to look round it?”
“Well . . .” Sara glanced at her watch. She didn’t want to get home late, but she still had time.“If you wouldn’t mind.”
By the time she stood outside hailing a taxi, she’d decided to buy both of them, in order to use up every last peseta of her booty. Perhaps this was why she saw her again in the taxi window, in the streets, at the traffic lights, halfway between a memory and a character in a play, the girl with her name and longer hair, a lighter body but a heavier heart, legs that were twenty-six years younger as she rushed down the stairs of the kind of building she had never imagined she would live in again. Sara knew why the girl was running, and that she would only feel safe once she was back out in the street, breathing in the warm still air. She knew that she felt lost, ill, filled with shame and self-loathing, but she also had the strength to run like a hare, ready to do battle with whatever train crossed her path, with nothing to help her but her almost childishly agile figure. She could still feel the pain in her side, hear the miserable words with which she sought encouragement rather than solace:“I’ll get used to it.”This was all she’d managed to tell herself back then, and now she knew how true those words had been:“I’ll get used to it.”The image made her smile, and her eyes filled with tears. She’d been so young then, so good and naive, so gullible, so gauche and intransigent. She could still feel the pain in her side, and there was a taste in her mouth that was more bitter, more salty than tears. She’d kept on going, always moving forward, because she didn’t know how to go in any other direction, and she’d been prepared to do anything—courses at secretarial college, at the Arce Academy, the Open University—to pay any price for a future that would never fully compensate her for all her efforts. Sara knew this and it was why, that afternoon, as she headed back by taxi to the CalleVelázquez, she would have given anything to find her, that brave, defenseless girl, to hug her and kiss her, to look her in the eyes and tell her:“Look at me, you’re like me now, one day you’ll be what I am, don’t forget it.When the streets shrink and the sky falls in on you, and every day seems dull and cloudy and all your love has expired, when your child refuses to be born and your parents die, and you sit and cry in the kitchen without knowing why, think of me and wait for me, because I’ve learned to outrun the trains, I’ve found a way to take you home.”