The Wind From the East Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Two Beginnings

  I - WEARINESS AND NEED

  II - THE PRICE OF RIFLES

  III - THE WIND FROM THE EAST

  An Ending

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  “In her fifth novel, Grandes reaches the peak of her powers.This magnificent saga of shipwrecked lives grips from the first sentence and weaves parallel intrigues of memory and survival, money and revenge, resolved only in the closing pages. . . . Here, she has perfected her ability to leap between stories and epochs.”

  —Elizabeth Nash, Independent (U.K.)

  “This novel confirms Almudena Grandes as one of Spain’s leading writers . . . she reveals herself as a powerfully perceptive writer who understands the subtleties of human nature. . . . A hugely intelligent, wise novel.”

  —Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)

  “The Wind from the East promises a lot of bang for your buck . . . Grandes never lets the pace slacken, combining a cracking story with convincing characterisation and good detail.”

  —Miranda France, Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

  “[A] classy blockbuster—a layered saga of family life, rivalry and redemption.”

  —Joanna Briscoe, Guardian (U.K.)

  “Grandes can maintain such a high level of emotional tension without its collapsing into melodrama.The past lives of Juan and Sara seem full of unrelenting torment and hardship.Yet the dexterity with which Grandes is able to unpick psychological states makes for a convincing and moving book.We emerge from the story’s tunnel with a sense of qualified optimism.”

  —The Times (London)

  “This big, juicy saga is perfect for chilly nights; thrilling and toe-curling in equal measure.This is Grandes’s second novel following her successful The Ages of Lulu. She’s now a fixture on my holiday reading list.”

  —Sunday Times (Perth)

  “Plenty of passion in this huge, florid romance. There’s an absorbing small-town soap opera at its core.”

  —The Saturday Age (Melbourne)

  “Originally written in Spanish, it doesn’t seem to lose anything in translation, and has that quality typical of good Latin writing; detailed, vivid and colourful imagery and still retaining a simplicity and rawness, making it entertaining and believable at the same time.”

  —Fremantle Herald (Perth)

  To Luis,

  For the light of every summer

  I would have preferred to be an orphan in death, to be without you there, in the mystery than here, in what I know.

  To have died before, to feel your absence in the treacherous wind.

  —Manuel Altoloaguirre, Soledades Juntas

  Two Beginnings

  The east wind was blowing when the Olmedo family arrived at their new home. It lifted the canvas awnings from their aluminum frames, swelling them out then dropping them suddenly before inflating them again, producing a continuous, dull, heavy noise like a flock of monstrously large birds flapping their wings. All around, neighbors were hurriedly taking down their awnings, all of them green, all identical. From time to time, the rhythmic, high-pitched squeal of rusty metal could be heard beneath the sound of the wind, a piercing noise that Juan Olmedo immediately recognized as the scraping of the metal bars in their rings. He reflected that he’d been unlucky.There was something sinister about the contrast between the bright blue sky and the brilliant sun reflecting off the facades of the houses—all of them white, all identical—and this hostile, savage wind. A couple of times, on the journey from Jerez, he had promised Tamara that he would take her for a swim in the sea before lunch; but the perfect sunny morning that had seemed so tempting through the car windows had suddenly been transformed into this nightmarish storm. Now the girl was one step behind him, looking around warily, seeing it all for the first time but saying nothing. Alfonso had remained behind but Juan didn’t notice until he unlocked the front door of number thirty-seven.The unmistakable smell of decorating sprang at him like a cat covered in paint and varnish, and an old yellowed newspaper, stiff with droplets of paint, trembled slightly before flying out of the door and scattering in the wind. Juan watched as the loose pages danced in the gusts of air, swirling suddenly upwards or being dragged along the ground. Then he caught sight of his brother standing like a post at the intersection of two streets paved identically in red, his legs planted firmly apart, his arms hanging limply down, his head swaying slowly from side to side.Alfonso’s face was raised up to the wind, and he was frowning, his mouth open. Juan glanced down at Alfonso’s flies—a check he made so often now it had become almost instinctive—and saw with relief that they were closed. His poor brother, sniffing the air like a clumsy, disorientated animal, was conspicuous enough without exposing his clumsy disorientated penis. Juan went over to him and hugged him gently, smiling, then kissed him on the cheek before leading him away, an arm around his shoulders. Alfonso nodded several times, vigorously, as if trying to detach his head from his neck. As the two brothers made their way along the narrow pavement, the wind showered them in a flurry of pink, red, and purple bougainvillea petals. At last Alfonso Olmedo smiled. Tamara was waiting for them, leaning against a wall, clutching a brightly colored jewelry box, a couple of books and a Barbie doll. She burst out laughing when she saw her two uncles “in bloom.” Alfonso’s bald head, Juan’s hair and their trousers, shirts and arms were all covered in petals, making them look like a comical cross between a pair of badly camouflaged soldiers and two mimes dressed up as flowering shrubs. Juan joined in the laughter as he brushed the petals off himself and Alfonso and gently ushered his family into the hall. As he shut the door, he wondered whether this wasn’t all a big mistake—the new house, new job, new town hundreds of miles from their old home. But then it was still much too soon to tell.

  Sara Gómez had watched the entire scene from her bedroom window, which was firmly shut to keep out the wind. She had been checking that the shutters were secure when she’d noticed a tall, dark man in the distance, followed closely by a little girl who was also dark, with hair cut in a bob, and the disproportionately long legs of a child in the middle of a growth spurt. She had watched them with interest because that day, August 13, was a Sunday, the shops were closed, and the wind was blowing furiously—a combination that forced her to rest, reluctantly. She’d been very busy for the past few weeks. Setting up a new home, with all the myriad little tasks that she considered essential, was turning out to be more time-consuming than she’d expected.When she had finally found a cheese grater she liked, she realized she needed a garlic crusher, but when she found that, she realized that the toilet mirror was too small, or that she couldn’t let one more day pass without ordering mosquito screens for all the bedrooms.Time slipped by quickly in the car parks of shopping centers, taking the summer along with it, and with summer, all those hot sunny days at the beach that had lured her to this town, this landscape so very different from the big city where she was born and grew up, where she had lived for her not especially outstanding fifty-three years.That was why she had resolved not to let a single sunny morning pass without swimming in the sea, no good afternoon with a low tide go by without strolling along the wet sand leaving every last bather behind.The imminent arrival of September worried her. Although she could not recall ever having made as satisfying a decision as the purchase of this house, she still wasn’t sure how people lived in autumn in a small town where the taxis didn’t have meters and where you could go almost anywhere on foot.

  The other new arrivals felt a similar anxiety, although Sara couldn’t yet know that. She wasn’t even sure they were here to st
ay. House number thirty-seven was still under construction when she decided to buy number thirty-one, which was already complete except for the finishing touches.That was why she had chosen it, and she hadn’t enquired about the neighbors. Instead of the distasteful railings that she’d pictured before she visited the development, she found that the garden of each house was surrounded by solid, whitewashed walls over four feet high providing total privacy. With the awnings up, there wasn’t the slightest gap for a curious passer-by to see what was happening on the porch of the house opposite, and if she hadn’t been looking out of an upstairs window at the time of the Olmedos’ arrival, she would have been quite unaware of their presence. She had been so pleased with the privacy the walls provided that she hadn’t paid much attention to the estate agent when he explained to her in a monotonous voice—a speech he had clearly made many times before—that the walls were designed to shelter the garden from the constant winds.Alternately dry and loaded with sand, or else damp and surprisingly cold, these winds could be a blessing at certain times of year but even so, they were almost always destructive, although the estate agent preferred to describe them as merely “inconvenient.”

  On August 13, 2000, Sara Gómez was only beginning to learn about the nature of the local winds. Peering from her bedroom window, she watched as the shutters of number thirty-seven were opened one by one—all of them green, newly painted and identical.The wind caught hold of them, crashing them violently against the walls of the house, banging them repeatedly over and over again, until a member of the rather odd family returned in alarm and fastened them to the wall. Sara watched the Olmedos not only because she was worried at the thought of living opposite a house that was rented out for weeks at a time, or because the weather was unsuitable for going to the beach, or because the shops were shut. She watched them because she couldn’t fathom who they were, how they were linked, or why they lived together. Like many children who spent a great deal of time alone, Sara Gómez had enjoyed playing a game in which she invented lives for the strangers she encountered. Now she began to imagine a story in which this tall, dark, forty-something man was the father of the little girl walking a few paces behind him, trying to take shelter from the wind. From afar, they looked very much alike. Dark and tall like him, slender and long-boned, the child must have been about ten or eleven. Sara, who could not know that the only thing she had guessed right was their ages, wondered what the girl’s mother must look like. She must have stayed behind in the car, searching for something, or perhaps she had gone for a quick walk around the development; surely she was the person the husband went to find among the swirl of newspaper pages, floating in the air like big yellow parentheses in a cloud of bougainvillea petals. Up to this point, the scene was so predictable it was boring. But then the child stopped and waited by the open front door, not even attempting to enter the house. Leaning against the wall, hugging some books and a blond doll tightly to her chest, she stood frozen, motionless, her eyes large and alert as if she really didn’t want to be there and distrusted everything around her.The stranger observing her wondered what kind of child could resist the urge to rush into a new house, and she began to suspect that no mother was going to appear. In fact she was now fairly sure that the father must be separated, on holiday here with or without his new partner, accompanied by his child, who no doubt had a lengthy list of daughterly resentments, some of them justified. But then Sara caught sight of the tall dark man again, walking very slowly, with his arm around a second man; this was a possibility she hadn’t considered.The other man was walking like a badly coordinated puppet, tilting his head to look at the sky with his mouth hanging open, meekly leaning against the companion who was guiding him confidently, obviously used to taking care of someone who couldn’t take care of himself.Although he was fat rather than stocky, and almost completely bald, Sara guessed correctly when she estimated that the man must be about thirty. She quickly realized that she had been wrong about everything else, however, when she saw the smile that lit up the child’s face as soon as they approached.The tall dark man put his left arm around her and hugged her to him, his right arm still encircling the other man, and he kissed them both several times on the head and face, before gently pushing them inside the house. He closed the door, and it occurred to his new neighbor that he seemed rather sad.

  Very soon all the windows of house number thirty-seven were open, all the shutters secured, and Sara Gómez moved away from her bedroom window feeling vaguely guilty, as if she’d committed a sin by witnessing the new arrivals’ grief, their paltry joy. Sitting on the sofa in her vacant living room, a series of empty spaces crying out for the furniture that had already been ordered in half a dozen shops, Sara listened to the shrieking of the wind. Without the flap of the loose awnings, its howling seemed even more ferocious, like the soundtrack of a reality unfolding ceaselessly beyond her garden.With nothing to keep her company save the deafening roar of the wind and a packet of cigarettes, she began to doubt her own anxiety, to question whether the furtive, almost clandestine air she’d detected in every one of her new neighbors’ movements had really existed. She was, after all, learning what the wind had to teach. She already suspected that on a quiet day, a peaceful, sunny day good for the beach, her new neighbors would not have seemed so strange.

  A spectacular band of deep orange lay on the horizon between the sea and the sky. The sun was about to set, but even before he got to the beach, Juan Olmedo could see the silhouettes of some of the strange encampments that had so surprised him that morning. The cars of the Sunday day-trippers, most of them from Seville, had filled both sides of the road right from the entrance of the estate to the first sand dune, like a corridor of fans applauding anyone shrewd enough to have chosen a house so close to the sea. Juan had congratulated himself and remarked out loud, to mollify Tamara, that today,August 14, a Monday as splendid and sunny as a post card, was the day before a public holiday and therefore a holiday too, indeed the most popular holiday of the season. But the little girl seemed so pleased that the wind had finally died down that she wasn’t even listening. Nothing could spoil her mood. Even Alfonso, who was walking between them holding their hands, looked happy.

  The beach had been as crowded as they expected it to be.What Juan had not anticipated, however, were the peculiar habits of these weekend nomads. Entire families, including decrepit pensioners and tiny babies, would occupy an area of beach from first thing in the morning, before it was even hot, investing hours laboriously setting up a new version of home with tents, canvas windbreaks and portable furniture, until the beach looked like an extraordinary makeshift shanty town. As they looked for a place closer to the water’s edge where they could lay their humble mats, Juan saw an elderly woman having her breakfast of coffee and churros using a plastic plate and cup and a patterned fabric napkin. It made him smile.The spectacle of other people’s strange habits took his mind off his own litany of misfortune. In addition, he realized that the crowds at the water’s edge were having the same useful effect as they did in big cities—the bathers were so busy searching for a place to enter or exit the water, or chasing their little white ball amongst the dozens of other identical balls bouncing up and down the damp sand, or keeping an eye on their children’s buckets and spades, or anointing each other with sun-tan lotion, that they had neither the time nor the inclination to stare at Alfonso, who looked more conspicuous and helpless than ever in the stripy Bermuda shorts that Tamara had chosen for him. Juan couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been anxious about his younger brother and by now he was completely immune to the curiosity of others, but Tamara had inherited her mother’s steely intransigence, and could not bear the sympathy of strangers. That morning, however, all three were able to swim and play in the waves without Tamara having to shout, “Hey, what are you staring at, idiot?” at unwelcome spectators. In the afternoon, they had eaten grilled sardines at the only bar nearby, and had another swim before going home, exhausted from all the sun and sea. Everythin
g had gone so well that a couple of hours later, when Alfonso fell asleep on the sofa, Juan was able to go out for another walk. He felt like being on his own for a while, so he headed back to the beach.

  He had thought that the setting sun would induce everyone to go home, but he was only partly right.There was no longer anybody in the water, but semi-naked bodies still lay beneath parasols and sunshades, and there were children playing soccer, groups of adults on plastic sun-loungers chatting, while others slowly, despondently, gathered all the chairs, mats and tents that they had set out so energetically that morning. Juan Olmedo gave them a wide berth on his way to the water’s edge. He wasn’t sure whether they really were all staring at him, or whether the uncomfortable sensation of being watched was an inevitable consequence of feeling that he looked ridiculous. He walked faster. He had lived on the coast for a few years before, but in a city like Cadiz it had been very different. There, he wouldn’t have stood out in his immaculate white trousers, long-sleeved navy-blue T-shirt and lightweight moccasins, but here, over a mile from the town’s seafront, everyone walking along the beach was wearing shorts and trainers. Juan realized he’d have to dress the same if he didn’t want to become known as “the pretentious poser from Madrid,” and set off towards a section of the beach that was studded with fishing rods.