Read Online The Wind From the East by Almudena Grandes - Free Book Online

good-looking.You should have seen him, gorgeous, not very tall, but so handsome it wasn’t true. He had a really good body, and he was cocky, that’s for sure. He always went on about having a good time, saying he’d only had three hours’ sleep, how he’d been to a bullfight in El Puerto, he’d gone for a big night out in Jerez, that he’d burned himself out at the Trebujena fair, he was friends with flamenco singers—Paula, Camarón, all of them. Anyway, I was just crazy about him. I loved to listen to him and the way he could convince anyone he was important. He seemed to live life to the full. I even liked the way he pulled so many girls, always bragging about this one or that one, and showing off about how many tourists he’d scored. God, I was stupid. I thought I could change him, that with me it would be different. He knew I had plenty of blokes after me too. It’s true, I really did, I had to push them out of the way just to get into my house.And with all the men I had running after me, I had to go and pick the worst one.When I think about it now I could kill myself! Anyway, I started going out with him, and we got engaged. He gave me some coral earrings, and took me round the festival on his horse. It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me, that’s for sure, but the minute we got off that horse, I got pregnant. Until then, it had all been very nice, but then . . . He didn’t want to marry me, and my dad was livid.You should have heard him, and Andrés’s father was the same, so in the end we got married. He never spent three nights in a row at home, even in the first week we were married, and when the boy was eighteen months old, he cleared off for good. He moved in with another woman, two streets away, and when she got fed up with him and threw him out, he took up with another one, who runs a bar and puts up with everything. She must be at least ten years older than him. So anyway, there he is, living on the Chipiona road.”
     
    Maribel had told the whole story in one go, folding and re-folding the yellow cloth that she used to wipe the worktops, and not taking her eyes off her son, who was reading a comic in the garden. Sara understood everything except the woman’s apparent calm, the neutral, flat, almost casual tone with which she had told the simple tale of her small wretched life, the brief smile that appeared on her face as she recalled the glory of a morning at the festival. Then, in the silence that followed, she tried to smile again, but her lips just drooped, and she kept passing the cloth from one hand to the other as if it were on fire. Then suddenly she turned round and threw herself into wiping the same marble surface she’d just cleaned with an energy that shook her entire body.
     
    “On the Chipiona road,” she said again, thickly. “Cocky bastard, that’s exactly what he is.”
     
    And with that the conversation ended. Sara never dared to bring the subject up again, but she gleaned other facts from the anger in the eyes of Jerónimo, the obliging gardener who found jobs for people, as his cousin Maribel clicked around the kitchen on her high heels, in Andrés’s scowl of displeasure as his mother put on a dress that was too tight when she changed out of her pink housecoat, in the hard look in the eyes of the cashier at the supermarket as she ignored Maribel when she and Sara went shopping together, and in the smile with which her cleaner greeted the wolf whistles of the traders at the Wednesday street market. Maribel was very young, Sara thought, and she wasn’t doing anything that any other thirty-year-old woman wasn’t doing: going out in the evenings, going to clubs, flirting, having drinks, wearing make-up, not wearing a bra with a low-cut dress, sleeping with lots of different men, maybe ones she didn’t want to see again but keeping her sights set on a different, better kind of man, one she could stay with forever. None of this had anything to do with