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

banisters that barely served as a reminder of better times, was at the end of the hallway. On the left-hand side of the third floor, it always smelled of cooking, and shouting could be heard from behind the door.This was Arcadio’s home. But not Sara’s.
     
    “Oh, darling!” cried Sebastiana. She’d come running down the passage as soon as she heard the key in the lock, embracing Sara with hands that always felt damp however much she wiped them on her apron.“Let me look at you.You look lovely! I think you might even have grown! Come here, let me give you a kiss.”
     
    Her mother would kneel down and hug her. A few months younger than her husband, Sebastiana’s sparse, brown hair was badly dyed and scraped back into a bun, exposing a round face with fat cheeks that seemed to squash her small, dark, button-like eyes. Her body had a soft, compact quality to it, making her black skirt and blouse look as if they were stuffed with pillows. But unlike Fray José, Sebastiana Morales always smelled clean, of soap and water, and her plumpness exuded warmth, constancy, an indefinable promise of protection. Perhaps this was why Sara was more affected by her kisses—loud, quick, interspersed with words—than by Arcadio’s solid embraces.When her mother’s eyes softened, as she succumbed to an emotion that she could no longer express in words, Sara felt her own eyes begin to fill with tears.At that moment, just before everything became blurred, her father intervened and drew them apart.
     
    “That’s enough, Sebas. Don’t start.”
     
    Her mother would immediately spring up with an agility surprising in one so heavy, and rub her eyes on her cardigan sleeve, nodding in agreement with her husband. Meanwhile, their daughter stood stock-still in the middle of the tiny hall, never knowing what to say or do, or where to go once she’d quickly fought back her tears. She was never really sure what they expected of her so she preferred to remain where she was, waiting for someone else to take the lead so that she could respond in kind, being careful and polite, just as her godmother told her to be whenever they went to visit anyone. Her Sunday lunches were nothing like those afternoon teas with ladies who ate their cake using dainty knives and forks. She’d learned from the stories her godmother told her—which never featured wicked stepmothers—that poor, very, very poor parents cried a lot when they said goodbye to their children, and that if they sent them out into the world to earn their living when they were small, it wasn’t because they didn’t love them but because there wasn’t enough food to go around. That was why she didn’t like the tale of Hansel and Gretel or any of the adventures about defenseless children who found their way into the castle of a hungry ogre and stole his treasure. In the end, all those children returned home laden with gold, and the parents wept all over again, with joy this time, at their return. But Sara would never have known which home to return to, especially since she had noticed that in the flat on the Calle Concepción Jerónima, they only seemed to eat twice a day.
     
    Although she almost always felt sure she didn’t want to be like them, she sometimes wondered why her four older brothers and sisters lived with their parents while she was so far away, in a different house, in a different part of town, with a different family. But she never dared demand a definite answer, because she realized that Arcadio and Sebastiana were suffering, each in their own way—he, proud, terse but tender at the same time; she, much more humble and tearful. Her brothers and sisters, on the other hand, treated her with an indifference that varied from the distrust of the older ones, whom Sara would always regard as hostile adults, to the curiosity of Socorrito, the youngest girl. Socorrito had been born seven years before Sara, and she was the only one who went near Sara of her own free will,