The Wind From the East Read Online Free PDF Page B

Maribel!” Sara burst out laughing. She stroked Andrés’s hair, ruffling it and then smoothing it down again.
     
    She had her own secret feelings about the boy, but she couldn’t tell anyone about them, not even Maribel because she wouldn’t understand. Nobody would understand what Sara Goméz felt the first time she realized that, when she thought of Andrés, she could remember him only in black and white.
     
     
    Arcadio Gómez Gómez was a dark man. In those days, almost all men were, but young Sara had learned to distinguish between limited shades of grey.At one end of the scale were all the gentlemen who came to call at the flat in the Calle Velázquez: Don Julio, doctor to her godmother’s husband Don Antonio, and Don Fernando, the solicitor, and Don Cesar and Don Rafael, who had been friends of Don Antonio’s since attending the same Jesuit college as children, long before he became ill and before they won the war with the army in which they all three enlisted the same morning.They were all very much alike, from their heads—all three usually wore stiff hats with a band round the crown—to their feet clad in pointed shoes of punched leather. Each had a little moustache so fine and straight that it looked as if it had been painted on with a brush, dividing the space between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip into two precisely equal halves.They always wore grey suits, sometimes made from a light cloth that had a metallic sheen, sometimes in a heavier, dark flannel that was soft to the touch. And they always wore a badge in the buttonhole of their jacket, except Don Julio, who was a widower and wore a button covered in black fabric to show that he was in mourning. Doña Sara, the younger Sara’s godmother, enjoyed teaching the little girl about different fabrics, and the cut and style of her own clothes, but she never told her much about the uniform elegance of Spanish gentlemen in the 1950s, except that all those suits—so intrinsically grey they appeared grey even when they were navy blue—had been made in England, while the ties, with discreetly bold polka dots or little stars on plain backgrounds that sometimes even dared to be deep red, were always Italian and made of silk.
     
    These men in grey made up for the dry monotony of their appearance with the sophisticated elegance of all their gestures, from the studied nonchalance with which they handed their hats to the maid at the door, to the skilful way they tapped—always three times and with just the right force—the end of the cigarettes they were about to light on a silver cigarette case pulled with a magician’s dexterity from the inside pocket of their jackets. Secretly watching them through the crack of a half-open door, Sara enjoyed everything about these visits, especially when it was Don Cesar and Don Rafael, who always seemed so youthful and full of jokes that their mere appearance lit up the gloomy drawing room with the sparkle of a party. But the little girl, who was only allowed in to greet the adults and then leave, had fun witnessing these adult gatherings from afar, even when the visitor was just Brother José, the Father confessor, an imposing Dominican friar, tall, fat, bearded, who sweated profusely even in winter and had mad eyes that Sara found frightening.The Father, as they called him, had only one subject of conversation: El Pardo, the official residence of General Franco. Every time he uttered these two words, it was with the kind of reverence reserved for a person’s name, but he spoke so elliptically that it was impossible to make out what he was really trying to say.“It’s always the same, Antonio,” Doña Sara would conclude after seeing the monk out,“all that boasting and trying to make himself sound important, but he really doesn’t have a clue.” Although Sara didn’t understand this criticism any more than the gibberish spouted by the coarse monk himself, she took a dislike to him and although she