The Wind From the East by Almudena Grandes Page B

understand.”
     
    “What?”And he burst out laughing, feeling more important than ever. “But it’s so easy!”
     
    Sometimes it was the boy who started the conversation. Crossing the living room en route to the garden, he’d point at one of the large illustrated books that occupied the lowest bookshelf. Sara would carry it outside and show it to him, at last finding a use for all the heavy tomes she had begun to accumulate over the past few years— The Prado Museum , Spanish Fauna , The Hermitage , Nature Reserves of Europe , The Masterpieces of Michelangelo , Australia , Picasso —since her godmother had tired of giving perfume or scarves to an old spinster like herself. It made Sara feel useful, reading out the names of the paintings or statues or monuments or places in the photos, although she sometimes felt overwhelmed by Andrés’s omnivorous curiosity.
     
    “And the duck-billed platypus?” he’d ask suddenly, as if she knew what he was talking about.
     
    “What?”
     
    “The duck-billed platypus. It’s a disgusting animal that’s got boobs but it lays eggs, and it’s got a duck’s beak, I think. It lives in Australia, but it isn’t in this book.”
     
    “Oh, yes?” Sara cast her eyes over the list of illustrations several times, but in vain. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it never lets anyone take photos of it. Or maybe it’s extinct.”
     
    “No,” he’d answer, suddenly as sure of this piece of information as he was of the direction of the wind.“I’d know about it. But it must almost be extinct, which is a shame, because I’d really like to see one. In my science book last year there was only a drawing of it.”
     
    “Well, I’ll try to find a photo of it in another book.The thing is, it isn’t easy here, but remind me about it the next time I go to Cadiz.”
     
    “Or Madrid,” suggested Andrés, his eyes suddenly shining, because he liked to imagine that, one day, she’d take him with her and show him the city she came from.“It’d be easier in Madrid.”
     
    “Yes, but the thing is I don’t think I’ll be going back to Madrid.” Sara tried to let him down gently.“At least not for the time being.”
     
    “Ah!”Andrés acquiesced, never daring to ask her why, and then he was off again, saying he’d love to see the photo of the strange mountain that was so flat it looked as if the top had been lopped off with a knife.
     
    Andrés was a quick learner, and he’d repeat the names over to himself so that he wouldn’t forget them. Sara would watch him, recalling how much energy it took to deal with all that information, all those names and titles, dismantling concepts with the tools of the mind and then nailing them into memory through sheer will, and every time the boy managed to link one concept with another, or dared to voice a correct supposition, it pleased Sara even more than it did him. She felt that Andrés was a special boy, that his seriousness, his focus and his melancholy nature were symptoms of an unease that bordered on anguish. Perhaps it was simply that she was too old to kneel down on the floor and play toy cars with him, but the wound seemed to go deeper than that. Difficult lives produce difficult children—she knew that herself—and Maribel’s lot was not an easy one.
     
    “Well, what can I tell you?”When Sara finally got Maribel to confide in her, almost unintentionally, about the boy’s father, it took only a few sentences to clear up the mystery. It was a banal story, like so many others. “What a disaster. I left school at fourteen. My teachers said I was bright but my family wasn’t well off, so I went to work in a supermarket, as a messenger at first and then in the produce department. That’s where I met Andrés’s father—he’s called Andrés too, he’s the son of a hauler and he drove a small truck. I saw him every day, because he delivered the bread and rolls.They called him ‘Tasty Bread’ because he was so