The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  And I did have fun, so much fun that I didn’t have time to look for a toy shop to buy a present for my son. I ended up buying him a truck at the airport just before my flight left. Next to it in the shop window I saw a velvet-lined shawl in tones of red with long silk fringes that looked perfect for my wife. I was so sure she would like it I bought it in spite of the price - more than half of what I’d earned from the conference and the round table put together. As I paid, I felt calm, sure of what I was doing and my reasons for doing it, and guilt was not one of them. I’d often brought Mai gifts from trips when it had never even occurred to me to hook up with someone; just as often I’d not brought her anything, including after a trip to the Universidad de la Laguna when I didn’t even make it back to my hotel room the whole weekend. Although it wasn’t as much fun as La Coruña. Mai didn’t care if I didn’t bring her a present, but she always thanked me when I did. Although this shawl was something else.

  This was why, when Raquel walked out that afternoon, leaving me alone with a double whisky, I thought about Miguelito, who wasn’t even four years old when he’d watched his mother take off the shiny red wrapping paper, shriek, take the shawl delicately between her fingers, then throw her arms around my neck and cover me in kisses. My son didn’t remember it, he would have been too young, but perhaps the image of that shawl was engraved on his memory, because Mai cared for it more than she cared for herself, and always put it on when she got dressed up to go out. If he did remember it, I thought, then he would realise that it had been a present from me, something beautiful, rare and expensive, and it would never cross his mind that his father, who loved his mother so much he couldn’t even walk past a shop window if he saw something she might like, had spent the previous three days fucking like an animal with some professor from Valencia.

  Miguel will never know, I thought, he will never have to listen to his mother say in that calm, neutral tone with which she had once told me, ‘It’s a big world out there, and life is very short, and very long.’ The first time I heard them, the words were like a healing balm after the Chinese water torture of Lorna’s jealousy.

  ‘There’s no point in me hoping you’ll never come across another woman you find attractive, Álvaro,’ and she seemed calm, sure of what she was saying. ‘There are so many women in the world, so many men, so many people . . . But what we have together is important. It’s important to me, too important to throw it away over some stupid little thing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know. Yes . . .’ I said, unsure of where this conversation was heading.

  ‘Well then . . .’ She smiled. ‘I’ve always thought it’s better to do stupid little things and get them over with, otherwise if you bottle them up they grow into something much bigger. That’s why all I ask is that you be loyal, that you love me, and do not humiliate me or degrade me, and whatever stupid little things you do with other people are not important to me.’

  The first time I heard them, these words were like a healing balm, the second time I liked them less, and the third time I asked why she always talked as if it was just me, why she never mentioned herself.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re jealous!’ she said brightly, though I could not tell whether she liked the idea or found it inadmissible.

  ‘No . . . I don’t think so,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’m jealous, but I’d prefer not to find out.’

  Mai laughed and she never brought up the subject again. And when he grew up, her son, my son, Miguel, would have no memory of the hazy conditions of the pact that his mother had offered his father, the pact I had agreed to with a casual confidence that grew over time, and not only did I become sure that my wife’s speech referred only to me, I also ceased to worry about whether or not she was really having dinner with friends each time she went out.

  When I could no longer detect the distinctive taste of ice made with tap water in my glass, I looked up and realised that very soon only the waiters and I would remain, since the only other diners were already getting to their feet. I paid the bill and left quickly, but when I reached the street I had to stop and think what I was going to do next. I turned on my mobile and registered that I had eight missed calls and eight voicemails, two from Mai, three from my mother, one from Clara and two from Rafa. They were all about the same thing.

  ‘I’ve just left the restaurant,’ I said to Mai, who was the first person I managed to get hold of. ‘I turned on my phone and found out I’m the most wanted man in Madrid.’

  ‘Yep.’ She laughed. ‘It’s your mother, she wants to know if you can go to the solicitor’s office at six on Thursday afternoon for the reading of your father’s will.’

  ‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘What for? She must have a copy so presumably she already knows what’s in it . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s your mother’s business.’

  ‘And can you come on Thursday?’

  ‘I’m not invited, Álvaro, it’s only the children. There would be no bequests to sons- and daughters-in-law, we know that.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Her very words.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ We both burst out laughing. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to find a way to be there, though I don’t know how . . .’

  I realised that I wasn’t ready to talk to my mother just yet, to hear her delicate but firm voice, that heartbreaking note of constant reproach, ‘Oh, Álvaro, where have you been, I seem to spend my whole life running round after you.’ My mother was a tough woman, but I didn’t quite know how tough - I remembered the hard-headed discipline she had meted out to us as children, a discipline that alternated with intense surges of affection, which was a very different combination to the attitude of my father, who seemed much more indulgent, except when he was angry, when he would explode into a furious rage that terrified everyone, even my mother. While Mai filled the silence, telling me about her day, how Miguelito’s teacher was very happy with his work, though not so happy that he was constantly picking fights in the playground, I wondered how much my mother knew, whether Raquel was just the last in a long line of lovers whose existence she was aware of; I wondered whether my father’s infidelity had hurt her, or hurt her only at first, or never hurt her; perhaps she had accepted it as an inevitable part of their marriage, or perhaps she had been suffering in silence for years.

  ‘. . . and I told him no,’ my wife went on, ‘of course we don’t encourage our son’s violent behaviour, although I know what you’re thinking, Álvaro, you’re thinking that it’s your fault, because you’re always happy when he’s rowdy and all you ever buy him is dinosaurs and robots covered in missiles . . .’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ I admitted, not prepared to enter into a discussion of the educational criteria of the most idiotic teacher I had ever come across. ‘Mai, can you do me a favour ?’

  ‘You want me to call your mother?’ I could hear her smile. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Would you? Please? It’s just that I’m really tied up right now. I still have to stop by the museum and I’ve no idea what time I’ll get home . . . Call her and tell her I’ll be there, then maybe she’ll give me a bit of peace for a change.’

  It was true, I did have to stop by the museum, I thought, as I hailed a taxi. I told the driver to take me to the Calle Jorge Juan, checking the street number on the key ring I’d been carrying in my left hand ever since I’d left the restaurant. ‘Is that between Velázquez and Núñez de Balboa?’ the driver asked. I told him I had no idea, that I’d never been there before. But I was wrong.

  I recognised the doorway even before I stepped inside, and suddenly I felt an icy chill running down my spine.

  So it’s true, I thought, though I hadn’t even imagined for a moment that it might be a lie. But everything had been so weird, my meeting with Raquel, the lunch we had, what she’d told me, the way she’d told me so that I hadn’t really thought of it as anything other than one more theory, one more version of my father, which seemed surprising, comical
at first, then bitter and hurtful, but certainly more moving than any of the theories I had come up with. The image of this old man, powerful to the last, determined to cling to life with a strength all but spent, his hands flayed, his teeth gritted with the effort, banished all other thoughts, not simply his wife’s face, but the possibility that he might fail, the inevitable humiliations his eighty-three-year-old body visited on his unbroken spirit. As I stepped through the door, walked across the foyer and waited for the lift, I could think of nothing else. I could think only of my father, how he had been a more extraordinary man than we, his children, would ever be. And it moved me to realise quite how much.

  The key Raquel had given me easily opened the armour-plated door of Loft E, which together with Loft F covered the right-hand wing of the building, while on the other side, the same floor space had been carved into twice as many apartments. My heart was hammering as I stepped into the spacious hallway and saw, at the far end, an enormous living room and, farther still, a terrace that seemed to rush headlong into space. I suddenly felt something almost like euphoria, but more tangible.

  ‘God, you are such a bastard, Papá!’ I said aloud, using the present tense, talking as if he were still alive. ‘What a complete prick . . .’

  Because although this loft apartment was no more luxurious, it was twice the size of the one my brother Rafa had tried to palm off on me a couple of years earlier.

  ‘We’ve just finished restoring a magnificent historic building, it’s in the best part of Salamanca,’ he told me over the phone. ‘It’s really special, I’d love to show it to you . . .’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I’m not in the market for an apartment.’

  ‘That’s what you say now, but just wait until you see it . . .’

  His persistence was suspicious. I didn’t trust his far-fetched business ventures, but there was nothing I could do when, one afternoon, Mai answered the phone.

  ‘I’d like to go and see it, Álvaro,’ she told me later, ‘if only out of curiosity. I mean, it’s not as if we have to do anything, just meet up with Rafa some Saturday morning, see the apartment and that’s that.’

  What we saw was more like the kind of luxury suite you see in films than an apartment someone might actually live in. It had a huge living room, an enormous bedroom that looked like an apse, a bathroom with more marble than a Persian mausoleum, a Jacuzzi and a ridiculous ‘American-style’ galley kitchen tucked away in a cupboard.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly impressive,’ said Mai, nodding her head.

  ‘Impressive?’ I said incredulously, but my brother ignored my scepticism.

  ‘It could be yours,’ he said.

  ‘Ours?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Rafa addressed me, ‘you can afford it . . .’ He put his arm round my shoulder - uh-oh, I thought - then started trying to reel me in. ‘I mean, you’ve been saving, Álvaro, haven’t you?’

  He was right. When I had returned from the States, I’d found out that my father had begun to share out some of his profits with us, quite a large share in fact, amounting to between two and three million pesetas each. He had set my share aside, he was always scrupulous and would never have favoured one of his children over another, and I had invested it all in the house. Later, until Mai got pregnant, I squandered the money I got each year on long, impressive trips. When impending fatherhood put an end to that, I thought it would make more sense to buy somewhere at the beach, an apartment or a little house that might become a childhood paradise for my unborn son, so I asked my father to hang on to my share until I told him otherwise.

  We were taking things slowly. Mai liked the idea of somewhere up north, but I wasn’t keen. Miguelito was still very young and my parents’ house at La Moraleja, with its servants, its vast garden and swimming pool, was too big and much too comfortable to give up just yet. So I had been saving for three years, that much was true. That year, my father had given us the same share as usual, but he told us there was more to come. He had just sold his stake in a company he’d never liked at such a profit that he had decided to share that equally with us as well. We all knew this, but Rafa was probably the only one who knew exactly how much we were going to get.

  ‘You see,’ he said to me as we were leaving, ‘between the money you’ve saved and what Papá is going to give you any day now, you have more than enough for a deposit. You can buy it, put it on the market and then you’ll make twice what you paid for it, because I’ll sell it to you at cost. And with whatever you make you can pay off the balance and then buy a place at any beach you like.’

  ‘Yes, but the thing is, I don’t . . .’

  ‘I know, you don’t know anything about business,’ he got in before me. ‘But this is the sweetest, easiest deal you’ll ever be offered. Clara’s going to take one of the others, and Julio would have too, but Verónica won’t let him . . .’

  ‘Look, Rafa, count me out.’

  ‘OK,’ he said with a pained look. ‘Whatever you say . . .’

  He didn’t say anything more about it, but when I got home, I began to think I might have made a mistake.

  ‘Listen, I’ve had it up to here with your brother Rafa,’ my father roared down the phone. ‘I’ve told him a thousand times, not to get you involved, not to rip you off, but he won’t listen. He needs money, of course he does, he always needs money, because he’s got his fingers in too many pies, he doesn’t even tell me the half of it . . . I’ve never met anyone as fanatical about money as your brother, not that you ever see him spending it.’

  ‘So you mean . . .’ I was a little surprised by my father’s vehemence, ‘you mean the apartments aren’t worth . . .’

  ‘The apartments are worth a fortune,’ he interrupted me, ‘of course they are, that’s why he’s hanging on to them. He’s sold three, two little ones to an American film distributor who’ll rent them out to film stars when they have to stay in Madrid, and one of the large apartments to one of the directors of the Banco de Santander, who wants somewhere to screw his mistress, because if you’ve seen the apartments you’ll know that’s exactly what they’re designed for.’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me, but now you mention it . . .’

  ‘The thing is, he’s made his money, but he still has three apartments on his hands and he won’t find it easy to get a buyer quickly. If he took his time he could make a fortune on them, but he seems to need the money fast - God knows why - and obviously millionaires don’t grow on trees . . . That’s why he thought about your idiot brother-in-law Curro, who said yes to him until I had a word with your sister. He wouldn’t dare try it on with Julio, and Angélica still has to pay off half her mortgage, so that leaves you and Clara . . .’ He sighed as if he were tired of constantly repeating himself. ‘Listen, you call him and tell him I said you’re having nothing to do with the Calle Jorge Juan, let him sell you one of those new houses in Arroyomolinos at cost, a house for a normal family with two kids and a dog . . . You’ll see, I’m the one who’ll end up having to buy one of those bloody apartments . . .’

  I never did call my brother about buying a house in Arroyomolinos, but my father must have said something to Rafa, because he didn’t mention his bargain when I next saw him.

  ‘So this is why you didn’t want us buying here, isn’t it, Papá?’

  I crossed the vast expanse of the half-empty living room. I recognised the furniture: the three white leather sofas, the glass-topped coffee table, the dining table flanked by eight chairs, the teak deckchairs on the terrace, were the same ones I had seen in the apartment Rafa had shown me. ‘You even managed to get the furniture from the show flat,’ I thought. ‘Nice work . . .’ But there were other details I recognised too, the big, healthy plants, the tastefully framed abstracts on the walls. It was obvious that nobody had actually lived here - that wasn’t what these apartments were for, I remembered, but there were some well-thumbed books on a shelf above the television and a crystal ashtray on the coffee table, clean but clearly used.
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br />   The bathroom was much more instructive. On two chrome hooks beside the door were a pair of bathrobes, a large one in white and a smaller one in salmon pink. On the stand next to the washbasin were two toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste, some jars of cream, a can of shaving foam and a tissue holder. In the drawers, I found a box of tampons, some aspirin, a make-up bag, some cotton face wipes and two different types of disposable razor in blue and pink. Through the shower screen, I could see gels, shampoos and a well-worn facecloth. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, but when I came to the Jacuzzi, which was even bigger than the one Rafa had shown me, and was almost entirely surrounded by a large picture window with a spectacular view of the city, I noticed dozens of half-burned candles sitting round the edge. Fucking hell, I thought, how tasteless, how tacky, and before I’d even finished the thought I realised my face was burning.

  But the burning on my face was as nothing compared to the sudden, savage blaze raging inside me, the flames of innocent guilt, an infinite shame that did nothing to appease the heat. ‘Please, take a seat. I’m sorry, I should have offered you a drink. Would you like a coffee?’ And Raquel Fernández Perea, who was more beautiful than she seemed, lighting the last candle before slipping naked into the Jacuzzi. Easing her thirty-five-year-old body, her skin, velvety as a rare peach, her gorgeous legs, those hips slightly too wide for her narrow waist, into the water so that my father could take her in his arms as he thought to himself that his son Alvaro was a bloody fool who didn’t have the first idea about what was horrible or tasteless or tacky in this world. This new feeling, of being a naive idiot, an inadvertent witness to a complexity I could not begin to understand, simply added to the excitement and shame I had felt a moment before. And this is nothing, I thought, this is nothing.

  At first glance, the bedroom shed no further light. The domed room was like an apse, making the king-size bed seem like some pagan altar, an effect reinforced by the two alcoves above the bedside tables. The tables themselves were beautiful, simple lines, slightly curving, like the matching chest of drawers against one of the side walls. There was an enormous, flat-screen television on the far wall and underneath, on a metal TV stand, was a DVD player and a neatly arranged pile of films.