The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘No, no, I mean, yes, if you like . . .’ You’re a complete bitch, Raquel, this is dangerous. ‘I don’t have anything on tomorrow.’

  This was a lie. I was supposed to be looking after Miguelito. Mai was going out to dinner with her girlfriends. She’d let me know well in advance. So, before she reappeared with half a kilo of pastries from my favourite bakery, I remembered that Clara, who owed me a favour, had already agreed to have Miguel for a sleep-over - pizza, popcorn, films and karaoke - the sort of thing Miguelito couldn’t resist and his mother couldn’t object to.

  Once I had got them both to agree, I thought about Raquel. Not about my grandmother, nor the letter, not about my father, nor the two membership cards, his uniforms, or the oath of loyalty, just about Raquel. Everything else could wait, because all I could think about was Raquel Fernández Perea, the only woman who had ever made me lose control, who, without trying, had disturbed my lush peaceful garden where nothing happened unless I wanted it to happen, unless it was consistent with who I was, with my life, the life of a man to whom random things simply didn’t happen.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Raquel. I couldn’t. And when I saw her, as I ran my tongue along my razor-sharp teeth, I felt that same thirst, that same perfect, pure desire I had felt that first night when she’d arrived dressed to kill. Ten, nine, eight, I’m falling. My heart leapt into my mouth with the agility of a well-trained pet and the shock was so great that I didn’t even notice she was not alone.

  ‘Hi.’ She leaned towards the car window, her breasts taut against her low-cut dress. ‘Get out for a minute, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine.’

  The other girl had short hair that was dyed pink with mauve highlights, a bit over the top, but it suited her. She was tall, big boned, good looking at first glance, though less so when I looked closely at her - the opposite effect to the one that Raquel had had on me.

  ‘This is my friend Berta.’ She gestured towards me. ‘This is Álvaro.’ She looked at me. ‘Berta wanted to meet you, she’s heard so much about you.’

  ‘She’s right.’ Berta came up to me and kissed me on both cheeks.

  They both smiled at me separately before smiling at each other; I tried hard not to blush and realised that I had failed. I should have expected something like this, but I hadn’t thought Raquel was capable of improving on her previous military campaigns. To get her back, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I stared at her friend. Berta’s skin was a little rough, but she had a good body, and she was wearing green combat trousers with dozens of pockets and a pink spaghetti-strap top.

  ‘So are you interested in black holes too?’ I asked.

  ‘That depends . . .’ Berta laughed. ‘Not as much as I am in other holes ...’

  ‘Do you want to come with us?’ I suggested, and regretted it even before I had finished the sentence, though I was pleased to see that my suggestion made Raquel nervous. ‘Up close and personal, I guarantee, they’re more interesting.’

  ‘No, she can’t . . .’ So nervous that she was the one who answered. ‘It’s a pity, but Berta has a rehearsal. Actually, she’s going to be late ...’

  Berta quickly backed her up, kissed us goodbye and walked away slowly, as though she didn’t care if she was late.

  ‘Is she an actress?’ I asked Raquel when she was sitting in the car next to me.

  ‘Yes. Theatre. She’s good too.’ She smiled at me. ‘She’s rehearsing, Valle-Inclán’s Barbaric Comedies, they’re doing all three. You should come to the opening night.’

  ‘She’s not much like you,’ I said, as I tried to start the car and keep my eyes off her body.

  ‘Who, Berta?’ She seemed surprised.

  ‘Investment advisers don’t normally have friends with pink hair and diamond studs through their nose.’

  ‘We’re best friends. We’ve known each other for years.’ She glanced at me and paused. ‘You know, I tried to be an actress too. Or at least I was in the drama society at university. That’s where we met. Berta was talented, I was terrible.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s true, honestly . . .’ She turned to look at me as she spoke. ‘I liked the theatre, I loved acting, but it didn’t come to anything. It’s not that I couldn’t do it, it’s just that even I didn’t believe in what I was saying, and after a while I couldn’t get the lines out. I’d dry up halfway through. We put on Strindberg’s Miss Julie once, do you know it?’

  ‘No.’ As I shifted gear, my hand grazed her knee but she didn’t move away. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Of course you should !’ But she smiled as she said it, forgiving my theatrical ignorance. ‘It’s a masterpiece! A story of impossible love . . . there are only three characters, Julie, the daughter of a count, her footman Jean, and Kristin the cook. The director, who was playing Jean, was interested in me so he offered me the part of Julie, she’s young, beautiful, rich and aristocratic but in truth she’s unhappy because she feels trapped by social mores, she hates it, it’s like a prison, but she doesn’t dare to escape. Julie despises men, she feels being attracted to them is a weakness, but she’s in love with Jean. She knows she can never marry him, that he’ll marry the cook even though he’s in love with her.’

  ‘What a tragedy!’

  ‘Well, it is! What do you expect?’ She accepted my sarcasm good-naturedly. ‘The play takes place on the Feast of St John when the footman and Miss Julie meet. She flirts with him, he seduces her and they decide to run away together. It ends at dawn when Miss Julie’s father, the count, rings the bell, which is the symbol of his power. It’s the sound that brings them back to the real world, returns each of them to their allotted place. It’s one of the best parts ever written for a young actress, a gift . . . I did my best, honestly, I rehearsed and rehearsed, but every time I said the lines I couldn’t bring myself to believe them, I couldn’t believe in Julia’s suffering, her hysteria, her rage . . . So I gave up, I stopped going to rehearsals, and quit the drama society for good. In the end Berta played Miss Julie and she was so good they extended the run.’

  She paused, as though she was expecting some response from me. I felt disconcerted, not simply because it would never have occurred to me that she had wanted to be an actress, but also, maybe particularly, because of the artlessness with which she’d told me this story, as though she didn’t care what conclusions I might draw from it. I had never been certain of her behaviour and now, though it seemed childish, I had another reason to distrust her, this skill, this self-assurance which from the start had seemed artificial and rehearsed. Yet her revelation didn’t put me off, for I had become a guinea pig, a lab rat, that knows what is waiting at the other end of the tunnel but can’t resist going through it, the same way the bull can’t resist charging a matador’s cape.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. I remembered that she was an intelligent girl, and I knew that she knew what I was thinking.

  ‘Nothing.’ I realised there was no need to explain further.

  ‘I’m a really terrible actress, Álvaro, believe me, I am.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ She nodded. ‘It’s a bit personal, you might be offended.’

  ‘If I don’t like it, I won’t answer.’

  ‘Did you sleep with the director ?’

  ‘Álvaro!’ She burst out laughing and I did too, we laughed so hard that I veered on to the hard shoulder and didn’t even realise it until I heard the noise, the tat-tat-tat you get when your car crosses the white line. ‘I don’t know how a nice boy like you could ask such a question!’

  ‘Just curious,’ I replied. ‘Anyway, you don’t know what kind of a boy I am yet.’

  ‘Seriously?’ She laughed again, but I didn’t look at her this time. ‘I suppose you’re right . . . And yes, I did sleep with him. I was nineteen and he was thirty, I was a terrible actress and he was a very good actor . . .’

  ‘And you believed in him.’

  ‘Of cours
e. We were together for a while, but he never forgave me for walking out. First I left the theatre, then he left me. It didn’t really mean that much to me. Oh, I cried my eyes out at the time, but I was grateful afterwards. I’ve never met anyone who so attracted and infuriated me at the same time. He was handsome, intelligent and sexy, but he was also neurotic, a perfectionist to the point of mania, he was the most neurotic man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘That’s the theatre.’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled, ‘but it can be wonderful too - and nothing wonderful comes for free.’

  That’s why we’re in this mess, I was about to add, but I didn’t say anything because I was having fun, and I almost felt disappointed when we arrived in Alcobendas.

  Stepping into the foyer, I glanced at the pendulum and congratulated myself on my ingenuity and the synchronicity of time, space, chance, the traffic in the city, and the planet. Two and half minutes, I calculated, three at most. I looked at my watch, and explained the structure of the museum to Raquel, leading her slowly towards the circle of vertical rods between which a large sphere oscillated. A moment before the impact, I fell silent. Raquel looked at me, surprised, and I pointed towards the pendulum.

  ‘One,’ I counted aloud, ‘two,’ I paused, ‘three.’

  The ball knocked over one of the rods. She looked at me and smiled.

  ‘What happened ?’ she asked.

  ‘What happened ?’ I asked.

  ‘The ball is spinning?’ she guessed.

  ‘No, the ball doesn’t spin. The pendulum moves continually between the same two points, first one way then the other, always with the same force, the same inertia, the same reassuring stability.’ She frowned, thinking. ‘What’s moving is the earth, Raquel. It’s moving right now beneath your feet, turning on itself, that’s why the ball hit the bar and knocked it over. In twenty-four hours it knocks them all down. Don’t tell me that’s not wonderful.’

  ‘It is,’ she finally admitted, her eyes on the pendulum, ‘it really is.’

  ‘Better than the theatre?’ She laughed. I loved it so much when she laughed. ‘And better still, it’s free.’

  She turned towards me and her laughter resolved into a deep, radiant smile, the small expression of a private joy that I would later come to know well. It was her way of saying that she was happy with me, that she was delighted to see me. It would not be long before I learned to live hanging from that thread, that smile which, that afternoon, I did not yet understand.

  ‘I really like it.’ She looked at the pendulum one last time. ‘Come on, teach me some more.’

  I gestured in one direction and slowly began walking. For better or worse, I was still the same, the son of my father, the magician, the playboy, the wizard, the snake-charmer, a more extraordinary man than any of his children would ever be, the lover of the woman who was walking by my side. He would not have hesitated, and I did not hesitate. I had a few more things up my sleeve as spectacular as Foucault’s pendulum, but I tried to eke them out carefully, planning the tour as though it were a performance, setting traps, altering the logic, the immutable laws of the universe. All that mattered was her, impressing her, making her happy, softening her up, winning her admiration the way a magician might, if he wanted to save the best trick for last. Raquel allowed herself to be led, adopting the curious, reverent, rapt attitude I had often noticed in intelligent adults and in most of the children who visited the museum. But what most impressed her was something that happened right at the end, as she was staring into a spiral that I could stare into for hours . . .

  ‘Hey, mister . . .’

  It was a girl of about twelve. She had been watching from a distance as I encouraged Raquel to push the red button, as I told her to be patient, as inside the vast bowl something began to move, began to change, began to take on a surprising, ethereal form . . . Raquel let out a shrill, excited gasp.

  ‘It looks like . . . a miniature tornado,’ she said almost fearfully, as though she was afraid of saying something stupid.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a tornado . . .’ I said. ‘It is one. You’re looking at a tornado, a small one but a tornado just the same. It’s the closest thing on this planet to a black hole because it even absorbs light.’

  ‘But . . .’ Her eyes shone with such intensity that for a moment her face reminded me of that beautiful unknown woman Paloma; I thought I could see a similarity - in the shape of her face, the angle formed by the chin and the neck, the high cheekbones. ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. We magicians never reveal our secrets.’

  I expected a wink, some spark of recognition, but she must not have heard me repeat the mysterious, frustrating phrase with which my father had invariably concluded his performances when I was a child, because she was still smiling into the tornado, absorbed by it, her eyes shining with childlike enthusiasm. My own eyes were drawn to her beauty, dazzled by it, blinded by it; it seemed to exert some tyrannical power over them, as though forbidding them ever to look at another woman. It was at that moment that the little girl shattered the illusion.

  ‘Excuse me, mister . . . Do you understand this stuff?’ She gestured around her at the exhibits. I nodded. ‘Could you explain something to me? There’s something I don’t understand . . .’

  I walked with the girl to the exhibit demonstrating the Coriolis effect while she explained that she’d come with her school, all her friends were in the shop and her teacher was no use because she only taught maths and was never very good at science. ‘What I don’t get is, when I look at it, it looks weird, and I know that something weird is happening, but I can’t work out what it is.’ I was amused by the way she talked, her forcefulness, the brusque way she interrupted me in mid-sentence before I’d finished explaining the effect.

  ‘Of course, that’s it,’ she yelped, ‘the water isn’t flowing the right way, it’s going down the drain the wrong way . . .’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘so do you understand it now? That’s why, when you turn on a tap in the southern hemisphere, the water drains in the opposite direction to what we expect in the northern hemisphere.’

  ‘I get it now.’ She nodded emphatically, as though someone had wound her up.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘what I’ve just explained is written on the sign. I should know, I wrote it. Next time, even if it seems a bit long, it’s best to read right to the end before asking questions.’

  ‘I know,’ she started to blush, ‘but I was listening to you telling her stuff, and she wasn’t reading the signs either . . .’ She pointed over my shoulder to Raquel, who was now standing next to me. ‘Anyway, sorry . . .’

  ‘No, don’t be sorry, it’s not a problem. It’s just that I’m not always here.’

  She thanked me again and ran off.

  ‘Clever girl, isn’t she?’ I said to Raquel. ‘That’s the best thing about working here.’

  She gave me a strange look, though not as strange as the words she said next.

  ‘I think I was wrong about you, Álvaro.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Raquel Fernández Perea couldn’t have known about the documents I’d found in my father’s study, nor what had happened the previous day. She couldn’t possibly have known about the existence of the little leather folder with the flimsy lock, she couldn’t have read my grandmother’s letter, though she might have seen the photos of her lover wearing his Spanish uniform, his German uniform, and some night when she was foolish enough to complain about the cold, she almost certainly would have heard him talk about the weather in Russia and Poland. I was fairly sure she couldn’t know anything more, it wasn’t logical, it made no sense that Julio Carrión González would brag to some young girl about a past he did not want even his children to know about. And yet, as we walked slowly towards the exit, her words hit me like a volley of sharp, judiciously aimed arrows.

  ‘Because you’re not like your father.’

  ‘That’s what you said the other nig
ht.’

  ‘I know, but . . . then it was just a hunch. Now, it’s a certainty.’

  I stopped and looked at her, her serious, almost solemn expression belied by her tender, half-closed eyes.

  ‘Is this about the girl . . .?’ I wondered aloud, and she nodded. ‘I was happy to talk to her, explain things, because then I know I’m not wasting my time . . .’ She nodded again and I slipped into the warmth of memory. ‘Papá would have criticised me for wasting my time on things like this. He did it often enough - my mother still does. The only time she ever came here she said it was more like a children’s playroom than a museum. It wouldn’t even have occurred to my father to come, but if he had he would have agreed with Mamá. Neither of them ever really understood what it is that I do, they’ve never really tried . . .’ Raquel Fernández Perea was still staring at me with the same solemn expression, the same tender eyes. ‘My father was handsome, rich, powerful and ignorant, the way only rich and powerful men can be ignorant: not because they don’t know much - my father knew a lot of things - but because they behave as though whatever it is they don’t know about doesn’t exist, as though it’s trivial or worthless. You know that, or at least you must have suspected it. I mean, you knew him, and yet . . .’

  ‘And yet I slept with him,’ she finished the sentence for me, ‘that’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was afraid I’d done something stupid, but she didn’t seem offended or angry with me. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What for?’ She smiled again. ‘Don’t worry. It’s just I don’t feel like talking about your father.’

  ‘Me neither. Fancy going for a drink?’

  ‘Don’t tell me there’s a bar here too?’

  ‘Oh yes, and you’re even allowed to smoke in it.’

  ‘You know what?’ She took my arm, pressed against me for an instant, but it was enough to dispel the awkwardness of the conversation, the insinuations. ‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody. It’s stupid, but, I don’t know, I just thought of it . . . In my final year at secondary school, they gave me a test, like an IQ test - I’m sure you know the kind of thing.’