The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘No, I went to the Marist brothers’ school . . .’

  ‘What, and everyone there was clever ?’ I shrugged my shoulders and she laughed. ‘Well, anyway, we all had to do them. There was a rumour that a lot of the questions were trick questions, and you had to read every question twice so as not to fall for them, and it was true. In the maths test, there was data missing in the problem, and in the language test some of the answers were identical. Then later, on a different sheet, there were two almost identical drawings of a housewife hoovering. They looked the same, with headscarves and pleated aprons and faces like something out of a 1950s advertisement, but one of them was hunched over more than the other because, although they both had their left hand on the handle, the first woman had her right hand halfway down the extension, while the other woman had hers much farther up, near the handle. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled, ‘I’ve seen that sort of drawing.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. So, the question was “Which of these women will end up feeling more tired and why?” So, there I was, I’d always got good marks, was one of the best in the class, and I put neither of them because the vacuum cleaner engine does all the work . . . Can you believe it, I was the only one who got it wrong? The only one, honestly, the teachers couldn’t understand it. Even my friend Marga, a moron who got herself suspended from school at least three times a year, got it right. And she said, “Have you never used the vacuum cleaner at home?” so I said, “Of course I have, lots of times” and she said, “How could you get it wrong, then?” I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards it occurred to me to argue that it was outrageous, in a girls’ school, to have a picture of a woman pushing a vacuum cleaner as an intelligence test designed to assess your aptitude for university, it was sexist, and that that was why I’d answered the way I had.’

  ‘Very clever,’ I admitted.

  ‘Maybe, but I still didn’t get the marks. That damn Hoover lowered my average in science. In the final examination they recommended I study humanities . . . And that’s not the worst of it . . . The worst thing is I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, I can explain it to you if you like.’

  ‘OK.’

  She grinned and went on smiling as though walking through the cafeteria, the light, the commotion, the catcalls of the children pressed against the railing had changed something until we found ourselves somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar yet comfortable, not simply because Julio Carrión González had disappeared but because the intimacy Raquel had instigated when she took my arm had been reinforced by a flurry of little gestures. It fascinated me to watch her movements, analyse and interpret them every time she leaned forward and brought her face close to mine, every time she brushed my fingers with hers then quickly pulled them away, every time she folded her arms on the table and leaned on them, carelessly or deliberately, pushing her breasts together, but what I found even more compelling was the lightness of her voice, weaving a commonplace story and yet one which was strange to her and precious to me.

  ‘Well, I think I should phone Marga and tell her I finally know the answer to the vacuum cleaner question.’

  ‘Do you still see her ?’

  ‘Not much, but I still see her from time to time. She was my best friend in secondary school and when we started university, but she studied to be a teacher, then she gave it up, got married, had a kid, then I got married, both our husbands were arseholes, I got divorced, she didn’t, she had a daughter, I didn’t, and now . . . We just don’t see much of each other . . . I love her, but I can’t understand how she can live like that. Obviously she thinks exactly the same thing about me, but anyway, she’s not nearly as stunning as Berta, so you got a good deal.’

  ‘I didn’t think Berta was all that stunning,’ I objected.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t seen her naked.’ She raised one eyebrow and laughed. ‘It’s not that big a deal - it’s obvious you don’t go to the theatre much! Directors are always getting her to take her clothes off . . .’

  I’d never heard her talk like this. I was so caught up listening to this ordinary, funny, ironic, intelligent, bitchy woman I had just discovered that I didn’t notice the waiter arrive.

  ‘Álvaro, darling, it’s a quarter to nine,’ the waiter said, and I realised then that we were the only customers left in the bar. ‘It’s not that we’re closing up - we should have closed fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Sorry, Pierre,’ I said, putting some money on the table. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  Pierre was tall, heavyset, muscular with sideburns like a bandit’s and a long thin moustache which seemed entirely incompatible with his style.

  ‘No problem, honey, it’s just that today is Friday,’ he said as he headed towards the cash register. ‘And you know what happens on Fridays.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Raquel protested, ‘what does happen on Fridays?’

  ‘His boyfriend comes home,’ I explained, ‘he’s in the army, or rather he’s a professional in the armed forces, as he says. You should see him on Mondays, he spends all day sighing and complaining about how he aches all over.’

  ‘Why do you call him Pierre? Is he French?’

  ‘No, he’s from Talavera de la Reina. It’s just that he thinks Pablo sounds too butch.’ Raquel was laughing so hard, enjoying herself so much, that only then did I think of something that I should have thought of earlier. ‘Do you want to hang on here for the change? There’s something I forgot to do. I’ll meet you at the front door in a couple of minutes . . .’

  The shop was closed, but one of the assistants came over and opened the door, tapping his watch as he did so. When I came out, Raquel didn’t ask why I’d kept her waiting or what was in the plastic bag. The motorway was clear and we were back in Madrid before we realised it. At the first light on the Paseo de la Castellana I turned to look at her.

  ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ she said, nipping her lower lip with her teeth.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Of course you know, Raquel, you always know everything. You always have done.’

  ‘Which would you prefer, a plan including dinner or not including dinner ?’

  ‘Depends what the alternative to dinner is.’ She laughed, but quickly recovered herself.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she shrugged again, ‘how about another drink?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What do I know?’ She smiled, then turned to the window for a moment, as though she needed time to think, but I wasn’t going to let her off that easily. ‘That way, I suppose.’

  ‘In that case, I’d prefer to eat first.’

  She’d reserved a table at a restaurant close to where she lived and where everyone seemed to know her, just as they had in the first restaurant she’d taken me to, but this time I didn’t need her to explain the menu to me.

  ‘Here.’ I took a gift-wrapped box out of the plastic bag and put it on the table.

  ‘For me?’ She picked it up, brought it to her ear and shook it. ‘Is it a present?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not a present for you . . . It is you, it’s like a metaphor, something that defines you.’

  She frowned at me, carefully took off the wrapping paper and took out a cardboard box. She seemed disappointed.

  ‘This is me?’ she said. ‘A board game?’

  ‘It’s not a board game,’ I said, taking the box, ‘don’t go all economist on me, Raquel.’

  I took out the contents of the box. I set the base - a black plastic circle with two grooves in it - on the table and slotted the two transparent side pieces into the grooves. Then I took out the most important piece. The external pendulum was crossed vertically by an oval piece of metal which held the inner pendulum - a rod with two plastic balls attached, one red, one black, that spun freely. A couple of small horizontal rods stuck out from both sides of the metal oval a few centimetres
beneath its centre of gravity. I slotted them into the perspex walls so they would support the double pendulum, which now swung in the air.

  ‘This device, which you so disparagingly dismissed as an executive toy, has two pendulums - see?’ I said, holding them tightly so as to give nothing away. ‘The outer one is an ordinary pendulum, it swings over and back, over and back, over and back, always the same. But the internal rod is a chaos pendulum, it’s like you.’ I set the first pendulum in motion, waited a few moments and then the second began to swing wildly. ‘It’s impossible to predict which way it will swing at any point - see? It speeds up, slows down, stops, starts, changes direction, changes its mind, seems to be mocking us . . . It’s unpredictable, unknowable, fascinating, but it’s never the same, because it moves according to a mysterious force, but you’d never guess that if I hadn’t told you. It’s funny, brilliant, strange ... just like you.’

  She stopped the pendulum and set it going again. Then she looked deep into my eyes.

  ‘I’m all those things?’

  ‘And more . . .’ I said, captivated. ‘I forgot to mention that watching it is addictive. Like the sea. You never tire of looking at it.’

  Raquel Fernández Perea closed her eyes, covered them with her hands, smiled and sat motionless for a moment. Then she began to shake her head.

  ‘This is madness . . .’ she whispered before picking up the menu and saying at a more normal volume, ‘Would you like to share something?’

  ‘Yes,’ I paused, waiting until she looked up at me questioningly, ‘madness.’

  She closed her eyes again and blushed.

  ‘Apart from that?’ Maybe she’d been telling the truth, maybe she was a lousy actress, because her voice was shaking.

  ‘Apart from that, I don’t care, so why don’t you order for us both? I mean, that’s what you would have done anyway . . .’

  And yet she gave me the option of staying sane.

  Dinner was hurried, awkward and confused. Raquel didn’t eat much and I didn’t eat anything, but we both drank a fair bit. The wine she chose soothed my palate without eliminating the tingling sensation I could feel on my tongue. It was fear, but it was delicious, the thrill of being overwhelmed by her every gesture, by every movement of her body as it tensed, relaxed, shifted.

  I tried to anticipate how she would feel, the taste, the smell of her, everything I might sense through my hands, my fingers, my lips. I wanted her so much that I didn’t even remember that I had forbidden myself from thinking about my father.

  She had decided to behave as though nothing was happening, offered me a way out when we both simultaneously said ‘no’ to dessert.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Please.’ I choked on the word as though I really was drowning.

  Leaving the restaurant, we walked at some distance from each other in the direction she had chosen, as men and women do on the brink of their first time. We came to the doorway of an old house. The façade had recently been painted a daring blue, which contrasted with the creamy white of the antique mouldings. She leaned against the wall and from her bag she took the stainless-steel propelling pencil and the silver pillbox I had found in the bedroom she had shared with my father. She placed both in the palm of one hand and looked at me. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t need to. She was offering me a way out and I rejected it, kept it in my pocket with the final excuse, the final pretext. Then I kissed her, and as I was kissing her, for the first time in my life I was perfectly aware of the earth turning on itself, wheeling about the sun, just beneath my feet.

  On 25 April 1944 a young, silent, dark-skinned man, with a military crop but civilian clothes, stepped off the Berlin train at Orléans. In the inside pocket of his jacket he carried a card issued in Madrid in 1937 by the Unified Socialist Youth and bearing the name Julio Carrión González. In the right-hand pocket of the same jacket, he had another card, issued in 1941, also in Madrid, also in the name of Julio Carrión González, this one for the Falange Española de las JONS. Somewhere in his bag, carefully folded, were a German uniform, a Spanish uniform and between them his military record and a safe conduct in the name of Julio Carrión González issued in Riga some four months earlier by the commander-in-chief of the Spanische Freiwilligendivision, or the Blue Division.

  The man should not have been on this train. Members of the Blue Division had been repatriated in autumn 1943, except for some three thousand volunteers who elected to serve under German command. But even these men - the Blue Legion - returned to Spain in April 1944 as Hitler’s armies were preparing to retreat from the Eastern Front. There was no reason why Julio Carrión should have been in this place on this date, and yet all of his documents were authentic.

  The soldier with multiple identities was travelling alone, carrying only one light bag, but ten minutes before the train was due to arrive at the next station he would take it from the luggage compartment, put on his scarf and his hat and nod goodbye to the other passengers, with whom he had not exchanged a single word. If any of them remembered him, they would only remember him leaving the train, just as, when he climbed into the next compartment, the passengers seeing him struggling to put his bag into the luggage rack, before taking off his scarf and hat, would assume he had just boarded the train.

  As they came into Orléans station, he repeated the same obvious, exaggerated actions as he had at every other station. And as before, he stood away from the carriage door, his hat tilted forward, hiding his face, politely allowing ladies, old men, couples with children and - especially - German soldiers on first, always taking the last place. In Orléans too he waited until all the passengers joining the train had boarded, but he did not follow them into the carriage itself. Instead he stood by the door until the train started to move and as the engine slowly pulled out of the station, he jumped down, ending up far down the platform, a long way from the other passengers who had just disembarked and were greeting people who had come to meet them, or dragging their suitcases towards the exit. He began to walk towards them quickly, purposefully, fingers crossed, as though he had nothing to hide. As he turned the first corner he pulled off his tie and tossed it into a rubbish bin, and as he rounded the second corner, he took off his hat.

  This young, silent, dark-skinned man who had genuine documents of every sort was in fact Spanish, but he had no desire to go back to Spain because he was convinced that Hitler was going to lose the war. This was why he had just deserted.

  The choice of Orléans had not been an accident. At the beginning of the campaign, he, like everyone else, had been surprised that the train taking them to Germany, which had stopped at every station until they reached the border at Irún, was scheduled to go from one end of France to the other without stopping. As they crossed the border, the volunteers in this glorious European campaign to wipe Russian barbarism from the face of the earth were wreathed in honours. In every Spanish city, large or small, there had been celebrations, banquets, receptions, girls laden with flowers. It seemed strange that nothing similar was happening in France, nor did logic help him to work out the origin of the harsh, sharp, metallic sounds he heard two or three times as the train slowed down to go through the first station.

  ‘What was that?’ Eugenio, who had not taken his head out of his book since they left Madrid, looked up at Julio, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Julio, who was sitting by the window, looked out and saw a figure in the distance, his arm raised.

  ‘They’re throwing stones!’ someone shouted. ‘The French bastards are throwing stones at us!’

  At first no one know who they were or why they were doing it, but it quickly became apparent. As the train passed through the next station, Eugenio and Julio ran out into the corridor and carefully slid open the window.

  ‘They’re yelling “sons of bitches”,’ Eugenio glanced at Julio, ‘in Spanish.’

  ‘They don’t have an accent.’

  ‘They’re not French, then.’

  ‘No,
I’d say they’re Spanish.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Eugenio closed the window, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Julio thought. It was not the first time Eugenio’s reactions had surprised him, but he said nothing, because he had not yet dared broach the subject of politics with him. He was too afraid of putting his foot in it, of not getting the terms, the vocabulary, right, of saying something suspicious, though he knew he was being overly cautious since his friend had a prodigious ability to hear only what he wanted to hear. Eugenio went about as though he were floating a couple of metres above the ground. He had his own version of the world, he didn’t notice what was going on around him, and he took ingenuousness to new heights with a unique combination of naivety and fanaticism which denied any reality that refused to bend to the fierce will of his gaze. It was not simply that Eugenio Sánchez Delgado was convinced that he was right, it was unthinkable to him that anyone could possibly make the mistake of believing the contrary.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ he said after a moment. ‘After all the effort we’ve put in, all the deaths, the blood, now that we’re finally rebuilding a free country, they come and start throwing stones at us. At us! Does anyone here understand?’

  His glasses would slowly slide down his nose, underscoring the theatrical fervour of these diatribes, until they were perched on the tip and he would push them back up with his forefinger. The first time Julio had heard him talk like this he had been surprised at his fervour, at such an utter lack of cynicism; in vain he waited for a wink, a nudge, to which he might respond with a loud complicit chuckle. It took him some time to comprehend that his friend was utterly serious. Now, when he spoke, Julio did not doubt his sincerity, though he still thought that what Eugenio had said bordered on perversity or stupidity.

  ‘Hombre,’ he ventured to suggest, ‘they lost the war.’

  ‘So what?’ Eugenio turned brusquely, his glasses already halfway down his nose. ‘We could have lost it, couldn’t we? And you think if we had done we’d be in France attacking out own countrymen? No, sir. We’d be in Spain helping to rebuild the country, we’d be doing our duty as Spanish men.’