The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  He did not like the look of the bitter, surly regulars he found in the first Spanish-speaking bar so decided to try his luck next door. There, at the back of the bar, he found three men some years his senior, hard-working family men who were chatting in low voices as they polished off half a bottle of wine. He moved closer so that he could hear snatches of their conversation. The tall, grey-haired man with the easy smile who was sitting in the middle gestured theatrically as he made fun of one of his friends. Julio recognised the Madrid accent as he said: ‘Come on, don’t fuck around . . .’ That was why Julio chose him.

  ‘Perdone . . .’ The men did not seemed surprised to be addressed in Spanish. ‘Could I have a light?’

  ‘Of course, hijo,’ said the man, ‘here.’

  Julio lit his cigarette, looked at the men and decided they didn’t look much like anarchists. So, with a sly movement, hiding his arm with his body, he raised a clenched right fist in case they were communists, but did not call them comrades, in case they were socialists.

  ‘Cheers, compañeros,’ he finally ventured to say in a whisper.

  ‘Put down your fist, you little fool.’ The Madrileño who had given him a light was shaking his head with a benevolent, almost paternal smile. ‘Well, aren’t you just what we needed . . .’

  The whole is equal to the sum of its parts only when the parts do not interact.

  This is how it was, how it had always been before that night which altered the laws of physics, which refuted the eternal and sacred laws of the universe, leaving my tiny insignificant shoulders unprotected.

  When I left Raquel’s, dawn was breaking, and on the dirty pavements between the badly parked cars, beneath the pale curtain of last laughs, I found not a shard, not a splinter, of that vital axiom which had been shattered, painlessly and without the least resistance on my part, into a million tiny subatomic particles.

  This was not me, my life was not like this, and yet never had I felt more alive than I did at that moment when I found myself alone - not free, because my freedom no longer belonged to me. The hand is quicker than the eye, and even as I walked away, I felt Raquel’s hand holding me back though she did not touch me, her voice dictate my movements though she did not speak to me, and her beauty, all-powerful even in her absence, fetter my eyes completely. And I was happy, I missed nothing and no one. Not even my father, or my longing not to be his son.

  I had resolved not to think about him any more, and I managed to unplug the cable, but he was still there, in some corner of my mind. I was alive, he was not. This was significant, yet it did not answer the one mystery I did not need answered, for the most mysterious thing about that night was that I did not feel the expected surprise, the awkwardness, while I lay in bed with my father’s mistress.

  I was in bed with Julio Carrión González’s lover; this was the first time I had touched her, the first time I had caressed her, kissed her, slipped my tongue, my fingers and my cock inside her. The first time that my body felt the fingers, the tongue, the mouth of this woman who was no longer my father’s mistress, but mine, as though my freedom now resided in some obscure nook of her body. My freedom lay sleeping with her in a bed which felt like a new world, then like a newborn universe, impervious to the laws of physics, like a part of me that did not know how to and did not want to be reclaimed. I can’t say that I did not realise what was happening, I simply didn’t care, because this was the first time, and yet as I left her place, I felt as though I had done nothing, learned nothing, experienced nothing except the right to hope for the moment in which I touched, kissed, caressed Raquel Fernández Perea so that my hands, my tongue, my cock might recognise in her some unfamiliar part of myself.

  ‘The bottom line . . .’ said Fernando Cisneros the next day sitting at a bar halfway between his place and mine ‘. . . is you’ve got it bad.’

  ‘Hombre . . .’ His distillation of events was so crushing that I faltered. ‘I . . . I don’t know. I suppose that’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘One way?’ He laughed. ‘Oh no - it’s the only way. I saw this coming, anyone could have seen it coming from the very beginning.’

  He was right. Even I had seen it coming, though I did not want to, didn’t want to think about it, or even imagine it. But it was true. Anyone could have seen it coming from the very beginning, from that cold March morning when that mysterious woman had stared at me, patiently, determinedly, like someone with a mission, captivating my eyes, the useless lenses that now saw her everywhere they looked. So I did not disagree with Fernando, I simply asked for the bill.

  ‘I assume you’re paying, you dirty little fucker?’ he chided me before I could take it. ‘It’s the least you can do.’

  He smiled, and I saw Raquel’s smile superimposed on his, floating in the warm, boisterous air of the bar as we stepped out into the street, but it was there too, on the billboards, in the shop windows, in every woman I passed . . . Every woman was Raquel, was on the verge of becoming her, or had already been her, it was this that defined them. I walked along the pavement, aware of the time, of Fernando waiting to cross at the zebra crossing, which was the easiest way to get to the restaurant where we’d arranged to have lunch with my wife, and I smiled, I smiled every time I remembered some detail, a gesture, an image in my short-term memory, the only memory that mattered to me now. I finally had all the variables in the equation, but now I did not feel able to solve it, and my wistful longing for my warm and safe, tender and loving home dissipated with every step, with every thought.

  ‘Álvaro . . .’ Fernando put a hand on my shoulder as we waited for the light to go green.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get that smirk off your face.’

  Afterwards, I had studied her slowly, for a long time, from her toenails with their bright red nail polish, to her long brown hair, its tousled shock of curls. I stared as if my eyes might see beyond what was in front of me, might sense the outline of the bones, the colour of the blood, the obedient ranks of muscle under her skin, and still I could not understand her. She let me look, saw herself through my eyes, and waited for my eyes to meet hers. I didn’t know what to say. I watched her lips curl into a lazy smile and I kissed her slowly, patiently, kissed her for a long time, and the earth began to turn again.

  ‘You have a nice place,’ I said finally.

  ‘You haven’t even seen it yet!’ she said, laughing.

  She had led me by the hand through the foyer to a lift that was so small, so cramped, so slow, that it had seemed complicit in our fate.

  ‘If you don’t let me go, I won’t be able to get the door open . . .’

  The straps of her top had slipped from her shoulders, her skirt was rucked up to her waist and her cheeks were flushed. I kissed her before releasing her, the skirt slipped back down into place but she did not readjust her top.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ She laughed as she held the door open for me.

  ‘No.’

  Her room was at the far end of a narrow corridor which had doors on either side. I bumped into scattered pieces of furniture, stumbling like a blind man, led by her lips, her eyes, allowing myself to be guided by her into the spacious room. It was curiously shaped but comfortable; a cast-iron pillar with a capital of leaves and tendrils painted black stood to one side of the bed and a row of windows framed the night sky as though it were a photograph, an imagined image of itself.

  ‘But the room is really pretty,’ I insisted.

  By now I had had time to examine it, to study the elegant antique wooden writing desk, it’s finely turned legs gracefully counterpointing a severe armchair upholstered in black leather, which I also liked. The carpet was beautiful, a grid of brightly coloured geometric patterns - Turkish, I decided, or maybe Moroccan; and I liked the nineteenth-century porcelain lamp with coloured crystals dangling from white enamel arms artlessly painted with blossoms. The easy chair was upholstered in a sort of cut velvet I could never remember the name of, and ornaments were dotted here and there. I l
iked everything, but not as much as I liked the complete incongruity of this room and that other bedroom - large, semicircular, with walls of terracotta stucco and white alcoves, that temple to a kind of bad taste only the truly rich are capable of.

  ‘Yes, it is beautiful . . .’ she said, ‘especially during the day. The view is magnificent, because we’re so high up. I love this house,’ she smiled, ‘I’ve always loved it. I was very lucky to get it.’

  ‘Did you inherit it? I’d love to have inherited the house I lived in as a child, but one of my sisters got there first.’

  ‘I didn’t live here as a child, but it was a sort of inheritance, even if I’m paying for it . . . What happened is that they were knocking down my old place - well, mine and my ex-husband’s really, but in the divorce settlement I got the flat, and the mortgage.’ The whole street where I lived was being knocked down as part of an urban regeneration project, and instead of buying somewhere else with the money, I got another mortgage and took this place. It used to belong to my grandparents, but it was empty then. When my grandfather died, my grandmother decided to go and live with her daughter Olga, whose own husband had died a couple of years earlier and who lived close to where my parents were on the Carretera de Canillejas. But she still thought of this place as home and didn’t want to rent it out. She didn’t even want to sell it to me. ‘How can I do business with you, hija mía,’ she’d say, but a couple of months ago, I finally managed to convince her. The truth is, no one else was interested in this apartment. Both my brothers are married and have their own place, I’m the only one who wanted to live in the centre of town, and of course I can walk to work from here. San Bernardo, Santo Domingo, Ópera . . . It’s more or less a straight line . . .’

  You have another place now, I thought, a much more expensive apartment than this one. I thought this, but I did not say it. She looked at me and kissed me on the lips as though to reward my silence. Then she turned and took something from the bedside table.

  ‘This is them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My grandfathers - both of them.’

  It was an old crystal frame with carved corners. The photograph was of a tank, with four men leaning against it, two on either side so as not to block the driver, who smiled radiantly into the camera. On his left stood two young men, one tall and blond, the other shorter and dark haired. They looked happy, as did the man crouching on the ground on the right, and the fourth man, also on the right, who was so young he looked like a boy.

  ‘The one pretending to drive the tank is my grandfather Aurelio Perea, my mother’s father. He was a tank driver in the republican army during the civil war, that’s why he’s sitting up there. He wanted to drive across the border in that thing . . .’ She looked at the photo and smiled with an almost childlike innocence, stroking the crystal frame with her fingertips. ‘The one crouching over here,’ she moved her finger, ‘his name was Nicolás, he was Catalan, from Reus. They called him The Confectioner because before the war he used to go around the villages selling sweets. This guy here was from a village in Alicante, but I can’t remember his name, all I remember is that they nicknamed him The Kid because he was seventeen. I met this dark one when I was young. His name was Amadeo, known as Salmones, and he was from Asturias, he was friends with my grandfathers right up to the end. This tall, blond guy,’ her fingers moved to stroke the last face, ‘is Ignacio Fernández, my father’s father. He was a captain in the Popular Army and head of his section. When he saw the tank, he started yelling, “Hey, Sardine, come here, I’ve found a donkey you can ride back to your village ... ” ’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘That’s what they called my Grandfather Aurelio, because he was from Málaga. Ignacio, my other grandfather, was from Madrid, and they called him The Lawyer, because, well, he was a lawyer. He and his wife, my Grandmother Anita, were the ones who used to own this place.’

  I looked at the men carefully, but it was difficult to make out their faces, not so much because it was a bad photograph, though it was, nor because the photographer had taken the picture from a distance to fit in the tank, but because their smiles were so broad, so ruthless, so wild that they seemed to have taken over their faces.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘I don’t really know, I can’t tell you exactly . . . It was in one of the camps, in the woods somewhere in Ariège,’ she looked at me and realised I didn’t understand, ‘a region in the French Pyrenees on the border with Spain, somewhere between Toulouse and Huesca. The photo wasn’t taken during the civil war, it was the Second World War.’

  ‘I get that, but I don’t understand . . .’ and although I had resolved not to do so, I thought about my own father, his military record, the two uniforms so neat, so pristine, so utterly different from those of the smiling men who were dressed any old how. ‘They were soldiers?’

  ‘Yes . . . well, they were guerrillas.’

  ‘They were Spanish?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But they were fighting in France.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Against . . .’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. Raquel laughed.

  ‘Against the Nazis, obviously. The tank is a German one - they captured it along with eleven members of the SS, including two officers. They loved to tell us about it. “You should have seen us, five poor bastards, that’s what we were, a bunch of raggedy, scruffy, badly armed kids, but we captured those Ayran bastards . . . ” ’ She moved closer to me and kissed me, but the glow in her face gradually faded. ‘They were Spanish communists, exiles. They kicked the Nazis out of France, they won the Second World War, and what good did it do them? But don’t worry, it’s normal not to know about them. Nobody knows about them - there were thousands of them, nearly thirty thousand, but there are no Hollywood movies about them, no documentaries on the BBC. There are films about the French prostitutes who put cyanide in their vaginas, about the bakers who put poison in their baguettes, but never about them. If there had been a film, the audience would have wondered what happened, why they fought, what they got out of there . . . And in Spain we don’t talk about them, we pretend they never existed . . . Anyway, it’s an ugly, unjust story. One of those Spanish stories that spoils everything.’

  Then she smiled again, but she could not disguise the rictus of bitterness, the trace of a terrible ache, a deep-rooted pain that she bore with modesty but also with pride. I thought it was the saddest smile I had ever seen, and I did not know what to do, what to say. She kissed the photo, put it back on the little table, then turned and hugged me; I took her in my arms and kissed her again and my body discovered in hers a warm and safe, tender and loving home with no dark attic rooms, no locked doors, no secret corners, no basements boarded up against time’s humiliation.

  ‘My father fought in the Second World War,’ I whispered into her ear, in deference to the gentle bitterness of her smile.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘But he fought on the side of the Nazis,’ I went on, my lips grazing hers as I spoke. ‘He was in Russia with the Blue Division.’

  ‘I know.’ She drew away for a moment, ran her fingers through my hair and stroked my face. ‘But he was never here, he was never in this bed.’

  She said this and everything resumed it course, running gently, like water, eroding the importance of words, which suddenly seemed futile, awkward, pompous. Raquel Fernández Perea opened her eyes, and suddenly every pendulum in the world began to move in harmonic motion, which brought time to a standstill, anihilated space. Raquel Fernández Perea closed her eyes, making every pendulum in the world reverse its arc, taking reality to a fresh universe, tender and newly born. Raquel Fernández Perea breathed, and an invisible thread made her breasts rise, and I wanted to die . . .

  ‘Álvaro ...’

  I wanted to die right there, to end on this moment of abundance, to give up hoarding trivial moments that were unworthy of a man who might have elected the devastating beauty of such a death. Raquel smiled, lettin
g herself go. ‘Álvaro . . .’

  A half-formed, involuntary, delicate smile, because she smiled with her whole being, with every inch of the flawless skin that quivered beneath my hands. Raquel Fernández Perea surrendered, lost control, dissolved before me, with me, only to regain control of her body, her movements suddenly more precise, more regular, and I listened to her voice, and I obeyed, I followed the voice, and I wondered what would become of me, wondered how I could ever wake up in another bed . . .

  ‘Álvaro . . .’ The third time, Fernando did not simply say my name. He stopped in the middle of the pavement and shook me by the shoulders.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ He paused for breath, but did not let go of me. ‘I’ll tell you what. You’ve got this girl’s cunt plastered all over your face - Jesus, I can practically see it.’

  ‘Really?’ I grinned. ‘You can see it?’

  ‘Pubes and all.’ He laughed. ‘Not that it bothers me, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think your wife in there . . .’ he nodded to the door of the restaurant, ‘is going to appreciate it the way I do.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything to me this morning.’

  ‘That’s because she doesn’t know the signs. She’s not used to it,’ he said, ‘but, believe me, my wife will spot it in a heartbeat.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said without thinking, but I suppose I was telling the truth.

  ‘Don’t be such a prick, Álvarito.’ He shook me by the shoulders again. ‘Now listen up. You do care, got it? You do fucking care. And I care. So get that smirk off your face, because I’m not going to get an earful about my past sins given how virtuous I am these days.’

  The whole was no longer equal to the sum of its parts, even when those parts did not interact. But I tried to pretend that I still believed that, and I offered to sit with the children, between Miguelito and Max, Fernando’s younger son and the peace offering he had made his wife when he still wasn’t sure whether he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Max, named after Máximo, his admirable great-grandfather, was a year older than Miguel, but they got on well together. That day, Miguel had brought a Spiderman doll that shot a web when you pressed a button and had a whole arsenal of guns and bombs hidden inside his body, and Max had brought a Tyrannosaurus rex with retractable claws that made realistic sounds, according to him, as though anyone had ever heard the roar of a bloodthirsty dinosaur. He’d also brought a plastic Smurf to be the victim, so Spiderman dodged between the plates and napkins trying to save the Smurf until the food arrived. Mai, facing the other end of the table, listened with an attention bordering on enthusiasm to the story of her cousin Pilar, Nieves’s little sister, a recent but fanatical convert to the concept of the urban spa.