The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  There was a pile of well-thumbed exercise books on the table, the covers worn and creased.

  ‘I did my homework,’ she said, and seeing him smile, she smiled too.

  ‘So I see.’

  She put the child down, took Ignacio in her arms and kissed him; her kisses kept coming, her feet lifted off the ground long before he wrapped his hands around her waist and sat her on the table, still kissing her, finally accepting the reality of her flesh. He felt so overcome that he did not recognise the cause of the sharp pain in his calf until they finally broke their embrace and, glancing down, he saw the son whose very existence he had forgotten.

  ‘He’s biting me . . .’ Ignacio said, laughing, as he removed the hairpins that imprisoned her lush confusion of curls in a severe chignon.

  ‘I know,’ she said, helping him. ‘He’s very attached to his mother.’

  After lunch, the rest of the family went for a walk, taking the boy with them, and they found themselves alone in a bed different from the one Ignacio remembered, in a large, comfortable room that looked out on to the street. At that moment, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz said what he believed he had to say, but it felt not like a duty but a privilege. She did not agree to his request so easily.

  ‘Listen, Ignacio, I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s not as simple as that.’ Anita leaned back against the pillow and became serious. ‘Everything is about to change, it’s obvious, your father goes on about it all the time: “It might not be our war, but at least we’ve won this one.” And when the Nazis surrender, or maybe even before then, the Allies will deal with Franco, they’ll have no choice - I mean Franco sided with the Germans and the Italians from the very beginning, he even sent troops to Russia . . . So some day soon the Allies are going to invade Spain, you’ll go back to war, you’ll kick the bastard out, everything will be fine, and then what? Because everything’s different here in France - here everything is a mess, all of us are penniless. Back home, things will go back to being the way they were, with everyone back in their rightful place. And it doesn’t matter how communist you are, Ignacio, you’ll always be rich, a gentleman, and you might say it doesn’t matter, but it does. And me . . . there’s no point lying about it, in Madrid before the war, the best I could have hoped for was to be your mother’s maid.’

  Anita had carefully prepared this speech, and rattled it off without pausing for breath, like a schoolgirl reciting a lesson. Then she looked at him and he was smiling.

  ‘Well, well,’ he was laughing now, ‘honestly, you’re as stubborn as a mule . . . I’ve never seen the like of it . . .’

  ‘What? I’m right, aren’t I?’ she protested.

  He did not want to answer her. He gazed at her, pushed a lock of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  ‘Marry me, Anita.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Though his answer made her smile, still she held out. ‘Are you sure you’re not just asking me out of pity?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  Ignacio Fernández Muñoz and Anita Salgado Pérez were married in Toulouse in late January 1945. The man who officiated at the ceremony was a former councillor in the Popular Front who had fought with The Lawyer in the final months of the war before taking up his post again. His wedding gift was highly unusual: he waived the need for Anita’s birth certificate. She had tried half a dozen times to get a copy, writing first to the mayor then to the parish priest in her village, but she received no answer. Shortly afterwards, the newlyweds moved to Paris. For Ignacio, it was here that the reunions began, those they had spoken of during those long years of goodbyes.

  Paris was fizzing with hope, with news, with great plans whispered about or broadcast loudly in Spanish. It was in Paris that Captain Ignacio Fernández Muñoz met Amadeo’s fiancée, Aurelio’s wife and the wife of the lad from Zamora who had spent sleepless nights worrying about his fate. Here, he met up again with friends he had known through hard times long ago and more recently. When he asked whether there was any news of Roque, he found out the man from Pas had been killed by gendarmes, shot dashing through the fields after sabotaging one of the electricity pylons he loved so much. The lad from Alicante, the one they called ‘The Kid’, was dead too, killed by a Vichy sniper holed up in a barn who had to go down fighting even as the liberators marched through the village. What had happened to Nicolás was worse. Nicolás had been the only one of the tank squad who stayed behind with the Maquis because his wife lived nearby and from time to time he took the risk of visiting her. On one of these visits, the Germans dragged him out of bed at dawn, and The Confectioner realised that someone had turned him in - and the only other person who knew the address was also in the Maquis and usually came to the village with him. He screamed the man’s name over and over as the Nazis were dragging him away. He was sent to Mauthausen and never came back, but his wife would forever remember those screams. When Ignacio, Aurelio and Amadeo found out what had happened, they decided to track down the traitor and kill him, but they never found him.

  On the other hand, one night, in a café they often went to, ‘The Lawyer’ spotted a smiling, confident young man he recognized as Julio Carrión González, the eldest child of a charming woman named Teresa, a socialist schoolteacher from Torrelodones.

  Raquel put the chaos pendulum on the bedside table next to the photo of her grandparents. She loved looking at it, and I loved looking at her because her lips moved constantly, her smile wavering and broadening with each impulsive twitch of the black ball.

  ‘It’s like they’re chasing each other, isn’t it?’ she said to me once. ‘Of course they can’t be because they’re both attached to the same axis, but when they change direction and start spinning really fast it looks like one of them’s trying to catch the other one . . .’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘If I’d known, I’d never have got it for you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you don’t listen to me any more . . .’

  ‘Oh . . .’ She opened her eyes wide as though shocked and took me in her arms.

  From my side of the bed, the pendulum blocked my view of the photo behind. The outer pendulum alternately hid the photo of the tank and revealed it at fixed, regular intervals, seemingly unrelated to the wild gyrations of the other. Sometimes when I looked at the pendulum, I thought that this ingenious, innocent contraption was an image of me: a good boy, a good son, a good citizen, an ordinary, almost boring man to whom nothing ever happened that had not been minutely planned, and the glorious, painful chaos, bitter yet pleasurable, that whirled inside me.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about your father,’ Raquel had warned me just before the subtle, silent explosion which shifted the planet’s orbit. ‘Neither do I,’ I told her. And it was true. This simple, unconditional pact laid to rest the ghost of Julio Carrión González and his last mistress dispatched him from a reality of which he would never again be a part. This was one place he had never been; here in this bed. In telling me this, Raquel gave me something more than a gift, she gave me a guarantee, that whatever we had would never be a continuation of what had gone on between her and my father in the apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan.

  I had a similar experience with Encarnita’s revelation. ‘It always was a mysterious business,’ she told me, and I was satisfied that what she had said was more or less consistent with the official version of events. As a girl, my mother had always spent the summer holidays in Torrelodones; this was where my father first met her, then, many years later, he had given her work to get her out from under the thumb of her tyrannical grandmother, who would have kept her shut up in the house all day long. They fell in love, got married and had five children. I was number four. The idea that Mariana had gone to the Guardia Civil and said Papá had robbed her, not of the little house near the train station, but of one of the most elegant villas in Torrelodones, had to be a misunderstanding. In any case, it
was of no importance since the wronged woman had been a witness at the marriage of her daughter to the man who had supposedly ruined her. The mystery Encarnita had mentioned was clearly nothing more than a family squabble, the sort of quarrel that seems hugely important to those concerned, but trivial to outsiders. And by this point, I no longer wanted to think about it.

  All I could think about was Raquel. Raquel was Time itself, the days, the hours, the minutes. My life was divided into the moments when I was with her and those wasted hours I spent without her in a world in which everything reminded me of her. I was falling so fast I did not even realise my own speed, and before I knew what was happening, my life had become nothing more than an excuse, a façade which made it possible for me to live a life greater than my own, a life which was called Raquel.

  She did nothing to stop me, imposed no limits. That spring blessed each of our encounters with the gift of simplicity, protected us, cradled us between the four corners of this bed in which nothing existed but sex and laughter, the thoughtless complicity of teenagers in love and something else, something more solemn, more vital - the earth rotating on its axis, rotating around the sun as we lay together, naked and entwined. Out there was everything else. Out there was winter, ice, the slippery expanse of snow trampled into slush by passers-by - guilty and innocent, faithful and unfaithful, aware or unaware of the wounds their every footstep would make on their children’s future; a guilty, ravaged landscape very different from the pristine country wrapped in brightly coloured paper which they believed they would inherit. Out there was winter, but I could not feel it, and so I let the time slide by.

  Raquel knew everything. She had always known everything. She knew this world we held in our hands would one day burst like a child’s bubble. I knew only that I didn’t want to know, not yet, and all the while my life was an excuse, a façade that concealed the only true life, which began every time I pressed the button on the entryphone.

  ‘Hi, it’s me . . .’

  ‘Come on up.’

  She always said the same thing: ‘Come on up’, an order, an entreaty, or a secret code. ‘Come on up’, and up I would go. Sometimes I rang before I came, sometimes I didn’t, but every time I pressed the button on the entryphone, she was there. The weather was mild, spring was in no hurry to stumble into summer, and for me it was still enough just to need Raquel. This need was still a blessing. I had to control my anxiety at her absence, hoard my desire for her like a miser shutting himself away to count his money.

  ‘Come on up,’ and there she was: Raquel Fernández Perea, an intelligent girl with a secret, enigmatic beauty, a woman so beautiful you had to look at her twice to see it, to truly appreciate the problem of her hips, which seemed slightly disproportionate given the narrowness of her waist but which merely trumpeted the perfection of her body, her skin, velvety as a rare peach. This was the only problem I wanted to solve, the only challenge that interested me. When I placed my hands on Raquel’s hips, I touched a whole infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

  But when I took her in my arms, for an instant, though I had sworn I would not do it, though I had forbidden myself to do it, I remembered everything. I remembered my charming, charismatic father, magician, wizard, snake-charmer - a poor bastard addicted to harmless but possibly fatal pharmaceuticals, son to a grandmother I never knew, husband to my mother, lover to this woman who broke the perfect circle of her mouth in a slow smile. I remembered all these things and they seemed so incompatible with the reality before me that I began to babble about anything at all, simply to silence the deafening clamour in my head. The sound of my voice comforted Raquel, reassured her. At that moment, I realised that today, as every day, she had been waiting for me to make my mind up whether I would ask her about my father and, realising that I had decided not to, she responded with one of her intense, radiant smiles.

  ‘The other day, I was thinking . . .’ I looked at her but she looked away, shrugged almost imperceptibly as I began to babble about the first thing that came into my head. ‘Your husband, what was he?’

  ‘A moron.’

  ‘Yes, but apart from that . . . I mean, what did he do for a living?’

  ‘He worked for IBM - still does as far as I know. But just to make you happy I’ll tell you that he was an economist like me, we met at university. Apart from that . . .’

  I smiled. ‘If we were at a dinner full of couples, I’d stand out!’

  ‘As I was about to say . . .’ she went on. ‘Apart from that, he had a Harley that he thought was prettier than me, an Afghan hound he loved more than me, a coke habit he found more stimulating than me, and a whole group of friends with Harleys and pedigree dogs that he got on better with than he did with me.’

  ‘Then why did you marry him?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She paused for a moment. ‘To be honest I don’t know any more. We started going out in second year at college, we were together for two years, then we split up. I went off to study drama, I had this thing with an actor - I told you about him - and when he dumped me my ex found out and pestered me to get back with him. I found him a lot more interesting than before - I suppose because he had a Harley and an Afghan hound, and he earned a lot more than I did. He took me on exotic holidays and he was very handsome. I was young and a bit of a moron myself. But I’ve got better, haven’t I?’

  ‘He was very handsome?’ I asked, frowning.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll show you . . .’

  As she slipped out of bed, night was beginning to fall and the fading sunlight traced luminous planes on the air, swathing Raquel in an unreal, almost theatrical golden glow. As she moved towards the antique desk I loved so much, she seemed to take this shifting, defiant glimmer with her and I felt the whole world plunge into darkness, that nothing could exist beyond the compass of this body so loved by the sun.

  ‘Look,’ she said. She had a pile of photos. ‘That’s him, there.’

  I don’t remember the date, and I don’t know whether it was precisely at that moment that I realised I was in love with Raquel, utterly, irrevocably, and with no way out. I can’t reconstruct it because I’d never felt anything like it before, and because I had a deep-rooted tendency to smile indulgently at the sweeping, metaphysical pronouncements of my brother Julio, my friends, and my wife’s friends. I just thought they were exaggerating, and even the idea that I might be missing something was not enough to stop the imaginary red pencil with which I mentally divided the suffering, the loneliness, the tears and the anger from the pleasure and happiness of other people’s lives. Back then, I used to remind myself that I loved my wife, my work, my life, that I did not regret anything. But that was when I believed that my life belonged to me, when I believed it was a life.

  I don’t remember the date, all I know is that it was late May, maybe June, because by now I was spending every afternoon at Raquel’s apartment and the sunlight was urging us into summer. And I remember I had difficulty focusing on this tall, muscular young man with blond curly hair, a round, childlike face and a weak chin who looked a little like a tanned teenager in some American soap opera. I know I had trouble focusing on him because, standing next to him in almost every photo, was Raquel at twenty, delicate and tender as a peach still ripening on the branch. It pained me to think of all the years she had lived without me, of the hands that had touched her, the arms that had held her, the lips that had kissed her; it saddened me that I had not known her earlier and I realised I could never allow myself to be parted from this woman, that all I wanted was to grow old by her side.

  ‘Well, come on . . . say something,’ she said. She looked scared.

  ‘You were pretty.’ I kissed her breast near the nipple and managed to recover some semblance of composure. ‘Not as pretty as you are now.’

  ‘Álvaro, flattery will get you nowhere.’ She laughed.

  ‘I’m serious. As for him ... What do you want me to say?’ I looked up at her. ‘I prefer the men on the tank.’

  ‘Me too, but
we’re not talking about them.’

  ‘No, that’s true, I just mean I think they’re more handsome. Your husband is . . . well . . . He’s handsome too, mostly because he’s blond, but he looks a bit effeminate, don’t you think?’ She was rolling with laughter now. ‘I’m just saying, the curly hair is weird, even for an economist, and he’s clearly put a lot of hours in at the gym, and that fake tan, I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you there was nothing effeminate about him. He was constantly cheating on me . . .’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I cheated on him too in the end, but . . .’ She raised a finger. ‘He started it!’

  Well, don’t even think about cheating on me, I was about to say, but I said nothing, not because I was married - a fact I barely remembered at that moment - but because such a ridiculous cliché seemed to go beyond the neutral territory, overstep the boundaries we had set ourselves. In the distance, among the numberless men who had shared her bed before and after her divorce, stood the figure of my father, and I had no desire to know the times, the places, the names of the hotels, the restaurants; I didn’t want to know the details. We could do anything, tell each other anything, talk about anything except the man who had brought us together, the man who had once been her lover and would always be my father.

  What happened that afternoon had happened before, it would happen again, so then, as I had done before, I kissed Raquel as though I had never kissed another woman, I held her with such infinite care it was as though I held her life in my hands, and she looked at me with such complete surrender that it was as if she was saying that I did. Then I went home. On the scale of unreality that marked the profusion of that spring, going home far outranked the silences imposed by my father’s ghost.

  ‘Álvaro!’ Mai was always happy to see me. ‘I’m glad you’re home, here, let me show you something, I’ve been looking into the new kitchen. My sister-in-law took me to this factory out in Fuenlabrada, they make units for all the top brands but you can buy them at cost, and it only takes six weeks, which is lucky, because that’s exactly when the Polish builders finish at Isa’s place . . .’