The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘What is this, a riddle?’

  ‘No.’ He looked serious, almost solemn, now. ‘Think about her and think about you, Álvaro.’

  ‘She’s not right for me?’ I guessed.

  ‘No, she is right for you, you make a great couple, I realised that watching the two of you together last night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, that’s what’s weird . . .’ My best friend looked at me, closed his eyes and said something it seemed he had hoped he would never have to say: ‘She is right for you, Álvaro, you’re right for each other. But you’re nothing like your father. The person she’s wrong for - I mean absolutely wrong for - is him.’ He paused and looked up at me. ‘Don’t tell me it hadn’t occurred to you.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about your father,’ she’d said. I didn’t want to talk about him either, so that had been that. The last thing I had thought with my old head, the head I lost the moment I laid it on the pillow in that bed where he had never been, was that I wasn’t going to think about him. I had followed my own orders to such an extent that I had not been tempted to link the figure of my mother with the flimsy cable given to me by a frail old woman. I was in bed with Raquel and that was all that mattered. Since then, I had not spent any time alone with my mother, I hadn’t wanted to, and I was not about to let some mystery about my father’s life ruin my own.

  Conscious of the long, horrified silence with which I greeted his words, Fernando Cisneros told me to take no notice of what he’d said. ‘What do I know?’ he muttered, but it was already too late. I knew what he meant.

  That was the worst of it. I completely understood his surprise, the radical disparity between what he knew and what he had imagined. Raquel turned up and everything about her was completely normal, the way she looked, the way she talked, the way she moved - she was an ordinary girl. That was why I’d fallen in love with her, why it had been easy for me to evict my father’s ghost from her bed. The worst thing was that I understood Fernando, I could easily imagine what he had been thinking, visualise the woman he had been expecting to meet; there was no vampire sucking my blood at night, no big-breasted floozy trying to make me forget she was an airhead, no cold, calculating bitch trying to lure me into her web, no brazen schemer after me for my money. Raquel Fernández Perea was none of these things, I had known that from the beginning, just as I’d known that I was not attracted to her because she had been Julio Carrión González’s lover, quite the reverse.

  As we ordered two more beers and went back to talking about trivial things, I began to feel again the happiness I had felt the first time I had seen Raquel’s room, and this feeling became a problem that I should have considered before now. It was a beautiful room, agreeable, furnished with a few well-chosen pieces: an antique, hand-painted lamp, a richly coloured Turkish or Moroccan kilim. The stark contrast between this room and the vaulted bedroom with its stucco walls and plaster niches and the vast plasma TV positioned so that it could be watched from the bed underscored what Fernando had said with a thick red line. The first time I had thought about both rooms, I had thought only about my privileged position, that I had exclusive access to a place in Raquel’s life, I didn’t stop to wonder what a girl like her with a beautiful apartment in an old but well-maintained building in a historic area of Madrid had been doing in the type of slick bachelor pad where married millionaires took their mistresses - usually married women of the same social class, or younger women of modest means determined to improve their lot. Raquel did not fit into either category, but seeing the alarm clock on the nightstand, I reminded myself that she wasn’t some lost little girl and I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she had had other motives - ambition, maybe, or greed.

  The man who had shared Raquel Fernández Perea’s bed before me had left no trace in her life. The chaos pendulum in his lover’s apartment hid a photo of an old German tank, there were no photos of him, nothing that belonged to him. I’d given Raquel other cheap presents: Physics for Dummies, a set of magnets I’d bought long ago in the Natural History Museum in New York, a wooden box she’d admired on a stall one afternoon and the photo of me receiving a prize for arithmetic at school in which I stood, hair neatly combed, in front of a statue depicting the Virgin Mary hovering above a plaster cloud; I was dressed in a blue blazer, white shirt, striped tie and grey trousers, and was holding the trophy in one hand and a certificate tied with a red ribbon in the other.

  ‘Go on, give it to me, please,’ Raquel had asked when I showed it to her, ‘I love it. What year was it taken?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know it sounds conceited, but I won the prize every year. How old do I look? Ten, maybe eleven?’

  ‘Something like that . . . Go, on, let me have it . . .’

  ‘OK, I’ll have a copy made for you.’

  ‘No! That’s not the same at all! I don’t want a copy, anyone could have a copy . . .’

  I’d always had the photo in my wallet, but she asked for it and I gave it to her. She put it on a shelf in her bedroom next to a photo of her with her friend Berta - unrecognisable, both of them, with white faces, red plastic noses and black baggy trousers. Sitting next to each other on the shelf, my photo and hers, the swot and the clown, made the perfect comic coupling; a photo of my father would have ruined the effect. After less than three months, even a bungling detective would have noticed clues that a physicist who won prizes for mental arithmetic as a boy had been here. Souvenirs of the physicist coexisted with those of her heroic grandparents, her moronic ex-husband, ‘I got that rug in Tangiers with Josechu ... Why are you laughing? I don’t see what’s so funny about his name . . .’, her actor ex-boyfriend, ‘he designed the poster too’, and actress friend, ‘Berta lent me that wig and liked it so much I hung on to it’, a close friend - too close for my liking - ‘the software is Paco’s, he came to help me buy the computer, and the manual belongs to him too. I told you we slept together, didn’t I? But it’s no big deal, we’re just friends. I know you don’t go round sleeping with all your friends but this was different, I’d just got divorced . . .’, and a number of other men, ‘the mirror was a present from an old boyfriend, Felipe, he brought it back from Peru, that’s from Manolito, my next-door neighbour, he gave it to me the day I said I’d go steady with him . . .’, but nowhere were there any gifts from an elderly, rich businessman.

  In Raquel’s bathroom there was only one perfume bottle, the only perfume she ever wore, expensive, but in keeping with her income, nor was her apartment crammed with antiques, all the pieces of furniture, books, albums, figurines, ornaments and oriental vases that exiles leave behind whenever they leave home. It was the same with her jewellery, she kept only what she wore, pieces that she liked, whether antique or modern, but none of the opulent pieces a filthy-rich sugar daddy might have chosen. There was one exception, a bracelet, but it was too precious to have come from him. She had worn it the night we had dinner at the Japanese restaurant. The night when all the laws of physics were suspended, it lay on the bedside table as though Raquel had intended to wear it but had changed her mind at the last minute. The afternoon after the storm, I noticed it again and asked:

  ‘Does it mean a lot to you?’ She looked at me, mystified. ‘. . . the bracelet?’

  ‘Of course it does!’ She picked it up and handed it to me. It was very old, a simple band encrusted with a spectacular constellation of precious stones, waves of diamonds, sapphires and more diamonds, with a single, enormous pearl in the centre. ‘It was an engagement present to my great-grandmother María, the mother of my grandfather Ignacio.’

  ‘The one who lived on the Glorieta de Bilbao?’

  ‘That’s her. It’s all that’s left of the family fortune, the only thing that survived the shipwreck.’

  The previous evening, when I had got dressed to go home, Raquel had asked me to wait. ‘I’ll go with you,’ she said, ‘I’m meeting someone at the Café Commercial.’ ‘Who are you meeting? ’
I asked, spinelessly, thinking of Paco, and she answered with a question, ‘What the fuck do you care?’, then she laughed and told me she was having dinner with Berta.

  As we arrived at the café, we saw Berta inside, waiting at the bar. She waved at us. ‘Do you want to come in for a drink?’ I followed her inside and immediately ran into one of my fifth-year students, a dull boy I barely recognised, who had come to my office a couple of weeks earlier to ask whether I would supervise his thesis. He said hello and I stopped to talk to him for a minute, but Raquel didn’t wait. When I went to join her, she apologised. ‘What for?’ I asked, kissing Berta. ‘I’m sorry you were seen with me,’ she said. She was so obviously joking, half-flirting with me, that I laughed, took her in my arms and gave her a long, hard kiss, long enough for everyone at the bar to turn and stare, including the tedious physics student, who had never met Mai and probably didn’t even know that I was married.

  I had learned two things from this encounter. The first was that had the person who had seen us together in the café been potentially compromising, I would have done exactly the same thing, and knowing this absolved me of the sleazy calculatedness of the inveterate womaniser. The second was that Raquel had been thrilled by my performance, all the more so because Berta had been there to witness it. This may have been the reason why she chose that evening to tell me something she could have told me earlier as we crossed the same square. When we finished our beers, I announced that I would pay. Berta went to the toilet and Raquel took my hand and led me out of the café. We stood on the pavement, between the newspaper kiosk and the entrance to the metro, and she pointed to something.

  ‘You see that house?’ I nodded, not really looking at the building, which I had seen a thousand times before. ‘That’s where my grandfather Ignacio was born.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, genuinely surprised. It wasn’t a palace, but it was a mansion.

  ‘Really. They lived on the second floor, in a huge corner apartment, with two balconies looking out over the Glorieta and the Calle Carranza . . .’ She pointed confidently to the apartment in question. ‘That one there, see?’

  ‘I didn’t think anyone lived there, I thought the whole building belonged to an insurance company,’ I murmured.

  ‘Now maybe, but not back then.’

  ‘What happened ? I mean, if he owned that apartment, it doesn’t make sense that your grandfather would live where you live now. Did they sell this place?’

  ‘No. They lost everything they had in the war, this apartment, their place in the mountains, my great-grandmother’s land . . .’ She stared straight ahead. ‘To be more precise, they were robbed of everything they had.’

  At that moment, Berta had emerged from the café and said something to Raquel that I didn’t quite catch, because Raquel looked at me with the same smile she had hidden behind the first time she had talked to me about her Grandfather Ignacio. There was something compelling about that smile, a desolate, hopeless tenderness; I could not resist that smile and at that moment I would have given anything to comfort Raquel, to save her from her own expression, snatch that pained rictus from her face and make her laugh out loud.

  ‘If I wanted to join you for dinner . . .’ I said apprehensively. ‘Would that ruin things . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Berta looked at Raquel with the same brazenness she had displayed the first time we met. ‘. . . the thing is, you were the first item for discussion on the agenda.’

  ‘It would ruin everything,’ Raquel said, pressing herself against me. ‘But I’m sure we can find something else to talk about . . .’

  We had already ordered when I got up to phone Mai. I told her I had run into an old friend at the library, someone she knew, who at that moment was probably sitting quietly in his office in Columbus, Ohio. Before I could even say that I was calling not to suggest she come and join us, but to let her know I wouldn’t be home for dinner, she had yawned and told me there was no point expecting her to come, that she was tired and was on her way to bed. When I went back and sat down, Raquel laid her head on my shoulder and let it rest there a moment. I realised that she knew precisely what I had been doing when I said I had to go to the toilet, and for the first time, despite the trivial nature of my offence, I felt I owed her more than I owed Mai. The feeling was a first step on the slippery slope, the plateau from which I began my descent, but that evening all I could think about was Raquel. The star of the evening, however, was my Grandmother Teresa.

  ‘OK, I propose we move straight to the second item on the agenda,’ I said, breaking the somewhat awkward silence that followed.

  ‘There is no second item,’ said Raquel.

  ‘Really? I didn’t realise that I was such a complex subject . . .’

  They both laughed, but neither of them said anything, so it was left to me to speak. I could have waited for a more propitious moment, for a quieter, more private place, but I had been holding my silence for a long time. Too long.

  ‘In that case, I’d like to suggest a topic. Earlier on, when you showed me the house where your grandfather was born, it reminded me . . . Actually, I didn’t need to be reminded because it’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since I found out . . . Strange things have been happening to me recently and I had always thought my grandmother, my father’s mother, died in 1937 during the civil war. Then two months ago, while I was going through my father’s papers, I found out it wasn’t true . . .’

  That evening I was the one who spoke, who brought Teresa González Puerto back from the grave in which her son had buried her, and I told them everything, what I had thought I knew, and what I now knew, what I had been told, and what I had discovered. It was something I knew I would have to do sooner or later because the secret about my grandmother was suffocating me, because my jealous, loving silence made me complicit with my father’s unjust, unjustifiable silence, and because I could not stay silent any longer. I had to talk about it so that my grandmother could live again, if only through my words, so that her true life could be restored to her, the path she had chosen, which had cost her her life. And the more I talked the better I felt; I felt like a better, a braver, person, more like the son she would have wanted, this gentle, moving presence that hovered over us like an ancient blessing, outlasting the horrors of the war, the deathly silence of cemeteries, the still smiles of photographs.

  This was what I felt, and I felt her, my Grandmother Teresa, not the meek wife of a brutal husband but the adulterous girlfriend of a magician, the incorrigible young girl who, at the age of thirty, had decided to let down her hair and spend her days shouting in the streets, the woman who had dared to write that perhaps she was wrong, but she was doing what she felt she had to do, and she was doing it out of love. That Teresa was a part of me, she was with me as I told her story; she had been brought back from the dead by my love, my pride, and she would go on living through the love, the pride, of my children and my grandchildren. Because the end of the chapter is not necessarily the end of the story and the life of a brave woman does not end with her death. I felt all this, talked about it, her voice through mine, so that my grandmother might return and win her war that night. And Teresa González Puerto did win, and in winning, reason won through and the light for which she had so long fought glinted in the startled actress’s eyes while the woman her grandson loved listened in silence, burying her face in her hands.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Berta was the first to speak, ‘you must have been ... it must have been awful for you, I know because I come from a pretty fascist family myself, and if I found out something like that, well . . . On one hand I’d feel terrible, but on the other hand I think I’d feel proud . . . it’s like you said, but it must be tough, thinking about your father in retrospect?’ I nodded and glanced at Raquel but she hadn’t moved and her hands were still pressed to her face. ‘Could you make a photocopy of her letter for me? I’ve got loads of letters like that, from people who were in prison, who were executed, from soldiers. I’v
e often thought of putting on a play about them, I’m not sure exactly what. It’s not easy, because you can’t read a lot of the letters straight through. They’re full of mistakes, clichés, they can be muddled and repetitive. They’re letters written by people who didn’t read, who weren’t used to writing. But that’s not the thing I find most surprising. What I find surprising is that anyone reading those letters should be able to tell that this country has gone to the dogs.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling, ‘that’s what I thought.’

  ‘I mean, I know your grandmother’s letter is well written, you can tell she was a teacher. It’s nearly as good as the letter Raquel’s uncle wrote to his wife when he was sentenced to death. You’d like that one . . .’

  ‘I don’t feel well . . .’

  Raquel stared at us, shoulders hunched, face ashen.

  ‘What’s the matter ?’

  ‘Raquel, you’re white as a sheet . . .’

  ‘It’s really hot in here. I just felt faint for a minute, I don’t know ... I’d like to go home.’

  ‘Of course,’ Berta and I answered together, but Raquel looked only at me.

  ‘Could you walk me back? I think some fresh air would do me good.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said again, and asked for the bill.

  We split the bill before going our separate ways; Berta grabbed a taxi outside the café and we waited until it had driven away before setting off on foot.

  ‘We can take a taxi if you want . . .’ I suggested, but she shook her head.

  ‘No, I feel like walking. I’m a lot better, and it’s a beautiful night ... especially given how hot it was in the restaurant ...’

  I respected her wishes and made no comment. We headed towards the Glorieta de Bilbao, past her grandfather’s house, turned up the Calle Carranza, and I found myself thinking aloud.

  ‘It’s weird how things change, isn’t it? There’s your family, who lived in Madrid, owned that big apartment and then lost everything. And then there’s my father, the son of a shepherd and a penniless schoolteacher who grew up in some village in the mountains and never even went to university. He wound up so rich he could buy that building, and others, all within the space of a couple of generations, and now here we are, you and me . . .’