The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Spanish soil,’ she murmured in a humble, nervous, almost gentle tone.

  ‘Yes.’ He discovered he too was whispering.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m going to like it.’

  ‘Me neither, but I had to come sooner or later.’

  ‘I suppose. So you’ve never been before either?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ she smiled at him, ‘at least this way we’ll get through it together . . .’

  ‘Like chickenpox.’ Ignacio smiled back and Raquel laughed.

  And then Raquel stepped out of the plane with him and did not leave his side until they had collected their bags. They moved at the same pace, serious and silent, not looking at each other, as if they had nothing to do with each other, and nothing to do with the gaggle of noisy French students laughing and chasing each other down the corridors. At first, Ignacio’s only thought was that he could distinctly taste apricots. Then a woman’s voice came over the loudspeakers.

  ‘Hey!’ Raquel grabbed his arm and squeezed. ‘Listen to the way she talks . . .’

  ‘She has a nice voice,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘No, I mean her accent, she talks just like my mother does in Spanish.’

  She didn’t let go of his arm, but squeezed it harder as they queued at passport control.

  ‘The Guardia Civil . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ignacio, who had just read the sign.

  Ignacio Fernández Salgado suddenly felt grateful for his father’s dictatorial contrariness, he was even grateful for the ‘punishment’ that had meant bringing Raquel Perea with him on this trip, because until this moment, Ignacio had simply felt nervous, excited, perhaps a little shaken. Now, as he moved towards that little window, he could taste every apricot he had ever eaten grow rancid in his mouth. With each step, Ignacio Fernández Salgado could feel his palms sweating, chills running up and down his spine, his legs giving way. But with each step, he could hear Raquel’s ragged breathing, could feel her nails digging into his arm, and he knew that she was trembling, he knew it, and that was enough to keep him going. If he was calm and composed, she would be calm and composed. When his turn came, they both stepped up to the window. He pushed his passport over the counter, looked at the man in the green uniform, who returned his stare, and greeted him in Spanish.

  ‘Buenos días.’

  ‘Buenas . . .’ The guard opened the passport, glanced at the photograph, then at Ignacio, then wrote on a piece of paper. ‘Fernández Salgado. So you’re Spanish?’

  ‘No.’ He reeled off the answer his father had suggested. ‘French. My parents are Spanish.’

  ‘I see . . .’ The guard flicked through the passport, studying the stamps. ‘This is your first time here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well.’ The man pushed the passport back to him with a smile. ‘Welcome.’

  God, I’m so stupid, thought Ignacio as he watched the same scene played out again by Raquel: ‘Perea Millán?’ ‘Yes. I’m French, like him. My parents are Spanish.’

  ‘Could you be any more stupid ? Ignacio thought of his father’s preferred put-down, and he felt obliged to answer ‘No’ with the same rage, the same pig-headedness he felt every year as he watched his grandparents, his parents, his aunts and uncles raise a toast on New Year’s Eve. ‘Very well, welcome.’ That was all there was to it, it had been so simple, so straightforward, that once they were on the other side, Raquel seemed ashamed that she had been trembling.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s it.’ She looked at him sceptically. ‘It wasn’t so bad after all . . .’

  Ignacio shrugged. It was true, it hadn’t been so bad, in fact it had been nothing. During their first days there, everything seemed to be like that. True, Seville was astonishingly beautiful, as was Córdoba then Granada, as ravishing as a bride, her veil of white houses spread below the snow-capped mountains. That was his favourite photograph, although he had taken some good shots of the Santa Cruz district and a portrait of Raquel at night, dazzling and half drunk, in front of the statue of Cristo de los Faroles.

  He loved Andalucía, because, his father being from Madrid and his mother from Aragón, he had not known what to expect. He genuinely liked it because what he had been expecting - the stiff gentleman accompanying a dark-haired dancer in a flamenco dress of flounces and ruffles - was poorer than what he found: the unhurried pace of these cities, slaves to their own beauty, to the ancient rhythm of water constantly gurgling through the chalk, the flowers, the narrow labyrinthine streets. It was beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful, and it filled him with a curious stillness, but a sadness too, for this place, with its chalk-white houses, their stone terraces groaning under the weight of potted plants as tall as trees, was surely a wonderful place to live, but it was not his home. He would have liked to live here, but it was impossible. He would never lean over one of these balconies, with their black railings, their red geraniums, where his mother, who for decades had struggled in vain against the winter frost of Paris, would have been so happy.

  The weather - warm but temperate, neither too joyful nor too sad - reflected how he felt on his first days in his parents’ country, for it was not his country. He was finally in Spain, and it turned out that Spain really did exist, that it really did occupy a specific part of the planet. But because it was nothing like the ghostly, posthumous country in which his tribe had pitched camp, the real Spain seemed to him a strange and unfamiliar place.

  ‘Are you still in Seville?’ His mother’s voice at the other end of the line was tremulous.

  ‘Yes, still here. We leave tomorrow.’

  ‘So what is it like?’ Anita Salgado had never been south of Teruel.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Mamá, you’d love it here.’ In the silence, he could hear her anxiety. ‘You have to come and see it some day.’

  ‘Of course, hijo. I’m so happy just knowing you’re there, Ignacio . . .’

  ‘Let me talk to him, Anita! We might get cut off like we did yesterday.’ Ignacio heard his father’s voice. ‘You should call your grandmother, she’s from Andalucía . . . she’d be so happy to hear from you.’

  As he hung up, Ignacio felt puzzled and guilty. These feelings were all too familiar to him, but in Seville, in Córdoba, in Granada, the guilt seemed to outweigh the confusion. It had been obvious that his mother would have preferred him to go anywhere but here, and yet every time he spoke to her on the phone she seemed to be close to tears. Nor could he understand his own feelings in this unfamiliar country where everything - the language, the food, the customs - was so familiar, where certain people, certain scenes, left him reeling with the unsettling sensation of déjà vu, the impossible conviction that he had lived these moments before.

  In Andalucía, Ignacio Fernández Salgado belatedly realised that his parents had been right, that he had ‘gone back’ even though he had never set foot on Spanish soil. But it was they who should have been here, they who should have ‘gone back’, since they would recognise themselves in this world he did not feel able to decipher. This was what he thought, what he believed, as he embarked on his last night in Andalucía.

  They had been told it was a cave, but it did not look like a cave. The walls of the vaulted room, which was as long and narrow as a tunnel, were rough hewn and whitewashed, but the copper pots and pans, the ornate glazed earthenware plates that covered every inch of wall, gave the place a vibrant, baroque feeling entirely at odds with its subterranean location. And yet it was a real cave, one more peculiarity in this savage land of garlic-eaters.

  ‘Flamenco, oh, great!’ he had said that morning when they found out that they were to spend their last night in Andalucía at a flamenco show in a cave in Sacromonte. ‘That’s all we need . . .’

  ‘Don’t be like that . . .’ Raquel spoke to him in Spanish, before reverting to French, which they spoke when the others were present. ‘You’ll love it, it’s unique, it’s moving, it’s like no other music on earth.’

  ‘I loathe fla
menco,’ said Ignacio, slipping back into Spanish.

  ‘Well, then you’re an idiot.’ she said, and turned to the others.

  As she did, Ignacio thought again how much better she was handling this than he was. Maybe it was because her parents were from Andalucía, but her French accent was starting to fade. Ignacio witnessed this evolution in her pronunciation which culminated in a shop on the Calle Zacatín, when the shopkeeper closed the display case too quickly.

  ‘Ay, mi deo!’ yelped Raquel, sucking her injured finger.

  ‘What do you mean, mi deo?’ said Ignacio when the assistant had finally finished apologising. ‘Don’t you mean mi dedo?’

  Raquel stared at him for a minute, confused, and when she did reply, it was clear she had not understood.

  ‘Yes, my finger . . . I pinched it in the case . . .’ She pronounced it pillao rather than pillado. So, I suppose now you’ve got diez deos on your hands and diez deos on your feet, he thought, not bothering to explain that he was sure that back in Paris he had heard her say dedo without the Andalusian accent. And it was not just that. If she ever gave a thought to the Dordogne and the indigestion her boyfriend must be suffering from an excess of foie gras, it did not show. Raquel was enjoying Spain more than Ignacio thought was reasonable or indeed healthy. He too liked the fried fish, he loved the pata negra ham, the tomato salad flavoured with garlic, the taste of extra-virgin olive oil, he loved the sweet dessert they called tocino del cielo, even pale dry manzanilla sherry, he liked all these things, but . . . the religious processions? She didn’t miss a single one. She would send Philippe on in front like a guide dog to clear a path all the way to the railing, and there she would stand until the last pilgrim passed holding his lighted candle. This was too much for Ignacio, who would go and sit in a crowded bar and drink, little realising that the tradition of heading for a bar to avoid a religious procession was as Spanish as the procession itself. But there was more to it than that, too.

  Ignacio looked at Raquel and saw her eyes grow wide, lips parted, and he realised that he liked to look at her, needed to look at her, as though he might feed on her enthusiasm, her happiness, this warmth that tempered his spirit, which was frozen with confusion and guilt. On the sixth night of their trip, the last night they would spend together in Andalucía for a long time, not only did Raquel no longer speak disparagingly about Spain, she would not tolerate anyone else criticising or complaining, not even him. Two nights earlier, in Córdoba, just after posing for the photo, she had confessed to him that she had never imagined she would love her parents’ country as much as she did.

  ‘Don’t you feel that?’ Ignacio shook his head. ‘Well, I do. Isn’t that weird ? To be honest I was sick to death of Spain and Spanish proverbs and Spanish battles, I was sick of hearing that Spain was better at this and that but . . . I don’t know, now I feel like this is my home. I know it’s not, it’s just an illusion that will probably vanish the minute I get back to Paris, but right now, that’s how I feel.’

  ‘You must have Moorish blood,’ Ignacio joked.

  ‘That must be it,’ she smiled, ‘but that’s not so bad, is it? Just look around . . .’

  She was right, and Ignacio was happy to admit it, to watch the mysterious alchemy of exile at work in her, even if it produced no results in him. This was why, despite Raquel’s infectious happiness and enthusiasm, despite the thousand reasons that went through his mind, he still hated flamenco when he stepped into that cave in Sacromonte.

  ‘I don’t know how you can listen to that, Papá,’ he had dared to say one day after three-quarters of an hour of aural agony. ‘I don’t like it, but I like listening to it,’ his father had said. They were working together, building a wooden boat, out on the porch of the house in Collioure that his parents rented every summer when he and Olga were young. Ignacio loved working with his father because he was patient and skilful. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz would always say that he had been useless with his hands when he arrived in France, but that he had an excess of time in the concentration camp and was so bored that he decided to learn some trades. He was an able carpenter, which was the only trade he practised after his release. When they began working on the boat, Ignacio remembered the torment he had endured while they were building the four-storey doll’s house for his sister, and to spare himself more pain, he said: ‘That’s impossible, Papá, you can’t like listening to something you don’t like.’ His father smiled. ‘Of course it’s possible, but, if you prefer, let’s just say I like flamenco.’

  ‘Well, I don’t, I don’t like it at all.’ This is what he had said to his father, and this is what he said as he settled himself on one of the hard wooden benches that lined the walls of the cave, having tried and failed to wangle a place next to Raquel.

  But he liked the wine, and at first he thought it was because of the wine, because he had had quite a lot to drink. The company - a pretty, plump gypsy woman and another, slimmer but considerably less attractive, both middle-aged, a number of young dancers with dark hair and heavy eye make-up, two guitarists dressed in black and three young men - all sat together around a stage at the far end of the room. There were a few words of welcome, a few off-colour jokes, and then the guitars began.

  ‘Tonight, I’m going to start with some bulerías,’ announced the plump gypsy, and began to sing.

  Ignacio heard, though he was not listening. He was not watching the performance so much as watching Raquel, who sat grave and intense, her eyes fixed on the singer. Then the gypsy fell silent, there was applause and the guitars started up again, and one of the young men sitting next to the guitarists, a skinny, nervous boy with a narrow waist, began to beat out the rhythm with his hands, at first soundlessly, his hands barely touching, as though keeping time merely for himself.

  ‘I’m going to sing granaínas,’ he announced.

  ‘Desea el hombre una cosa, parece un mundo, luego que la consigue, tan sólo es humo, tan sólo es humo, prima, tan sólo es humo. Desea el hombre una cosa, parece un mundo . . .’

  The boy’s voice was diaphanous, pure as crystal yet cracked, rich and deep, intimate yet strange. All these things Ignacio could hear in this voice as he listened, and he had not even been aware that he was listening, but the words had come to him, and he welcomed them, embraced them and allowed them to enter his ear, his body, his memory.

  ‘A man may yearn for something, it seems like all the world, but once he possesses it he finds, it’s nothing more than smoke, it’s nothing more than smoke . . .’ The singer was young, barely older than Ignacio himself, and he closed his eyes as he sang these words. And Ignacio liked the wine, not the flamenco, he was enjoying the wine. That had to be what it was, because he suddenly realised that he was excited, that he had been moved by these words, this song, it’s nothing more than smoke, it’s nothing more than smoke, the young man’s voice took him to places he did not recognise, places that set his heart racing, though he had never heard the song before. And he thought that perhaps this song, just this song, this encapsulation of the human condition, might be Spain for him. A man may yearn for something, it seems like all the world, but once he possesses it he finds it’s nothing more than smoke. Words so simple yet so complex, so precise yet so universal, sung in this high, hoarse and faltering voice, as fine as crystal, as a needle, an invisible weapon. Emotion is strange, and this one was stranger than any, though the wine was probably to blame, he thought. He knew the words to this song though he had never heard it before; maybe his grandmother María who was from Jaén and a fine singer had sung him to sleep with it.

  Then everything suddenly changed. The singer finished and he applauded enthusiastically, Raquel shot him a surprised look, and the dancers began to flick the ruffles of their skirts to the rhythm of the guitars and the clapping of the others. Ignacio realised that this was the highlight of the show, the one the tourists had come for, but while his friends tensed, leaning back in their seats or craning forward the better to admire the furious taconeo, heels cra
cking against the boards as though the dancers were wielding bullwhips, Ignacio found himself missing the unexpected surge of emotion, the crack and caress of that voice which, with humble words, said such extraordinary things.

  He could still hear them, could still feel their caress, when Raquel began to move in her seat, her feet, her shoulders, her whole body swaying to the rhythm of her hands, which made a powerful, hollow sound, something like applause yet not, because the air in the slight space between the curved palms makes of them a percussion instrument. She’s about to stand up, he thought, and as he did so, one of the gypsies, a tall, dark-skinned man with a hooked nose, reached out his hand and led her on to the stage. A moment later Raquel Perea Millán, daughter of Aurelio and Rafaela, the skinny little brat, who used to go to the L’Humanité parties dressed in flamenco frills and clamber up on to a table to show off, was dancing in a cave in Sacromonte in her yellow-and-white miniskirt, with no ruffles, no combs, no brightly beaded necklace, but a great deal of talent.

  The performers said as much - ¡olé! ¡olé! you have a gift, hija! She twirled, moving her feet and her arms to the rhythm of the music, leaned down to flick the ruffled pleats of her imaginary skirt, then straightened quickly, and strode across the stage in quick graceful steps, as though about to step down, but she did not, she started all over again, ¡olé! ¡olé!, they said, just look at the girl dance. Raquel was dancing, and dancing extremely well, so well that it was as though she had only ever danced here, now, with the tall, dark-skinned gypsy, who moved with unerring instinct, matching his movements to her body. They came together and parted with the tense languor of an animal in heat, as his arms encircled her, never touching her, to envelop her in the grace that enveloped him. The singer clapped his hands, gazing at the couple, everyone was staring at them, they seemed aware of nothing and no one else, they did not need to look at anyone else, only at each other, lips parted, in an expression of fierce, almost savage recognition that excluded all those who were not part of the reality they shared, of the only thing that existed for them in that moment.