The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  She wasn’t telling me the whole truth. Shocked as I was, I realised that Mariví was lying, but I also saw there was sympathy in her gaze.

  ‘However . . .’ she lowered her voice and leaned across the desk as though to indicate that she was on my side, ‘when you first came, it was something to do with settling an estate, wasn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you know, sometimes these things can drag on for ever.’

  When she was twenty years old, thirty kilos lighter and smoked only after meals, her childhood sweetheart had left her for another guy while her wedding dress was still hanging in the dining room of her parents’ home. Raquel had told me the story once, and Mariví told me it again that morning. Heading back to the lift, after I had thanked her, I felt exhausted.

  I walked back to my place, shambling along, dragging my twin temptations with me - the urge to give up hope and the need to salvage the slender thread of hope I still held between my fingers. I wanted to go on believing. ‘To believe’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb; even condemned men walking to the gallows prick up their ears and die waiting for a last-minute pardon. When I resigned myself to the incomprehensible, that Raquel had wanted to disappear, I could still see a light at the end of the well shaft into which I was tumbling. They were black, terrible days, heavy and slow, made up of heavy, interminable grains of damp sand, one last grain then another last grain and another falling on my head.

  ‘What’s the matter, Papá?’ Miguelito asked. ‘Are you not feeling well ?’

  ‘No, I’m not feeling well,’ I said, and he went off to the beach with his mother.

  The weather had improved and everyone was happy, everyone except me. So I went back to bed before they came back for lunch and when they went out again, I got up and sat on the sofa. I spent one day like this, two days, three days, and when I woke at dawn on the fourth day, convinced that anything was better than this uncertainty, I realised the significance of that light in the distance. ‘To believe’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb, more compassionate and treacherous. Anything would have been better that this uncertainty, I thought, it would have been better if she’d told me she was seeing someone else, if she’d told me she didn’t love me, if she’d dumped me. I would have preferred it if she’d dumped me, but that was something she hadn’t been prepared to do . . . I thought about this.

  Raquel had disappeared, but she hadn’t dumped me. At first this sounded like a ludicrous theory, a fool’s comfort, but thinking about it carefully the logic made a certain sense: it was shaky, but it held up better than anything else I could think of. If Raquel had wanted to dump me, she would have done so. It would have been easy. It would have been as simple as not asking me to stay on that last stormy night when she stood crucified in the doorway of her flat begging me not to leave. All she had to do was let me leave, but she had begged me to stay.

  Why? I wondered as I got up from the sofa, washed my face, brushed my teeth, put on my clothes and went out. Why? Raquel had disappeared but she hadn’t left me. She had disappeared, but before doing so she’d taken the precaution of saying goodbye, of telling me she loved me. If you said it over and over, it was almost like music, like a dreamy old melody. Goodbye, I love you. It was warm and sunny out and as I wandered slowly along the seafront, I soaked up the sunlight, the sight of people bathing, like a convalescent.

  Raquel wasn’t dying, she wasn’t married, she didn’t have a boyfriend who’d just come back from the far side of the world, she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t have an incurable illness, wasn’t about to be sent to prison, she wasn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic, she didn’t have a secret love child, she wasn’t a member of some religious cult or a terrorist cell. I examined and rejected each of these possibilities in turn. ‘For a physicist, you have a vivid imagination . . .’ And maybe I had, but I harried my imagination, I twisted it, wringing out every possibility, and I came up with nothing. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she had a secret lover, some dark, shady connection that made it impossible for her to share her life with me or any other man, but if such a man had existed she would have told me. Raquel Fernández Perea was a normal woman, if by normal you meant like me. She had been working for the same company for years, had been living in the same apartment, everyone in her district knew her, she was on first-name terms with her local shopkeepers. There was nothing strange about her, and yet her disappearance confirmed Fernando Cisneros’s pronouncement, a verdict that sounded like a riddle: the strange thing about her was that there was nothing strange about her; that she did such strange things without being strange. If Raquel had really wanted to disappear, she wouldn’t have picked up the phone like a half-hearted suicide. If she hadn’t wanted me to look for her, she wouldn’t have said goodbye.

  This conclusion gave me back the decisiveness that I’d lost during the sterile period of exhaustion. If Raquel wanted me to look for her, I would look for her. Uncertainty is a cold, unwelcoming house full of invisible terrors. Better to suffer, better humiliation, anger or ice, better the taste of blood in my mouth, any of these was better than this limbo of stale air. I wanted to know and I was prepared to pay the price for that knowledge. At times, Raquel had looked at me as though I held her life in my hands and I had felt that was true. Now, I held my life and hers in my own hands, and the archived message on my mobile phone was a white kerchief, the ensign of a knight urged on by a fair maiden to slay the dragon. I was prepared to slay that dragon, but before I could, I had to find it, to know who or what it was. That night, I went out to dinner with my wife and son, I sat on a terrace and stared at the sea, added my voice to the voices ripping me to pieces, and on the way back, I announced that I was going back to Madrid. ‘OK,’ Mai did not even look at me, ‘but I’m keeping the car.’

  I took the train back to Madrid on 26 August, caught a taxi outside the station and asked the driver to take me to the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps. There was no one at Raquel’s apartment, or at least, no one answered the door. The signs of the holidays were evident - all the shops were closed and there were parking spaces on the Calle de Conde-Duque. I sat on the terrace of the only bar I could find and waited for nightfall. No light appeared beyond the twin balconies of her apartment, but I carried on waiting, then finally I went back to my house, which welcomed me with the strange indifference of new smells, paint and plastic and silicone. This shiny new space was not home, and it sent me out again in search of the colours, the smells and warmth of the home I had lost.

  I had come back to Madrid to look for Raquel, and I looked for her everywhere, but it was useless. Two days after I got back, the doorman of her apartment building told me he thought she’d probably be back in a day or two. On the 31st, when I saw him again, he looked at me suspiciously, almost alarmed by my persistence. He hadn’t heard anything, but it didn’t matter because I was convinced I would find Raquel at her office. When Mariví explained the lengths to which Raquel had gone to disappear, I almost broke down. But I had decided to hold out until the end, and before heading home, I sat on a bench and phoned my brother Rafa.

  ‘No, no, everything went fine. I told her we wanted to sell up, and she didn’t have any objections,’ he told me. ‘I was surprised, I expected her to try and talk me out of it, but when I got there, she had the papers ready for me to sign, we both signed and I left. I can’t have been in her office more than ten minutes, that’s why I don’t really remember much about her . . . A brunette, polite, friendly . . . but why do you need to get in touch with her ?’

  I’d already prepared an answer: ‘When I met her, she gave me the address of a bookshop . . . It’s not important, but we talked for a bit. I told her I taught physics and she told me she knew a secondhand bookshop that often had monographs and old manuals. I jotted down the address on a bit of paper and now I’ve lost it . . . I only thought of it because next week it’s a friend’s birthday . . .’

  My brother, ever conscious of his status as a rich, powerful ma
n, wasn’t interested in sentimental details: ‘Well, then, call her . . . The thing is, I can’t actually remember her name, but I can look it up if you like . . .’

  ‘No, that’s OK, I’ve found the letter she sent to Mamá.’

  I had hoped he’d give me a clue, something specific that might help me track her down. I thought about calling Julio and asking him what kind of financial hassle might crop up with a legacy, but I guessed that a vague reference would be enough. I was right, but when I spoke to the girl at the bank, she didn’t transfer me to Raquel.

  ‘I’m sorry . . . I’ve looked but I can’t find an extension number for her. I think maybe she doesn’t work here any more.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said, as much to myself as to her.

  ‘What I mean is, she no longer works for any of the departments in this building.’ The girl sounded young, dynamic, and she was patient. ‘It’s a big bank, there are hundreds of departments, there are any number of places she might have transferred to . . . But she’s not on my list.’

  ‘In that case I’m not really sure what I should do . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take your details and send them to the right department. Even if the assets have been liquidated, someone will still be dealing with your file. If you give me your phone number, I’ll make sure whoever has taken over gets in touch.’

  I made a big deal of thanking her. I didn’t hold out much hope, but three days later a man named Francisco José Reguiero called and told me he was at my disposal if I needed anything. He had qualified a few months earlier and had only started working at the bank on 1 September. He still had no idea how things worked, so they’d put him in charge of unresolved files, ‘to get used to asset management’. He was as chatty, as friendly and as useless as everyone I had spoken to over the past few days. Obviously he didn’t know Raquel, didn’t know where she might have gone, he didn’t know anyone who might know except maybe her secretary, Mariví, who knew everything. ‘What about Paco?’ I ventured.

  ‘Paco?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was mortally embarrassed now, yet I ploughed on regardless. ‘Raquel mentioned a colleague named Paco, maybe he might ...’

  ‘What’s his surname?’ Suddenly, Reguiero seemed considerably less forthcoming. ‘There are lots of people called Paco in the department.’

  ‘I realise that, but I don’t remember his surname . . .’ In fact, I’d never known it, any more than I knew Berta’s. ‘It doesn’t matter ... Thanks for your help.’

  I called directory enquiries, once, twice, three times, until I finally happened on an operator more sympathetic than her colleagues; she gave me the same number I had been vainly calling at all hours since 19 August.

  Don’t do this to me, Raquel, why are you doing this to me? I felt as though I were trapped inside an impenetrable maze whose walls were closing around me, forcing me to take two steps back every time I thought I was getting somewhere. And yet somewhere in this city a dragon awaited. I tracked it with a single-mindedness that could no longer be called determination, it was more like an illness, a morbid obsession that could only be described as temporary madness.

  That must be what other people thought, all those people I pestered relentlessly in those first days of September: Raquel’s doorman, the caretaker at the building on the Calle Jorge Juan, Mariví, whom I went back to see at least twice more, Reguiero, not to mention the host of secondary figures who had had some loose connection to her. I asked anyone whether they had seen her: the woman at the florist’s who had sold her an automatic sprinkler system in late July, in the bakery where she usually bought her bread, the man at the newsstand outside her building, waiters in the two or three bars we’d gone to over the summer. All of them remembered Raquel, some of them even remembered me, but they all shook their heads. Little by little any sympathy they had turned to irritation as I insisted on explaining how important it was for me to find this woman. Raquel had just been part of the scenery to them, one of the hundreds of women they saw every day. ‘Why don’t you hire a private detective?’ the man at the newsstand asked when I gave him my card and asked him to call me if he saw Raquel. One of the waiters said it was a pity the TV series that traced missing persons wasn’t on any more. ‘Of course, they’ve got a list people can sign up to, to say they don’t want to be found,’ he added, ‘so maybe your girlfriend . . .’ He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

  Yet if she hadn’t wanted me to find her, she wouldn’t have said goodbye. I didn’t mention this belief to anyone, but now and again I’d switch on my mobile phone and read her message. I wasted the last few days of my holidays prowling her district, hanging around the stalls selling curios where she had liked to browse, wandering aimlessly around Canillejas. Meanwhile, September rolled on with the languor of a transitional month, halfway between summer and autumn, between the last warm days and the first cold snap, and I adapted to its rhythm.

  I didn’t dare talk to anyone any more, not the doorman or the man on the newsstand, but I saw them and they saw me. There goes the headcase again, they probably thought as they turned away. I usually strolled through the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps at sunset, and every day the same thing happened: nothing. I’d get to the door of her building, press the button and remember her voice. ‘Yes?’ But no one answered. I could remember my own voice: ‘Hi, it’s me,’ and Raquel saying ‘Come on up,’ but the silence dulled the memory of her voice and mine so much that, for a moment, it made me doubt everything.

  ‘To believe’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb, and every night this vagueness gripped me, covered me in the ashes of a joy I had lost, one that, in truth, maybe I had never possessed. I felt worn out, depressed, worn out with being depressed and depressed by how worn out I felt. Maybe this is how it ends, I thought, maybe this is it. Term starts again soon and some day I won’t make it to my daily appointment with this intercom, some day I’ll start to forget Raquel, I’ll be myself again.

  These days, Mai was the one always waiting for me at home. We barely spoke to each other, but she knew that something had happened. It wasn’t hard to guess since I was spending more and more time at home. I didn’t feel like going out any more, I didn’t feel like working, I did nothing except walk every afternoon to an empty flat and sit for an hour or two on a café terrace watching the building. Mai wasn’t crying any more, she wasn’t attacking me, and every night she made dinner for me. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she’d slip her arms around me; she wasn’t to blame for any of this, she didn’t deserve this. I didn’t want to go back to the way my life had been before, and yet this was the landscape that was beginning to appear on the horizon. Maybe this was how it would end, in September, maybe October, November; the earth would go back to its usual prosaic orbit and I wouldn’t even know what had been true and what was a lie.

  ‘But surely it’s better this way?’ Fernando Cisneros said with a smile on our first day back on campus.

  ‘No it’s not,’ I said, determined to hold out to the end. ‘It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  He looked at me pityingly and said nothing.

  ‘What about your friend ?’ I asked.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘The girl who was looking into that thing about the theatre . . .’

  ‘Oh, her . . . She never called me back. I told you it was difficult.’

  When he’d got back from Comillas two days before my wife, he had adopted a different tactic for reassuring me.

  ‘You look like shit, Álvaro,’ he said. I told him about my conversation with Mariví. ‘Look, Raquel can’t just disappear, it’s impossible - there’s bound to be some trace. She could go and live on the other side of the world, I suppose, but some day or other you’re bound to run into someone who knows where she is,’ he reassured me. I said I wasn’t so sure but he was obviously thinking about Elena Galván, about the time I was Christmas shopping and had run into her on the Plaza de Callao. Then I r
emembered Berta, remembered the play she’d been rehearsing - actually it’s a trilogy that runs to six hours.

  ‘There you go, then,’ Fernando said.

  ‘But I don’t remember the name of the play or the writer, though I do know he’s Spanish and well known. I recognised his name when Raquel mentioned it, and the name of the play, but I can’t remember it now . . .’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, I have a friend, Pilar, she’s professor of literature and she knows all that stuff . . .’

  It had all seemed so easy to him that afternoon, but now, two weeks later, he no longer seemed convinced. This might take a long time, I thought, that evening, as I stared at the door of the building, at the dark window beyond the balcony, but some day, somewhere, I’d run into Raquel again, although by then it could be too late.

  Everything about the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps depressed me, the name, the place, the stubbornly closed door. You can’t slay a dragon if it hides from you, and I was worn out, I was completely worn out.

  ‘Maybe it’s for the best, don’t you think?’ Fernando Cisneros said that morning, but the following morning, Saturday, 17 September, I finally spotted a thriving plantation of geraniums on the balcony.

  When I saw that the light was on in the room beyond the balcony, I felt so nervous that I walked round the square half a dozen times like an ox tethered to a waterwheel. And while my legendary intelligence stalled at the prospect of this impossible conversation, my feeble body showed me that it was capable of coming back to life. I felt the sweat, the frenzied pulse of my blood, the sudden state of alertness that sent pins and needles shooting through my fingers.

  If ever I believed in fate, it was that evening, and if ever I needed a drink, it was at that moment. The mixture of belief and alcohol was so effective that not for a moment did I doubt that Raquel would be there. ‘Yes?’ I imagined. ‘Hi, it’s me.’ ‘Come on up!’ I savoured the sound of these words as I pressed the button on the intercom, I could taste them, feel their warmth in my belly.