The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  My one grey suit, the one I wore to my viva examination, to conferences, was still hanging in the empty wardrobe, together with a white shirt, the tie I usually wore tucked into the breast pocket. I hadn’t worn it for more than a year. ‘Álvaro, hijo, you could have worn a tie ...’ The day we buried my father, the day we met with the lawyer, and before that banquets, commemorations, birthdays: ‘Álvaro, hijo, you could have worn a tie ...’ ‘I know, but I forgot ... didn’t think of it, you’re right, sorry, Mamá ...’

  I’ll wear a tie today, Mamá. As I stepped out of the shower, I wondered whether it was worth it, but it didn’t matter any more. Methodically, reluctantly, I put on my suit, the way I used to when I was nine, ten, eleven and had to go up on stage at school to collect my prize for mental arithmetic. That Saturday morning, looking at myself in the mirror, my right eye already purple, I thought about Julio, Rafa, Angelica, just as I had the night before. We’d never resembled each other less.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Alvaro, you could have warned me! All hell is breaking loose, and of course everyone assumes I knew all along ...’

  My brother Julio came up to me, smiling, but before he finished the sentence, he frowned and took me by the shoulders.

  ‘You look like shit,’ he whispered. ‘What’s going on?’

  When Raquel told me that she had never slept with my father, I hadn’t thought about the rest of them. It was not just that this truth was brutal, squalid, bitter; it was my truth. It was my love at stake, my life. It had been an implosion, a subdued, silent blast detonated by men and women who were long dead, leaving everything in ruins, like a building suddenly disappearing in a cloud of dust. This was how I saw things, and it concerned only me, it had only ever concerned me, from the moment my mother sent her good son to that meeting where it had all begun. It was pure coincidence, a chain of trivial, insignificant events, a series of accidents utterly unrelated to each other except for the unfortunate fact that I was always present. Raquel had nothing to do with anyone but me, she was mine and mine alone.

  When she told me she’d never slept with my father, I didn’t think about the rest of them. The truth had scorched the earth around me, razed it like a spring frost, leaving me alone, with no one behind me, only the faint form of Raquel, curled into a ball, somewhere on the distant horizon, And yet, beyond this shadow, they had still been there, my mother, my brothers and sisters, those cut-out faces on the family tree that hung in the living room at La Moraleja. My mother had been obsessed with arts and crafts, something that, at one point, had taken up all her free time. There was restoring old furniture, then needlepoint, paintings, napkins, towels and baby blankets, carefully embroidered with her grandchildren’s names. My son’s bedroom was filled with the fruits of his grandmother’s hobbies. At one point, she had become interested in genealogy and had drawn up dozens of family trees, for her children, her sons- and daughters-in-laws, her friends. The largest of them she had kept, painting the branches and the leaves with the skill of a miniaturist in special metallic paint. There we all were, our little heads carefully cut out, forming an intricate design. The tree was moderately leafy at the crown, choked in the middle, with a profusion of lower branches, a gap here, a gap there, then suddenly the Carrion Otero family, my parents, my brothers and sisters, each detail mapping out the highs and lows of marriage, births, more births, then at last a death which would never remove the embarrassing smile from the board it was stuck to.

  That morning, Raquel had gone to work, leaving me alone on the threshold of what would be the rest of my life. I sat at the kitchen table and had a coffee, and another, and another, smoking like a trooper. I thought about my father, about weighty subjects and trivial things, until I remembered the family tree, the green leaves, the smiling faces, the empty spaces my mother had left for the future marriages her children might have, the little comments that sounded like warnings addressed to no one in particular, though when she made them she was always looking at Julio. You can leave me in peace, because I have no intention of redoing it ... Anyone who doesn’t fit in there now will just have to be left off it ...

  My father was out of our life now, but my mother would never take his photograph from the tree. Raquel was part of my life now, but no one would ever cut out her face and stick it in its rightful place. As far as my father was concerned, Teresa González Puerto died on 2 June 1937, when she was most alive. To my brothers and sisters, maybe even to my mother, I would begin to die the moment I managed to get up from this table where I was sitting drinking coffee and smoking compulsively in an attempt to bring myself back to life.

  Time had passed, a lot of time. When Raquel told me, the main events were so devastating that I hadn’t noticed the loose ends. ‘My grandfather met your father again in a café in Paris, invited him home, he spent a lot of time with the family, he was so charming that they all became very fond of him and before long he was part of the family ...’ Between the third and fourth cups of coffee, I reminded myself that I should phone Mai, that it was the first thing I should have done that morning, but I dialled Raquel’s number instead.

  ‘Álvaro, hi ... Is something wrong?’ she said, her voice choked with panic.

  ‘Everything’s fine. I just wanted to ask you ... When your grandfather and my father met up in Paris, how did they know each other?’

  ‘From Torrelodones,’ she sounded calmer now, ‘my family used to go there on holiday before the war. They had a house there.’

  ‘I know that, but there must have been a lot of children in Torrelodones, even if it was only a village ... And before the war, my father would have been ... well, he was born in 1922. I’m just surprised your grandfather would have remembered him after all those years ...’

  ‘Yes, but his mother, your Grandmother Teresa, was friends with everyone; not so much with my Grandfather Ignacio, because he was the youngest, but with Mateo and Carlos, his brother-in-law. They were all socialists, they were in the same chapter of the party as her, they went to the same meetings at the Casa del Pueblo ... All I can tell you is that my grandfather knew your grandmother, and so he was able to recognise your father as Teresa’s son. I don’t know if that makes sense ...’

  ‘It does, yes.’

  The last coffee did nothing to shake me out of my inertia — barely two fingers of thick, lukewarm glop, the grounds sticking to my palate. My Grandmother Teresa, her little smiling cut-out face, maybe I was the only one who knew the truth about her, or maybe Rafa and Angelica knew, maybe they’d always known; my mother never knew what happened to her mother-in-law, but she knew the rest of it, she had to.

  Why? What good will it do? Raquel had asked these same questions twenty-four hours earlier in an attempt to dissuade me from making the visit that would close the circle. Now I was asking myself, Why? What good will it do? The questions were hardly original. They had been asked by so many, answered by the silence of millions of voices who had said nothing for over thirty years.

  Why? Because of me, a treacherous son who listens to stories put about by the enemy, Alvaro, the ingrate, the traitor. Perhaps I didn’t have the right to think only of myself, but this wasn’t about my father, my memories of my father, any more. It was about my own identity, my own memories. Perhaps I didn’t have the right to think only of myself, but thinking about myself was thinking about all of us, freshly washed, our hair combed, dressed in our Sunday best, posing in front of the camera for the family album my mother kept in the attic with our school reports. Portraits, group shots, a family — my family. There was still time for me to save it, to preserve the smiling face of this model family, to spare them the aggravation of finding out who they really were. Or maybe not. In all probability they already knew and didn’t care.

  There was no coffee left, but I kept on smoking. I thought about the word ‘generosity’, the word ‘responsibility’, the word ‘selfishness’. I thought about order and chaos, about the past and the future, I thought about Teresa, and I thought about Raquel.
How could we begin to live like this, how could we rise above it. It would never be just the two of us, Alvaro, it would never be just you and me. There would always be too many other people, the living and the dead, going to bed with us, getting up with us, eating and drinking with us. Why? What good would it do? Just because. Because thinking is the antithesis of action and I couldn’t think any more. Julio picked up as soon as I called, his voice sounding both cheerful and worried. Then, as I left the apartment, crossed the square and hailed a taxi, I realised that Mai would have talked to him. It was then I also became aware that I had forgotten something vital — the need to protect Raquel, to find an alibi for her, to minimise her role in this ugly, squalid, sordid mess.

  ‘Let’s get a table. I need to talk to you,’ I suggested.

  I’d already warned him over the phone, but he followed me without saying anything.

  ‘First off, I’ve left Mai, but you already know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I know,’ he said, smiling, as if he hadn’t heard the first part of the sentence. ‘Mai called Angelica yesterday and as you can well imagine, half an hour later Mamá knew. She gave me a real bollocking, too. “You must have known, Julio, I’m sure you knew, he always covered up for you and now you’re covering for him, you men are all the same, you’re pigs, the lot of you.” That’s why I said you could have told me beforehand.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. What exactly did Mai say?’

  ‘To Angelica? I don’t know. All I know is that I got an earful because you left your wife for a younger woman.’

  ‘She’s not younger. Mai’s not even a year older than she is.’

  ‘Well, to hear your sister talk, you’d think she was straight out of school, that’s all I know ...’

  ‘Raquel is thirty-six but ... she’s very special ...’

  ‘I’m sure she is.’ He laughed.

  ‘No, I don’t mean like that. I don’t know how to explain it ... You remember Papá’s funeral?’

  ‘Papá’s funeral?’ Julio raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course I remember, but what’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘You remember we went for lunch afterwards and I asked you if any of you had seen the girl who turned up at the end, and you said you hadn’t?

  He looked at me, confused, thought for a moment then shook his head.

  ‘I vaguely remember something ... I don’t know, does it matter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean that’s her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was she doing at Papá’s funeral?’

  ‘She’s our cousin.’

  ‘A cousin?’ He looked impressed.

  ‘A third cousin or something. Her great-grandfather was the brother of our great-grandfather.’

  He put his elbows on the table and rubbed his face a couple of times. ‘Jesus Christ! So how come we don’t know her?’

  ‘That’s precisely the point ... why don’t we know her?’

  I paused, then let him have the whole story.

  ‘Remember after the funeral when I found the little silver pillbox with the Viagra? And I was wondering what sort of man Papá was ... You had a lot on at the time and Mamá asked me to go to La Moraleja instead. I’d already been there once, but I hadn’t taken any photos or anything. Anyway, when I arrived no one else was there, Lisette was off doing some course or other, so I was looking around in Papá’s study and I found a cardboard file with his papers from the Blue Division. Some notes had been scribbled on them quite recently, names and dates and things I didn’t understand, and there was a phone number. That’s how I met Raquel. I phoned her and I asked her who she was and she said she’d prefer to tell me in person.’ I wondered whether I was lying convincingly; from my brother’s expression, it seemed I was. ‘It was all a bit cloak-and-dagger, but in the end I agreed to meet her and she told me that she’d met Papá by accident, because she owned an apartment in Tetuán that Papá’s company was trying to buy because they already had the one next door and wanted to knock through the wall to make a bigger flat, I’m sure you remember ...’

  ‘Wait a minute, that rings a bell ... But we bought a lot of property in Tetuán, so I don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You probably wouldn’t remember anyway because she refused to sell for ages. She works in a bank, so she’s quite clever about these things, and she thought the longer she waited, the more you were likely to offer, and that’s what happened. In the end, Papá swapped her apartment for one of the ones Rafa tried to sell to Mai and me, the one on the Calle Jorge Juan. She was worried because the deal was done only a couple of days before Papá went into hospital and she wasn’t sure if the sale had gone through. That’s why she came to the funeral. She had to talk to one of us sooner or later, and she wanted to get a good look at us ... Anyway, that’s what she told me. It all sounded weird, and it was pretty weird, but I didn’t care, it seemed harmless enough, and anyway, I fancied her. About ten minutes later we were flirting and, well, what happened next doesn’t really matter. When we went to the reading of the will, I noticed that the apartment she was talking about wasn’t listed as part of Papá’s estate, I even had an argument about it with Angelica, remember?’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember that all right.’

  ‘Anyway, that night, I phoned Raquel and we arranged to meet up again, and I was still attracted to her. So much so that we started seeing each other, and before I knew what was happening I became obsessed, I’d fallen completely in love with her and I told her I was going to leave Mai. Then suddenly, she disappears and I went crazy, I mean really crazy, I was in a very bad way. It was all a coincidence. It could have happened to Rafa, or to you, or a different company might have bought her apartment and we’d never have met. But that’s how it was, and I fell for her. And now I’ve found out there was something else she wasn’t telling me.’

  My story was full of holes, but I’d already gone too far when I realised that sooner or later Rafa was bound to meet her, and although he’d only spent ten minutes in her company, there was a chance he would recognise her as the investments adviser he’d met at the bank, in which case my whole story would collapse like a house of cards. At that moment, it was the least of my worries, and if my relationship with my family survived the weekend, it would be the least of their worries too. Anyway, Rafa never really noticed women, and Julio had swallowed the story hook, line and sinker.

  ‘I think I know the girl you mean,’ he said. ‘I never actually met her, because I wasn’t dealing with the contract, but I remember there was one of the buildings in Tetuán where this girl was driving us mad. What I don’t understand is ... Why would Papá trade an expensive apartment for her place? I mean, he was old, but he wasn’t stupid. And why are you looking so depressed, Alvaro? The girl came back again, didn’t she, you should be happy.’

  I rubbed my eyes and ordered another beer.

  ‘Julio, do you remember Mariloli?’

  ‘Mariloli?’ He nodded, looking at me as though I was insane. ‘The caretaker’s daughter from Calle Argensola?’

  ‘That’s her. The one who found Clara’s doll in the street and wouldn’t give it back.’

  The story of the red-haired doll in the green dress was one that had survived the ages, and the expression on my brother’s face changed. At that moment, I realised he knew, that he had probably always known, maybe since that day in 1977, but I told him anyway, who our father was, just how honourable he was, what he had done to become a self-made man, everything from the two separate ID cards right up to the moment when Raquel forced him to face up to what he’d done just before he died.

  ‘It was a dirty trick,’ he said, yet he was still smiling. ‘What I don’t understand is why this girl feels bad, why she feels guilty for sleeping with you without telling you. I mean, if meeting each other was just a coincidence ... She has to be as weird as you, Alvaro ... So she knew Papá was a bastard? So what? I’ve known that for years, I told you so myself. I ca
n deal with it. She suddenly had the chance to fuck him over and she took it? Good for her ... Maybe Papá died because some girl showed up at his office one day with a pile of papers he was hoping he’d never see again? It doesn’t change anything, Alvaro. She didn’t kill him. He was eighty-three, he was bound to die sooner or later. What difference does it make now?’

  ‘Dead men have no friends.’

  ‘Never a truer word.’ Julio raised his glass.

  ‘But... I don’t understand,’ I looked at my brother and saw his smile fade, ‘I mean, don’t you care?’

  ‘I already knew, Alvaro. I’ve known for years. I’ve known since that afternoon when your girlfriend - Raquel, isn’t it? — showed up at Calle Argensola with her grandfather.’ He finished his beer, then signalled to the waiter. ‘I think I’ll have something stronger ... fancy a gin and tonic?’

  ‘No.’ This didn’t mean I didn’t want a drink, and my brother knew it.

  ‘A whisky, then? I’d scored three goals that afternoon, I remember it like it was yesterday. I’d played really well and Papá was proud of me, and back then, that was all I cared about. I was supposed to have a try-out for the Madrid junior squad the week after that, remember?’

  ‘Of course, I spent three months bragging about you at school. I bet all my friends they’d sign you.’

  ‘Mamá was terrified, but Papá liked the idea of having a footballer for a son. We talked about it after the match, just Papá and me — Rafa was sulking, he didn’t say a word the whole way home. He was very jealous of me at the time, because he’d spent the whole season on the subs bench. Anyway, we got home and there was this girl playing with Clara and ... And nothing. I had no idea what was going on. Then, before dinner, Mamá came and got Rafa, Papá wanted to talk to him about something, and I was sure it was about me, I was sure he was going to tell him not to be so jealous, to accept the fact that he wasn’t as good a footballer as I was. But it wasn’t that. At dinner, everyone was solemn, Papá, Mamá, Rafa and Angelica.’