The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  On the day of my father’s funeral, I hadn’t yet realised how painful that difference would turn out to be. Father Aizpuru went on murmuring and the wind went on blowing. ‘You should have been in Russia, or Poland . . .’ my father would have said, because it was cold, I felt cold, in spite of my scarf, my gloves, my boots, I felt cold even though I had my hands in my pockets and my coat buttoned up, even though I wasn’t blond and fair skinned, even though I wasn’t like my brothers. They felt the cold too, but they hid it well, they stood to attention, hands clasped over their coats, exactly as my father must have stood at the last funeral he attended. He would have worn that same expression - so different from the patient resignation I saw in the eyes of Anselmo and Encarnita, who were in no hurry, who no longer expected to be surprised, bowed only by time, drawing strength from their terrible weariness so that they could look reluctantly on the lives of others. This, I thought, was what my father had lost when his life diverged from theirs. He had been luckier than they had because although money does not make for a happy life, curiosity does; because although city life is dangerous, it is never boring; because if power can corrupt, it can also be wielded with restraint. My father had had a great deal of power and a great deal of money in his life and had died without ever being reduced to the vegetable, the mineral state of these men, these women he had known as a child, and who, at the moment of his final farewell, had come to claim him as one of them.

  He was not one of them. He had not been one of them for a long time. That was why I was so moved to see them, huddled together on the far side of the grave, not daring to mingle with us, Julito Carrión’s widow and his children. If I had not stared at them, had not accepted the quiet challenge of their bare knees, the coarse woollen jackets, perhaps I might not have noticed what happened next. But I was still staring at them, wondering whether they had noticed that I didn’t look like my brothers, when Father Aizpuru stopped talking, and, turning to look at me, spoke the terrible words: ‘If the family would like to come forward.’

  Until that moment, I had not been aware of the silence; then I heard the sound of a car in the distance and was relieved as its dull roar masked the dirty clang of the shovels digging into the earth, the harsh grating that seemed to rebuke me, the cowardly son, Father Aizpuru’s unruly pupil. ‘If the family would like to come forward,’ he had said, but I didn’t move. Mai glanced at me, squeezed my hand. I shook my head and she went over to join the others. Next come the ropes, I thought, the wheezing and panting of the gravediggers, the brutal indignity of the coffin banging against the walls of the grave, but I heard none of this as the profane, reassuring sound of the engine drew closer, then suddenly stopped just as the shovels finished their work.

  There were not many of us, but we weren’t expecting anyone else. And yet someone had turned up now, at precisely the wrong moment.

  ‘What will you have, Mamá?’

  ‘Nothing, hijo.’

  ‘Mamá, you have to eat something . . .’

  ‘Not now, Julio.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have the fabada, and then after that . . .’

  ‘Clara!’

  ‘What? I’m pregnant. I’m eating for two.’

  ‘Let her have whatever she wants. Everyone has to grieve in their own way.’

  ‘Really? In that case I’ll have the eel.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it!’

  ‘But Papá, Aunt Angélica said . . .’

  ‘I don’t care what Aunt Angélica said, you’re not having eel and that’s final.’

  ‘Has everyone decided what they’re having?’

  ‘Yes. The boys will have lamb chops’ - my nephews snorted but didn’t dare to argue - ‘I’ll take care of the main courses. Mamá, at least have some soup.’

  ‘I don’t want soup, Rafa.’

  ‘Have a starter, then.’

  ‘No, Rafa.’

  ‘Tell her, Angélica . . .’

  ‘Can I say something?’

  ‘What is it, Julia?’

  ‘Well, you said the boys had to have lamb chops, but I’m a girl and I want garlic chicken.’

  ‘OK, all those who want chicken put up their hands . . .’

  My sister-in-law, Isabel, assuming her husband’s rights as the firstborn, took over and, ignoring the waiter, started to count hands; everyone fell silent as if someone had pressed ‘Pause’ on a film we had seen a thousand times: the Carrión Otero Family Meal, twelve adults - only eleven now - and eleven children, soon to be twelve.

  ‘Mamá, who was that girl who showed up at the end ?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘What girl ?’ My mother threw the question back at me.

  ‘What are you having, Álvaro? I haven’t got you down here.’

  ‘Be quiet a minute, Isabel.’ Mamá’s blue eyes sparkled with curiosity. ‘What girl, Alvaro?’

  ‘There was a girl, about Clara’s age, tall, dark, with long straight hair . . . She turned up right at the end in a car, but she stayed by the cemetery gate. She was wearing trousers, huge sunglasses and a raincoat. You didn’t see her ?’

  No one else had seen her. She had crept slowly into the cemetery, stepping carefully so that her high-heeled boots wouldn’t sink into the mud, yet she wasn’t looking at the ground or the sky, she was looking straight ahead, or rather, she was allowing herself to be looked at. She walked across the recently mown grass as though walking down a red carpet; there was something in her bearing, in the way she moved, shoulders relaxed, arms gently swinging as she walked, utterly different from the involuntary, inevitable, almost theatrical stiffness common to mourners at a funeral, even if they did not really know the deceased. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could see her mouth; her lips were slightly parted, serene, almost smiling, though she did not actually smile. She drew level with me and stopped, far from the fur coats and the coarse wool jackets. Perhaps she knew I was her only witness, the only one who had noticed her, the only one who would later remember having seen her, perhaps not.

  ‘I thought maybe she worked with you?’ I turned to my brother Rafa, my brother Julio. ‘Maybe she was once Papá’s secretary or - I don’t know - maybe she worked for the estate agents.’

  ‘If she had, she would have come over and said something.’ Rafa looked from me to Julio, who nodded. ‘I certainly didn’t mention the funeral to anyone at the office.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know. But I did see her. Maybe she knew Dad better than she knew us, perhaps she was a nurse at the hospital, someone who looked after him? Or she didn’t feel comfortable coming over to talk to us . . .’

  But these were things I had thought of afterwards to try to justify her departure, which had been as sudden and inexplicable as her arrival. At first, I stupidly thought that she had made a mistake, she hadn’t known there was a funeral and had some other reason for being in that small, remote cemetery on that cold Thursday morning in March. It wasn’t just her attitude, the studied casualness of a woman with no particular place to go, a woman who simply wants to be seen. There was something worryingly incongruous about her presence at my father’s funeral. Those present fell into two diametrically opposed groups: the people my father had known as a child, and those he had known as an adult. This woman was young, well dressed, wrapped up warmly, yet in spite of her expensive boots, her hair was loose and she was wearing no make-up. If she had been related to Anselmo or Encarnita - or to any of the people of Torrelodones - she would have gone over and said something to them. But she didn’t. Instead, she had opened her handbag, taken out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, lit one, taken off her sunglasses and stared at me.

  ‘I don’t know what to say . . .’ My sister Angélica was slower to react. ‘I work at UCI, I know all the nurses there and she doesn’t sound like anyone I know . . . Besides, even if she was too embarrassed to talk to Mamá, she would have said hello to me.’

  ‘Well, all I know is that I saw her,’ I sai
d again, looking around the table. ‘Maybe she’s somebody’s neighbour, or she went to school with one of us, she could have been at school with Clara . . .’

  ‘Maybe she’s a local,’ said Rafa as Clara shook her head.

  ‘I thought that too, but she didn’t look like she was from Torrelodones.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean a thing, Álvaro,’ my mother said. ‘Maybe if she were my age, but nowadays young people all look the same whether they’re from small towns or the city. It’s impossible to tell them apart.’

  The woman had looked at me as though she knew me, or was trying to work out who I was, and it occurred to me then that this was why she had come - not to be seen, but to see us. I had looked into her large dark eyes, and she had held my gaze, patiently, resolutely, as though she had been waiting a long time to see us again, or simply to acknowledge us, to acknowledge me. I had smoked so much over the past two days that I had woken up that morning determined never to smoke again, but there was still a packet in my coat pocket, and watching her slowly smoke her cigarette, I was forced to break my resolution. By the time I had lit my cigarette, she had finished hers, and when I looked back, she was no longer looking at me, but staring straight ahead, at my mother, who was sobbing gently as Rafa took a handful of earth and threw it on to the coffin, at Clara, who, in one last, heartbreaking gesture, threw flowers into the grave, at my little nephews in their suits and ties, awkward in these roles, these clothes, knowing that grown-ups were watching. At that moment I realised that this woman knew exactly where she was and I felt a shudder of anxiety, of fear - not of danger but of the unknown. Then my mother collapsed. My brother Julio caught her and everyone clustered round, and I realised that it was over: the shovels, the prayers, the ropes. By the time I, too, finally stepped forward and took my place next to my family, my father had begun his journey towards oblivion.

  ‘I saw her.’ My nephew Guille, Rafa’s youngest son, stopped playing with his mobile phone and looked up at me. ‘She was wearing a checked jacket and those trousers people wear for horse riding. They were tucked into boots that came up to her knees?’

  ‘Yes, that’s her. I’m glad you saw her too . . .’ I smiled at him and he smiled back, a fourteen-year-old pleased to be the centre of attention. ‘Did you see her leave?’

  ‘No. She was right at the back. I thought she’d come up to us afterwards, but I didn’t see her again. I only noticed her because . . . well, she was pretty, wasn’t she?’

  ‘It’s strange . . .’ My brother Rafa looked from his son to my mother and then to me.

  ‘Could she be related to us, Mamá?’ I persisted. ‘A distant cousin or something . . .’

  ‘No,’ my mother snapped, then paused for a moment before saying, ‘Please, hijo, I think I’d recognise my own relatives. I may be old, but I’m not completely gaga.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ I didn’t dare continue, because I saw something in those eyes I did not expect. ‘It doesn’t matter . . .’

  ‘Álvaro, are you on something?’ my sister Angélica interrupted in that slyly solicitous tone everyone in the family recognised from births, hospital visits and convalescences. ‘The pill I gave you this morning wouldn’t make you act like this . . .’

  I had been waiting to see the woman up close, to look into her eyes and see their colour, find out who she was, why she was there, why she studied us so closely - but all the fur coats and woollen jackets had converged, hugging friends and strangers, kissing smooth cheeks, and the woman did not appear. Then my mother, looking more shattered than she had even in her husband’s final hours, asked whether one of us would help her back to the car. Julio and I had each slipped an arm around her, felt the astonishing weightlessness of her body, and manoeuvred her out of the cemetery. ‘Forty-nine years,’ she murmured, ‘forty-nine years we lived together, forty-nine years we slept in the same bed, and now . . .’ ‘Now you have Clara’s baby on the way, Mamá, you get to watch your grandchildren grow up,’ Julio babbled, ‘you have five children and twelve grandchildren, and we all love you and need you. We need you so we can go on loving Papá, so that Papá carries on living, you know that . . .’ My mother walked slowly, Julio trying to console her with sweet, slow words. From time to time I kissed her, pressing my lips to her face as I glanced around to find the mysterious woman, although I suspected she was already gone. I was certain that this woman had known exactly what she was doing, turning up at the last minute when the mourners had their backs to the cemetery gates, when the family was gathered around the priest, leaving her free to watch the funeral from a distance, shielded by the last paroxysm of grief, only to disappear as those unaffected by the death came forward to offer their condolences. She had anticipated all this, but she could not have reckoned on me, my one phobia, the morbid aversion to funerals that had frustrated her clever plan. I had seen her - just me, and a fourteen-year-old boy - and I might have forgotten all about her were it not for the fact that, as I left the cemetery, I became convinced that her appearance at the funeral had not been a mistake, an accident, or any of the names we give to such chance events. She had come, and she had looked at us as though she knew us, and when I had looked at her, I had seen something familiar in her profile, a vague, fleeting impression I could not put my finger on, in the same way that I could not say what it was that had made my mother’s eyes flare a deeper, purer blue when I had asked my innocent question.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something at the time, Álvaro?’

  ‘Say something about what?’ Miguelito was struggling in my arms like an animal as I tried to strap him into the child seat in the car. By the time I had managed to buckle him in, he was fast asleep.

  ‘About the girl . . .’ Mai started the car.

  I slipped into the passenger seat. My sister Angélica, in her usual hysterical way, had insisted that I wasn’t fit to drive. Besides, I didn’t feel like it.

  ‘You could have told me at the time, or when we went to pick up Miguelito, or on the way to the restaurant.’

  ‘I suppose so . . .’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘It just didn’t occur to me.’

  We stopped at a traffic light and Mai smiled and stroked my hair. Then she leaned over and kissed me, and this warm, calm and affectionate gesture rescued me from the cold and the worry of the morning, bringing me back to somewhere familiar, to the little patch of garden that was my life.

  ‘It was strange, though . . .’ she said after a moment, as we turned on to the motorway.

  ‘Yes. I mean no.’ Death is strange, I thought. ‘I don’t know.’

  Grandma Anita’s balconies teemed with geraniums, hydrangeas and begonias, blooms of white and yellow, pink and red, violet and orange spilling out of the clay flowerpots, climbing the walls or tumbling over the railings. ‘In Paris, the frost used to get them every year,’ she said to her granddaughter as she stepped outside to water them. It was a difficult task, because the plants were constantly searching for space that did not exist, climbing over one another as they grew towards the light, and only Grandmother knew exactly when and where, how and how much to water each pot.

  ‘Come over here into the sun with me, I’ll comb your hair.’

  For Raquel, this was the prelude to the most glorious part of her Saturdays. She would rush over and sit very still, staring out at the balconies that looked like posters advertising happiness as her grandmother brushed her hair.

  ‘Why do people call you Anita, Grandma?’

  Absorbed, as she watched her nimble fingers divide and subdivide the tresses with almost mechanical precision, Grandma Anita hesitated a moment before answering.

  ‘Because that was the name I was given.’

  ‘But you were named Ana, weren’t you?’

  ‘Of course. My father wanted to call me Placer, pleasure, but my mother didn’t like it. She said Placer was no name for a decent, hard-working woman . . .’

  Although Raquel could not see her face, she knew her grandmother was smiling, alth
ough she had never understood why it was funny. ‘And as I was the youngest in the family, and I was never very tall, and I was only fifteen when we left . . . Well, everyone always called me Anita.’

  She finished braiding one side and began on the other: the plaits were perfect, the same length, the same thickness, not a single stray hair, and as symmetrical as ears of corn.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Do you know why you’re called Raquel ?’

  ‘Of course I know.’ Raquel took a deep breath and rattled off the answer. ‘Grandma Rafaela didn’t like her own name, but she wanted Mamá to be able roll her Rs properly, so she wanted to find a different name beginning with R, and Raquel was the one she liked best, so she was called Raquel and Mamá and Papá liked it best too, and that’s why they called me Raquel too, even though people say the thing about rolling her Rs is just silly.’

  ‘Well, they’re wrong.’ Grandma Anita took the girl by the shoulders, turned her round and studied her carefully, looking for some fault she never found, then kissed her cheeks, her forehead and the tip of her nose. ‘Now you look beautiful. Do you want to wake your grandad ?’

  ‘Yes!’