‘Well, if not there, at least somewhere near by.’
‘What’s the name of that square?’ One year later, this was the first question Raquel asked the caretaker as he helped her take down the blue-and-white sign from the balcony, which was clearly no longer for sale. ‘That’s the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps,’ he told her. ‘That’s difficult,’ she said, as the man, who had told Mamá that he realised the apartment was a little expensive, but in this neighbourhood, they wouldn’t find anything better, signed a piece of paper. ‘And how far is it to the Glorieta de Bilbao?’ she asked him. ‘On foot?’ She nodded. ‘About ten minutes if you’re a slow walker . . . That’s not far, now, is it? No. I’d say it was very close.’
‘You’re going to love it, Grandpa, you’re going to love it.’ She had rushed to the phone as soon as they got home, eager to be the first to tell him the news. ‘You can’t imagine how big the sky is from there.’
In the hour and a half of my second class that morning, my mother managed to crash the voicemail system of my mobile. Álvaro, hijo, it’s Mamá, don’t forget to give Lisette the money for the gardener; Álvaro, hijo, remember to pick up the post, I know you’ll probably forget; Álvaro, hijo, when you pick up the post, could you go through it and throw out the junk mail, because I don’t have time for all that rubbish right now; Álvaro, hijo, instead of gorging on junk food like you always do, why don’t you ask Lisette to make something for you back at the house, you know what a good cook she is; Álvaro, hijo, call me when you’re leaving La Moraleja, I might take your sister out shopping . . . I deleted the messages before leaving the campus, standing at the bar with a glass of beer and two montaditos de lomo, the house speciality, famous all over Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma, although some people said the secret ingredient was simply that the chef never cleaned the grill, then I left a message on Mai’s voicemail - she was the scatty one - to remind her that I couldn’t pick our son up from school that afternoon, since it was my turn to ‘keep an eye on things’, as my mother put it, at her house.
It had been a little less than a month since my father’s death, and I quickly worked out that she had previously delegated the task to my two brothers, working down the list by age and leaving out the women, as she always did. I did not know how my brothers had felt going back to a house that inevitably still bore traces of Papá, his things still strewn over his desk, his favourite chair still turned to face the television, because we were all at that autistic, considerate stage of mourning, when everyone tries to avoid burdening others with his own grief and hopes they will do the same. Almost every afternoon, we spent some time with my mother, so we saw a lot more of each other than usual, but by virtue of the strict but tacit agreement between us, we avoided discussing the recent memories of our adult lives, settling instead for the shared memories of childhood, which were sweet and easier to digest.
In peacetime, I got along well with my brothers, when there were no external conflicts to trouble the comfortable, routine topics of conversation - the weather, the football, the kids. But lately, things had been anything but peaceful and a number of family meals, children’s birthday parties, even Christmas 2003, had degenerated into blazing rows. Whereas previously, Papá’s distaste for talking politics had put a brake on such things, now we found ourselves re-enacting on a smaller scale the tensions that divided the whole country. Divisions in the dining room echoed the balance of power in government, with the right wing holding an overall majority, while the opposition - my mother, my brother-in-law Adolfo and me, with the passive support of my sister Angélica - was zealous and argumentative. The radicalism of one side fuelled radicalism on the other, to the point where I found myself haranguing my pupils about the evils of the government before the 2002 general strike, even though I had joined a union only to support my friend Fernando, and until then had adopted political views more out of instinct than necessity. My family had been at daggers drawn until that first day in March 2005, when collective grief at our father’s death had brought us together. Now, however, the fault-lines had once more begun to show.
As happens in almost all large families, ours had been divided into two groups, the elders - Rafa, Angélica, Julio - and the ‘little ones’, my sister Clara and me. The fact that I was only four years younger than Julio but five years older than Clara had never seemed to matter, but over time, other factors had complicated this web of rifts and alliances for everyone but me.
Rafa and Julio worked together. Both had bowed to my father’s wishes. He had wanted his firstborn to study business, his second to study law and would have liked me to become an architect so that he could parcel out his various companies between his three sons. When I told him architecture didn’t appeal to me, and that I was thinking of doing physics, he gave me a long and detailed lecture outlining the advantages of his strategy. Though he never reproached me for my decision, I still felt as though I had disappointed him. Angélica’s vocation as a doctor, in a family with no paramedical precedents, appealed to him, and Clara’s unpredictability in embarking on two careers and finishing neither frustrated rather than upset him.
Faced with the professional common ground my brothers had shared almost since university, my sisters slowly began to forge an alliance based entirely on gender. For their part, Angélica and Julio shared the fact that both had divorced and remarried, and had had children by both partners. Although they had each married only once, Rafa and Clara shared the fact that both had married partners of a higher social standing than our own, though in the case of my sister-in-law Isabel, who had blue blood on both her mother’s and her father’s side, the size of our family fortune somewhat took the shine off aristocratic names.
In each case, I had remained on the sidelines. I did not work for the family business, I had been the last to marry, my only wedding had taken place in a register office, my wife worked as a civil servant, her family were practically paupers, and my son was the only one of my parents’ grandchildren to go to a state school. To top it all, I was the only member of the Carrión family to vote for the left until my sister Angélica, the perfect wife, capable of winding herself around the man by her side with the sinuous intimacy of an orchid to a tree, kicked off the twenty-first century by unexpectedly leaving her first husband - a rather dumb urologist who had already walked out on her a couple of times - for an oncologist who was more intelligent than she was, handsome, charming, a militant atheist and even more left-wing than me.
Since then, my brother-in-law Adolfo had sided with me in these arguments and my sister followed our lead, albeit with some difficulty, since she had previously had no interest in politics beyond an instinctive, I would almost say pathological, approach to law and order which consisted of blaming everything on the victims. Five years into her second marriage, she could just about keep this trait in check and I was grateful to her for having brought someone interesting into our family discussions.
My isolated position meant that I could maintain a similar, equidistant relationship with all my siblings, including those like Rafa and Angélica whom I loved but did not get along with. Julio, who as a little boy had seemed destined to idolise and emulate the firstborn, had adroitly managed to shed this role to become a very different man, someone whose moods veered from light to shade with equal intensity. He was very likeable, funny, he adored his children, and he knew how to get the most out of those pleasures in life that cost nothing. In addition, he was much weaker than Rafa, which to me seemed a virtue, and although we didn’t have much in common, he was the closest thing to a friend I had among my brothers and sisters.
Clara and I still shared a special closeness, though I knew that there were times when she looked at me as though I were from another planet, wondering what I had done with her brother Álvaro. None of this bothered me much, until the day my father had another heart attack and the gravity of the prognosis meant we kept vigil into the long dark hours, the brothers- and sisters-in-law all vanishing, leaving me alone with C
lara and Mamá in the waiting room of UCI. Then, perhaps because I had nothing else to do, I thought about my family, what we were, what we had been, about the things that brought us together and those that kept us apart, about the things that had endured and those which time had obliterated.
My father made it through the night; in fact he would live for almost a fortnight. From that moment, my sister and my mother became inexplicably important, almost indispensable, to me, not simply for what they represented, but for that part of me contained in each of them. And I knew that this was simply a side effect of grief, a trap set by my tired brain, which was frantically attempting to commit to memory every date, every place, every image of this man whom we could now do nothing to save. To remember my father was to remember us all, freshly washed and combed and dressed, posing for the camera in every family snapshot in the photo album which Mamá kept in the attic, along with the folders in which she kept our school reports. And I was thinking about this as I unwillingly, almost fearfully, prepared myself for my father’s absence, his desk still littered with papers, his chair in front of the television, maybe even his toothbrush, or worse still the empty space where his toothbrush had once been. But I had not reckoned on Lisette.
‘Álvaro!’ I opened the gate with the remote control, but she was already standing outside the front door waiting for me, as though she had heard the car. ‘It’s so lovely to see you!’
I gazed up at her for a moment for the simple pleasure of looking at her. Then, as I bounded up the half-dozen steps to the front porch, I wondered how she would greet me. In front of my mother, Lisette always addressed me formally and referred to me as ‘señorito Álvaro’; in front of my wife, Lisette talked to me as a friend but did not kiss me when we met. That afternoon she kissed me on both cheeks, as she always did when it was just the two of us, and then hugged me, rocking me like a mother comforting her child.
‘How are you, niño?’
‘Fine,’ I said, but my smile faded as I realised what she meant. ‘Well . . .’
‘I know . . .’ Slowly she let the palms of her hands slide down the back of my neck before stepping away. ‘I know . . .’
‘Your mother called to say you would be coming,’ she said as she walked into the house and headed towards the living room. ‘I’ve made you some sandwiches and a little salad . . .’
‘Thanks, Lisette, but I ate something at the university before I came.’
‘Oh,’ she seemed disappointed, ‘so I suppose you won’t want some crème caramel after all the trouble I went to learning how to make it?’
‘OK, then,’ I smiled finally, ‘I’ll have some of that.’
Lisette herself was as rich and intense, as syrupy and golden, as the crème caramel she now offered me. She had the face of an exotic doll, almond-shaped eyes with just a touch of make-up, full crimson lips, her body small and slender yet curvaceous with soft, velvety skin the colour of milky coffee. ‘Have you seen Mamá’s new maid, the one from Santo Domingo?’ my brother Julio had asked me at one of his kids’ birthdays, and when I told him I hadn’t, he put his face in his hands. ‘Jesus, she’s sex on legs.’
At that point I burst out laughing, although I didn’t particularly pay him any attention since my brother was the kind of man who tripped over gorgeous women at least twice a day, even if he only went out to walk the dog. But when I saw Lisette I had to admit that, despite his somewhat shallow and indiscriminate taste, this time my brother had not been exaggerating. ‘Hey,’ I said when I next saw him, back when my father still wanted us all to go to a restaurant for Sunday lunch, ‘you were right!’ ‘Right about what?’ Julio asked. ‘That thing you said about the Caribbean,’ I replied, even though it was just us and Rafa at the bar and none of the women could overhear. ‘I was right?’ I nodded. ‘Boy were you right!’ ‘Well, I did warn you,’ he shot back. ‘Incredible,’ I said. ‘Fucking incredible,’ he stressed. ‘Could you two just stop all that bullshit?’ interrupted Rafa, who, according to Julio, had always been appropriately interested in women, that is to say, not very interested, ‘you sound like a couple of horny schoolboys.’ ‘Not schoolboys,’ Julio burst out laughing, ‘but definitely horny,’ and I laughed with him.
I liked women a lot more than Rafa did, but I was less obsessive than Julio. I didn’t go looking for them, I didn’t run around after them, I didn’t chat them up in bars or chase after them at traffic lights. To me, women had always seemed to be a sort of gift, an extraordinary goodness that floated far above my head and rained down on me from time to time. I never felt that I had done anything to deserve the attention that some of them lavished on me, perhaps because, although I found them beautiful, funny, gentle, and infinitely arousing, I also found women strange. I never bothered to try to fathom the mysterious working of their minds, never doubted for a moment that they were the ones who did the choosing; I was content to watch them come and go, neither regretting those who were beyond my reach, nor believing that their preference was in itself valuable, but accepting their existence gratefully. In any case, I loved my wife.
Mai and I had been together for nine years and neither of us had yet shown any sign of growing tired of the other. She was still cheerful, tranquil and patient, did not meddle too much in those parts of my life that did not concern her, and valued her own independence. I was grateful that she was easygoing and was pleased that she did not seem to miss the intense, emotional ups and downs of the kind of love that catapulted many of her friends from abject depression to the dizzy heights, only to spiral inevitably back down into depression, their lives like a squall constantly about to break.
‘She’s a complete idiot, you’ll never believe what she’s done this time,’ Mai would say before she’d even hung up the phone, annoyed by histrionics I simply found amusing.
Then she would lie next to me on the sofa and I would stroke her hair while she brought me up to date on the endless passions, the jealousies, the break-ups, the doubts, the reconciliations, the wild make-up sex, the business trips, more jealousy, more doubts, more break-ups, and I wondered whether sometimes she too was prey to these strange, intense feelings, beyond reason, something capable of dismissing common sense in favour of some mythic happiness as insubstantial as smoke. Or not.
I didn’t know, because I was not the kind of person who felt this kind of suffering, that kind of happiness, and so, sometimes as I sat there listening to Mai, I wondered whether she had the same doubts as I did, if she had ever wondered about the stability of our life together, what we were losing in return for this image of the perfect couple. I never saw the least indication that my wife was unhappy, not even on the hypothetical plane on which I played out these timid conjectures. It only took a moment for me to remember how much I loved Mai, that I liked her, that we were happy together. This had always been enough in dangerous situations, and although there were a number of isolated instances when I had succumbed to temptation, I had only ever cheated on her when I was away from home, and only with women I met by chance and did not find too attractive, at least not attractive enough to think of these nights as anything more than a moment of madness. Whenever I met a woman I thought I might grow attached to, I put up barriers.
Consequently, I did not suffer from any pangs that first summer Lisette spent at my parents’ house, and since that time we had had a curious relationship, a sort of innocent flirtation that did not worry me in the slightest. This was a game that I knew how to play, something that the women I genuinely found attractive - Lisette, the secretary at the museum, one of my colleagues - realised immediately. Some of them, especially the younger women, were hurt by my lack of ambition, but for the most part we had fun.
‘Delicious,’ I said as I finished the dessert. ‘You get better every day.’
‘Thanks.’ She smiled. ‘How is your mother?’
‘Not great. She says she’s fine, but . . . Staying with Clara has done her a world of good. She spends her whole time tidying: the kitchen cupboards, the wardrob
es, the boxroom. My sister must be going up the walls, but it keeps Mamá busy.’
‘She will come back, won’t she?’
‘Of course she’ll come back!’ I said with exaggerated emphasis because I could hear a waver of anxiety in her voice and realised she was worried about her job. ‘She still doesn’t really get on with Curro and sooner or later she’s bound to get bored with reorganising things. Clara is due next month, so Mamá will probably hang around until the baby is born, but she’ll be back here by the middle of June, when it starts to get hot. You know how much she likes to have her grandchildren over in the summer.’
‘I could go and stay with her there, help her with things,’ she pursed her lips, her face both puzzled and hurt, ‘but she doesn’t want me to.’
‘Of course she doesn’t, because she’ll be coming back here, and she needs you to look after the place in the meantime, to pay the gardener and so on . . . That reminds me, I brought some money for you.’ From my wallet, I took out half a dozen sealed envelopes held together with an elastic band, each one carefully marked with my mother’s elegant, old-fashioned handwriting. ‘Has there been any post?’
‘It’s in your father’s study.’ Lisette gave a shrug. ‘I always used to leave it there. I’ll go and get it if you like . . .’
‘No, I’ll come with you . . .’
I did not know how my brothers had felt, I knew that I was going to find this very difficult, and yet I had not anticipated the aching sadness that breathed through every object, permeating the whole house with an invisible patina at once ancient and impossibly new. Heading towards his study, something I could have done blindfold, every step I took, every door I opened, every thing I touched jolted me with the realisation that this was a step, a door, a thing that still existed in a world where my father did not.
The Frozen Heart Page 5