By that point, she had ceased to think of herself, of her parents, her family, as Spanish. Many years had passed, many things had happened and her brother Ignacio, the third Ignacio Fernández in the family, had been born in Madrid, just as the first had been. When it seemed as if life was settled, on a June afternoon like any other, while her grandfather Aurelio was sleeping, his face turned towards the little strip of the blue Mediterranean where he had come to die, Raquel headed towards the radiant white house where she had spent her childhood summers, not realising how much she had forgotten of those strange years, of her life before Spain. A life that seemed all the more strange every time she visited Paris - where Mateo, where she, had been born, yet where it seemed impossible that they could ever have lived. She did not realise that waiting on Grandma Anita’s table, on that ordinary Sunday afternoon in the 1980s, would be a salad of endives and chopped walnuts with blue cheese dressing that she could not remember ever having seen before, a salad that, although it looked wilted and slightly revolting, tasted rather pleasant.
Many years had passed and much had changed in Spain, rapidly at first, more slowly later, as dreams and reality slotted into their new, if narrow, moulds, just as she learned to fit into an ordinary life, to modify her dreams to fit reality; she had wanted to become an actress, but had wound up studying economics, she would have preferred a more interesting job now but worked in a bank, she had married, but was divorced, she longed for a child but had never found the right time or the right man, she was unhappy sometimes, but sometimes she was happy.
Many years had passed and much had changed, but Raquel Fernández Perea never stopped looking at the sky. And she never forgot the name of the man who had made her grandfather cry.
The day dawned cloudy and damp, but by nine o’clock sharp, when I dropped my son off at school, the sky had cleared and the sun was beginning to warm the air. Tomorrow was the last day of March, and the last chance to meet my deadline if I was to avoid a long series of pained reproaches. ‘Álvaro, hijo, what is it, is it so difficult for you to go and talk to the man at that office? I don’t know, I ask one little favour . . .’
My mother would never understand how much even the name of the office left me feeling tired and depressed, and vaguely indignant as I invariably felt when dealing with languages designed only to be understood by initiates, the sort of deliberately incomprehensible jargon that obscures the very idea it is supposed to explain. It could have been called the Department of Financial Consultants, or even just the Financial Consultancy, but no, of course not, that would be too easy, people might understand that. Instead, the consultant who was disinclined to part with the money which death had snatched from my father worked for the ‘Department of Asset Management at the Administrative Society of Cooperative Investment Institutions’, and that was no place to be on a beautiful spring morning.
Indeed, the weather was so beautiful that, on a whim, I drove home, parked my car in the garage and, leaving my coat behind, set off on foot for the Plaza de las Descalzas Reales. I was sure that the meeting would be a short one, given my complete ignorance of financial matters and my determination that I would not be the one to make any important decisions, and if it did drag on, I could always get a taxi to Recoletos and then a train from there to the university. Though I had sworn to myself that my mother would never find out, I had no classes that morning, but did have a meeting at noon with my research group.
I arrived at the bank in good humour though somewhat later than I had expected. I had no trouble finding the Department of Gobbledegook and walked straight up to the receptionist.
‘Hello. I’m here to see Mr Fernández Perea.’
The receptionist, a plump woman of about fifty who was wearing too much make-up, stubbed out her cigarette - although it was early and there was a ‘No Smoking’ sign posted above her head - and glared at me.
‘Mrs,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Mrs Fernández Perea,’ she explained. ‘She’s not married, but she doesn’t like to be called Miss. I’m single and I don’t like it either.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I replied, as though I had done something to be sorry for. I felt so uncomfortable about having apologised that I took the letter out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘The letter doesn’t give her full name, so there was no way I could have known she was a woman from the letter.’
‘OK.’ She nodded, agreeing to a ceasefire. ‘Have you an appointment?’
‘No. The letter didn’t say I needed one.’
‘You don’t say. And I don’t suppose it said that it’s a good idea to put on your clothes in the morning?’
I was about to turn on my heel and leave, but she pressed the button on the entryphone.
‘Raquel . . . You have a visitor. I don’t know his name. No, he doesn’t have an appointment. Yes, wait a minute, reference number JCG 32 . . . Right, straight away, I’ll tell him.’ She released the button, handed me the letter and glared at me. ‘Go on in, she’s expecting you. Third door on the left. There’s a plate on the door,’ she attempted something approaching a smile, ‘with her full name on it.’
Later, when I knew that her name was Mariví, that she had a stomach ulcer, that she hated men in general because one in particular had dumped her for another guy when she was a twenty-two-year-old non-smoker who weighed seven and a half stone, I often thought of her as a frontier, a border, the last witness to what I had been like before Raquel. Mariví was a complete bitch, but not enough of a bitch for me to walk out, and she cut off my retreat before I realised the consequences. If she had been a little more stupid, a little more rude, I would have left, I would have gone home and picked up my car, driven to the university and then phoned my mother to tell her about the abortive meeting, ‘I’m no good at this kind of thing, Mamá, I’ve told you that before, now I’ve wasted a whole morning and I’m not about to waste another.’ She, of course, would have persisted for a while and then given up and phoned my brother Rafa, thinking that was probably what she should have done in the first place. After that, something would undoubtedly have happened, but I wouldn’t even have heard about it because Rafa would have dealt with it on his own, with the legendary dignity and determination he had inherited from Papá. He had been waiting for an opportunity to play the martyred soldier, the one who solves everyone’s problems and heaps all the responsibility, all the blame, upon himself. I would have gone on living my life, this carefully tended patch of earth which required little effort and little thought. And so I often thought about Mariví later, when all around me seemed like an infinite expanse of scorched earth.
And yet, that morning, I stood wondering whether or not I should knock and thinking that I’d go in, listen to whatever tedious claptrap she had to say, nod politely, take down a few figures and then be out of there by ten. In the end, I knocked gently and got no answer. I knocked again, harder this time, and a bright, confident voice said, ‘Come in.’ I stepped inside. It was a big office, bright and spacious with two distinct sections. In the background was a large, simply designed but clearly designer desk next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on to the street; in the foreground two sofas flanked a low table. Years working at the university meant I could immediately spot where my consultant fitted into the hierarchy. She was not a big fish - hardwood furniture, expensive carpets and a distance of at least three metres between desk and reception area - nor was she a minor functionary - tiny office with small table, a workstation for the computer and a couple of chairs for visitors. It was a pleasant space with large plants and tastefully framed prints; glancing around gave me a moment to think before I looked up and found myself face to face with her: Raquel Fernández Perea, the woman who had turned up unexpectedly at my father’s funeral, the strange woman who had suddenly ceased to be a stranger.
My body recognised her before I did, an involuntarily spasm I could do nothing to stop. But she didn’t notice my sudden weakness, so overcome was she by her
own astonishment, staring at me, mouth open, hands clenched into fists against the desk. We stared at each other, silent, bewildered, each trapped in mute immobility for what seemed to me to be a long time. Then she closed her eyes, forced herself to smile and apologised.
‘I’m sorry, it’s just . . . I was expecting your mother.’
‘Yes, I . . .’ Who are you? Why did you get in touch with us? Why did you come to my father’s funeral? To look at us? What are you doing here? What am I doing here? But I said none of these things. What I said, though I barely recognised my own voice, was, ‘I came instead. And since your charming receptionist didn’t even bother to ask my name . . .’
‘Yes,’ she smiled again, more convincingly this time, ‘Mariví is a real character. Please, take a seat.’
Who are you? Why did you get in touch with us? Why did you come to my father’s funeral? To look at us? Over and over the same questions kept running through my head as I moved to a sofa and sat down. I noticed that her hands were shaking; I saw her grip a green cardboard folder in a vain attempt to still them as she came over to me with her scary, businesslike smile. She leafed through the documents in the folder, until finally she looked up at me and I realised that whatever the situation we found ourselves in, she was in control, not I.
‘I’m sorry, I should have offered you a drink. Would you like a coffee?’
I nodded. She picked up the phone and asked for two coffees.
‘You do take sugar ? - Yes, thank you, and some mineral water.’
Then she began. ‘I know it can be difficult to focus on practical matters after the death of a loved one, but your father was one of our clients and our duty - our obligation - is to continue to look after his interests now just as we did before.’
She was pretty, much prettier than she had seemed when I saw her at the cemetery. Guille, my nephew, had noticed it but I hadn’t.
‘This is why we contacted you. We need to give you an account of all the investments entrusted to us by your father, which at the present time show considerable appreciation, a fact which may be relevant to his heirs.’ She was much more beautiful than she appeared at first, you had to look twice, it was a hidden beauty, mysterious, because there was nothing particularly beautiful about her face except her face itself, the surprising symmetry of her gentle but very ordinary eyes, her small but ordinary nose, a well-defined but ordinary mouth, a finely chiselled but ordinary chin.
‘I assume that you, by which I mean your mother, your brothers and sisters, and yourself, are your father’s sole heirs, in which case you will have to decide what happens to these investments. But I feel I should point out that the investments I’m referring to benefit from a privileged fiscal status the advantages of which terminate should you choose to withdraw the capital.’
She was in control of the situation, I was not, and her advantage grew with every second as she delivered the speech she had carefully honed in front of many other heirs who, to judge from the rising confidence of her voice, had surrendered long before I did. She didn’t realise that I was the wrong son, that I was the brother who would never make an irrevocable decision; she also didn’t acknowledge the fact that I was her only witness, the only person who had seen her and would remember her afterwards. At that moment there was a knock at the door and an assistant came in with the coffees and the mineral water. She set the tray on the table and left, and I found myself making a joke.
‘Just as well Mariví didn’t bring it.’
She smiled. She had a gap between her front teeth, just like my mother.
‘I’m scared to death of her,’ I added, and she laughed, and when she laughed she was even more beautiful, and I felt almost proud to have made her laugh. Then I wondered what I was playing at, what was happening to me. Who are you? I remembered. Why did you get in touch with us? Why did you come to my father’s funeral ? After a moment, she went on in the same soft, clear voice of a woman accustomed to getting her clients to agree with her. ‘That’s why I got in touch with you. Of course, I understand that this is a delicate matter, and you may not be in the right frame of mind to make a decision, but there’s no hurry, I’d just like you, for your own interest, to bear it in mind . . .’
At this point, she floored the accelerator and began skipping whole sections of her carefully prepared speech. I’ve never believed I’m as clever as other people say, but I’m not stupid, and I know all about timing. It’s very important in my job - and clearly in hers, too, because you didn’t need to know much about investments to work out that she was desperate for us not to move the funds. This was why she had come out from behind her desk to sit with me in a more intimate, neutral area, this was why she had offered me coffee, why she was trying to butter me up, why until now she had been trying to reassure me with her warm, intelligent words. And yet now she put her foot on the accelerator, and I let her. I had expected her to give me figures, percentages, in-depth analyses - this is how much you would lose if you decide to withdraw the capital now, this is how much you could earn if you leave it in for a year, two years, ten years - but she skipped over it, and I let her. I didn’t ask any questions, request any figures, demand any explanation. I had never been in control of the situation, but now she no longer seemed to be in control either. And I didn’t understand why, when or how she had lost the self-assurance that had been supporting us both, that had given a sense of reality to this meeting, which now seemed dreamlike, impossible.
‘I’ve drawn up an outline,’ she said to me. ‘These things are easier to understand when they’re written down in black and white.’
She got up and walked over to her desk. She was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with white scribbles on it. She had a good body in spite of the fact that her hips seemed disproportionately wide compared to her waist, or maybe because of that, I didn’t know. ‘Here it is,’ she said, holding out an open folder so that I could see that it contained all the necessary information, the evaluations, all the figures regarding tax and interest that she had not explained to me.
‘Take it home so you can study it in peace. It’s been a pleasure.’ I took her outstretched hand and shook it, and in her eyes I could see a look of boundless relief.
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘’Bye,’ I said, and I left. I don’t know how I made it outside. That’s something I also thought about afterwards. I must have gone back down the corridor, past the receptionist, walked to the lift, pushed one button, then another, and walked out through the ground floor, but all I remember is the light, the surreal brightness of neon lights reflected in the marble floor of the vast entrance hall, as though I had stepped out of the lift into another world. I remember standing, unable to make sense of that cold glare until I felt my feet begin to slip out from under me and almost fell. I watched people coming into the bank, their hair wet, their clothes sodden; there was something unexpectedly sad in the jumpers soggy from the rain, a bitter tribute to the treacherous spring that had tricked me too.
It was pouring outside, the rain dashing against the cobblestones as if announcing some ancient godlike wrath. The spectacle was so magnificent and so terrifying that no one dared to break the dense, damp silence that bound us together, a small multitude of strangers. When the rain finally slowed, a few brave souls ran outside and made a dash for the nearest shopping centre, where a couple of hawkers were selling umbrellas for three euros. I didn’t buy one. I put the folder in my briefcase, crossed the square and went into the nearest bar I could find.
By the time I got inside, I was soaking, but I didn’t care. I ordered a coffee with a dash of brandy and took it over to a table by the window. The bar was fairly empty, but the coffee machine hissed and a jukebox kept playing ‘El Golpe: Quiéreme, cuídame, trátame muy bien’. The coffee was good, but I knocked it back quickly and was still shivering inside. It had been years since I’d had a drink in the morning, I didn’t even drink beer until after work, but then I’d never been in a situation like this bef
ore. That’s why I revived a ritual from my old student days and ordered a Sol y Sombra, brandy and anisette - the worst it could do was get me drunk and that would be a lot better than the uncertainty I was feeling at that moment.
I knocked back the drink, but it didn’t get me drunk. The rain stopped at a quarter to eleven and ten minutes later the sun was glinting off the puddles as though it had all been a joke. Fifteen minutes later, my mobile phone rang. It was one of my scholarship students so I didn’t answer. It rang again a minute later and I turned it off.
Then it occurred to me that I could just do nothing, I could hang on to the folder, whose innocuous contents I had read through carefully to make sure it contained nothing strange or suspicious, then catch my train, get to the university in time to attend the meeting, go home, and in the afternoon I could go round to Clara’s flat and give the paperwork to my mother: ‘It wasn’t a man, Mamá, it was a girl, she explained the whole thing to me but I’ve got it written down here, you’ll have to decide what you want to do, I don’t have an opinion but I’m sure whatever you decide will be fine.’
It occurred to me that I could choose to do nothing, I could just file away the memory of that morning as one more inexplicable episode in life, along with the paranoid fantasies and the imaginary memories of things never experienced, with astounding coincidences, with the fears and the nightmares and the mysterious lights that turn themselves on and off until we realise that our little boy is playing with the light switch.
‘You didn’t see anything the day of the funeral, Álvaro,’ this was something else I thought, ‘you were out of it on painkillers, you were exhausted, in shock. You don’t even know if it’s the same woman, perhaps she just looks like the woman.’ But at half past eleven I got up, went to the bar and paid. I crossed the square and went back into the bank, took the lift to the third floor, walked straight past the receptionist.
The Frozen Heart Page 11