The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Don’t worry, I know my way.’

  ‘Hey!’ she called after me. ‘You can’t just . . . You can’t do that . . . Hey!’

  I didn’t knock, I simply opened the door. Raquel Fernández Perea was sitting at her desk, talking on the telephone and jotting something down on a piece of paper. She looked up, saw me, and as she had done that first time, she closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a long while, a conscious, deliberate gesture. When she opened them again I was still standing there. She said goodbye to the woman on the phone, telling her she had an unexpected visitor, then folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, though I showed no sign of actually being sorry for bursting into her office like that. ‘But I needed to ask you some questions. There are things I don’t understand.’

  ‘Take a seat, please.’ She waved towards the chair beside the desk. I thought I could sense a helplessness in her gesture, but her voice was consummately professional and polite. ‘So how can I help you?’

  ‘Well, what I don’t understand is . . . This place isn’t like a bank, is it? I mean, the department you work in, someone can’t just show up here and set up an investment fund the way you open a bank account, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  She smiled at me, reassured. She didn’t suspect where this was leading and her naive smile stirred feelings in me I didn’t know I was capable of; I felt the sudden thrill a hunter feels when he creeps up on his prey, savouring the shot he is about to fire.

  ‘So,’ I went on, ‘my father wasn’t directly a client of yours, was he?’

  ‘No, we don’t work that way.’ She relaxed a little more, leaning back in her chair, and her voice took on the scholarly tone she had used earlier. ‘This is the central investment management office. Here we manage the investments of the customers from all the various branches. Now, obviously, we have an investment adviser in every branch who deals directly with the client. In this case, I assume your father dealt with his local bank manager when he set up the investment, and the local manager sent the details to us. We process the transaction, manage the funds and provide the branch managers with an account of how investments are performing. The customers generally get their information from the person who handles their account.’

  ‘So customers don’t come here,’ I ventured.

  ‘That depends. On the type of investment, the size of the capital. But in general, as you say, we never meet our clients face to face.’

  ‘Have you been managing my father’s investments for long?’ I smiled, allowing myself the luxury of politeness. ‘You look so young.’

  She acknowledged the compliment with a little laugh, as professional as everything else about her. ‘No, no I haven’t. My supervisor used to handle your father but when he was promoted, his portfolios were shared out between a lucky few, and so I inherited your father, along with a number of other clients.’

  ‘And he never had the pleasure of coming to see you at your office.’

  ‘No. Well, I think I did meet him once, in my supervisor’s office.’ At that moment, she began to worry and her smile faded. Clever girl, I thought, the penny has dropped, too many questions for a curious relative. She was looking at me differently now and sat bolt upright in the chair, her legs crossed but her right foot tapping hard enough for me to follow the rhythm from the other side of the desk. It’s over, I thought, and for a moment the hunter in me was disappointed.

  ‘But you must have known my father somehow, because you were at his funeral.’ I paused, and she looked at me poker faced, but she could not control her breathing. ‘I saw you there.’

  She held my gaze for a long moment, then looked down at the papers on her desk.

  ‘Unless of course your bank customarily sends someone to attend its clients’ funerals,’ I added, relishing the slow, exasperated tone of every word. ‘But it doesn’t, does it?’

  ‘No,’ she said finally, the word almost a whisper.

  ‘That’s why, when I showed up, you said you’d been expecting my mother. Because you know us, you saw us all together at the cemetery. Otherwise your assumption would make no sense. I look a lot like my father, as I’m sure you know, but almost anyone looks more like my mother than I do. You, for example. I don’t know if you know this but she has a gap between her front teeth just like yours.’

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  ‘No what?’

  She lifted her head, looked at me almost defiantly and spun round in her chair angrily, like a little girl who feels that she has been unfairly punished but can do nothing about it. When she spoke, her voice was different, it was hard, harsh, callous.

  ‘No, I didn’t realise that your mother had a gap between her front teeth.’ The telephone rang. ‘And, yes, I was at your father’s funeral.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She picked up the phone. ‘Yes, yes, of course . . . No, no, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m really sorry, I’m just running a little late . . . If you could just hang on for one second . . .’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you right now. Tomorrow I’ll be in a meeting all day, but if you want, we can meet on Monday. I finish at three.’

  She took her hand from the mouthpiece, swung her chair round and went back to her conversation, jotting down figures on a piece of paper as though I didn’t exist. She didn’t even look at me when I told her I would be back on Monday at three without fail.

  My heart was in my mouth that Monday as I watched her step through the glass doors; in fact, it had been there for so long it didn’t know how to find its way back to my chest, to the gentle, regular rhythm it had known until only three days before.

  ‘You’re exaggerating, Álvaro.’ That’s what Mai would have said, which was why I said nothing to her, nor to anyone else. My unhealthy obsession, far from dissipating now that I knew the identity of the strange woman, seemed to grow with every passing second. I knew now that this woman had known my father, knew that whatever had passed between them was complicated, a connection that could not be explained in a few words, something that would justify Raquel Fernández Perea showing up at a ceremony as personal, emotional and dreary as a funeral. The prospect that I was finally going to hear the answers to my questions did nothing to calm me - on the contrary. By Friday evening, when I took Mai and Miguelito with me to visit my mother, my head was exploding, although nobody else seemed to notice. ‘Actually, it wasn’t a man, Mamá,’ I said, as I gave her the green folder, ‘it was a girl, she was pleasant, quite pretty, she explained the whole thing to me but I’ve got it all written down here.’ You should meet her, I was tempted to add, I’m sure that her name would mean something to you.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. Tossing and turning, I tried to come up with some reasonable hypothesis to connect the two - Raquel Fernández Perea, about thirty-five years old, beautiful, clever, with a gap between her front teeth, employee of Caja Madrid, and Julio Carrión Gonzalez, RIP, eighty-three, a successful businessman with impeccable credentials, CEO of a real estate company, customer of Caja Madrid - fitting the pieces of the puzzle together to form endless solutions, first daring, then anodyne, then daring, until finally, at 6 a.m., I fell asleep.

  Mai woke me four hours later. ‘Are you all right, Alvaro, you look terrible.’ ‘I just slept badly,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’ And she didn’t worry, but that evening at my house, while his wife, my wife and a couple of friends were having a few drinks and watching the football on television, Fernando Cisneros grabbed my arm, dragged me into the hallway and asked me what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘don’t worry, everything’s sorted. José Ignacio is going to sign and María . . .’

  ‘I’m not talking about that, Álvaro, you’ve been acting strangely . . .’ He shot me a cautious smile and I remembered that he knew me better than anyone, better even than Mai.

  At university, we were known as ‘the odd couple’ because
we had nothing in common, but we agreed on everything, which was why I became his right-hand man, his permanent campaign manager. Fernando had already been head of department, vice-dean, then dean, and was about to be appointed vice-president of the university - with a bit of luck, in ten years he would be president. He was much more interested in politics than he was in physics - ‘That’s why I need you,’ he’d say - but even the stress of the forthcoming election hadn’t thrown him off the scent.

  ‘There’s something going on,’ he insisted. ‘What is it, some girl ?’

  I was about to tell him the truth. I would have done, but given we only had a moment, the story was too long, too complicated, so I told him I didn’t know.

  ‘You don’t know?’ He laughed.

  ‘Some other time. I promise. There is a girl involved but not in the way you think. Really. It’s to do with my father . . . Look, I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Have it your own way,’ he said.

  We went into the kitchen to get some ice and then returned to the living room. Javier was rolling a spliff. I told him I’d been having a hard time sleeping so he rolled another one just for me and I smoked it after everyone had left. Sunday didn’t dawn until half one in the afternoon. ‘I’m sure you’re coming down with something,’ Mai said.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I replied to avoid lying, ‘I don’t feel great.’

  ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you yesterday?’ She took Miguelito and they headed off to her parents’ place for lunch. I stayed in bed working on my two main hypotheses - one of them cheap and unpleasant, the other one genetic and devastating on so many levels.

  On Monday morning, I pretended to feel better, a recovery as phoney as my illness, and told Mai that I had lunch with the dean and that afterwards I’d be going to the museum. It was eight o’clock in the morning but my heart was already thumping.

  ‘Hi.’ I realised that she had noticed me when she was halfway across the foyer. It was already ten past three. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But it did matter. She had put on lipstick and some foundation so close to her own skin tone it was almost invisible, together with subtle eyeshadow. I had not been standing close to her at my father’s funeral, but at our previous meeting I had noticed that she was not wearing any make-up. She could get away with it, she could get away with anything she wanted, and yet today she had decided to put on lipstick before meeting me. She was a clever girl, I remembered, and her make-up was a serious, a worrying, sign.

  ‘I booked a table in a restaurant people from the bank often go to.’ She set off in the direction of Arenal. ‘It’s small and old fashioned, up here on the Calle Escalinata. Actually, I would have preferred Japanese, but I wasn’t sure if you liked sushi . . .’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say and I stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. She turned and looked at me, putting her own interpretation on my awkwardness.

  ‘What is it? You haven’t eaten, have you?’

  I was so dumbstruck I couldn’t even answer this simple question. I felt as though everything was getting out of hand before it had even started.

  ‘I should have checked with you, Álvaro,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have a phone number.’

  ‘No, it’s not that . . .’ I finally managed to say. ‘It’s just I didn’t realise we’d be having lunch.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and walked on. I followed her like a well-trained puppy. ‘That what I mean when I said I should have called you. But you needn’t be so shocked.’ She smiled. ‘People do eat at three o’clock in Spain, you know, or at least I do. I’m always starving by the time I leave work. If you haven’t had lunch, so much the better.’

  ‘It’s just . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she laughed, ‘I’m not expecting you to pay, Álvaro. We’ll go Dutch. After all, it is a business lunch of sorts.’

  ‘By the way, I do like sushi,’ I said after a moment.

  ‘Glad to hear it. I’ll bear that in mind the next time.’ She looked at me as though she already knew there would be other occasions. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me using your Christian name?’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

  We had almost arrived at Ópera, and were standing waiting for the traffic lights to change. She gave me an enigmatic smile and we didn’t speak again until we got to the restaurant.

  It wasn’t a long walk - only three or four minutes - but it was enough for me to realise a few things. The first being that the woman I was walking alongside was not the same woman I had met the previous Thursday. She had the same face, the same hair, the same body, this time clothed in a cotton print dress which suited her better than the jeans. There seemed to be nothing left of her earlier vulnerability or her fake smile, and yet I was not entirely convinced by her sudden artlessness, the spontaneous, faintly ironic candour which was clearly designed to be charming. And it was charming, but there was something too polished, too eloquent, about it, something that reminded me of someone playing a well-rehearsed role.

  The second thing I realised was about myself, the memory of the thrill of the chase she had awakened in me, a feeling I had never had before and which had since faded, though not completely. I could still remember the sensation, could still feel the tingling of the hunter’s excitement and the furious energy with which he tried to hide it. No one who saw us as we went down the short flight of steps that gave the Calle Escalinata its name would have believed that only four days earlier I - the tense man shuffling gingerly along the street - had had this tank of a woman, who now steamrollered all before her, cornered behind her desk. And yet I could still feel the thrill of being that man, a thrill that only she could awaken.

  The third and most important thing I realised on that short walk to the restaurant derived from numbers one and two. But it was not a fact, merely an intuition - that neither of us was really the person the other thought we were.

  ‘Here we are.’

  She pushed open the wooden door. I waved for her to go in first; she nodded gracefully and smiled before stepping inside. The restaurant was not full, but all the empty tables were reserved. Raquel didn’t like the table that had been reserved for us and asked the maître d’ for a table in the corner by the window.

  ‘Do you mind if we order first?’ She went on talking without waiting to see whether or not I minded. ‘The place is half empty now, but at three-thirty when the people from Alcalá get here it’s always jammed and it takes ages to be served.’ She looked up from the menu. ‘Do you fancy sharing something?’

  Everything was so absurd, the conversation, the place, the food, the two of us sitting at the same table as if we knew each other, as if we had lunch together all the time, as if there were something more between us than a single question and a single answer, that this last question, which sounded both terribly innocent and terribly intimate, took on a grotesque meaning and I burst out laughing. I was nervous. She wasn’t.

  ‘I meant share something to eat.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’

  ‘OK, I know what you meant.’ I opened the menu and scanned through the starters.

  ‘The anchovies are extraordinary. I’m serious . . . What about deep-fried courgette flowers - have you ever tasted them?’ I shook my head. ‘Oh, you’ve got to try them.’

  In the end, she chose what she wanted; she picked the wine, tasted it and held her glass out for me to take a sip.

  ‘I think it’s fine,’ she said, ‘but maybe it’s a little too cold for you?’

  ‘No, no, it’s very nice,’ I said, because it was, although I had no intention of letting this new display of warlike intimacy pass unnoticed. ‘But I’ll stick to my own glass, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, taking back her glass and filling mine. She put her elbows on the table and stared at me. ‘Do you want to know why I decided to call you by your Christian name?’

  ‘Please.’ />
  ‘Well, first off, on account of your father.’ She paused to see what effect these words might have, but I didn’t blink. ‘Your father and I were on first-name terms, and you’re his son. But, apart from that . . . When I realised the only thing to do was have lunch with you, because when I get off work I can’t do anything without eating first, it seemed . . . I don’t know. I’ve always thought that eating is something that should really be done in private, because eating with someone, no matter how discreet or polite you are, means showing them the insides of your body - your tongue, your teeth, your palate . . .’ By now, I knew we were playing out a scene, and I felt vaguely flattered by the passion she brought to her role. ‘Have you ever thought that? When you eat with someone, they see you chewing, swallowing, maybe even choking on your food if you’re unlucky. I’ve always found eating with someone who’s not a friend strange, doing something as intimate as eating when I don’t even know their Christian name. Of course, I have to do it all the time for work, but I don’t like it.’ She paused again, more briefly this time. Fuck, you’re in trouble now, I thought, and she smiled as though she knew what I was thinking. ‘What I mean is, I don’t eat with just anyone.’

  ‘Me neither. But I’m not used to being here, eating with you.’

  After this mutual confession, there was a silence I found uncomfortable but she found easier to deal with since there were lots of things she could do to fill the void: she picked up her bag, took out a pouch of tobacco, a lighter, her mobile phone, a PDA. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said, tapping on the screen of her PDA with the plastic pen.

  ‘What? I look like Bank Manager Barbie with all the accessories, don’t I?’ she said, and laughed, but I didn’t laugh with her. Too right, I thought.

  ‘Why did you come to my father’s funeral, Raquel ?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Álvaro, don’t be so impatient.’ She looked at me as though I’d said something startling, when all I had done was repeat a question I had asked her before. ‘I know you’re probably expecting some terrible revelation, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. It’s a boring story. At the end of the day human beings are boring and predictable, our lives are pretty much the same, we all have about half a dozen things in common.’