The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Like what?’

  She clicked her tongue and shot me a weary look. ‘Look, we’ve ordered now. This is a really good restaurant, but it’s not cheap, so it would be a pity to waste our money. We’ve got an hour, maybe an hour and a half, together, and what I have to tell you will only take about two minutes. I don’t want you to be angry with me ahead of time. We’ve only just met, and you seem like a decent guy. Why don’t we talk about you instead? You know lots about me, but I don’t know anything about you. It doesn’t seem fair.’

  At that moment, I stopped feeling nervous and I stopped feeling scared, because I was starting to feel like the most stupid, incompetent, needy, arrogant fuckwit in the whole world. ‘Just walk away, Álvaro,’ I thought, furious with myself. ‘Fuck her!’ But I didn’t move. I looked at her, and I didn’t move. She’d tricked me, she’d won me over to her side, by making me a promise that she might never keep, she was toying with me, playing me for a fool to make herself feel like she was in control, the same way she had decided where I was eating, what I was eating and with whom. ‘Just walk away, Álvaro,’ I thought, ‘let her pay for everything - she ordered it!’ But I stayed, because she had put on lipstick before leaving the office, because she held the answers to all my questions, and because I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  She answered with a radiant smile, as though she had been listening to my inner conflict and was celebrating her victory.

  ‘I don’t know . . . Tell me about the family business. What do you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and I felt much better.

  ‘Nothing? But I thought . . .’

  ‘I don’t do anything,’ and for the first time I was the one to smile. ‘I’m the only one of us - well, of the brothers, I mean - who doesn’t work for my father’s business. My elder sister is a doctor, she works in intensive care. My little sister doesn’t work - well, I suppose she’d say she was a homemaker.’

  ‘Oh!’ She quickly tried to hide her disappointment. ‘And . . . and what do you do?’

  ‘I teach.’ In spite of her efforts to hide it, I had to laugh at her reaction. ‘It’s not that bad, you know, lots of people do it.’

  ‘I know, it’s just that . . . I don’t know . . . Of course, that’s why you’ve always got that briefcase with you . . . What do you teach, secondary school ?’

  ‘No, I’m a professor.’ She seemed happier to hear this. ‘I teach at UAM, in the physics department.’

  ‘Physics . . . And you enjoy it?’

  ‘More than anything.’

  ‘I nearly always failed it at school . . . For someone who always got top marks in maths . . .’

  ‘You had a bad teacher.’

  At that moment, the waiter arrived with the starters and she busied herself serving them out. She was rethinking her strategy, I realised, looking for another way to get the information she was interested in. But just as I was about to take pity on her, she came up with a question.

  ‘And what exactly do you teach?’ Anyone listening would have thought she really wanted to know.

  ‘Well, this year, I’m teaching an introductory course called Principles of Physics, two one-term advanced courses and a doctoral course.’

  ‘Did you have a lecture today?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So, what did you talk about?’

  ‘About the whole. And its complex relationship to its parts.’ I took one of the pieces of toast she had put on my plate and bit into it. ‘You were right, the anchovies are good . . .’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How can the relationship between the whole and its parts be complicated ? I mean, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, isn’t it? Even a child in primary school knows that. And it has nothing to do with physics.’

  ‘Really?’ I was enjoying this. I didn’t yet realise how far I was about to fall. ‘Are you sure?’

  It was obvious she’d just been playing for time, and whatever her plan had been, it had failed. But what she had said was also true. We’d already ordered, the waiter would bring the food and we’d eat; we had a whole hour ahead of us and we had to fill it with words, and I was the only one who could do it. So I decided to have some fun.

  ‘From what you’ve said, I think I can work out that you studied that debased, theoretically redundant pseudoscience known as economics, am I right?’ She laughed and nodded. ‘OK. The problem with economists is that they are extraordinarily arrogant, utterly lacking in the intellectual humility you learn when you work on a broader scale. I’m not going to question the fact that Marx was a genius, or that money makes the world go round, but you have to remember that the world is only one thing in a vast universe, a simple pinprick in something whose totality we cannot begin to understand. Beyond the limited scope of economics, which is confined to this world, the whole is not necessarily the sum of its parts. In fact, one might say that the whole is only the sum of its parts when those parts do not interact.’

  ‘Do you speak Sanskrit too?’ She was enjoying this as much as I was.

  ‘It’s not that difficult. I’ll explain it to you. I’ll give you a classic example directly related to everyday life, the same example I gave my students this morning. They were only first-years, so even though you’re only an economist, you should be able to follow it.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Let’s assume we have two rooms with a connecting door. In the first room, there is a little boy crying. We’ll call him A. In the other room is another little boy, who is also crying, we’ll call him B. The door is closed, and the sum of A plus B we will call X, this being the crying that we can hear.’ I paused while the waiter brought our main course, pan-fried dorado for her, grilled veal sirloin for me. ‘Now, let’s see what happens if we open the door, that is to say, if we allow the parts to interact with one another. Now things become more complicated, because A and B could decide to ignore each other and carry on crying. But it’s also possible that when he hears B crying, A will be curious and stop crying to go and see what’s happening, or maybe B will stop crying when he hears A crying. Best-case scenario, A or B will wander into the other room hoping to play with the other boy, and if he manages to convince the other boy, there will be no more crying. Worst-case scenario: A or B, angry at hearing the tantrum, will attack the other boy, a fight will break out, they’ll thump each other, and the crying will go on, louder and more desperate than before. Get it?’

  ‘Yes. You’re a good teacher.’

  ‘Of course I’m a good teacher.’ I smiled. ‘Consequently, I assume you’ve learned that X can be equal to, greater than or less than the sum of A plus B. It depends on the interrelation of the parts. This is why we can only ever state that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts when those parts do not interact.’

  ‘Fine. But what use is it?’

  ‘I don’t know how anyone puts up with you . . .’ She laughed, she was much more beautiful when she laughed. ‘What use is it? It’s useful for knowing how things happen. It’s useful for trying to formulate rules that alleviate the existential angst of our existence on this insignificant speck of dust lost in the infinite universe. But, to bring it down to basics that even an economist can understand, it’s useful for determining natural disasters, for example. A disaster is what happens when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ she applauded, clapping politely.

  ‘It is . . .’ I said. ‘Much more wonderful than what my brothers do for a living. Though a lot less useful to you, I’m afraid.’

  At that moment, a symbolic bell announced the third and final round. She had won the first, I had won the second. The third was to be much longer than either of us could have known, there would be no winner, and it would change our lives for ever.

  ‘You think I’ve brought you here to get information from you about your father’s business,’ she ventured cautiously after a moment. ‘Things you do
n’t know, but your brothers could have told me.’

  ‘I don’t think that,’ I answered, grateful for the fact that for once she had decided to meet me head on. ‘I know it. You told me so earlier.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ She seemed calm.

  ‘But you knew my father through your work.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ She smiled.

  ‘It’s one of the theories I’ve considered.’ Her smile had unsettled me, but I couldn’t back out now. ‘ . . . that my father was mixed up in some shady deal you were involved with. As his broker or his accessory or maybe just as a witness.’

  She weighed my words for a moment.

  ‘Do you fancy dessert?’ I shook my head. ‘Coffee, then?’ She signalled to a waiter and ordered two coffees. ‘Your father was mixed up in some shady deals - every successful businessman is. But my relationship with your father had nothing to do with his business - shady or otherwise.’

  ‘Or . . .’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

  ‘Or?’ she asked.

  ‘Or . . .’

  I tried a second time, and for a second time I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I had another theory, but I had been so sure that my first theory was right that the second had been no more than an act of masochism, a wild guess with nothing to back it up except that it was consistent with the evidence. The consequences, while not disastrous, nor beyond the bounds of possibility - in fact it was all too possible, especially in Spain, back then - would be difficult for my family to accept. I had had a nagging suspicion that had stayed with me since that moment when I first saw her in the cemetery at Torrelodones, before I even saw her up close, before I had had time to study her and notice a faint family resemblance in her profile, something vague and fleeting. Now that she was sitting opposite me, the feeling vanished like a bubble, and yet that first day something had prompted me to ask my mother whether she might be some distant relation, and that question had made her uncomfortable. Since then, I had become obsessed with the gap between her front teeth - something that linked her not to my father but to my mother, yet I could not get the idea out of my mind.

  ‘Or . . .’ I said eventually, ‘we could be related.’

  ‘Really?’ She smiled at first, and then looked serious. ‘How?’

  ‘No offence but . . . it occurred to me . . .’ I took a deep breath and said, ‘You might be my father’s daughter.’

  She was drinking water and her immediate reaction, halfway between a gasp and a giggle, sent a spray of water over the table, and me.

  ‘Sorry.’ She laughed, wiping her face with her napkin. ‘You see? This is what happens when you have lunch with someone who doesn’t trust you.’

  ‘So you’re not my sister?’ I said, relieved, as she reached over and, with a dry corner of her napkin, wiped my chin. At that moment, in spite of the tension that hung over the apparently light-hearted scene, I realised that - leaving aside Thursday’s polite handshake - this was the first time Raquel Fernández Perea had touched me.

  ‘No, of course not.’ She laughed again. ‘It’s just that I thought about my father, poor man, and . . . My father’s name is Ignacio, he’s a telecommunications engineer and he’s twenty years younger than your father. They have nothing in common, really - I mean, it would be hard to imagine two more different men. My mother’s name is also Raquel, she studied history of art, she runs a picture-framing shop and as far as I know she’s always been a model wife.’

  I kept my mouth shut. She went on laughing and shaking her head. I thought she was protesting too much, but nothing could have prepared me for what came next.

  ‘I have to say, Álvaro, that for a physicist, you have a vivid imagination . . .’

  ‘Physics requires a great deal of imagination,’ I said solemnly, though I realised I had already lost any last shred of authority. ‘Without it, there would be no progress.’

  ‘In any case . . . I don’t suppose I should have been too surprised. I was afraid you’d come out with something like that from the start.’ She looked at the waiter, scribbling in the air to indicate she wanted the bill. ‘I told you the story was trite and you’d be disappointed. At the end of the day human beings are boring and predictable . . . Besides, you explained it better than I ever could. The whole is only equal to the sum of its parts when the parts do not interact.’ She paused and looked at me. ‘Until now, you and I have been two parts of a whole, though we knew nothing about each other.’

  The waiter brought the bill, she glanced at it, dropped two notes on to the tray, put her belongings back into her bag and took out a large, flashy, state-of-the-art key with a blue plastic tag.

  ‘Your father and I were lovers, Álvaro. So this . . .’ she pushed the key across the table ‘ . . . this is yours. The address is on the key ring.’

  She looked at me one last time, then got up and walked out.

  II

  Ice

  The Popular Front manifesto began with these words: ‘The Republic as conceived by the parties which make up the Popular Front is not a republic governed by motives of social or economic class, but a regime of democratic freedom motivated by the interests of the people and social progress.’

  Constancia de la Mora, In Place of Splendor

  (New York, 1939-Mexico, 1944-Madrid 2004)

  One night, in the café Gayango, we were drinking coffee, Juan Tomás, then leader of the ‘flechas’, airmen Terviño and Bergali and capitán Martínez from the Division. Díaz Criado arrived [. . .] Some moments later, a policeman arrived in a car - a man I had often seen at the Comisaría - with a folder. He sat beside him, took out some papers and started to read out a list of names. Díaz Criado nodded: ‘Him, him, OK. No, not him. That one, maybe, tomorrow.’ I remember perfectly that the policeman, so he would remember, made him clarify: ‘This one has a brother in custody too.’ ‘Yes, that one, yes.’ ‘He’s the one you saw the other day, the fat, bald one.’ ‘No, not him. Hang on . . . That one too.’ [. . .]

  He said that, once he got going, it was all the same whether he signed a hundred death warrants or three hundred, what was important was to ‘rid Spain of the Marxists’. I heard him say: ‘Here, no one’s moved in thirty years.’

  Antonio Bahamonde, A Year with Queipo de Llano

  (Memories of a Nationalist)

  (Barcelona-Buenos Aires, 1938-Sevilla, 2005)

  She has great legs. That was my first thought as I watched her walk away, say goodbye to the manager, and disappear through the door.

  She fucked my father. That was my second thought, a split second before a wave of words, ideas, images, memories, suspicions and feelings broke over me. I called the waiter over and ordered a whisky, a double.

  By the time I had downed half of it, I had remembered that I was not my brother Julio, nor was I my brother Rafa. So there would be no scandal, I said to myself. Poor Papá, it was his life, who was I to judge him, but what a bastard - eighty-three years old, fucking hell . . . Then I started to laugh, in a sort of euphoria mingled with astonishment, it was the only possible way I could react to news that shocking, so unexpected, so utterly irreconcilable with everything I knew, with the fragile, grief-stricken face of my mother as she told us over and over that she and my father had slept together for forty-nine years, forty-nine years in the same bed, and now what?

  But, after all, what did I know? I thought about my own son Miguel, who wasn’t even four years old when I had gone, in mid-November 2004, to La Coruña for a three-day conference. I’d had no more desire to go than I had to throw myself out of a window, because my father had just come out of hospital and I was worried and, more than anything, exhausted. But still, I went to La Coruña, because the guy organising it was a friend of mine and I didn’t want to leave him in the lurch.

  I’ll try to wangle it so I’m only there for one day, I’d told Mai before I left, I’ll see if they can bring the round-table discussion forward, and I did, I talked to the secretary as soon as I got there,
but afterwards, over dinner, I ran into a delegate from Valencia I’d never met before but had heard a lot about from my colleagues - mostly bad things from the women, good things from most of the men, better than good in some cases. Naturally, I sided with the men on this one; not only was she attractive, she was intelligent, she was funny, she was married and she knew exactly what she wanted.

  ‘I’m a completely different person at conferences, you know,’ she said to me over a drink in the bar later. ‘It’s a strange phenomenon. I leave my house feeling good, feeling calm, but as soon as I arrive, I can’t help it . . . I look around thinking, let’s see . . . who am I going to fuck tonight? I’m mean, physics conferences are full of men, and there are so few women. I’ve no idea how art historians survive these things,’ she added, ‘I suppose they end up slashing their wrists . . .’

  She was so straight with me that I wondered whether she had already slept with every other delegate at the conference, but I didn’t care, because in situations like this it didn’t matter to me if I was just another notch on someone’s gun. The next morning, over breakfast, I realised that I’d been wrong; it became obvious that although many were called few were actually chosen. Though this did not change the way I saw things, it put me in a good mood, made all the better when the conference secretary told me that they could change the time of the round table but not for that day, because one of the guests was not arriving until Friday morning. ‘Oh, never mind, then!’ I said. ‘I’ll hang on, let’s keep to the original schedule.’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mai said to me. ‘It’s OK, Álvaro, it’ll take your mind off things, try to have fun.’