As I paid the bill and walked back reluctantly to the car that contained the evidence of my problem, I found myself thinking about what Julio had said, the enormity of what he had said in those few words. ‘He was happy to give Rafa money for his businesses but when it came to my kids, nothing’. What had struck me most about the conversation was his surprising insight that Papá was not one person but many, how our memories of him all differed, as our conversation that afternoon had proved, which seemed all the more brutal, more difficult to accept, when I tried to square Julio’s story with my own memories of our childhood.
‘But Papá was always a good father,’ I protested, very sure of what I was saying, ‘he played with us, he was always there if we needed him, to help us, to comfort us . . .’
‘You think?’ My brother sounded sceptical. ‘That’s what Rafa says too, but I don’t remember it like that. Sure, he did magic tricks for us, especially if there were visitors, but only because he enjoyed it and he liked to show off. And, yes, he came to watch us play football, but as for the rest . . .’ He shook his head and pulled a face. ‘I don’t remember it like that. I think he was a good father when it suited him, when he could pencil it in, when he had nothing better to do, but I don’t remember being able to count on him, the way we could with Mamá. We were talking about it one afternoon at Clara’s and she reminded me that Papá never went to any of the concerts at her school, he never went to hear her play.’
This was true, I thought, before admitting it aloud. I could still remember my sister’s disappointment year after year, with Mamá, Angélica and I, sometimes Rafa, sometimes Julio, sometimes the whole family, everyone except Papá, sitting in the school theatre applauding. Clara didn’t play particularly well, she was never going to be a concert pianist, but she was the best in her class and she always played in the end-of-term concerts, although Papá never attended a single one.
‘She’s right about that,’ I admitted. ‘But I think Papá didn’t want to see her play the piano because it reminded him of his mother.’
‘His mother?’ Julio asked, surprised.
‘Yes, Grandma Teresa played the piano.’
He looked at me wide eyed. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I thought she was a teacher ?’
‘She was a teacher, but she also played the piano - badly, but she played it. I think I remember Papá telling me once that Grandpa gave her a piano as a wedding present.’
‘Well, he never said anything to me.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There’s something else weird about Papá, he never liked to talk about his family, his mother and his father.’
‘I suppose that’s true. But even if we knew the whole story, that wouldn’t excuse him for never going to see Clara play.’
‘No,’ Julio agreed, ‘of course not.’
The bin bags were lighter than I remembered, but even so, by the time I got them up to the flat, I was sweating. My brother had been right, it was difficult to agree on what my father had been like, on the details at least. It was something that should have occurred to me, I thought; after all, I knew his secret, I was the one traipsing in and out of the apartment none of them even knew existed. And maybe, I thought, this was not his only secret.
Before Julio voiced the thought, I had often pondered our strange family structure. We were a tight-knit clan and yet we seemed to be floating in a void, with nothing behind us, nothing on either side, no grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins, no relatives of any kind. My father used to tell us that Mamá’s father, Grandpa Rafael, had died very young, before the war, and Grandma Mariana had died before my brother Julio could walk. I had seen a few photographs of her, holding my older brothers in her arms, a dark-skinned woman dressed in black who lived in some distant town in Galicia. She was not pretty, in fact she was a little frightening, like Papá’s father Benigno, who was the spitting image of my father and of me. His wife was Grandma Teresa, the one who played the piano badly, although she looked more like his daughter in the only photograph I’d seen of her, a wedding photo in which she is smiling at the camera while her husband’s face is sullen. She had died young, too, in the summer of 1937, during the war, and she’d never had any other children. Benigno had been over seventy when he died in the late 1950s. He never got to see my brother Rafa, the child his daughter-in-law was expecting at the time. I had never known grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, I had no ancestors, no old stories, just isolated facts, a few casual remarks, fragments that did not always correspond with what my brothers knew. This was why Julio had never known that Grandma Teresa played the piano. Maybe this was why our memories of our father also did not concur, because there was no other version with which he could compare them, no source other than the unreliable memories of one man who told us the same stories over and over, growing up in Torrelodones, the snows of Russia and Poland.
‘What happened, Álvaro?’ Mai asked when I got home.
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I went for a couple of drinks with Julio and I lost track of time.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I was talking to Clara. I called her because I thought you might be there and she told me you’d had a bust-up with Angélica at the solicitor’s office.’
‘It was nothing, you know what she’s like, she winds me up . . .’ I paused and smiled. ‘But the good news is we’re filthy rich!’
‘I know, Clara told me.’
My wife knew more about our inheritance than I did, because my sister had worked out what was coming to each of us with astonishing accuracy, as it turned out. At any other time, my sister’s sudden fondness for mathematics would have seemed as surprising to me as Mai’s happiness, although Mai did her best to hide it, as though she felt that being happy would be in bad taste, but I could still feel my father weighing on my shoulders.
It was all so intense, all happening so fast, and I wasn’t sure I could control it. This is why, when I talked to Raquel again, when I felt the bit between my teeth, it seemed incredible to me that I could have considered telling my wife about the meeting. In fact, I had spent the whole weekend thinking about telling her, ever since the night when our new-found wealth gave me the opportunity to take advantage of her joy at inheriting so much, at being the lawful spouse to an heir caught in a landslide.
‘By the way . . .’ I adopted my most innocent tone as she served the salad, ‘I don’t suppose you know anyone who works at the Land Registry?’
‘Me?’ She looked surprised. ‘No, why would I?’
‘I don’t know, you’re a civil servant . . .’ Without giving her the opportunity to remind me that she worked for the Department of Health, I told her a long-winded story, noticing as I did so that with every passing day I was becoming a better liar. ‘It’s something Rafa said, as we were coming out of the solicitor’s office . . . He took me and Julio to one side and told us that one of Papá’s properties - one of the apartments he showed us once, remember ? - wasn’t in the inventory. It looks as if Papá intended to give it as a wedding present to one of his partners’ daughters, but the thing is, we don’t know what’s happened to the apartment, and we wouldn’t want Mamá to think there was something funny going on. So . . . I don’t know . . . he thought that it would be more discreet if someone whose name isn’t Carrión made enquiries.’
‘OK,’ my wife was very understanding, ‘don’t worry. I’ll call from the office. I don’t think there’ll be any problem . . .’
There was no problem. On Friday afternoon, when she got home from work, Mai gave me a copy of the deed on which, in capital letters, was written the name Raquel Fernández Perea and next to it the word ‘gift’. ‘Excellent,’ I said, ‘Rafa was right, problem solved,’ and Mai smiled, then said that the first thing we should do was change the living-room furniture. But before that, we needed to paint the walls because they really weren’t white any more. ‘Any colour you like,’ I said, feeling like a bastard for having lied to my wife simply because I was saddled with playing arbitrator, shuttling between the
private and public faces of my father the hypocrite. At that moment, I was on the point of confessing, of telling Mai the whole story. Telling her that it had all been a coincidence, a chain of trivial events, a series of accidents unrelated to each other except for the fact that I was present at all of them. Neither Mai nor anybody else could have blamed me for what I had done on my own. Nothing would have been easier than telling Mai about it and then calling my brothers and sisters to share the burden of my father’s secret. But I said nothing, not to her, not to anyone, and the following Monday I called Raquel. I said we had to meet.
‘Really?’ I could hear a playfulness in her voice that I was quick to defuse.
‘Yes,’ I confirmed, ‘I’ve got news.’
‘News?’ Her voice had changed. ‘What kind of news?’
‘Well . . .’ I tried to find a way to sum things up, but couldn’t think of one. ‘Look, it’s not something we can talk about over the phone. We’re going to have to meet anyway, so I’d prefer to wait until then, but I should tell you that the apartment on Calle Jorge Juan isn’t ours, it’s yours.’
‘Mine?’ The news clearly came as a shock to her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Which means I have to give you back the key, though I’m not sure when we’ll be able to meet, because I have an exhibition opening on Friday and as usual everything’s running late . . .’
‘An exhibition? Do you paint?’
‘No,’ I smiled, ‘I don’t paint, but that’s a long story too. Look, why don’t we meet up some afternoon . . .’
‘Evening would be better . . .’ she got in before I even had time to suggest a date. ‘That way we can have dinner - Japanese. And this time I promise I won’t throw water over you.’
‘Dinner . . .’ I was weighing up the suggestion, not yet ready to agree to it, when she pre-empted me again.
‘Wednesday.’
‘No,’ I said, not realising that it was no longer a question of whether, but when, ‘I’m always busy on Wednesdays. Thursdays are better, but not too early.’
‘Ten o’clock?’
‘Ten o’clock,’ I agreed, ‘but this time I get to choose the restaurant. ’
‘Excellent,’ she said when I suggested the best restaurant I knew. ‘I suppose you know it’s horribly expensive.’
‘I know, but don’t worry about that, I’m paying. You know how much I like to get the better of economists . . .’
I was doing what I had to do, playing a part I had not chosen to play. I was shouldering the burden of my father’s memory and nobody could blame me, not even Mai, and yet something like guilt took root inside me because that same night I lied to my wife again and felt all the worse when she simply accepted my story that my colleagues had decided to bring forward the end-of-term dinner by a month and a half.
When I got to the restaurant, it wasn’t quite ten o’clock so I took a seat at the bar. I guessed that Raquel would arrive late, on purpose, and I was right. I guessed she would not come dressed in her business clothes, and again I was right. I guessed that nothing she could do or say could change me now, and I was wrong.
She arrived wearing a strapless dress of a very pale, sparkling material that looked like an old-fashioned petticoat, the neckline and the hem trimmed with lace. It was a daring, almost dangerous dress, but the most harmful aspects were neutralised by a longsleeved knitted jacket which she wore half-buttoned over the dress. The curious combination made her look like a little girl trying on her mother’s lingerie who suddenly feels cold, or a mother hastily covering herself up with the first thing to hand. Clever girl, I thought, but I had been expecting that. What I had not been expecting was that, when she came over to me, she would press herself to me and kiss me on both cheeks, slowly, almost carefully, so that I would be completely aware that this was the first time Raquel Fernández Perea had kissed me.
‘Hi,’ she said afterwards, and seeing my expression, she laughed. ‘What’s the matter? In Spain, friends kiss each other all the time.’
‘And they have lunch at three o’clock when they get off work,’ I added.
‘Exactly.’ She nodded and went on looking at me with an expression that was intended to be serious but failed. ‘OK, I’m sorry about the kiss, really. I did it without thinking, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’
She was wearing slingbacks with very high heels, which cut me down by a couple of inches, and she smelled wonderful. I realised this as she kissed me - slowly, carefully - on both cheeks, and I also realised that there was a small strip of plastic dangling from her jacket that had recently had a price tag attached. It’s the first time she’s worn it, I thought, maybe she bought it because she was having dinner with me.
‘You didn’t embarrass me,’ I said. She was beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful now that I had learned to see it. ‘You have a plastic tag stuck to your jacket. Want me to take it off for you?’
‘No, don’t bother . . . It’s new, I only bought it this afternoon,’ she said, as though she didn’t care what I thought, ‘I can’t bear hanging new clothes up in a wardrobe, I just have to wear them as soon as I’ve bought them. What about you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well . . . I don’t really care, to tell you the truth.’
‘A real man.’
‘Maybe, what do I know?’ Then I remembered the beer waiting for me on the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Definitely a real man!’ She laughed. ‘No, I’d prefer it if we went straight to the table. I’m hungry - for sushi and for news. You did reserve a table? The place is packed.’
She set off down the aisle and I followed her. I no longer felt like a trained dog, or his master, the impatient hunter, licking his lips at the first sight of prey. With her, I felt like myself. The vast, almost cosmic, distance that separated me from Raquel when I was thinking about my father all but disappeared in her presence. As we walked to our table and sat down, as we looked at each other for a moment without finding anything to say, I remembered the apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan, the candles by the Jacuzzi, the blue pills, the purple dildo, but at the same time I sensed that the woman sitting opposite me, her head tilted to one side, oblivious to the power of her face, the graceful beauty of her long neck, was not the same woman who slipped naked into a Jacuzzi or lay back against a pile of pillows, her lips parted in a smile that showed the gap between her teeth. It was as though the Raquel who had known my father and the Raquel I knew were different, dual incarnations of the same person, identical twins, or two halves of the same woman. Maybe that was why I felt calm, why I was sure that I didn’t need to be anybody except myself, ready to take control of the situation.
‘Do you mind if we order before we start?’ I suggested, unable to suppress a smile.
‘What are we playing?’ She smiled too. ‘Follow My Leader?’
‘Yes, but you’re not my leader . . .’
‘Thankfully . . .’
‘Anyway,’ I ignored her last comment, ‘this evening, I have a lot of things to tell you.’
We both ordered sushi - Raquel pronouncing the Japanese for each dish, me prodding the menu and saying ‘this one, this one, this one’. This was how I always ordered in Asian restaurants, but Raquel thought it was a joke and laughed, and she was much more beautiful when she laughed. So much so, that I was sorry when she listened seriously as I explained things to her in a calculated order, beginning with the will, the meeting with the solicitor, my surprise when I noticed that the apartment was not on the list of my father’s assets, my discovery that she had been the owner for almost three months.
‘He told me that once,’ she remarked, a mysterious longing in her voice, ‘but I didn’t believe him. That’s the truth, I really didn’t believe him.’
‘Well, he was telling the truth. It’s in your name at the Land Registry.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘My wife told me.’ She frowned when she heard the word. ‘She works for Madrid City Council, in the Department o
f Public Health.
‘Your wife?’ she repeated. ‘I didn’t know you were married, you never mentioned her.’
‘Well . . .’ I smiled, ‘never is a big word - this is only the third time I’ve talked to you.’
‘I suppose that’s true, still . . .’ She struggled to find some other way to explain herself. ‘I don’t know, you don’t look like a married man. So, is she a doctor ?’
‘No, she’s . . .’ I paused. ‘She’s an economist.’
‘You don’t say!’ She laughed, and then tossed her head as though she was no longer interested in my wife. ‘You know something, Álvaro? You remind me a lot of your father. Not just physically, although you’re the spitting image of him. In other ways. A minute ago, when you were saying ‘this one, this one’ it was like a drum roll at the circus - do you do magic tricks too?’
‘No, I’m too clumsy. I tried to learn once, but I gave up.’
‘The first time I saw your father,’ she looked at me intensely and I saw an excitement in her eyes I had never seen before, ‘he pulled lollipops from my ears. An orange one and a strawberry one. I’ll never forget it.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Never . . .’ She glanced away, as though she could not go on looking at me and talking at the same time. ‘I thought he was a charming man, extraordinary, a man I could trust, and he was so kind . . . I’ve never known anyone as charismatic as your father. He inspired affection, didn’t he? He made you want to be with him. And when he hugged you, he made you feel safe. I don’t know how to explain it, but he wasn’t like other men.’
She paused, silently doodling with her finger on the tablecloth. I didn’t say anything. I was lost, navigating with no map, no compass, through a voice that was at once heartbroken and fretful, gentle and brutal. She had drowned in her own words, in a flood of adjectives that were overstated, accurate, precise yet ambiguous; they were a fair description of the man she remembered, but unfair on me because I did not know how to interpret them. I could not see Raquel’s eyes as she spoke, she would not let me see them, but I could see her mouth, those feminine lips so used to smiling, a slight emotionless smile underlining every point, every syllable, in every tribute she heaped upon a man who deserved them, but a man whose memory could not light up this beautiful face. Raquel Fernández Perea finally looked up from the tablecloth, and she knew what I had to ask.
The Frozen Heart Page 22