The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘No.’

  She said it straight away, without hesitating, looking me in the eyes, and her answer did not surprise me, though I could not say why.

  ‘It wasn’t that exactly, it’s not as simple as that . . .’ she added, then paused. ‘Let’s just say that when he wanted to be, your father could be irresistible. He only had to smile.’

  ‘That’s true. It’s the one thing we don’t have in common.’

  ‘You’re right, but I prefer the way you smile, it’s more restrained, less aggressive . . . When he smiled, your father looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, a big yellow ball with sunbeams streaming out of it. Oh, it was irresistible, but it was too much, almost brutal . . . No, brutal isn’t the right word . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘Humiliating. Your father’s smile was humiliating, Álvaro.’

  I nodded slowly, realising that I was seeing her for the first time. I had finally met Raquel Fernández Perea, peered behind the plastic veneer of the businesswoman accustomed to dealing with people then dismissing them, beyond the unvarnished bluntness tinged with a seductive irony, beyond the well-rehearsed roles, the pregnant pauses, to the woman herself, a person with no tricks, no trappings, no excuses. I could not know if she had consciously, even deliberately, removed the last of the dark veils, or if she had simply been overcome by her own sincerity, but it didn’t matter. I had seen her, was looking at her for the first time, and as she was looking at me, she could see me, or perhaps there was some other reason why the spark of fierceness disappeared from her eyes and they were suddenly sad.

  ‘I’m sorry, Álvaro,’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you that I didn’t love him.’ I held her gaze. She could have said ‘Take a knife and slash your wrists’, and I wouldn’t have thought it was a bad idea. ‘After all, he was your father.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. For a moment, I felt the urge to run away. But then I remembered who she was, who I was, why we were having dinner together, the question that had brought us together and the answer to that question. I wasn’t a child, a vulnerable teenager lost in the confusion of his own desire. From the first moment, I had known that something like this would happen, and from the first moment, I had preferred not to know.

  ‘You didn’t offend me, Raquel,’ I said, my voice intact. ‘I have no right to criticise your feelings, and besides . . . I’m grateful to you for telling me the truth.’

  ‘OK . . .’ She looked at her plate and then at mine. ‘You haven’t eaten anything.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You should at least try . . .’ She carefully examined the sushi on her plate and chose one she hadn’t tasted yet, deftly picked it up with her chopsticks, dipped it in soy sauce and popped it into her mouth with a little sigh of pleasure, ‘ . . . because this meal is going to cost you a fortune.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve just inherited a fortune, as you well know. Of course . . .’ I took the key from my pocket and put it on the table ‘ . . . you’ve inherited too. There’s something else . . . I went there.’

  ‘Oh . . . I’m sorry about that too, Álvaro. I’m afraid you have a lot to forgive me for. I suppose I should have gone over and collected my things before I gave you the keys, but, I don’t know . . . It all happened so fast.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I didn’t want to imagine her in that apartment, satiating my father’s ruined lust. ‘I did it. That’s what I wanted to tell you, I . . .’

  ‘You?’ she interrupted me, her eyes wide, smiling like a little girl. ‘You tidied the apartment, opened the wardrobes, emptied the drawers, got rid of all the stuff?’

  ‘Yes, me . . . why, what’s the matter ?’ She closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘It’s hardly surprising, is it? I didn’t want my mother or my brothers . . . I don’t know, I just thought it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Álvaro!’ She looked at me as though I were a winning lottery ticket. ‘Of course it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t expect . . . that’s so sweet!’ She started waving her hands as though to erase her infantile expression of joy. ‘No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that . . . what I meant to say was thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. And don’t get your hopes up, I’m not that sweet, I left the whole lot in two bin bags and dumped them in the hall.’ She raised her eyebrows in astonishment, so I tried to explain. ‘When you told me the apartment was ours, I put everything in two black bin bags. At first I thought I’d throw it all out, then I realised I should give you back your things, it was only fair, so you could decide what to do with them. Then, when I left the solicitor’s office, convinced that the place must belong to you, it seemed stupid to cart the bags around until I next saw you, so I went back and left them there, in the hall. I did throw out a whole lot of stuff before I went to the meeting with the lawyer - the food, the half-empty bottles of shower gel and shampoo, the magazines, the candles in the bathroom . . . sorry. Everything else is there. I just hope I didn’t break anything.’

  ‘It wouldn’t really matter,’ her smile faded slowly, ‘almost everything belonged to your father, or at least, he bought it . . .’

  ‘Even the crockery?’ I already knew the answer, but I missed the sound of her laughter.

  ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘The crockery was mine.’

  ‘Just as well, because if not, I could believe anything.’

  I took my plate, still almost full, and put it on her empty plate, but she barely noticed.

  ‘Doesn’t it scare you?’ she asked, looking me in the eye with that intensity I had seen earlier when she was talking about the first time she met my father.

  ‘What?’ You scare me, I thought, I scare myself.

  ‘Being able to believe anything.’

  Later, these words came back to haunt me, when they both helped and hurt me, when they sustained and crushed me, when I found myself alone among the living. ‘To believe’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb, this was something I would learn, when I could believe and when I wanted to believe, when I found out what other people could and would believe, when that mattered more than anything. When I was left with nothing the words came back to haunt me, and that night, when Raquel spoke them, I sensed their importance, their transcendence, but I did not interpret them correctly. Although I did not want to recognise it, I wanted her too much to separate her question from my desire.

  ‘Should it scare me?’ I smiled, thinking we were flirting.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not your father’s daughter.’ I wasn’t expecting this answer, and she realised it. ‘In any case, the truth is . . . The truth is I like you a lot, Álvaro. I like you the way you are, the way you think, what you do, what you say, the way you say it. I never expected your father to have a son like you.’

  ‘I think I’ll have a drink now . . .’

  She was a clever girl, I knew that, she was a clever, disconcerting girl, a complex, unpredictable woman, not two but lots of women rolled into one, but now I began to doubt my earlier confidence. I was still convinced that that night I had seen Raquel Fernández Perea for the first time, but that didn’t mean anything, it was of no use to me if I didn’t understand her, and I couldn’t understand her, I couldn’t decipher her words, fit the sound to the sense. ‘You know a lot about me and I know almost nothing about you,’ she had said the day we had lunch together. At the time I knew nothing about her, but I had learned, I had watched, I had studied, only to discover that everything I had learned was useless. The consummate professional, the stuttering little girl, the tank crushing the pavements of Calle Arenal beneath her caterpillar treads, the scatterbrain, the cunning weaver of fictitious intimacies, her naked body slipping into a Jacuzzi surrounded by candles; I could touch her, I had to see her, I had to hear her; I had kissed her, but I did not know which of these people was her.

  ‘Your older brother, on the other hand,
I never liked,’ she said after a moment, handing me back my plate, on which a couple of rolls remained. ‘You won’t believe this, but I can’t eat any more.’

  ‘You are human,’ I crowed, raising my glass to toast her.

  ‘Yes I am. Nobody’s perfect . . .’ She pointed at my glass. ‘I’ll have one of those.’

  ‘Sure.’ I ordered another whisky and looked at her to see whether she wanted to play again. ‘I can’t say I’m all that keen myself.’

  ‘On what, whisky?’

  ‘No, my brother Rafa.’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s who we were talking about! He came to see me, you know.’ I could imagine, but simply nodded. ‘Last week. Of course, he did make an appointment, and he was on time. The minute he walked in he told me he was in a hurry, said nothing

  I could say would change his mind, that the heirs had been unanimous in deciding to recoup the capital, and then he closed the accounts. He treated me as if I were a shop assistant. I’m sure he’d address a girl in a bakery as “hey, you”. I thought he was arrogant and . . . predictable. The typical moron who looks at himself in the mirror every morning and says to himself, you’re a rich and powerful man, never forget that.’

  ‘That’s a fairly good description.’

  ‘But . . . I don’t know. Your father was nothing like that, he was charming, he was nice, intelligent, he treated everyone with respect, he knew how to tell people exactly what they wanted to hear. But your brother didn’t surprise me the way you have surprised me, because making a fortune and inheriting a fortune are two different things, and a man like your father usually winds up with sons like your brother. You probably don’t understand what I’m getting at . . .’

  ‘No, I understand,’ I assured her. ‘The trouble is that the first person you met from the family was the odd man out - me. You would get on well with my brother Julio, he’s just as rich and powerful as Rafa, but he’s a party animal, he’s funny, a nice guy, almost as nice as my father. Plus . . .’ my voice dropped all by itself as I let my imagination run riot, ‘Julio would have wheeled out his charm the minute he saw you.’

  ‘Really?’ She smiled, and asked the question I was expecting. ‘Why?’

  ‘To get you into bed. He never misses a trick.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’ She didn’t answer, but laughed. ‘I’m not much like either of them. But I have more in common with Julio . . .’

  On one of the last days of school when I was eleven or twelve, the playground started to shrink before the bell rang for our first class, and by lunchtime, it was half its original size. All morning, trucks kept coming and going, with men unloading bricks and bags of cement, to the amusement of the children sitting beside the windows - unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them - and the despair of the teachers. Term was nearly over and the headmaster had finally decided to put up what he pompously called a sports complex - a far cry from the basketball court flanked by three miserable stands which we found when we got back after the holidays. I barely remembered the building itself, but what I did remember was the huge mountain of sand which grew bigger every day like some fantastical sand dune in the far corner of the playground. The idea of climbing it was Roberto’s, my best friend since nursery school, but when we got to the top, I was the one who stood calmly at the edge of the precipice, head high, arms outstretched. ‘What are you doing, Álvaro?’ he asked. ‘Shut up,’ I said, ‘wait and see . . .’ The first time was the best, because the sand had only recently been piled up, it was hard, compacted and held my weight for a long time - a minute, maybe more. I felt it shifting under the soles of my feet a second before the landslide; I stood tall, head high, arms out, and at first it seemed to slide slowly, almost imperceptibly, then faster, recklessly, vertiginously, but I was not afraid, my feet tensed, my arms outstretched, my heart in my throat, exhilaration thrilling through every inch of my body. The first time was the best, but it lacked the excitement of the second, the third, the fourth, because something new was added to the experience every time, and sliding down the mountain was exhilarating, but standing on the edge, controlling your breathing, senses alert, savouring the moment when the ground would fall away under your feet, was even more intense. I know, because that morning I did it over and over while the short-sighted, lenient playground monitor, Father Sebas, looked at me and smiled serenely. Later, when the workmen complained because they had to recompact the sand we had scattered all over the place, they told Father Sebas we could easily have broken a leg. After that, we were forbidden from playing there again - Roberto chickened out, but I didn’t. I liked doing it so much that on prize-giving day, I slipped away from my parents and brothers so I could do it one last time, and when I went up on stage to collect the first prize for mental arithmetic, I left a trail of sand behind me. My mother was furious but I didn’t care, because it was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done in my life. But I soon forgot about that mountain, surfing down the sand, the ground opening up beneath my feet, forgot how exhilarating, how wonderful danger could be, until almost thirty years later, when Raquel Fernández Perea, tired of clinking the ice around her glass, looked up at me and said:

  ‘You come from an interesting family.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it . . .’

  From that moment the countdown began. Ten, nine, eight, I’m falling, I’m going to fall. I wanted it, but she wasn’t ready to give in, not yet. Just as I was about to suggest we go and get a drink somewhere else, she put her glass on the table with a decisive gesture and looked at her watch.

  ‘Quarter to one, shit, and I’ve got to be up early tomorrow . . .’ She gave me a nervous glance somewhere between relief and sadness, as though she was unsure. ‘I didn’t notice the time.’

  ‘Yes.’ Maybe it’s for the best, I thought, it is for the best, but I didn’t believe it. ‘Me neither.’

  My name is Álvaro Carrión Otero, in November I will be forty-one, I am the son of Julio Carrión González, a poor man addicted to the benign and possibly fatal trickery of chemicals, the woman sitting opposite me is Raquel Fernández Perea, she is about thirty-five, an age which might easily make her my father’s daughter or even his granddaughter, but she was his lover, the lover of an old man with a weakness for believing that the most important thing was not getting laid but knowing that the next time would not be the last - a battle so unequal, so clearly lost before it had begun, that it could only end in a victory for death, and death had triumphed, my father was dead. But I am not, I am alive, I have a profession I love, a house I love, a son I love, a wife I love. My wife’s name is Mai, she is thirty-seven though she doesn’t look it, and her name isn’t short for Maite, as everyone seems to think, her real name is Inmaculada, but her little sister couldn’t pronounce it and made up a nickname which she liked much more, I love my wife, I love my son, I love my job, I love my work, I love my life, and my life is not like this, clouds and guilt, surprises and lies, this is not my life, this is not for me, I am nothing like this angry, irritated, worn-out man scared by intense, fearsome, perverse desires, my name is Álvaro Carrión Otero, in November I will be forty-one, I am the son of Julio Carrión González . . .

  I repeated this warning to myself as I asked for the bill, I repeated it over and over as I paid, followed Raquel to the door, asked whether she had come by car, as she asked me where I lived, as she told me that she lived opposite the Cuartel del Conde-Duque, as we discovered we were practically neighbours, as we decided to share a taxi, as I offered to drop her off at her place before going on to mine, as she refused my offer, claiming my place was closer, as the taxi double-parked, as I kissed her goodbye, even more carefully than before, as I opened the door and stepped into my apartment, as I took off my clothes, brushed my sharp teeth and got into bed, as I noticed the warmth beside me, Mai, asleep, her skin soft, and fragrant, as I lay there unable to sleep, I was still repeating this little mantra, repeating the same warning over and over, but it was useless
.

  My name used to be Álvaro Carrión Otero, of course. Julio Carrión González was my father. To lust after Raquel Fernández Perea, who had been his lover, was utterly despicable, but I didn’t care.

  The following day, everything was clearer.

  Everybody liked the exhibition. I had been fairly sure they would. Although I humbly accepted the praise lavished on me, making no distinctions as to the quality of the opinions - ‘It’s incredible,’ said a bank manager’s wife with diamond rings on every finger, ‘even I can understand it’ - the truth was that rarely in my life had the correlation between effort expended, which had been considerable, and the results, which had been spectacular, been so gratifying. José Ignacio Carmona, who, before he had taken the post as museum director and enlisted me as an adviser, had been my teacher, almost my guru and the chief influence during my years as a student, was thrilled. ‘Of course,’ I said as an aside, ‘we’ll both get the credit for this.’ ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he answered, and I realised that he felt a little bit proud of me. I was even more surprised by Fernando Cisneros’s reaction. He showed up late, his burly frame squeezed into a suit that made him look like an excited bear.

  ‘Congratulations, Álvaro, this is fucking incredible. Seriously.’