Fernando had been José Ignacio’s other pet pupil at university, and although all three of us were still good friends, from time to time Fernando almost seemed childishly jealous of the bond between our old professor and me. ‘No, no, you two are the disciples of science,’ he would say, ‘you’re the real scientists, not me, I’m just a lowly civil servant . . .’ I never took him seriously, but José Ignacio occasionally felt guilty and would offer Fernando a project that he would invariably refuse, though it would shut him up for a while. Black holes had been the most recent offer, and I had ended up taking it on myself a couple of days after my father’s second and fatal heart attack. At the time I would have been grateful for a hand to get it finished; Fernando didn’t exactly say no, but wondered aloud how long we had before the upcoming elections for head of department. I told him to forget about it for the time being, that I’d get back to him if I thought I couldn’t meet the deadline. I did make the deadline, but I knew Fernando Cisneros well, he was my best friend. I knew he felt guilty for not having helped out, but also that, on its own, no amount of guilt would have elicited a eulogy as warm and sincere for an exhibition which, by its very nature, did not belong to the kind of successes he valued.
‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ he had asked when I first told him I had accepted Carmona’s job offer. ‘Have you gone fucking nuts as well ?’ I didn’t answer, but he carried on regardless. ‘First José Ignacio loses the plot, now he’s taking you down with him.’ ‘But what’s so bad about it, Fernando? I don’t see what you’re getting at . . .’ ‘What’s bad,’ he explained condescendingly, ‘is a physicist of José Ignacio’s calibre giving up his career to put on exhibitions for ten-year-olds. It’s bullshit,’ he said, ‘a waste of space.’ ‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘First off, José Ignacio is not giving up anything for the museum, he’ll be the director and curator, and when it’s up and running all that will mean is he has to attend a couple of meetings a week. Secondly, a museum like this is not a waste of space, Fernando, I can’t believe you’d even say that. You spend your whole life bleating about how difficult it is to be a scientist in a society that’s not interested in science . . .’ ‘Listen, Álvaro,’ he shot back, ‘José Ignacio is one thing, he’s already had his career, but you . . . you should be aiming for head of department, not pissing about with physics as entertainment.’ At that point I laughed. The only major obstacle in Fernando Cisneros’s political career was his utter lack of interest in anything other than politics. It wasn’t that he didn’t do the research, publish the papers, he simply read less and less. Next to him, I was the Midas of research, the queen bee of publishing. ‘The one who needs to do more reading is you, Fernando, you’re the one who wants to be head of department,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, my museum work counts towards academic credit.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Of course,’ I assured him, although at that point I didn’t know that this was true, nor that José Ignacio would manage to persuade the museum’s board of trustees to sign a sponsorship deal to finance several research projects at the university.
‘Hey, you! I’m trying to congratulate you here,’ Fernando said, grabbing me by the shoulders when I responded to his initial congratulations with a shrug. ‘Con-gra-tu-late, get it? I am publicly admitting that I might have been wrong. If that’s not enough to flatter your vanity, I don’t know what is . . .’
‘I know, and I’m grateful, honestly,’ I said. ‘How’s the campaign going?’
‘The campaign?’ He frowned and stroked his chin. ‘The campaign’s fine, we’re bound to win, but you look like shit, Álvaro.’
‘Yeah, I know, things aren’t going too well.’
I looked around and saw Mai at the far end of the room, chatting to a group of people. She probably wouldn’t miss me for a while, so I grabbed Fernando and dragged him into a corner behind the display.
‘You’re not going to believe this but . . .’
He looked at me, his face concerned, an expression utterly unlike the mischievous grin he had given me when he had asked whether I was having an affair a couple of weeks earlier. He was clearly expecting some dramatic revelation, a serious illness or a fuck-up at work. Over the years, Fernando had cultivated a systematic pessimism which overlaid his naturally feisty personality and would drag him down into bouts of depression so intense that sometimes he was forced to switch to automatic pilot and become his own doppelgänger, a man who taught his classes with the mechanical reliability of a robot and spent his free time in his office doing nothing, a bitter taste in his mouth from constantly repeating that everything was shit. Until some departmental squabble emerged, at which point he would hurl himself into the breach with a passion that astonished even me, a zeal more intense than he had been capable of at the age of twenty. Back then, I had once joked with Fernando that his fundamental character trait was his need to plot and scheme, that he had been born a conspirator the way others are born artists, and time had proved me right.
‘OK, basically . . .’ I leaped into the void without a parachute, ‘my father had a lover.’
‘Fucking hell - good for him. You bastard, you had me worried there . . .’ He rubbed his face and shot me a wicked smile. ‘So your father had a lover, who would have thought . . . So was she around his whole life, or was she younger than him?’
‘She’s younger than me.’ I decided to repeat myself for emphasis. ‘Younger than both of us, Fernando.’
‘What!?’ This piece of information stunned him. ‘Fucking hell, Julio, you old dog, there he was, going around all stiff and starched, and secretly he was a dirty bastard . . .’
‘Yes.’ His reaction reminded me of my glee when I had first found out and I laughed with him. ‘But that’s not the worst part.’
He stared at me, astonished. ‘Do the others know about this? I mean, does your mother know?’
‘Nobody knows, not even Mai. I’m the only person who knows, and now you.’
In as few words as possible, I told him everything that had happened, from the day of the funeral up to the night before, and I told him that none of what I was telling him was as important as it seemed.
‘And that’s not the worst part?’ he asked when I had finished, bewildered.
‘The worst part . . .’ I took a deep breath and decided to see it through to the end, ‘is that last night I came this close to sleeping with her. Seriously, I mean this close. You know what this close means? It means she realised, and she looked at her watch and said it was getting late. If it wasn’t for that . . . it’s been a very long time since I’ve been this attracted to a girl, and it’s not just that . . .’ I paused, avoiding his eyes, and I made another decision, without knowing whether it was for the best. ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever been so attracted to a girl in my whole life. And yes, I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the truth.’
I looked up and his face was almost completely blank.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure?’ I nodded and he frowned. ‘You’d better not be taking the piss, this’d better not be a wind-up.’
‘It’s not, I swear . . .’
‘Fuck!’ His voice rose until it was almost a howl as he put his face in his hands. ‘Jesus, fuck!’ he took his hands away and burst out laughing. ‘So, what are you planning to do?’
I thought about it for a minute. ‘Nothing. I’ll probably do nothing because I’ll probably never see her again. Everything is sorted out now, we don’t have any unfinished business.’
‘Apart from this.’
‘Yes, but that’s just me.’
‘That’s not true, Álvaro,’ he was thinking about something else now, ‘you can’t know that.’
Elena Galván had jet-black hair, jet-black eyes, her nose was too big, her lips were too thin, a sharp, almost tragic face that she was the first to joke about. ‘With a face like mine,’ she would introduce herself, pointing a mocking finger, ‘you’d think they’d have come up with a better name than a Gree
k statue.’ By the time she had said it, a smile had softened her features so that she seemed like a different person. I never taught her myself, but by the time I came back from the States, her academic record was already legendary. And she went on outshining the other scholarship students because her remarkable intelligence did not stop her from being very clever, something that was not so paradoxical among the brilliant, ambitious young students. In addition she was charming, good natured, funny and friendly. She was a pleasure to work with and was devoted to José Ignacio, so I wasn’t surprised the following term when it became usual for there to be four of us in the bar, in the canteen, going for a drink after class. At first I thought Professor Carmona had decided to take this new chick under his wing, something he had done with students less worthy than Elena, but one day he couldn’t come to lunch with us and when she got up to go to the bathroom I realised I had been wrong. ‘You never told me, you dog,’ I said to Fernando, and he laughed. ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said, ‘nothing’s happened yet. But it will,’ he predicted, his fingers crossed.
What happened lasted for two years and it was tremendous. If ever Elena Galván seemed genuinely Greek, it was on the morning she came into my office to say goodbye, her skin stretched taut and pale as parchment, her eyes ringed with dark circles. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me,’ she said, hugging me. ‘Look after your friend, he’s in a worse state than I am and it will only get worse . . .’ She was in love, a woman scorned, but her words had the inexorable ring of prophesy.
‘Go with her,’ I had said to Fernando the night before, one of many such nights, Elena nights, the same bar, the same drinks, the same conversation, the same ratio of doubt to certainty. ‘Go with her,’ I said again after a moment, not that I had forgotten Nieves, who was a little like Mai, since they were cousins, who was nice, affectionate and good in the best sense of the word, a good wife, a good friend. Nieves didn’t deserve this, I had known her for years, we were still in school when she had started going out with Fernando and I’d always liked her. ‘You think I should go with Elena?’ he asked me that night, after I had already told him twice that I thought he should. ‘What the hell’s going on, Álvaro?’ Mai had been asking me the same question every couple of days for some months now. ‘You must know . . .’ While I still could, I told her I didn’t know, that I hadn’t the faintest idea, then afterwards, I told her to stop asking me. ‘Don’t ask me, Mai, don’t ask me to tell you, because you know I can’t.’
We hadn’t been living together for very long, and we weren’t yet married. ‘So your friend is more important than me, is that it?’ she said finally when we had reached breaking point. ‘No, that’s not it, think about it.’ ‘I don’t want to think about it.’ ‘Well, that’s your problem . . .’
‘You think I should go with her, Álvaro?’ Fernando asked me again, that last night, the same bar, the same drinks, the same conversation. Elena doesn’t deserve this, I thought, and neither does he, it’s two against one, and I knew that Nieves wouldn’t win, that Fernando and Elena would either win or lose together, and yet I didn’t dare tell him to go with her again. ‘What do I know?’ I said. ‘If you’re really not sure . . . Honestly, I don’t know’. But I did know.
From that moment, Fernando Cisneros began to believe that the biggest mistake of his life was not leaving with Elena Galván. ‘That’s not true. You can’t know that.’ It was a speech I repeated so often I knew it by heart. ‘You can’t possibly know how things would be if you were living with Elena, you could just as easily be chucking saucepans at each other every night. The reason you think not going with her was the biggest mistake you’ve ever made is because you’ll never know.’ He would listen to me patiently, nodding all the time, and when I was finished he’d repeat that not going off with Elena Galván was the biggest mistake of his life and eventually I didn’t have the energy to keep arguing, although I never said I told you so.
From the first, Elena’s prophesy was fulfilled, and continued to be fulfilled with each passing day. I saw her again many years later, on the Calle Preciados one afternoon in December. I’d taken Miguelito to see the Christmas lights, she was shopping with her husband, a good-looking man about her own age who was carrying a one-year-old girl. It was Elena who spotted me, and at first I barely recognised her because she’d put on weight, cut her hair and looked much better, prettier, with none of the dramatic tension about her, the bloodlessness that had characterised her last months with Fernando. I remembered José Ignacio on the morning she came to say goodbye, barging into my office screaming and shouting, ‘What the hell is going on round here? Has everyone gone mad?’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said; I didn’t have the stomach for rhetorical questions. ‘Elena Galván has just told me she’s leaving,’ he said, ‘she said she’s accepted an offer from the Universidad de Castilla la Mancha. I don’t get it . . . You think this department can afford to watch someone as exceptional as that walk away? We have to do something, offer her a contract, find her a permanent post, whatever it takes . . .’ ‘That’s not what this is about, José Ignacio,’ I interrupted him, ‘it has nothing to do with that. Elena and Fernando have been having an affair for the past two years. It wasn’t a couple of one-night stands, it was serious. He couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife so she’s decided to go. She won’t stay, no matter what you offer her.’ José Ignacio stared at me as though I’d just told him they were aliens. ‘But what about me? How come I didn’t know about this? I’m going to tell you something, for what it’s worth . . .’ ‘No, don’t say it,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t say it?’ ‘No . . . please . . .’ ‘We’ll still have to take that fucking idiot to lunch.’
For what it’s worth, why doesn’t he leave and let Elena stay here with us . . . This is what José Ignacio would have said if I had let him, and afterwards he would have regretted it, would have wanted to rip his tongue out by the root. I knew him too well, though not as well as I knew Fernando, who was remembering this very same event during the pause in my confession. It had been almost seven years since I had last seen her, almost six since he had last talked about her, except to put her at the top of the list of the mistakes he had made in his life. He and Nieves got on as well as they always had done, and since then he had not been unfaithful to her as far as I knew, but Elena Galván was still part of his consciousness and always would be.
‘I’m hardly the best person to give advice on this stuff, Alvaro, you know that.’
‘Nobody is . . .’ I said.
‘In any case . . .’ He thought for a moment, then smacked his lips. ‘You were talking about what you might have done, weren’t you - not even that, you were talking about something you felt might happen, but nothing did. And if it had? So what? It’s not like it would be incest or anything, it would be . . . a peccadillo . . .’ His definition made me smile. ‘An exotic interlude in your biography which, until now, has been pretty tame. The fact she slept with your father has something to do with it, you know . . .’
‘No, Fernando, it’s not that . . .’ I interrupted him, ‘I’m not morbid. It’s just the opposite. When I’m with her I feel . . .’
He interrupted me, like a judge about to pronounce sentence. ‘Look, this whole thing sounds pretty weird, Álvaro - not just the stuff about the woman, everything, the funeral, the letter, the meeting at the bank . . . I don’t know how to explain it but . . . don’t get involved. It doesn’t fit with who you are, it’s weird and you don’t do weird. You’re a guy who never does anything without planning it down to the last detail, you’re always in control, we’ve talked about this before. OK, there are some things we can’t control - falling in love, falling out of love, losing your wife, your parents, your job - these are twists of fate, but there are so many coincidences, all with you slap bang in the middle. If it were happening to someone else - someone less level headed, someone weaker, more unpredictable . . . I wouldn’t find it as strange if it were happening to me. Jesus, every other week I’m si
ck to fucking death of my home, my wife, my job, my whole fucking life. But you? Don’t get involved, do you see what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, and you’re right, nothing ever happens to me.’
‘But this did.’ He nodded and smiled. ‘Is it good?’
‘The best.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Raquel.’
‘Really . . .’ In a split second his whole manner changed, his expression, his posture; he raised his voice, and leaned towards me. ‘So anyway, I said to Raquel, don’t even think about it, the guy’s a fascist and the last thing we need is to wind up electing someone from Opus Dei to head of deanship!’
‘So what did she say?’ I didn’t want to turn round, but I knew my wife was coming up behind me and that he had seen her coming.
‘Raquel ? Well . . .’
‘What’s this?’ I heard Mai’s voice. ‘It’s late and you’re still plotting? ’
‘What do you expect,’ Fernando shrugged, ‘it’s who I am, you know that.’
‘Álvaro, your mother called.’ My wife slipped her arm round my waist. ‘Clara’s gone into labour. Curro took her to the hospital and the kids are fretting. She doesn’t want to miss the birth so she asked if they could sleep over at our place. I said they could, obviously.’
‘But I can’t leave yet,’ I said, ‘I’m supposed to be taking some people to dinner.’
‘I know.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ll go ahead, but I have to take the car. Is the dinner in Madrid ?’
‘I’ll drop him home, Mai,’ said Fernando, ‘don’t you worry.’
That night, when I got home, everything seemed much clearer. It had felt good to tell someone my secret, and not just because I felt more relaxed now that I had told someone - and not just anyone, someone I trusted to take my side - but also because, as I talked to Fernando, every incident that had been so hard to believe had suddenly felt more real, more solid. As I talked, I realised that words did not seem enough to describe how I felt, yet I carried on creating a narrative which - after his initial shock - Fernando had no trouble in accepting, perhaps because our own upheavals are never as upsetting to others, or perhaps because to him, my father’s role was simply a taster, a backdrop against which the real drama played out - the anxiety of lust unfulfilled, the woman who had made me lose my self-control.
The Frozen Heart Page 24