The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  My dearest, darling son, I read the letter again, please forgive me for the pain I have caused you, I did not do so deliberately for I love you with all my heart, I read it over and over, learned it by heart, read it until I was sure I would never forget it, until I cried myself out, forced myself to see it through my father’s eyes, when you have suffered for love you might understand, tried to see it through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy whose mother had just abandoned him, If you can find it in your heart, forgive me, I made a mistake in marrying the man I married, and to be fair to that boy, I repeated that word, abandoned, that squalid, ugly word, over and over, but you’ll grow up, you’ll get older and you’ll have principles of your own, and I had grown up, I had formed my own principles, and they were very similar to what I was reading. Now I didn’t feel like the treacherous son who listens to rumours put about by his father’s enemies, because this voice called out to me, spoke directly to me, because it was my grandma’s voice and she was right, do not be like them; be a good man, a brave man, an honourable man.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  I hadn’t heard Mai come in. Nor had I been expecting her so early, but when I looked up and found her beside me, pointing at the papers on the desk, I remembered that Miguelito had a birthday party that afternoon and didn’t need to be collected until eight o’clock.

  ‘They’re some of my father’s papers,’ I said with a vague wave of my hand. ‘When I took the money round to Lisette yesterday, I found this folder. Look . . .’

  ‘No, I was talking about the photo . . .’

  My grandmother Teresa, youthful and serene, wearing a simple hat, tiny pearl earrings and a jacket buttoned to the throat, the very picture of a bland, bourgeois housewife, smiled out at us from the silver picture frame - it had been a wedding present but we’d never used it because we thought it looked too solemn. I’d spent half an hour searching through every drawer in the house for it as soon as I’d happened on the portrait in the blue folder, among several photos of her with her husband and a photo of the two of them with Father aged four or five, posing in front of the pond in the Retiro. Benigno wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, no tie, but with a thick belt, ill at ease in his Sunday best, his cap in hand, blinking as though the sunlight bothered him. He looked older than he did in his wedding photo, but it was less the age difference which distinguished him from his wife and more his sullen, contemptuous, almost neurotic expression. Not only was Teresa better dressed, she looked happier, more comfortable in the city, with her son in her arms. She was clearly more sophisticated than her husband, more confident, more worldly.

  ‘It’s my Grandmother Teresa,’ I said to Mai, ‘my father’s mother.’

  ‘I know that.’ She nodded. ‘What I don’t know is why you’ve framed the photo. Wouldn’t a photo of your grandfather be better ? Look . . .’ She picked up a photograph of Benigno Carrión from the desk and showed it to me, as though I hadn’t seen that face every day for years when I looked at my father, as though I hadn’t seen it every time I looked in the mirror. ‘You’re the spitting image of him, and he’s a lot more handsome than your grandmother.’

  ‘No,’ I said with a brusqueness she didn’t understand.

  ‘Well, I think . . .’ she insisted.

  ‘Anyway, they’re not your grandparents, they’re mine - the frame has been lying around in a box for the last seven years, and I’m going to leave it here in the study, so I’m the only one who’ll be looking at it.’

  ‘OK, OK ...’ Mai tossed the photo on to the desk and stared at me, shocked and upset. ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Álvaro? Your mother’s right . . . you’ve changed.’

  ‘No, it’s not that . . .’ I got up, hugged my wife and kissed her face. ‘I’m just worked up. I’ve spent all day going through this stuff, it’s amazing. Here, let me show you . . .’

  I showed her the photos of my father in his German uniform, in his Spanish uniform, saluting, showed her the most cheerful of María Victoria Suárez Mena’s letters, Grandpa Benigno’s sanctimonious letters to his son, the oath of loyalty to Hitler, and watched as she read in silence, as she began to frown, and her face soured.

  ‘Gives you the creeps?’ I said at last, and she looked at me, her expression almost frightened.

  ‘Yes, it gives me the creeps. Seriously,’ she said, but I noticed a little click of her tongue before she spoke, something like a switch turning on, the tremor of a cord breaking. ‘But you can’t help feeling sorry for him, no? I mean, the poor thing, what else could he do back then, with the country in the state it was. Life was tough, people were starving . . .’

  ‘Of course.’ I didn’t like hearing her make excuses for him, and she realised as much.

  ‘You don’t think it’s understandable?’

  ‘He was my father, so my opinion doesn’t really count.’ I sat down again and looked up at her. ‘What’s important is that you empathise with him, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes . . . because I’m in no position to judge. I have no right to decide whether he’s guilty or . . .’ She glanced at me and saw something in my face that convinced her to change tack. ‘We didn’t live through it, Álvaro - who knows how we might have reacted to such a difficult situation, to all that violence, the hatred, and the deaths. It’s not part of who we are. I suppose you and I would have been pacifists in ’36.’

  ‘Well, I know I wouldn’t have been, Mai,’ I countered, ‘and neither would you. Because there were no real pacifists.’

  ‘But there were decent people.’

  ‘Of course there were, they were all republicans.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Álvaro! Really, it’s impossible to talk to you, you’re starting to sound like Fernando Cisneros . . .’

  Mai was right, I did suddenly sound like Fernando, I was saying things he might have said, and if what I was saying wasn’t exactly bullshit, it was hardly a dispassionate statement of fact, but I didn’t care that I was being unfair. Mai hadn’t said ‘good people’, she had said ‘decent’, and looking into her eyes I felt that between these two adjectives, something had shattered. But if I did not show her my grandmother’s letter, it was not because I was trying to put the pieces back together again. If I didn’t tell her what had happened to me that morning it was because, just in time, I remembered her grandfather Herminio. I knew only that his surname was López, that he’d been a labourer in Cáceres and had enlisted as a volunteer only to be killed three days before he got to the front, that he had died too soon, too young, too close to his home town.

  I didn’t know what he looked like and neither did Mai. In her parents’ house, there were no photos of him, his name was never even mentioned except when they were extolling the virtues of his widow - as though he’d decided to get himself killed, and it was his fault that his wife had to carry on alone. No one had any sympathy for Herminio. Mai, who was so liberal, so pacifist, so wrong headed, sympathised with her own father, who had chosen to expunge all trace of Militiaman López when he became engaged to the youngest daughter of a second lieutenant who never found out that his son-in-law was the son of a communist. ‘Imagine, the poor man, what he must have been through . . .’ she said when I first met her, and when I heard those words I sympathised with her father too. And if I hadn’t read my grandmother’s letter, these words that had weighed so heavily on me, calling out to me after so many years, I might never have remembered that Mai also had a secret, dangerous grandfather. A grandfather who had been quickly, untidily buried by his son, just as my father had buried his mother. This was why, before apologising, I thought of her Grandfather Herminio López, a man without a face, a man without a history. Maybe it wasn’t Mai’s fault, but it had to be someone’s fault, because apples don’t grow on the ground. Apples have to fall from trees.

  ‘You’re right,’ and in conceding to her, I altered the phrase that had triggered the argument, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Obviously there were good people on both sides. It’s just that .
. .’ I gestured towards my father’s papers ‘. . . this makes me feel sick.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ Just as well, I thought. ‘I’m popping out to buy a few things, do you want anything?’

  ‘If you were to bring me back some pastries from La Duquesita, I’d be eternally grateful.’ She smiled and kissed me.

  After that, things happened quickly: my mobile ringing, Fernando’s voice, out of breath as he asked me a question I didn’t understand. ‘It says I have a missed call from you,’ he said, and he was right, because a couple of hours earlier I had given in to temptation and called to tell him everything, but I’d rung off as soon as I imagined how the conversation might start, ‘Hey, I’ve just found out, I have a heroic grandparent too . . .’ Fernando had his own ideas. ‘So did she call?’ ‘Did who call?’ ‘Your father’s mistress.’ ‘No, nothing like that.’ ‘Well, that’s a let-down!’ he said after a long pause. ‘I was in the middle of a tedious budget planning committee and I thought it must be that so I rang you straight back.’ ‘Well, you can go back to your meeting, then, because there’s nothing to tell . . .’ As I was about to hang up, I picked up the leather folder to put it back inside the blue one and I thought I felt something else in there. I emptied it out as I said goodbye to Fernando, but the phone rang again immediately.

  I found myself with two identity cards in my hand, both bearing the name Julio Carrión González, both issued in Madrid, the first issued in July 1937, the second in June 1941.

  The first was for the Unified Socialist Youth.

  The second for the Falange Española de las JONS.

  The call was from Raquel.

  I was about to tell her I needed time to take in what I had just seen, to make sense of what I had remembered, to reformulate the most complex and serious problem I had ever faced in my life. I needed breathing space to work out a hypothesis in order to redefine my concept of probability, redefine my father, redefine myself. I’m here, I was about to say, I’m a physicist, probability is something I can rely on, something I need. I need to feel that there is some cosmic order that holds up my small, insignificant shoulders. But right now I don’t know who I am, don’t know what I signify. I need time to think about it, about the chaotic structure of a reality that seems to be crumbling, and its repercussions on my fragile, inadequate mind.

  I felt exhausted because, to me, curiosity had never been like this. For me, curiosity is a methodical process, a linear sequence of data, a precise number of formulae requiring a precise number of solutions, which make it possible to formulate new questions and so on ad infinitum. I know it doesn’t sound like much, it’s not very original or exciting, but I’m not a detective, I’m a physicist, and I need to be able to predict things. And right then, Raquel was the least of my problems. At the end of the day, an eighty-three-year-old man with a thirty-five-year-old mistress is biblical, an age-old premise, and therefore it is entirely plausible, it respects the relationship between order and chaos. I was about to say all of this, and I would have were it not for the fact that the moment I heard her voice the cards burning my fingers were transformed into two ordinary bits of cardboard, the sort of useless thing I might find in my pocket.

  ‘Hi, it’s Raquel, we have to meet up,’ she said in a single breath, as though she was about to tell me not to get any ideas. ‘I need to give you a couple of things that belonged to your father, and I’m guessing you haven’t got much on right now.’

  ‘Um . . . I don’t know . . .’ Her last comment disconcerted me. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Your exhibition.’ The tank woman, on the other hand, was very sure of her own power. ‘The private view was last Friday, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes . . . it was.’

  ‘How did it go? Did you sell much?’

  ‘No, I didn’t sell anything.’ I laughed and recovered some of my composure. ‘It’s not that kind of exhibition, it’s an exhibition in a museum.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Black holes.’

  ‘Wow.’ She paused and I could hear the smile I couldn’t see. ‘Sounds terrifying and mysterious.’

  ‘Well, that’s precisely why I put on the exhibition,’ the physics professor took over, ‘to show that blacks holes are neither terrifying nor mysterious.’

  ‘Really? That’s a shame.’

  ‘Why?’ I smiled. ‘Are you a fan of mystery and terror?’

  ‘More than you might think. I still haven’t got over people saying there’s no such thing as extraterrestrials . . .’ Just as I was about to contradict her, she cut me off. ‘No, please don’t explain it to me. I’d rather go on believing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’

  ‘Typical woman,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not quite sure how to take that . . .’ She paused. ‘Well, you can try to make a man of me if you like.’

  ‘What? I would never do something so stupid.’

  ‘No?’ She stifled a giggle. ‘Why not?’ She paused again, hoping that I would answer, but I held firm. ‘What I meant was, you could take me to see your exhibition.’

  ‘Would you be interested?’ I had expected anything but this, and was even more surprised to note the thrill of excitement her suggestion gave me. ‘Would you really like to see it?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’ She adopted a comic, slightly condescending tone that did nothing to discourage me. ‘I mean, we’ve already been for Japanese, and the only other thing I know about you is that you’re into physics. I mean, we could meet at La Cúpula del Palace, but that’s the sort of place I’d suggest if I were meeting your mother. I’d rather deal with you, even though you are the black sheep of the family. I suppose I could suggest a bar, somewhere quiet, elegant, expensive with soft lighting and designer furniture, the sort of place I’d never invite your brothers, but I find bars like that tacky. Or maybe a café - the Commercial or the Gijón - I’d feel more comfortable there. If I were free in the mornings, I could go to the university and sit in one of your lectures, but as you know I’m a busy woman. Busy, but curious. The other evening you said you didn’t paint so I thought maybe you spent the weekends sculpting or woodcarving or restoring furniture, but black holes are a lot more interesting. More in keeping with your foibles.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I only hope they’re in keeping with yours.’

  ‘So . . .’ she said, laughing, ‘shall we meet up there?’

  ‘No, it’s probably easier if I pick you up and we drive there. The museum is in Acobendas.’

  ‘As far as that?’ She sounded surprised.

  ‘Far ?’ I said. ‘That’s not far, it’s just round the corner . . . Anyway, it’s worth the trip. As you know, I’m a very good teacher.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ She laughed again. ‘So how does tomorrow sound ?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I said tentatively. Tomorrow I thought to myself, tomorrow, fuck, fuck, fucking hell, why so soon? Why tomorrow? Why does everything have to happen at once?

  ‘I say that because it’s Friday, and that way if we’re having a good time, at least we don’t have to get up early the next morning ... Obviously if you’ve got a wedding reception or something on Saturday we can leave it for another time.’