The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  From a distance, I could hear the murmur of superlatives - amazing, fantastic, fabulous, wild - as I cut up the kids’ steaks for them and glanced occasionally at Fernando, who would shake his head and raise his eyebrows, but he could not distract me from my task. I was thinking about Raquel, about how she had looked when I last saw her, at half past six that same morning, when she had walked me to the door and stood there, naked, smiling, staring after me as I started down the stairs.

  I was thinking about the warm, rumpled sheets on her bed, and I could picture her alone, sleeping on her side, could make out the outline of her body as she slept. She must have got up later, had breakfast in the clean, cool of the kitchen next to a window so that the sunshine could warm her body, she must be there still, maybe she went back to bed, maybe not. Maybe she is having lunch out, maybe she’s meeting her actress friend, maybe she needs to tell someone, maybe not, she might be having lunch with her parents, then she will come back home, to the same warm sheets, this bed which is a newborn universe, exempt from the laws of physics which became a part of me even before I knew it.

  I dreamed about these things as I thought about Raquel. My mobile phone was burning a hole in my pocket, and my head hummed with impatience at the gruelling effort of keeping myself under control, until during one of the abrupt silences so noticeable in noisy conversation, I heard the last phrase of one my wife’s recurring complaints.

  ‘Well, of course you can go but it’s difficult for me, especially on Saturdays, because we have to make plans for the boy . . .’

  ‘Go ahead . . .’ I interrupted her.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To the spa - that is what you are talking about, isn’t it?’

  ‘Álvaro ...’ my wife said, adopting a weary expression I knew all too well, the expression she always resorted to to let me know how impossible I was, ‘you know perfectly well we’ve got tickets to take the kids to the theatre this afternoon.’

  ‘Of course I remember . . .’ I said, smiling. ‘But Fernando and I can take them, can’t we? I mean, there are no names on the tickets.’

  ‘Huh?’ Fernando looked at me with an expression of panic I preferred to ignore. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Álvaro!’ Mai shot me such a grateful smile it almost made me feel like a bastard, almost . . . ‘You’d do that for me?’

  ‘Of course. I love Andersen’s fairy tales, and I’m sure Fernando does too.’

  ‘Sure, I love them - and a musical too, I mean . . .’ He kicked me under the table and lowered his voice. ‘Álvaro, you can’t be serious.’

  ‘Fernando, darling,’ Nieves leaned over and kissed him, definitively signing his death warrant, ‘you can’t believe how grateful I am.’

  ‘But The Searchers is on TV this afternoon,’ he grumbled.

  ‘You’ve seen it a hundred times.’

  ‘I know, but I’d like to see it a hundred and one . . .’

  I don’t know why I did it. ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours . . .’ I whispered to him as we left the restaurant, but he just told me to fuck off, convinced that I was going to leave him to look after Miguelito while I took off. I was tempted to, but in the end I went to the theatre with him and his kids, because I was afraid to be on my own. Because I knew that if I went home on my own I wouldn’t last five minutes, I might not even make it home, because the first corner I came to, I’d turn and wind up at her place, because I didn’t know what was happening to me, nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

  Not used to it, Fernando had said, and it was true. For most of the time I had been an ordinary, maybe even unexceptional, guy living in the little patch of garden that was my life, where there was nothing to trouble my eyes or my conscience. I had built up this patch of land, because I loved it, I loved my life, my work, Mai, and that was why I had only ever been unfaithful to her when I was away from Madrid, meaningless one-night stands with women I met by chance, women who meant nothing to me. If ever I thought I might like a woman more than that, I armed myself to the teeth, that’s the way I was, that’s the way I’d always been, and yet now I barely recognised myself, for that man had never felt as truly alive as I did now, now that Raquel Fernández Perea had happened to me, like a twist of fate that changes the lives of those it touches for ever. Yet everything seemed as simple, as elementary, as hunger, thirst, sleep, this strange new definition of need which I found difficult to reconcile with the cautious man I had been. I needed to see Raquel, needed to kiss her, caress her, to possess her, I needed to hear her voice, to breathe her in, but most of all I needed to know that tomorrow this urgent, brutal need would burn in me still. I needed to need Raquel. This was what sustained me in my resolve not to move too fast, not to overwhelm her as long as I could feel her on my face, between my hands, under my skin, just by closing my eyes.

  ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’ I said to Fernando as we came out of the theatre with the kids, still excited, their hands red from clapping. ‘I enjoyed it.’

  ‘What?’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What do you think - the musical?’

  ‘Will you buy us the CD, Papá, please!’

  ‘No way, we’ve spent far too much money already.’ Fernando dismissed his daughter’s request with the same brusqueness I would have used on any other day.

  ‘I’ll buy it for you, Lara,’ I said, before turning to the boys. ‘What about you boys, do you want a T-shirt?’

  ‘It’s a terrible age,’ my best friend looked at me worriedly and patted me on the back, ‘a terrible age to go losing your head . . .’

  In the end, I held out for forty-eight hours.

  I had my head screwed on more tightly than ever and I held out for forty-eight hours, an agonising ocean of seconds, although they dissipated the moment I saw her again, when she looked at me and decreed the non-existence of every living thing beyond the compass of her encircling arms.

  I had held out for forty-eight hours and during that time nothing had happened, yet a lot of things had happened.

  ‘Your grandmother was a strong-willed woman, Julio.’

  ‘Álvaro,’ I gently reminded her.

  ‘Yes, of course ...’ She thought for a moment, and her small, deep eyes glittered like pinheads. ‘A strong-willed woman. Too strong-willed, perhaps.’

  On Saturday evening, after the musical and half a pizza, Miguelito had fallen asleep in the back of the taxi and I’d had to carry him up to his room. Mai wasn’t much more awake, but she opened her eyes and gave me a radiant smile.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Wonderful. You can’t imagine, you should try it. Come here . . . smell me.’ She was lying on her back on the bed, naked, half covered by the sheet, her arms flung wide.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and inhaled deeply. She smelled of vanilla and cinnamon and something like mint.

  ‘It’s amazing, you smell like an ice-cream parlour.’

  ‘Really?’ She chuckled. ‘It’s a relaxing body treatment. You shower in cold water then hot water then cold, then you put the cream on. The masseuse recommended it. I’m floating on a cloud right now, honestly. It contains hashish extract, that’s why they have to put in so much perfume.’

  ‘It must be wonderful.’ I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. ‘Do you want me to pull the sheet over you?’ She nodded. ‘OK, I’m just going on the computer for a bit, I’m not tired.’

  ‘But you didn’t sleep at all last night.’

  It was true, but I hadn’t been tired then either. I sat in front of the computer but I didn’t manage to switch it on. Teresa González, young and serene, in her little hat and pearl earrings, stared out at me from the silver frame, the very picture of a smiling, harmless, middle-class wife. Her picture sent a sudden wave of love surging through me, as deep as it was ambiguous, since it related to everything I had gained and everything I had lost in losing my father. I had gained a grandmother, and found a rare fierce happiness. Everything had changed so much, so qui
ckly, that I could not analyse what was happening to me and experience it simultaneously. I had decided to experience it, and yet when I picked up the photo of Teresa González and touched the glass with my fingers, as I had seen Raquel do with the photograph of her grandfathers, I wondered whether it was not more commonplace for people to have photos of their father or their mother on their bedside table.

  I should have continued in that vein, gone on probing the differences, the coincidences, the real meaning of the old words that weighed so heavily on us, kept us obligated after so many years, but Spanish stories ruin everything, and I had fallen in love, and I had decided not to analyse that love but to experience it, to serve it loyally and selflessly, with the noble spirit of a medieval knight or the terrible desperation of a treacherous son rebelling against his father. My father. Two words that had never been a problem for me, before I knew Raquel, before I knew Teresa, the young beatific smile of a woman whose luck had run out, for whom reason and justice and liberty did not win through. My grandmother - a sudden wave of love and an intensity, a purity difficult to explain, would have made me a better man if I had known her earlier, if I had known her in time. Her memory would have stayed with me for years, would have given meaning to my name, but she had turned up now, when I was wrapped up in a complex and contradictory confusion, a fervour that simultaneously included and excluded her.

  Bad luck hounded you your whole life, Grandma. I would have loved you so much, would have boasted about you to the girls I fancied at university . . . I would have learned your letter by heart and recited it over and over, to the girls, to myself, so that I could feel your presence, feel your support when I decided to be different, decided to be the son my father never wanted, the only son who did not want to be like him. I needed you so much, Grandma, you were here and I didn’t know you, but now I see Raquel Fernández Perea everywhere I look, I am bound by the need to need her.

  I pressed my lips to the glass before setting the frame down again next to the monitor, and the memory of Raquel’s lips came to me with a sudden excitement that made my hair stand on end. Afterwards I went to bed, calmly, as though my life had not been turned upside down in the past three days, as though I felt able to cope with my confusion. But before I fell asleep, I wondered what sort of secrets forty-year-old sons might discover about their recently deceased fathers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and it occurred to me that there was a detail that eluded me.

  I did not realise what it was the next morning when I woke up, late, less good-humoured than Mai, who floated around the house as though her body weighed nothing. But much later, as I was sitting at the lunch table with my in-laws, I realised what I had not noticed. Sunday afternoon was heavy and slow and favourable to contemplation, but as Mai allowed herself to be crushed under the weight of the hours that separated her from the bliss of the previous afternoon and I sat in front of the television with Miguelito, seeing the beauty of Raquel’s body in every frame of Disney’s Peter Pan, my mind came back again and again to a nagging, insoluble detail to which I could find no explanation. My Grandmother Teresa had walked out on her husband on 2 June 1937. Her son had joined the Unified Socialist Youth fifty-two days later. The discovery of Julio Carrión González’s two membership cards had so shocked me that I had memorised the date of the first - 23 July 1937 - without realising what it meant. Now, the discrepancy between these two dates seemed more despicable, more painful, than the existence of the membership card for the Falange Española from 1941.

  To be a traitor is first and foremost to betray yourself. Maybe it is this lack of self-respect at the root of all betrayal that makes traitors so contemptible. At the time when my father changed sides, ideological treason was much more than a theoretical shift. He had often told us about his friend Eugenio, the only honest man this country had ever produced, the only one who could have used people, but never used people, could have stolen, but never stole, who could have informed, but never did. I remembered his words, had filed them away as though they were the words to a banal, repetitive song the chorus of which was ‘Cold? You think this is cold ? You should have been in Russia, in Poland, now that was cold !’ Traitors first and foremost betrayed themselves, and to stick to his ideals, regardless of what it was had come between my father and my grandmother, would have been more honest, more loyal, more respectful of her than to join the Youth Movement of her party and then jump ship when the die were cast, only to bury her alive later on.

  It was no use thinking that I was getting things out of proportion, or reminding myself that I knew a lot less than I thought I did. ‘Maybe I am wrong, but I am doing what I feel I have to do, and I am doing it for love.’ This was what my grandmother had done, and that was what I did on Monday morning. I gave a first-rate lecture, though I wasn’t sure why, though I was shorn of my freedom, though Teresa González was lodged in my heart and my father was weighing on me like some crippling debt I owed or was owed - all I knew was that it was long overdue. But even so, I gave a first-rate lecture which finally put paid to the prestige of that little patch of garden that had been my life.

  At 12.40 p.m., the register office in Torrelodones was deserted. I thought my luck had finally failed me, but I cleared my throat, banged on the reception desk, and a skinny young man in glasses appeared, looking at me nervously with the terrified air of a trainee. He could have been one of my students, and that thought reassured me.

  ‘OK. Can you fill out these forms, please . . .’ he said when I explained the purpose of my visit.

  ‘Listen,’ I cut him off, ‘I can’t hang around. This is really important to me. I’m a professor, I teach at UAM, and I don’t have much time ...’

  ‘You don’t have to come back,’ he replied. ‘We can post the information to you in Madrid.’

  ‘I know, but I’m guessing everything is on computer, isn’t it?’ He nodded warily. ‘So even if you’re going to send me the information later, couldn’t you look it up quickly right now and just tell me? It’ll only take five minutes.’

  ‘That’s not procedure. Standard practice is to send the information by post. My boss isn’t here right now, and I’m just a student, I’m only here for ten days, and . . .’ He looked at me, clicked his tongue then nodded. ‘What was your grandmother’s name?’

  ‘Teresa González.’

  ‘Teresa González what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at me, his eyes wide. ‘Honestly, I don’t know, as I said before. No one ever talked about her at home, I didn’t even know she had had another child, and I’ve only just found out that she didn’t die of tuberculosis in 1937. I think she might have been a victim of the reprisals after the war, but I don’t know. Maybe she left the country, I’ve no idea. All I know is that my father was born here in Torrelodones on 17 January 1922.’

  ‘That should be enough . . .’ he mumbled, more to himself than to me, before disappearing through a glass door.

  It took longer than five minutes, but he was back within ten.

  ‘Puerto,’ he said, handing me three sheets of paper. ‘Teresa González Puerto, daughter of Julio and María Luisa, born on 3 August 1900 in Villanueva de los Infantes, a village in Ciudad Real. I’ve found only three documents relating to her. A marriage certificate dating from 1920 when she married Benigno Carrión Moreno, a birth certificate dated 1922 for her first child, Julio Carrión González, and a second birth certificate dated 1925 for Teresa Carrión González. That’s all there is. She certainly didn’t die in this district. Are you registered as living in Madrid?’ I nodded. ‘In that case, you can go to the register office there and put in a request. It may take them a while, because they’ll have to circulate it to all the sub-offices in Spain, but they’ll track her down, unless her death was . . .’ He stopped, groping for a word. ‘Unless her death was, let’s say . . . unofficial. There were thousands of men and women whose deaths were never officially registered. Some of them were declared dead later on, when their families brought press
ure to bear, but if you say that your father didn’t want anything to do with her, I’m not so sure . . .’

  ‘Because he was a Spanish communist, not a Polish Jew, my father wasn’t lucky enough to be sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis.’

  Adolfo Cerezo, a man Angélica introduced us to that evening, said these words in my living room with a drink in his hand and a serene smile on his face.

  Later, while Mai, who had been involved in organising the dinner party, disappeared to find a box of chocolates, get more ice from the kitchen, check on Miguel, open the French windows, and show my sister the new dress she’d just bought, I listened as he told me about his mother’s family, who were from a village on Gran Canaria named Arucas.

  ‘The war never got that far,’ he said in the same sociable, seemingly offhand tone. ‘The rebels dispatched the whole African army to the islands and there was no way anyone could resist, there was no revolution, the people had no guns, there were no priests shot, no nuns raped, no riots, no propaganda, nothing. Arucas held out longer than anywhere else, and that was only for a day and a half. I’m sure you’ve never heard about this before . . .’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but the name sounds familiar.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a big place. That’s probably why the Falangists thought it would cost them a fortune in bullets. So they caught my grandfather and about sixty other republicans, threw them down a well and tipped in quicklime - not too much, you understand, just enough so the ones at the top couldn’t get out, they were famously stingy . . .’ He paused before explaining, ‘Auschwitz was more compassionate, you know, because the men at Arucas took a long time to die. Nearly a week. And they cried and pleaded, and the quicklime glowed in the night, and the people in the village called it the well of wailing witches, because what happened was like witchcraft. But they went on sleeping the sleep of the just all the same. That’s why my grandmother moved out to the peninsula, because she couldn’t bear to hear that name, and she never set foot in Arucas again. My mother was seven years old when they left the village and she never went back either. But it’s a nice place - that’s almost the worst of it - Arucas is pretty . . .’