She didn’t say anything. I hadn’t expected her to, nor had I expected her to start crying, which is what she did, crying like a little girl, giving in to great heaving sobs that needed no words. Her tears left me defenceless, lost, almost naked there in the street.
‘What’s wrong, Raquel ?’ I pushed back her hair, dried her tears, took her face in my hands, and I felt a twinge of panic when I realised I couldn’t bear to see her like this. ‘Don’t cry, Raquel, please don’t cry . . .’
I held her tight and she buried her face in my neck. All I could do was wait, and I waited. I waited and watched as she gradually calmed herself, stopped trembling, then drew back and said to me in that thick, guttural voice that follows tears, ‘What must you think of me?’ Her words, the frailty of her voice, the deathly pallor of her face, terrified me.
‘I think the world of you, you know that,’ I said, stroking her face again.
‘No!’ She shook her head, her gesture emphatic, almost childlike. ‘You can’t possibly think I’m wonderful. At least not tonight. Earlier on, when I was listening to you talk about your grandmother, I was wondering what you could possibly think of someone like me, of me being with your father, and the only answers I could come up with were horrible . . .’
‘No, Raquel . . .’ I hugged her again, kissed her forehead, ‘I never think of you being with my father. The only person I can think of you with is me. I don’t care about anything else.’
She wrapped herself around my neck and kissed me for a long time, and when she finished, she looked up at me with a look of such complete surrender that it seemed to say her life was in my hands. I kissed her again, and then we walked on, clinging to each other as we walked.
‘I’m sorry, Álvaro, please forgive me. I shouldn’t have made a scene . . . It’s just that . . . sometimes I can’t cope with things.’
‘Am I so very difficult?’ I suggested, because although I had heard her, I didn’t want to talk about my father.
‘No,’ she smiled, ‘it’s not you, you’re easy to cope with . . .’
I didn’t say anything else, I didn’t need to. Sometimes the love I felt for this woman confused and overwhelmed me, and sometimes, as this time, she realised it.
‘Can I ask you something?’ We were almost at her place and she didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘What did you say to your wife? When you called her earlier . . .’
‘I said that I’d run into a friend from Bilbao I’d met when I was living in Boston, that I was having dinner with him.’
‘Has it been a long time since you’ve seen him?’
‘Nearly three years.’ I didn’t need to lie, not then and not later. She laughed as though I’d invented the whole thing to cheer her up. ‘He used to come over every summer, he married an aerobics instructor called Ingrid, she’s black and has a body to die for. He brought her over once to show her off and he hasn’t been back since. He’s working in Columbus, Ohio, these days. He emailed me some photos of his son, he’s really cute . . .’
‘So if you were really having dinner with him, you’d have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘A whole lot . . .’
‘And after that, you’d go for a drink . . .’
‘Not one, at least two or three . . .’
‘Do you want to come up?’
‘Yes.’
Before, I had told her that I could imagine her being only with me, that what had happened before we met didn’t interest me. I had said it without thinking, as though no one before me had ever trotted out these hackneyed words rendered all but meaningless by millions of men and women who had felt just as I did and who said the same words, in different languages, in different epochs, in every country in the world.
Afterwards, having gone back with her to this place where the past did not exist, where everything was now, I felt at one with this woman; felt as though we were one, that we made up something whole, some perfect number, something precisely equal to the sum of its parts. Loving Raquel was as easy, as ineluctable, as breathing. It was enough for me to gently stroke her perfect skin to be reborn again and again, for every word I knew to be born again, so that ‘before’ no longer existed and ‘after’ would never exist.
‘About your father, Álvaro . . .’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘You might not be, but I am.’ I didn’t want to let her go on, but she pulled away, stretched out on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. ‘My affair with your father was the stupidest thing I ever did, Álvaro, the biggest mistake of my life.’ She looked at me then and I was afraid she would start to cry. ‘Please, listen . . . It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, I can’t talk about it, I can’t even remember it. I can’t bear it and now I can’t even understand how it happened . . . There are times in life when everything is weird, when you forget everything you ever knew . . . It’s difficult to explain, but I just want you to know that it wasn’t me. Honestly, it wasn’t me. You know me, Álvaro, I’m not like that. The woman you know, that’s me.’
At that moment, I didn’t realise the full significance of the words I had just heard. I was so moved, so much in love, that all I could do was kiss her, hold her. It was the only thing that mattered, the only thing that could banish ‘before’ and ‘after’. But two weeks later, as I was sitting at a table pretending to listen to Fernando Cisneros at the Argüelles bar and once again doubting my celebrated intelligence, that obscure, episodic conversation peppered with allusions took on a greater significance.
Raquel’s curious, partial confession, ‘this is who I am, that wasn’t me’, meant not only that Fernando was right, it placed the figure of my father on a different plane. Having said that she had never loved him Raquel Fernández Perea had not mentioned Julio Carrión González again, leaving in the air only an agreeable, rose-tinted trace, his charm, the innate gift for seduction that had made my father popular. At the end of the long, exhausting night we spent together with our ghosts, Raquel had spoken of him as an enemy, or worse, as someone capable of making her an enemy of herself, making her forget everything she knew. And I, unable to understand what I was hearing, accepted it unquestioningly; in fact I was foolish enough to think myself lucky to have heard it.
When Raquel told me who she was and who she wasn’t, all that mattered to me was that her words confirmed the intuition that had led me across the threshold of madness, the certainty that this woman was mine; mine and not my father’s. It was not merely an illusion, it was stupid; I had been single-minded and, more than that, I had been a fool; for the one thing I knew, I had known from the first, was that my father was lying in wait, watching this ridiculous, absurd infatuation. His immense, daunting shadow turned it into a necessity, a rite of passage, though I had never aspired to be like him. I had had no problem isolating Raquel from the other upheavals associated with his death, but I could not rid myself of him completely. I could not bring myself to do it, until Raquel did it for me, obliterating him with a few words; this was what I had thought when I heard them, that my father was gone, that he would never again come between me and this woman
As I glanced at my watch as though I needed to be elsewhere, and said goodbye to Fernando Cisneros as though nothing had happened, and started down Cea Bermúdez as though heading somewhere, and turned into the first side street without knowing why, and turned again at the next intersection, wandering aimlessly, I tried to fit the pieces together. Raquel had never seemed worried about what I might think of her until my Grandmother Teresa had sat down with us in that restaurant, but my father’s role in that story seemed too insignificant to have triggered such a response, even if it heightened her feeling that her relationship with my father was a betrayal of her grandfather, a distant, dead man whose very name lit up her face with an expression that was like no other. Raquel had exploded that night, and she had said things that took on new meaning in the light of the unease Fernando Cisneros’s words had left in my mind.
‘Sometimes I just can�
�t cope with things,’ she had said, and then stopped. I had assumed she was talking about my father and me, about the fact that we had both been her lovers - it seemed logical that in such a situation you might feel overwhelmed, the way I felt overwhelmed, though I refused to think about it. What did surprise me was that I had never noticed even the slightest sign of awkwardness or tension in her. On the contrary, it seemed she didn’t find it difficult not to think about my father, didn’t have to make herself forget. Between Raquel and me everything was now, and everything was easy, as though we had both been born the moment we met. But she had a past, I had a past. ‘Don’t say anything to Berta, she doesn’t know anything about it,’ she’d said when she told me what sort of woman she really was. ‘She doesn’t know about my father ?’ I asked, astonished, because they told each other everything. She hesitated for a moment then said: ‘She knows about him, she just doesn’t know he was your father.’ ‘Then who am I?’ I asked. ‘You’re the son of some client or other, you showed up at the bank one day and started flirting with me.’ Then she smiled. ‘That’s more or less the truth, isn’t it?’
She had a past, I had a past, though I didn’t know what to do with it. I still had no solution when I looked at my watch again and realised that I had completely lost my skills in mental arithmetic.
‘You’re late.’ She was leaning against the wall and didn’t move.
‘It’s not even five minutes. In Spain that’s not considered late,’ I argued. ‘How are you?’
‘Pff ! . . .’ She stepped away from the wall with a weary, almost pained expression. ‘I’m exhausted. I don’t even feel like eating, that says something . . .’
Stepping into her apartment, she didn’t even hang her bag on the coat hook by the door as usual, but carried it over her shoulder into the bedroom, where she let it fall to the floor before collapsing on the bed. I went over and took off her shoes.
‘Do you want me to take off your clothes?’
‘Yes.’ She opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘Please.’
‘It’s like I said to Fernando, she has only one fault,’ I talked as I undressed her, ‘don’t get me wrong, she’s a wonderful girl, but she has one failing, she drinks, but what can you do? She likes a drink, and when she drinks, well . . .’
I lay down next to her but she was already asleep. I fell asleep shortly afterwards, and still everything seemed OK. It was only later that the screw came loose, that cracks began to appear, that the well-oiled machine we had been until then began to creak. I was awake and Raquel slept on; I liked to watch her sleep; Raquel slept naked, abandoned to her nakedness, so accessible, and vulnerable, so confident and desirable that it was almost painful to look at her. And my eyes yielded to the dictates of this painful desire, wounded by this hostile, alien image, this other image, something I had never seen when looking at Raquel, this extraordinary woman who was so ordinary if ordinary was defined by me.
That afternoon, as I watched Raquel, I imagined her, conjured her in gestures, positions and situations which, to someone other than me, would have seemed perverse and obscene, a young woman slipping into a Jacuzzi surrounded by candles where a man old enough to be her grandfather was waiting. To someone other than me, because I had appropriated these images, my gaze had incorporated them as useful elements in the creation of an intimacy which had its rules, its own language, its own grammar, its own syntax. Raquel and I didn’t talk about sex, we didn’t need to, but she liked to describe her pleasure, to define it with an expression of almost childlike joy: wow, that’s great, that’s . . . We didn’t talk about sex, we had sex, spontaneously, impulsively, wordlessly, to the point of exhaustion. I had never known such pleasure, or given such pleasure to any woman. This had been the nucleus of the endless ties that bound us. Every day, I learned new things about Raquel, and nothing had induced me to change even the smallest detail of the rules of our shared intimacy.
Nor did it happen that afternoon, by which time I knew of the woman sleeping next to me the way a talented musician knows his instrument. It wasn’t that, nor was it the fault of some thing - the Jacuzzi, the candles, the purple rubber dildo. No, it was something else, something vague and difficult to pin down, something about the precise point where three identities intersected - mine, Raquel’s and my father’s - but where there were only two attitudes, two ways of seeing the world, of thinking about things including sex. It was a question of identity, of attitude. If Raquel Fernández Perea was truly the woman I knew, the body with which my own body intertwined, which opened to my least touch, then she could not be this other woman, the woman I imagined alone in the apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan, the stranger lighting the last candle before slipping naked into the water, resting her head against a pile of pillows, her legs spread wide and a broad smile that showed the gap between her teeth.
At that moment, Raquel woke; she smiled without opening her eyes and pulled me to her, reached out her hand until it grazed my penis, stroked it with a finger, then two, caressed it with her palm before closing her hand around it, and only then did she meet my gaze, her eyes wide, her lips an almost perfect circle. She breathed a sigh and began to purr as she often did. I recognised the signs; what I did not recognise was myself, the unfamiliar, borrowed gestures with which I tried to put her to the test and succeeded only in proving my own weakness.
‘Stop, Álvaro.’ She opened her eyes and drew her legs together.
Raquel Fernández Perea had never done anything to stop me, had never imposed limits, but this was not me, and she realised that.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re looking at me the way your father did.’ She covered herself with the sheet, turned her back and stared at the wall. ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later. And the worst thing is, it’s only what I deserve.’
I loved this woman. I loved her so much that sometimes it confused and overwhelmed me. Suddenly I was myself again, and I went to her, slipped under the sheet, put my arms around her and kissed her over and over, begged her to forgive me, told her I loved her. ‘Say it again,’ she said, and I said it over and over until I was hoarse.
At that moment I understood the full meaning of what I had said, something I would have to learn to live with, to love her in spite of Fernando’s disbelief, just as I had learned to love her in the shadow of my father’s ghost. And as the world resumed its course, running gently like water, I realised that the best thing for both of us would be if I never found out the true nature of Raquel Fernández Perea’s relationship with Julio Carrión González, I realised that the solution to the problem we were both thinking about at that moment had nothing to do with me.
And so I discovered the precise colour of fear, felt in the pit of my stomach the exact volume of nothingness it takes to fill the void.
On 12 September 1949, the sky clouded over suddenly in mid-afternoon. When the first clap of thunder came, Julio Carrión González was leaning against the granite columns of the porch of the Casa Rosa, the most beautiful house in the village, watching the taxi driver struggle to secure the boxes and trunks on the roof of the car. The second thunderclap boomed a few seconds before the rain came and the taxi driver gave up.
‘I’m sorry, señora, but you’re going to have to take this one with you.’
Mariana Fernández Viu did not reply. She took no notice of the suitcase he set down at her feet. Taut, like a dead woman, she stared at her enemy and clutched her bag as though it contained her last hope, the one thing that might save her from tumbling into the abyss. But there was nothing in her bag that could save her. Julio knew that, and so he could stand, patient, smiling, and stare into those eyes that burned with hate. He had seen much greater hatred in eyes more beautiful than these. ‘Ruin her, destroy her, and when you’re done, tell her I sent you. This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Paloma?’ he thought as he lit a cigarette. ‘Never let it be said that I don’t keep my promises . . .’
‘Señora, please! Get a move on, we’ll get drenched!�
��
The taxi driver ventured to put a hand on her shoulder as the rain began to fall. Finally, Mariana lowered her head and climbed into the car. When, a moment later, the engine roared into life, the man smoking on the porch thrilled at the sound. That man had come to the end of his journey, a journey that had been long and tortuous, but none of that mattered now. He had finally made it: Julio Carrión González, the son of an alcoholic shepherd and a political prisoner who had died in jail, was rich, he was a gentleman.
‘It’s theft, Julio,’ Eugenio had said, in his eyes the fierce glint of integrity he knew of old. ‘Even if it’s legal, even if everyone is doing it, it’s still theft and I’ll have nothing to do with it.’
Eugenio Sánchez Delgado was the first person Julio sought out when he returned to Madrid in April 1947. Before that, he had gone to see his father, or what was left of his father, a gaunt, bewildered thing, just one more useless stick of furniture in a house that was filthy, filled with broken fragments salvaged from a previous life that were carefully arranged on the same tables and shelves as before.
‘Father . . .’
The first thing Julio recognised was a cracked glass vase, then the yellowed tablecloth, an old coffee grinder with the handle missing. Everything was dark with layers of dust, slick with rancid grease. The air stank of mildew and misery.
‘Father . . .’
Julio crossed the room and noticed that Benigno smelled even worse than his surroundings. The old man did not look up, did not move when a gust of wind whipped away the old newspapers, sending terrified cockroaches scattering for safety. Julio had to shake his father, but Benigno was so drunk he didn’t recognise him.
The Frozen Heart Page 54