The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘What do you take me for ?’

  Her tone was shocked, but she was not shouting. Then she got up, her back straight, her chest out, her head high, and began to scream at him:

  ‘You think I’d inform? I’m not some grass, some traitor like you, Julio. I’d rather starve, I’d rather beg in the streets, I’d rather die than betray my own, you’ll get nothing out of me, understand ? I won’t be bought . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Mari Carmen . . .’ Julio took her arm, and pulled her to him. ‘What do you take me for? I’m not with the police, I’ve nothing to do with the police, I don’t care what you know and what you don’t . . . I was talking about something completely different. And, forgive me for saying this, but you look like a complete fool.’

  Mari Carmen took a moment to react. Slowly, she sat back down on the bar stool, sipped her coffee, and smiled to herself.

  ‘Oh, so it’s the other . . .’ she said, shaking her head as though she could hardly believe it, ‘you want to sleep with me, is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, thinking that he had nothing to lose.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she laughed, ‘after everything that’s happened you still want to sleep with me.’

  ‘What do you expect? I’m a one-woman man.’

  ‘Really . . .?’ Mari Carmen laughed again, she was nervous and she was flattered by the fact he still wanted her, but neither her nervousness nor her vanity stopped her from picking up the money on the bar so quickly he was taken aback. ‘Well, I’ll take this for the moment, and I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Take my phone number, that way you can call me.’ He scribbled his number on a business card. ‘I usually go home for a siesta and I never go out before seven p.m.’

  ‘All right. But I don’t think it’s likely.’ She took the card and put it in her purse.

  And then the prettiest pair of legs in Madrid walked away, taking her astonishing body with them. As he watched her go, Julio replayed the scene as though it had happened to someone else and found himself with a quaint moral dilemma. Though the integrity that had prompted Mari Carmen’s fury was strange, Julio Carrión knew that it was not feigned: she would genuinely prefer to starve than to betray one of her own. But her integrity had not stopped her from taking three hundred pesetas from under his nose as an advance against possible favours she might just as easily have granted him for considerably less. But even if she did, Mari Carmen had never been fickle. Julio had seen her with more than one man, but he knew that she had been faithful to each of them until she slept with the next. And since her marriage there had been no one else, as far as Doña Pilar knew, and in such matters she was as all-knowing as the Almighty. Strange woman, thought Julio, and then he thought of Eugenio and laughed. It would not have occurred to him to introduce Mari Carmen Ortega to his old friend, but he realised that were he to do so, Eugenio would probably think her decent, even admirable, a real hero. It was a foolish idea, obviously, but he might introduce her to Romualdo . . .

  Mari Carmen Ortega had told him she would not call him, and she did not call, but ten days later she showed up at his place at 6 p.m.

  ‘No kissing,’ she said, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Like the whores?’

  ‘Exactly.’ She stepped inside, put her bag on the sofa and looked at him. ‘That’s what I am, isn’t it? A whore. But I’m a better person than you and I don’t want either of us to forget it.’

  ‘You are . . .’ Julio caught her around the waist, then ran his hand slowly over her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, ‘You are the better person, Mari Carmen, but you’re totally screwed.’

  That afternoon, Julio Carrión González settled his scores and put the finishing touches to his plan.

  The remaining stages of the plan proceeded slowly and without incident until the last storm of the summer of 1949, when Mariana Fernández Viu reluctantly climbed into the taxi, along with her daughter. Angélica, who was only fourteen, was the only character able to play a role other than the one Julio Carrión had assigned to her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ her mother called, as her daughter clambered out of the moving taxi, the rain dashing against the windscreen. ‘Angélica! Come back here!’

  ‘I forgot something, Mamá,’ the girl did not turn, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  Still leaning against one of the stone columns, smoking, Julio Carrión watched her rush back, but he thought nothing of it. Angélica was an only child, she had always been spoiled, impulsive, disobedient, she always did as she pleased. She knew nothing of Julio’s last conversation with Mariana, had not heard her mother’s vicious insults and Julio’s cold indifference. And yet, this young girl knew something that he could not have guessed.

  ‘Angélica!’ Mariana opened the car door, stuck out her leg, but did not dare get out. ‘I said come back here at once!’ But her daughter had already reached the top of the steps.

  ‘Come with me,’ she grabbed Julio’s hand and dragged him inside, ‘I forgot something.’

  In the hallway, she pushed him against the wall. What happened next did not seem like much, and it was over very quickly, but before her mother had time to call to her again, Angélica closed her eyes, kissed Julio hard on the lips and ran out.

  In mid-July the countdown began.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I’d ask Raquel from time to time.

  ‘Nothing,’ she’d say, and I didn’t believe her, but I hugged her and saw her smile.

  Her smiles were not different from those I had seen before, but now there was something new, a kind of insistence that made them linger just a second longer than necessary. The same was true of her kisses and of the sudden urge that compelled her to hug me as we were walking down the street. I know it should have worried me, but at the time I barely noticed, because aside from these subtle changes, Raquel expressed no doubts, showed no sign of tiring of me. On the contrary, what I most noticed about her was an absorption, an intensity in her most serious and her most frivolous gestures, the way she stroked my face as though attempting to leave some indelible trace, the sentences left unfinished, her wide eyes studying me as though trying to memorise ever line, every detail, every wrinkle of my face.

  I noticed and interpreted these clues, but I was wrong about every one. I would probably never have guessed their real significance, but other factors conspired to mislead me. The most important was my particular interpretation of the relative speed of time. If the Whole had been merciless to me, Time was more cruel still, stripping me of everything I had once known, of every scrap of knowledge, all my suspicions, my intuitions, my certainties. The calendar was no use. I knew how to read it, I knew that if sex counts as the beginning, then my affair with Raquel began on 22 April, but even the date - ‘22 April’ - was just words, meaningless words in some altered reality.

  ‘What’s wrong, Raquel ?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Honestly, there’s nothing wrong.’

  I matched her smile, her silence, with my own, never saying what I never found the right moment to say - ‘Of course there’s something wrong, and I know what it is’. Looking at the pages of a calendar, not only did our situation not seem tragic, it looked as though it might still aspire to the breezy foolishness that is the first flush of love. But our lives were not lived in the pages of a calendar but on a tightrope which every day grew more taut, which had begun to flay our feet. This is what I felt, what Raquel must have felt: we had exhausted our resources, cut every corner, and time was running out.

  On one of the many surreal mornings when I arrived back at my own house, feeling strangely as though overseeing the team of builders was my sole occupation, I discovered a package from the register office in Madrid in the letterbox, containing the death certificate of my grandmother, Teresa González Puerto, deceased on 14 June 1941, in the famous Ocaña penitentiary, just as Encarnita had said. The certificate specified the immediate cause of death - cardiac arrest - and the secondary cause
- pneumonia, the result of tuberculosis. It also indicated her date of birth, her marital status, the fact that she was a prisoner, and her age - she was forty. She would have been forty-one on 3 August, but she did not live to see it.

  Two days later, in the same letterbox, I found a class photograph, some fifty pupils posing with their teachers, and two good-quality enlargements; one of Teresita Carrión González, with her hair in pigtails, wearing a spotless school smock, and a second one of my grandmother, her hair loose, standing next to Manuel Castro. Inside the envelope was a short, affectionate note from Encarnita’s daughter in which she apologised for the delay, explaining that it was because her mother had been upset after my visit. ‘It was two weeks before I could get the photo away from her.’

  For my part, I had not stopped thinking about my grandmother. Every time I was surprised by the peculiar lack of feeling, the guilt of the cheating husband that should have kept me from sleeping at night, I wondered whether she had felt something similar, whether, when she looked at her husband, my grandfather, she felt the slight uneasiness, almost annoyance together with a vague feeling of pity, that I felt when I looked at my wife. It was possible that, when this photograph was taken, this freedom fighter was no longer free. Maybe she had already sacrificed her freedom to this man, who stood gazing at her as though she were the only woman in the world. Going into the house, I placed the photo Encarnita had sent me next to the bland portrait which stared back at me from its silver frame.

  That morning, Mai arrived to see how the work was going. She came during her lunch break every two or three days, and never stayed longer than ten minutes or so.

  ‘It’s like a madhouse!’ She hugged me and laughed. ‘I don’t know how you get any work done.’

  ‘This is nothing! The jackhammer in the early stages was much worse!’

  The Poles were conscientious and hard working, and I had no problems with them. Mai was thrilled with the results, and talked about them on the way back to her office. Sometimes we had lunch together, sometimes with Angélica, sometimes just the two of us, and recently, for reasons she never quite explained, Mai sometimes had a little extra free time. On one of these afternoons, she skipped dessert, ordered coffee with an ice cube so she could drink it immediately, smiled at me and wondered aloud whether I might not reschedule by half an hour, since the library was hardly likely to be invaded by hordes of knowledge-hungry physicists mercilessly commandeering every book I needed.

  At which point, my body suffered something akin to frostbite. It was the middle of summer, the weather was warm, but I felt my blood drain away and my veins fill up with some icy, metallic gas. But I would smile, and everything would be fine. It had to be fine, since Mai was still looking at me with the same expectant smile she had when giving Miguelito a surprise present. ‘I thought you might enjoy a less - um - cerebral siesta.’ I realised that that was precisely what she was doing: giving me a surprise present. And I tried to behave like a well-mannered child, I was effusive in my thanks, displaying a gallantry that at the time she did not find suspect.

  These impromptu quickies had the virtue of being so infrequent that it was as though my wife and my mistress had swapped roles, and were also impeded by the collusion of the Polish builders, hammering, pounding and drilling, and chattering in a foreign language on the other side of the bedroom door.

  ‘I suppose it is difficult to concentrate here these days,’ Mai admitted.

  I nodded enthusiastically and continued applying myself to this bizarre exercise in concentration until I had delivered satisfactory results, although it was beginning to require more and more effort on my part.

  Mai didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. At first, the state of frenzied excitement aroused in me by the mere existence of Raquel meant that conjugal duties were no problem. Later, my cock became a little more demanding, but by then the pressure of this professorship I was working towards came to my rescue. In the end, even during the act itself, I would feel the terrible void of the holidays looming and start to tremble, but even then Mai seemed to see nothing worrying about my sudden lack of muscle tone. Raquel, on the other hand, recognised the symptoms.

  ‘You’ve been fucking your wife.’

  She would guess even before I stepped inside, as she stood in the doorway.

  ‘No,’ I’d lie brazenly. After all, how could she know?

  ‘Yes . . .’ She would step aside to let me in, close the door, put her arms around me and gaze deeply into my eyes. ‘Yes you fucking have.’

  ‘How can you tell ?’

  ‘Because . . . I can tell. I can smell it, Álvaro.’

  ‘I’ve just had a shower.’

  ‘You see? That’s how I can tell.’

  ‘I took a shower because it’s five o’clock, its sweltering outside, and I knew I had to walk here,’ I explained, adopting my most scholarly tone.

  ‘OK. And because you’ve just been fucking your wife.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her certainty rattled me; I was so angry that she was right that I responded with the abrupt and insolent logic of a child.

  ‘If you’re going to be like that, I’m going home.’ But she just laughed harder.

  ‘You don’t have to go. I’ve got TV. And I’ve got microwave popcorn ...’

  But we didn’t turn on the TV, we didn’t microwave the popcorn, we went to bed, and we fucked, and we fucked, because the earth turned in her bed, because Time, molten and shifting, suspended the laws of physics in this bed where we made love, and because I loved this woman, loved her so much that afterwards, when she lay serene and silent next to me, I could calculate with blinding, almost painful accuracy the precise nature of fate.

  Happiness is priceless. There is no task, no effort, no blame, no problem, that cannot be overcome when the goal is happiness. I knew this because I had been intimately familiar with greyness during my years of poverty, those years of believing my life was a life and that it was mine. So, when Raquel sat up and looked at me, and when I saw in her eyes a light that was the same and yet different, I realised that this sudden insistence had initiated the countdown, and I knew what I had to do, what I would do.

  And yet there was something else. There was something more, something unrelated to Raquel, something beyond the scope of those looks that terrified me, insisting that I never again look at another woman. There was something more, but it was far beyond Madrid, outside this city, away from this refuge, which gradually faded as my car carried me closer to Castellana, away from her, to a place that seemed increasingly alien and strange, a place that made me ache me even before my son came running down the gravel driveway towards me like a bull out of a pen.

  ‘Papá!’ he yelled. I crouched down beside the garage and flung my arms wide.

  ‘Miguelito!’ He leapt frantically into my arms, trying to knock me down.

  I had begun to understand my brother Julio a little better, his embarrassing, almost maternal love for his children, his constant, systematic self-denial designed to reassure them that he would always be their father, that they could always count on him, even when their respective mothers were no more than faint notches on his gun belt. It made my brother seem simultaneously more noble and more grudging, although it was good for his kids, obviously - and maybe that was the only thing that was important. Because one Sunday that summer, I no longer knew what to think of him, or me, or anything.

  I had arrived at La Moraleja before lunch with a plan that I implemented as soon as I arrived. I put on my swimming trunks and went to find Mai at the pool. She was lying with her eyes closed, tanning herself, and she smiled when she felt my finger slowly travel down her body from her collarbone to her belly button. She sat up and said my name, and everything went according to plan. I hadn’t reckoned on Julio being there, so I didn’t pay him any attention when we sat down to lunch, Mai smiling and still flushed, me as happy as I was when I was a kid, after I’d done my homework and knew I could spend all day Sun
day playing. I casually told Mai that I had to go back to Madrid that night, then she went for a siesta with Miguelito. While I was settling myself on the porch to read the paper, my brother stopped me.

  ‘What’s her name?’ he asked out of the blue.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl who’s got you so worked up.’

  ‘Julio!’

  I sat up with a jolt, looked around but saw we were alone.

  ‘Don’t worry, everyone else is taking a nap.’ He laughed, and proffered one of the Cuba libres he was holding. ‘Let’s try again: what’s her name?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Álvaro, please! I’m the expert in this family.’

  ‘Her name is Raquel, but tell me how you knew.’

  ‘You’re fairly good at hiding it, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ We heard a door close somewhere inside the house, and Julio dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I wasn’t completely sure, to be honest. I’ve thought you were behaving oddly, but what with the professorship and the fact that you always were a bit odd . . . But this morning . . . it was glaringly obvious, Álvaro . . .’

  ‘What was?’ I knew exactly what he was saying, but I wasn’t sure how he had spotted it.’

  ‘The defensive fuck.’ It was so funny, I laughed in spite of myself.

  ‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ I said, and he nodded.

  ‘Absolutely, no doubt about it. Do you know how often I’ve pulled that one? The spur-of-the-moment fuck to make sure I had the evening free, or the morning-after fuck so I’d be forgiven before anyone started asking awkward questions? Best thing you can do - a quick, hot-blooded fuck. Works every time. When I saw you down at the pool, I thought, ah-ha! And the best thing is, we’re only too happy to fuck them.’

  ‘Who?’ I was still laughing.

  ‘Our wives, who do you think?’

  ‘I’m not.’ Suddenly I was serious, and I saw the worry in his eyes. ‘I mean, maybe it’s because I’m odd, but more and more I’m finding I don’t want to.’