Only when I had stopped shouting was I able to think again. That’s it, was what I thought, it’s over. I’ve had my whiff of gunpowder, I’ve seen everything explode, and I couldn’t even blame her.
Raquel had curled into a ball, slowly folding in on herself as I screamed at her, like a maniac. I was trembling with rage, with pain, with shame, with helplessness, and with love.
‘I’m so sorry, Raquel.’ I waited for a moment for a reply that never came. ‘Honestly, I’m truly sorry. I should never have said those things, I’m not like that, I . . . I don’t know what came over me, but I’m truly sorry, I swear . . . Please forgive me.’
As I walked towards the door, I was convinced that it was all over, but suddenly she got to her feet and threw herself in front of it, as though crucified there.
‘Don’t leave, Álvaro, please ...’ Finally, she looked up at me. She seemed desperate, baffled by her own pain. ‘I’m begging you, don’t go . . .’ She launched herself at me and gripped me with such force that it would have hurt, if I had still been capable of feeling pain. ‘Don’t go, Álvaro, please, don’t leave like this. Forgive me, I need you to forgive me . . .’ Gradually she released her hold, still murmuring this soft, frenetic litany in which she seemed to find some small consolation.
I was stunned, dazed, shaken, but I had come alive again and Raquel did not realise it. She grabbed my sleeves, gently this time, almost fearfully, and slumped down until she was sitting on the floor. I looked down at her for a moment, then helped her to her feet, hugged her with every ounce of strength I possessed and told her that I loved her, I loved her, I loved her.
‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’
‘Come on, señorita . . .’ The first time I heard the message, I thought of Fernando Cisneros, remembered his most surprising, furious, fit of stubbornness. ‘No, I know it’s not your voice, of course I know you didn’t say it, I know it’s a recorded message . . .’ We were at the university bar, he had misdialled a number, but he deliberately misdialled again. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he said. ‘This is unacceptable,’ then, determined to speak to someone, anyone, he dialled directory enquiries, and kept dialling until he happened on some poor girl who had clearly never had to deal with anyone like him before. ‘Of course it’s important, it’s extremely important, because I can assure you that the number in question does exist, it has existed since the dawn of time, from the moment man first crawled from the primeval ooze . . .’ José Ignacio looked over at me and brought his finger to his temple. ‘Let it go, Fernando,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening. ‘What do you mean, “just a turn of phrase”? No, I’m afraid I can’t possibly accept that as an excuse. There’s no point telling me you don’t know what I mean. It’s very simple. The first digit, nine, is the number of units and nine exists, the one is the tens, and that exists, the six is the hundreds and six exists, seven is the number of thousands and that exists . . .’ He stopped suddenly, held the receiver away from his face and gave a look of comic distress. ‘She hung up on me,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not surprised,’ said José Ignacio. ‘What do you mean, you’re not surprised?’ He pointed at us, drawing an imaginary circle around us. ‘Come on, you’re not going to tell me that this sort of thing doesn’t matter to you? What’s going on, am I the only champion of popular science left round here?’
‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’
The first time I heard the message, I thought I had dialled a wrong number, but I didn’t blindly persist as Fernando had done. I looked up Raquel’s number in my contacts list, made sure it was highlighted and pressed the green ‘dial’ button. Usually I didn’t do this, because I enjoyed pressing the digits of her phone number, but I didn’t want to risk hearing that the number did not exist a second time. And yet that is what I heard, once, twice, three times.
The weather that day was more than cloudy, it was vile, and by noon it had started to drizzle. Mai liked spending summers at Comillas, where her mother’s family was from, and she uncomplainingly accepted, almost prized, the panoply of greys that marked the Cantabrian sky. Personally, I had never seen the appeal of the place, which was why, much as I enjoyed Fernando Cisneros’s company (he was much less negative about the traditional summer haunts of our collective in-laws), I hadn’t yet decided to invest our savings in any of the series of houses Mai spent every August finding. Instead, we went on renting an apartment - not very big, but big enough - on the second floor of a building that belonged to Mai’s parents.
Comillas had been the one major problem in our relationship back when I had no problem with our marriage. The sudden elimination of the second proposition quietly solved the first, however, and Mai made no mention of looking at properties as we left Madrid. We drove in silence, Miguelito sleeping, Mai saying nothing, simply feeding disc after disc into the CD player. I was distant, absorbed in contemplating the depth and number of my wounds and the nebulous state brought on by the sudden, terrifying remoteness of Raquel. Even the considerable energy needed to feed my misery was not enough to hide the glaringly obvious, however, and to Mai, who had been a stranger through the upheavals in my life these past months, it had become glaringly obvious.
Everything’s gone wrong, I thought as we headed north. It had all gone wrong. And I thought that maybe I should have stayed in Madrid. I had almost stayed behind, but at the last minute, I had thought of my son.
I was no longer certain of anything, all I knew was that my life would never be the same again, and that Miguel was the only constant that would survive in the new landscape after the destruction of the old. I’d often imagined scenes, desks, notes, dossiers, strangers coming and going in a corridor, like shadows stripped of their owners. I had imagined these things, moreover I had prepared myself for them, steeled myself for what was to come, because at the end of the tunnel, beyond the cacophony of shock and resentment, Raquel was waiting, the love of my life. I was a good boy, a good son, a good husband, a good citizen, yet now I was prepared be stripped of these medals, to become a topic for gossips and scandalmongers, to be labelled a scumbag, to ruin myself financially and do it willingly because I was in love with a woman who loved me and that made me brave, decent, good, innocent. It was precisely because I had already decided how the rest of my life would pan out that Raquel’s distance crushed me. Her confusion and ambivalence, which had seemed impulsive at the time, now seemed to have a certain lucidity, a compelling logic that hurt me more than I could have imagined.
All the same, when confronted with the dilemma of the holidays, I had a choice, and I chose Miguelito. If I was going to walk out on my marriage, I wasn’t going to do it until the time was right, I wasn’t about to give opposing counsel ammunition. I remember thinking that, I remember that very expression, ‘opposing counsel’, and a second later I felt sick, I felt vile, cynical, a traitor. A traitor going on holiday behind enemy lines, prepared to do anything if it would further the cause of my treachery.
‘It’s not that I don’t understand that it’s harder for you than it is for me.’ Raquel stirred up her doubts and my certainties after a night that was terrible and magnificent. ‘I understand, Álvaro, honestly I do. And the worst thing is, you’re absolutely right, but this is the way I am and there’s nothing I can do about it . . . I know I’m not being very clear, but I need time. I told you before, sometimes I can’t handle things, you remember ?’ I nodded, I remembered. ‘It’s just . . . everything is so fucked up. Because if I’ve fucked up, it was with your father. If there’s one thing in my life I regret, it’s that. But if I hadn’t done it, I’d never have met you, Álvaro, I’d never have fallen in love with you.’
‘And what am I supposed to do?’ I looked at her and realised that, stripped of the rage that had fuelled it, all the resolve of the previous night had abandoned me. A few hours earlier, I had wanted an unconditional surrender, now I was so weak I was prepared to settle for anything as long as I did not lose her. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘What?’ I took her hands and squeezed them. ‘To get through what?’
‘You said it yourself last night. You said that the thought of me being with your father disgusted you, and I knew it. Remember, I said it myself, that night when you told me about your grandmother. I asked what you must think of me and you said, “I think the world of you.” But that’s not what you thought last night, Álvaro ...’
‘OK ...’ I laid her hands on the table. ‘You want me to wait, so I’ll wait. I don’t want to talk about it any more, I’m not exactly proud of . . .’
‘. . . of telling the truth?’ A flash of irony suddenly lit up her dark, trembling face.
‘It’s not the truth, Raquel.’
‘It is.’
‘No, it’s true, but it’s not the truth. The truth is that I love you, that’s the only truth that matters, and you come with baggage, your past, your successes, your mistakes. I’m not a better person than you, there are lots of things I’m ashamed of, including what I said last night.’
Excellent, Álvaro, you’ve behaved like a gentleman, I thought, as Raquel took both my hands and kissed them.
I had behaved like a gentleman, and I knew it, but this irony was bitter, corrosive and powerful. I loved a woman who loved me, and that made me decent, pure, good, innocent. I loved a woman who loved me and who may not have been lying to me, but she was not telling me the whole truth, and that was worse. And the worst thing was, I didn’t dare ask her.
These thoughts hung in the air after that serene and sunny conversation. I behaved like a gentleman and she like a lady and both of us were keenly aware of the kid gloves. Nine days later, we said goodbye, having fixed no firm date when we would see each other again. Raquel went to Málaga to spend two weeks at the beach with her two grandmothers. ‘They’ve been friends since they were little girls, and now that they’re both widows, my grandmother from Madrid spends the summer with my grandmother in Málaga. I go every year, I love spending time with them, because they spoil me. I take them out, drive them around, take them to a Chinese restaurant. I don’t think either of my grandfathers ever set foot inside the place, but my grandmothers love Chinese food ...’
I listened to her talk, heard her describe this heart-warming film, adult themes, but suitable for all audiences. She looks so cute, so young, so innocent, I thought, and so I smiled and didn’t tell her what I planned to do for the holidays, a film rather different from her romantic chick-flick, a bleak drama set in a grey building overlooking a blustery stretch of beach, an overcast sky, the little boy playing with his Spiderman in the shadows, the distraught, heartbroken wife who did not deserve what was happening to her and a psychopath trapped in the depths of his own silence. This was what awaited me, this was the part I would be playing; all I had to do was smile like an idiot and behave like a gentleman, because that was the best way of ensuring nothing happened.
Nothing that was happening to me made any sense. Raquel’s absurd reaction, this studied nonchalance that alternated with tears, made no sense and yet, the moment we were apart I began to see a certain compelling logic to her attitude.
‘There’s someone else, isn’t there, Álvaro?’ Mai asked on our first night in Comillas.
I spent a lot of time trying to catch this ephemeral thread that slipped through my fingers, and yet I could still see it, bringing with it the information I needed to solve a problem of misleading significance.
‘If you’re seeing another woman, tell me, Álvaro, I need to know,’ Mai said again two nights later. And I said yes, I said I hadn’t deliberately gone behind her back, that I hadn’t wanted it, but yes, there was someone else. I can’t pretend that the confession did not affect me, that I didn’t feel terrible immediately before and after I told her, but then I didn’t spend much more time thinking about it. I needed all the time I had to analyse the words Raquel had said, the silences that punctuated a series of disconnected phrases filled with implications that seemed to be beyond my understanding.
Mai let another couple of days pass before asking: ‘Is it serious? Tell me, Álvaro, is this just a fling or . . .’
‘It’s serious, at least for me. I don’t know about her.’
I didn’t take me long to work out that Mai had not much liked my last response: ‘So, you’re just planning to stick around until she makes up her mind, is that it?’
‘No, Mai, it’s not like that.’ I held her gaze, did not raise my voice. ‘But if you want me to leave . . .’
She asked me to stay and I stayed, and when I was alone I went on thinking about Raquel, while Mai spent her time talking about me to her sisters, her cousins, her girlfriends and a whole army of women and their various partners who began to give me black looks over the dinner table.
‘You shouldn’t have come, Álvarito,’ Fernando Cisneros said, although he was happy to see me there. ‘They’ll rip you to shreds.’
‘I’ve already been ripped to shreds,’ I said, and told him what had happened.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t make sense. I mean, we belong to a structured society governed by norms based on the recurrence of specific events . . .’
‘OK, Fernando!’ I held up my hand, hoping for a truce. ‘I know the theory.’
‘But it’s not just a theory. Come on, Álvaro, look around you, and think about it ... A divorced woman with a good job, no kids, no ties, has an affair with a married man whose only problem is the fact that he’s married. He tells her he’s prepared to drop everything to be with her . . . she should be biting your hand off.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘She should, but she’s not.’
I spent a lot of time talking to Fernando, but instead of helping, his contributions only depressed me. I found it easier to think on my own, but although every bleak afternoon in the worst month of my life brought me closer to an explanation, by the time I finally understood, it was too late.
Goodbye, Álvaro, I love you. I LOVE YOU, Raquel.
On 19 August, I turned on my mobile phone and heard the tinkle of a message alert. It wasn’t her first text message, she’d sent others; not many - ‘Hi’, ‘Goodnight’, ‘I love you’, ‘I’m at the beach and I’m thinking of you’, ‘I’m eating chop suey and thinking about you’, ‘Is it raining up there?’ When I received this one, the last one, it had been two weeks since I had spoken to Raquel. Her phone was always switched off and I was sure she only turned it on long enough to send these few words, which fell like cool raindrops on the tongue of a man lost in the desert. Until I received this one.
Goodbye, Álvaro, I love you. I LOVE YOU, Raquel.
The first time I read it, I allowed myself to be taken in by those capital letters, by my own fear, by a panic that had the form of her face, the colour of her eyes, the shape of her lips. The first time I read it, I didn’t understand it any more than I understood anything that had happened to me since Raquel Fernández Perea had come into my life. My own telephone finally helped me understand the message. ‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’ Once, twice, three times.
Goodbye, Álvaro, I love you. I LOVE YOU, Raquel.
The weather the following day was vile, and by noon it had started to drizzle. The telephone you are calling has been switched off or is out of range. Miguelito was irritable at the thought of another day at the beach ruined in this tiny village on the Cantabrian coast where he had spent every summer and so, because I could think of nothing else to do, I suggested to we go down to the harbour and feed the fish. Mai was out. She had gone out earlier without saying where she was going. This was not an oversight, it had become routine.
‘Come on, I don’t want you getting cold.’ Miguelito was bizarrely compliant, he didn’t complain as I put on his yellow fisherman’s raincoat and buttoned it all the way up. ‘Maybe it’ll be fine tomorrow . . .’
He stoo
d silently for a moment, staring at me with an almost adult intentness, then he asked me the last question I wanted to answer that morning.
‘Why is Mamá crying?’
‘Mamá’s not crying.’ I put on his hat, not thinking what I was saying.
‘She is too, I’ve seen her,’ he insisted. ‘Why is she crying, Papá?’
‘I don’t know.’ I crouched down beside him. ‘She’s probably sad. People get sad sometimes . . .’
‘I know.’ He frowned and looked at me. ‘Are you going to cry too?’
‘No, I’m not going to cry . . .’
Two minutes later, he was laughing like a lunatic, running ahead of me in a race that, as always, he was going to win. At the harbour, we fed the fish stale bread we’d brought from the house, and some more we scrounged from nearby restaurants that knew us, and I thought maybe this is my life, and it was good, peaceful, happy, as my son giggled, watching the fish stuff themselves, following him along the harbour. Then I thought about Mai, I pictured her the way she had looked when we had first met, before I had ever seen her cry, when I loved her the way I might have gone on loving her my whole life if my father hadn’t died, if Raquel hadn’t gone to his funeral, if my mother hadn’t insisted that I should be the one to meet with the investment manager. But all these things had happened, and now everything was lost. Then, as though I thought there was still one more step to go, one false move I had to make before I tumbled into the void, I turned on my phone and called Raquel.
I expected the message ‘The telephone you are calling has been switched off ’, but I dialled the wrong number. So I did not redial the number, I looked for her name in my contacts list, made sure that her name was highlighted, pressed the green ‘dial’ button, and for the second, third, fourth time I heard the message:
The Frozen Heart Page 62