The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘So, where are you from?’ the gypsy asked her, after the show was over and the performers mingled with the audience. ‘Dancing the way you did is something you can’t learn.’

  ‘I’m from Málaga,’ said Raquel, her back to Ignacio, oblivious to the look of astonishment he gave her, ‘I live in France but I’m malagueña.’

  ‘Of course.’ The gypsy smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. ‘It shows.’

  Me cago en tu padre, cabrón! I shit on your father, you bastard! As he half-turned to evaluate the situation, Ignacio realised he was no longer even swearing in French. Nor was he cheered by what he saw. He couldn’t count on Philippe, whose unconditional devotion to Raquel had proved in vain. He was completely drunk - Laurent was trying to hold him up and calling to Ignacio for help. Nor was he the only casualty. One of the girls had had to be taken out just before she threw up, and all the others had their jackets on. In the meantime, the gypsy had made some progress, as could be seen in the flushed cheeks of his prey. Ignacio took a deep breath and walked over to them.

  ‘Raquel,’ he said, barely touching her elbow and addressing her in Spanish, ‘we’re going.’

  She looked from him to the gypsy and back again. She was hesitating, as both men realised; they both had the same desire in their eyes, each aware of her power and her frailty, the symbols of their respective tribes, at once exotic and distinct.

  ‘Are you leaving with the Frenchie?’ The gypsy was the first to crack.

  ‘He’s not French,’ she said at length, ‘he’s Spanish . . .’ She looked at the dancer and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m going to go too, we’re setting off for Madrid early tomorrow, and we’ve had a lot of late nights.’

  He accepted the decision with good grace, Ignacio was forced to admit, as he watched the man take Raquel’s hand in his, slowly kiss it and say a simple adíos before turning away and leaving the two of them alone. Then, because he needed to do something, Ignacio placed his hand on Raquel’s arm again and led her very gently towards the door. When they got outside and found themselves flayed by the dry, icy wind of the Sierra, which in the early hours belies the benevolent constancy of the noonday sun in Granada, he turned to her but had not expected her teasing smile, which made him think that, perhaps, she had realised her great conquest on this trip would not be Philippe, but himself.

  ‘I thought you were from Nîmes,’ he said after a moment, returning her smile.

  ‘And I thought you hated flamenco.’ They both laughed.

  ‘Now I like it,’ he confessed, ‘thanks to you.’

  ‘I’m glad, because . . . I have to say that when we were little, I didn’t like you very much, Ignacio. I can still remember at the L’Humanité parties, every time I saw you I felt ill. You were the only person who never clapped. I’d dance, because I loved dancing, and in France I didn’t have much opportunity, so I’d spend the whole year waiting for those parties, practising in my bedroom on my own. And then, bam! There you’d be, in your red-and-black scarf with your jug ears, and suddenly I’d get nervous, because I knew what was coming next. What I never understood was why you always gave me that look of contempt. When I finished your mother would come over and kiss me, and every year she’d tell me I was getting better, and there you were, standing next to her with your cachirulo and that pained expression like you’d been tortured ...’

  They were walking down the Cuesta del Chapiz, towards the Paseo de los Tristes, when she stopped and turned to him.

  ‘Why did you hate me so much, Ignacio? And why did you always watch if you didn’t like my dancing?’

  He did not know, but he knew what he had to do, knew what she was expecting.

  The kiss did not last as long as the one Raquel and her boyfriend had shared at the airport in Paris, but it was as sweet and crisp as the first bite of a piece of fruit, and its intensity surprised them both. They were coming to the hotel; neither of them spoke, they could think of nothing to say. Ignacio was wondering what had happened, what might happen next. Raquel, walking a pace in front, was simply wondering when, how and where it would happen. It would not be in Granada, but neither would it be in circumstances she could have imagined.

  ‘I’m not crying because I’m sad.’ Ignacio looked at her as they stood at a traffic light in Madrid. ‘It’s not because I’m sad.’

  And at that moment, Raquel Perea Millán, who had a tall, stocky boyfriend waiting for her back in France, gorging himself on foie gras, realised that her life was about to change.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she had asked Ignacio that afternoon, after the others had gone off to spend their free time shopping.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really know.’ He smiled, still dazed by how lucky he was. ‘My aunt told my father she lives at the end of the Moratalaz, but he couldn’t remember where that is . . . The best thing would be to take a taxi.’

  ‘I have to go and visit someone this afternoon,’ Ignacio had told her over breakfast on their first day in Madrid. ‘Who are you going to see?’ she asked him later, as they were walking down the Paseo del Prado. ‘My uncle’s wife,’ he said, and told her the story of this woman he had never met, whom no one in the Fernández family had seen since 19 February 1939, but whom he had grown up calling Aunt Casilda. ‘Well, maybe I could go with you . . .’ she said, as though it had just occurred to her. ‘I mean, we’ve been here a whole week, and we haven’t really seen how people live . . . if you don’t mind,’ she added quickly, because they had not kissed again since that strange night, and were not close enough to dispense with formalities. ‘No, of course not,’ Ignacio said quickly, ‘I’d love you to come.’

  ‘Where did you say you wanted to go?’ The taxi driver turned to him, astonished, and he slowly repeated the address. ‘Well, I have no idea where that is.’

  ‘It’s at the other end of Moratalaz,’ said Ignacio. ‘At least that’s what I was told.’

  ‘OK,’ he started the car, ‘well, let’s head for Moratalaz, and after that, we’ll see . . .’

  They headed down Gran Vía and turned on to an even wider boulevard with La Cibeles in the distance, passed the Puerta de Alcalá and drove for a while alongside the Retiro; this was Madrid, Ignacio knew that, had seen it a thousand times in photographs and films, and heard about it even more. Perhaps this was why he felt more at home here than Andalucía because here, finally, in the buildings and the street names, in the trees, the palacios, the boulevards and the statues, his two countries finally came together.

  Arriving in Madrid, he found it exactly as he had expected it to be, a sprawling city with too many houses, too many shops, too much passion to be disrupted by this new thing called tourism, and he liked that. He liked Madrid, and so did Raquel, though her approval barely counted since she had even claimed to love the monotonous scenery of La Mancha they had seen from the bus. And yet, beyond the Retiro and the Calle O’Donnell, Madrid began to blur and fade. Ignacio had the impression that he was no longer in his father’s city, and yet this was still a city, new areas of cheap, ugly houses, tower blocks, it could have been any city in the world, but it was Madrid. The taxi driver was still driving fast, he knew his way here, but he did not linger when he stopped and rolled down his window to ask for directions. If what they had been driving through was Moratalaz, they had clearly arrived at the far end of it, because before them were fields, an arid wasteland of building sites with a train track in the distance. ‘I think we might have passed it,’ said the taxi driver, and turned the car around, drove a little way, stopped and asked for directions, announced they had taken the wrong turning again, and this sequence of events was repeated twice more before they came to the house they had been looking for.

  ‘Well, here we are at the end of the world.’

  It was an ugly, three-storey building running the whole length of the block with several narrow aluminium doorways. The walls were of whitish brick, and on the terraces and the balconies there was laundry, bits of junk, ladders, and here and there a with
ered plant, utterly unlike Granada with its geraniums. This was not a pleasant place to live, thought Ignacio as he pushed open the door and found himself in a narrow hall lit by two bare bulbs. On the right-hand wall was a row of postboxes, two of the doors were hanging off and others were missing, one of the latter had once been his aunt’s mailbox, but Ignacio already had her full address: staircase C, second floor, left-hand door.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Raquel asked as he rang the doorbell.

  ‘Yes.’

  She took his hand and squeezed it as they heard the sound of a bolt being shot back.

  ‘Hello, you must be Ignacio . . .’

  In the doorway was a rather tall young man with the Fernández family nose which Ignacio had been lucky enough not to inherit, and the misty eyes which, unfortunately, he had not inherited either.

  ‘Yes, I’m Ignacio. You must be Mateo.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ The young man smiled then stood aside to let them pass. ‘Who’s the girl ?’

  ‘This is Raquel. Her parents are Spanish too, they’re good friends of my parents. I asked her to come. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, course not ... anyway, don’t stand there, come in.’

  The pressure of Raquel’s fingers relaxed, but he shot her a glance, pleading for her not to let him go. She nodded as they stepped into the hall. On the right, a door with a wooden architrave led to a narrow living room where there was barely space to move between the furniture: a three-piece suite, a low table with four chairs at the end next to the door to the terrace, and a sideboard opposite the sofa. Hanging on the wall above the sideboard there was a rug. Ignacio was so taken aback he had to look twice - a wool rug with a picture of two stags woven in darker wool, with long white tassels: a carpet on the wall, and a hideous one at that. He was standing, dazed by the sheer awfulness of the decor, when he heard a shout and turned and saw a woman who could not be much older than his mother, but who seemed much older. Short and stocky with dark curly hair, she came into the living room, wiping her hands on a dishcloth which she dropped on to one of the chairs so that she could hug Ignacio with such force it was as though they had been through some disaster together.

  ‘Ignacio! Oh, my God! Ignacio.’ She took a step back to to look at him and he could see tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it, let me look at you, hijo. You look just like your father. How old are you now?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘That’s how old he was the last time I saw him, I still remember, every day ... ay! ’ Her eyes no longer held back the welling tears. ‘You’re just the same, your eyes, that forehead, your ears . . . It’s like looking at your father!’ Then finally she turned and saw Raquel. ‘Who’s this girl ? She can’t be your sister ?’

  ‘No, no . . .’ Ignacio cut in. ‘She’s the daughter of some Spanish friends of my parents, her name’s Raquel.’

  ‘Oh! It doesn’t matter, hija, my home is your home.’ She kissed Raquel on both cheeks, then picked up the dishcloth and gestured to the sofa. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, take a seat . . . What would you like to drink? I’ve just made a sponge cake. Maybe you’d prefer beer ?’

  Just then a thin man of about fifty, prematurely old with sparse grey hair and a sad, drooping moustache, came in and crossed the living room without a word. His rubber-soled slippers glided soundlessly over the tiles as though he were floating.

  ‘That’s Andrés,’ Casilda looked at him coolly, ‘my husband. Andrés, this lad is . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know . . .’ He looked from his wife to the new arrivals. ‘Hello.’ He slumped into an armchair.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Ignacio, then everyone fell silent.

  ‘Well, I’ll just pop into the kitchen . . .’

  Casilda disappeared and the silence remained unbroken until her son asked: ‘So, what have you been doing? Do you like Spain?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Raquel smiled, ‘very much.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ Mateo focused his attention on the girl, ignoring his cousin. ‘Nowhere in the world can you live the way we do here. Just look at all the building work in Alicante, you wouldn’t believe how many tourists come in the summer. And that’s just the beginning . . . We live like kings here, honestly, the weather is perfect, the sun shines all the time, it’s not like those northern cities where you get up to grey skies and rain . . . And the food ? What did you think of the food ? I’ve got a friend who’s just moved to Cologne and he’s already sick to death of eating pork and sausages and potatoes, it’s just not the same. I mean, obviously, he earns a lot more money there, but I don’t think he’ll stick it out ... It’s just we have everything here, just look at the fruit ... And then there’s the ham, I don’t know how anyone could live in a country where there’s no jamón Serrano. And it’s so peaceful too, you can walk the streets any time of the day or night . . .’

  As Mateo prattled on, and Raquel listened with an inscrutable smile, Ignacio compared the boy’s words to the things on the sideboard facing him: six glasses, each a different colour, a school sports trophy, a small teddy bear, two small earthenware jugs painted yellow, a white china pot embossed with flowers, a perfume bottle and a box made of painted seashells. Nothing more. And not a single book.

  The poverty of the furnishings shocked him more than the rug hanging above his head. Ever since they had stopped thinking of him as a child - some six or seven years ago - his parents had stopped forcing him to accompany them to dinner with their Spanish friends, but he still remembered their houses, and his uncle’s house in Toulouse, his grandparents’ house, his own home. He had been born and raised in a home of exiles who had arrived in France with nothing but the clothes on their backs, who for years had worked like dogs so as to be able to live in a foreign country as they might have done in their own, or at least that was what he had believed. Until this afternoon, when he discovered the unexpected, grotesque reality, this ugly, ramshackle sofa, this house where even a perfume bottle might be considered an ornament. This was how they lived, those who had stayed behind, those whom the exiles envied, the men who had never had to sleep on a beach, the women who had never had to steal a petticoat from a dying woman. And still they wanted to go back, he thought, still they raised a glass every New Year’s Eve to toast the possibility that they might go back to this country. Before he had time to come to any conclusion, the lady of the house reappeared with some green cups and a sponge cake.

  ‘... and the women? Spanish women are stunning, of course, you’d know that being Spanish yourself. You should come back, honestly, there’s no place in the world where you can live like you can ...’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Mateo.’

  Casilda did not look at her son as she poured the coffee.

  ‘It’s not rubbish, Mamá, it’s the truth. And . . .’

  ‘No,’ his mother interrupted, looking at her nephew and the girl who had come with him, ‘it’s not the truth. We’re not happy here. You can see that for yourselves.’

  ‘You might not be happy, Mamá,’ Mateo raised his voice, ‘you’re never happy with anything!’

  ‘Maybe that’s it . . .’ she conceded, her voice calm. ‘I’m not happy here. Andrés, would you like some coffee?’

  ‘I’d like you all to shut up.’

  ‘. . . and some coffee?’ his wife asked sardonically.

  Her husband merely nodded as a girl of uncertain age commented from the doorway: ‘Mamá’s right,’ then crossed the room towards the guests.

  ‘Shut up, you brat.’ From his suddenly harsh, authoritative tone, Ignacio and Raquel realised that the man was clearly her father.

  ‘I’m not a brat.’ She, however, took after her mother. ‘I’m sixteen. ’ Then with a sincerity her older brother lacked, she went over to Ignacio and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Hi, I’m Conchita.’

  ‘There’s still one missing.’ Casilda smiled. ‘Andrésito, my youngest, he’s twelve, but he went out with his football a while ago and God knows where he
is now . . .’

  The football fan did not appear, and coffee and cakes proceeded without further interruptions, the women asking questions, the little girl eager to know everything about the guests - what they were studying, where they lived, what their parents did, what the French thought about Spain. Ignacio and Raquel answered her questions, choosing their words carefully, because they guessed that this was not the first time the family had had this argument, and they did not want to make things worse, but from time to time, Ignacio glanced at his cousin, who greeted his mother’s words - ‘So you’re studying engineering? That’s good. You’re just like your grandfather’ - with a contemptuous toss of his head, and he did not understand him, did not understand how Mateo could be so happy at the success of his father’s murderers.

  Again Ignacio thought that Spain was an impossible place, but he did not have time to think any further, because Raquel glanced at her watch and nudged him gently.

  ‘It’s already eight o’clock, we should be going,’ she said.

  ‘We only have half an hour to get back to the city for dinner,’ he added.

  Mateo looked at them wide-eyed. ‘You’re having dinner at half eight?’

  ‘No, well, at home we have dinner at half nine, sometimes as late as ten,’ Raquel said.

  ‘OK, but just wait a minute,’ Casilda said, ‘I’ve got something I want to give you. I’ll see you out.’

  As she went to fetch it, Mateo said his goodbyes to Ignacio and Raquel. He gave his mother a withering look when she reappeared with a plastic bag.

  ‘Don’t mind them inside,’ she said as she walked down the steps with them, ‘it’s the fear talking. They terrified, and they don’t know what to say.’ She stopped and turned to look at them. ‘We’ve had a hard time, and there’s more to come. That’s why people don’t want to know, they don’t want to acknowledge the problems. They end up believing what they’ve heard and forgetting what they’ve gone through.’