My life had changed so much, so quickly. And yet my memory bombarded me with images, gestures, words, some old, some recent, but all ancient, all obsolete now, and I could feel the joy of ignorance, the excitement and the exhaustion of the man who had arrived here only a few hours earlier. I no longer knew who I was, what I should expect, what I should do, when the woman sleeping next to me woke up. ‘Forgive me, Álvaro, please, forgive me . . .’ I hadn’t said anything, but I had taken her in my arms and had held her for a long time. I loved this woman. The only thing I knew was that I loved this woman and still I did not know what to do, what to decide when she woke up. It had been almost daylight when Raquel fell asleep, but it was harder for me.
‘Make no mistake, Álvaro, it wasn’t revenge,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t looking for revenge. Too much time had passed, I was too far from Paris, from 1946, 1947 . . . I’m not saying that to defend what I did, on the contrary. Revenge is noble, it’s a passion. A stupid, feeble, useless passion, because you never get back what you invest, but it’s an emotion nonetheless, and I . . . What I did was without passion, Álvaro, it was all calculated. I’m an economist, you know that.’
And she went on, taking no short cuts, stripping me of every consolation, pointing out one by one every pothole, every tree stump, every quagmire along the only path out of this maze.
‘When I saw your father’s name on the contract, I had no idea what had happened with Paloma. I knew about her husband, I knew that one of her cousins had turned him in and that he had sent her a love letter from prison. My grandfather always said that he had never seen a man love a woman more than his brother-in-law loved his sister. And I met her, she was a strange woman, she seemed a lot older than her brothers and sisters and she hardly ever spoke. I only ever remember seeing her sitting in an armchair at María, her sister’s, place. María was amazing, she was charming and funny and she was a great cook, she had a big house and a garden teeming with children and grandchildren, and her husband, Uncle Francisco, he was great too, he was from a village somewhere in Toledo . . .’
Then she looked at me, shook her head as though she wished she had bitten her tongue.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I was about to say something stupid.’
‘What?’
‘Just . . . I was just going to tell you that Uncle Francisco used to make marzipan sweets for everyone at Christmas. And I hate marzipan, but I always ate one of them so as not to offend him. That was all I knew at the time. When my grandmother finally told me what had happened, I understood why Paloma was the way she was . . . a sort of living corpse . . . but it wasn’t real to me, because I was too far away. Too far from those tragic widows, that strange, theatrical world of a life lived in mourning . . . I understood her in theory, in practice all it taught me was that revenge is not worth it. “I’m sick to death of the civil war,” my father used to sing every Sunday when we came back from lunch. Grandma Anita used to make paella every Sunday and invite us over.’
‘My mother makes paella on Sundays too.’
‘Well, there’s nothing better than a good paella. But as soon as we were outside, my father would start singing “I’m sick to death of the civil war”, and my mother and my Aunt Olga would join in, and all the kids laughed, because to us it was like blasphemy to a Catholic, it was something you weren’t suppose to think, let alone say out loud. We’d be in fits and Uncle Hervé, Olga’s husband, who was French and didn’t understand anything, would look at us like we were mad. And maybe we were, but that madness was the reason why I couldn’t really understand Paloma, couldn’t really understand what my grandfather meant when he said “To live here there are some things it’s better not to know. Things it’s better not to understand ...” I didn’t want revenge, Álvaro, but I’m worse than my grandparents, worse than Paloma, or at least I was when all this started. We’re all worse now, the Spanish, I mean, worse than the generations that came before us. “This country has gone to the dogs”, remember ? That’s what you and Berta said that night when I said I didn’t feel well, because I couldn’t listen to it any more, Álvaro, I was sick with shame. There you were, talking about your grandmother, and I felt so awful I couldn’t bear it any more. I wasn’t looking for revenge, I’m a typical modern Spanish woman, I was just thinking about business, I wanted to make a pile of cash, wanted to pull off the best deal of my life, oh, I wanted to cover my back, all those old grievances, but it was all so long ago I barely understood them. But your father died before I could pull it off and that ruined everything. That’s what happened, Álvaro, believe me.’
She had stopped and looked up at me, dropped the corner of the sheet she had been twisting between her fingers. I studied the creases one by one, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Of everything I had learned that night, what had hurt me least was Raquel’s attitude: it was cold - more than cold, it was cunning, ruthless, not like my father but more like my mother, like my Grandmother Mariana, but I couldn’t reject them or push them away. My parents would always be my parents, I couldn’t cut them out of my life, but she didn’t realise this, she didn’t know what I was thinking, what I was feeling at that moment.
‘None of this has anything to do with you, Álvaro. I didn’t know you’d be the one to come and see me, I didn’t even know who you were when I went to the cemetery the day of the funeral and saw you standing away from the others. You do look a lot like your father, you’re the spitting image of the Julio Carrión in the photos of birthdays and Christmases I saw, but I thought maybe you were a nephew or something, because otherwise you’d be standing beside your mother. I had to count your brothers and brothers-in-law before I realised there was one missing, and until I saw you go over and kiss the others at the end, I wasn’t sure. I was looking for the dark-haired boy I’d seen when I visited that huge apartment when I was eight years old, and that was you. But I didn’t intend you to see me. I wanted to see you, all of you, that’s all. That’s the only reason I went to your father’s funeral, to see your faces, to know what your mother looked like so I could be prepared. But things didn’t go the way I’d planned.’
She stopped again, and when I glanced up at her I saw that she was looking at me; she cautiously stretched out the fingers of her right hand to stroke mine. I took her hand and squeezed it.
‘It had nothing to do with you, it was your mother, I . . . I wanted to hurt your mother. That sounds awful, doesn’t it . . .?’ She tried to smile but it didn’t quite work. ‘I had nothing against you, I just wanted to ruin your mother . . . And then . . . then you changed everything, Álvaro. That’s the most ridiculous part, because I had a plan to make a pile of money and your mother wouldn’t have known anything about it, but then your father died and she sort of inherited it . . . When your father died, I turned against her, but she’ll never know, because you were the one who came to the meeting and nothing turned out the way I planned, which is good for everyone, except you, you’re the only good guy in this sorry mess . . . You saved your mother - because she doesn’t deserve to live in peace - and you saved me, because if you hadn’t ruined everything without even realising it, I would have been ruined too ...’
She paused again, tried to smile, and this time she succeeded. But I couldn’t smile. The cold, calculated way she had laid everything out had begun to pain me, though I hurt more for her than for myself.
‘At the start, I didn’t realise what was happening. I was so sure I knew who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, where I fitted into this story . . . I wasn’t looking for revenge, it wasn’t my style, and it wasn’t my revenge to take . . . I’d make the deal of a lifetime and, in the process, I’d ruin what was left of your father’s life, and I was glad about that, I was completely sure about what I was doing, I knew he deserved it . . . I wasn’t looking for revenge, but still the idea of revenge was reassuring, it was there in the background . . . Until that afternoon when we went to the museum, Álvaro, when I saw you talking to that ugly little gi
rl, but she was so clever you didn’t even notice she was ugly. It was like a switch being turned on - I saw you through my grandfather’s eyes, Álvaro, I stood there seeing you as my grandfather would have seen you, and I realised he would have approved of you, he would have really liked you. After that, I couldn’t stop, because there I was with you, and my grandfather was there with me, and I saw myself through his eyes, and I realised he wouldn’t have liked what I was doing, he wouldn’t have liked it at all. I know it’s hard to believe, I know it sounds like a lame excuse, but until that moment I didn’t realise what I was doing, what my plans really meant, what I would have to lose to make all this money. Oh, I know my grandfather was long dead, but that didn’t matter, I was still his granddaughter, and what I was doing to him was worse than anything anyone had ever done to him when he was alive. I loved him and here I was destroying everything he held dear by becoming like your father ...’
‘No ...’
I had not said anything for a long time, trying to take in what I was hearing, but the word came out of its own accord.
‘Yes ...’
‘No, Raquel.’ I took her in my arms and I remembered the half-burned candles around the Jacuzzi, the purple rubber dildo, the blue pills in the scuffed silver box. ‘No.’
‘Forgive me, Álvaro, please forgive me . . .’
It was almost daylight and she fell asleep. I stayed awake, envying her her guilt, her sleep. ‘It’s good for everyone except you,’ she’d said, and she was right. She had fallen asleep knowing I was there beside her, knowing I was on her side, but I was alone. Now that I finally knew all the variables in the equation, solving it was more difficult than ever. So much so that the first thing I was able to establish with any certainty, though it pained me to do so, was that it would have been better if Raquel had been my father’s mistress. The traditional, not to say biblical, hypothesis which during the good times I had managed to forget, and during the bad times had only appalled and disgusted me, had placed me in a more comfortable, more civilised place than the wasteland in which the truth had left me.
Utter solitude is not a good place to think. I could picture Raquel talking to my father, laying out her conditions in the same neutral tone she had used that afternoon when I first went to her office, the confident, self-assured, sterile tone she had mastered during so many meetings with clients just like him, so many heirs just like me. I could easily imagine the tense, squalid stand-off between them; what I found more difficult was picturing her here, in this apartment, planting her landmines for my mother to find, mines which had exploded in my face. Her clever little mise en scène - the hash, the half-burned candles, the unwashed dressing gowns - this troubled me more than her grand plan for blackmailing my father. Because this was not about the past, it was about the future.
This conclusion meant that I had already come to a decision, but I didn’t realise that before I fell asleep. I realised it in the morning, although my decision was not complete, it was only a husk. Because, if forced to choose between being left with something or with nothing, everyone would choose something. It was not a choice, it was a non-choice.
‘How do you feel ?’
Raquel woke long before she opened her eyes. I could sense the change in her breathing, saw her turn over, felt her foot brush against mine.
‘Fine,’ I said, although it wasn’t true.
‘You’re not fine. You can’t be fine. I knew it, that’s why I left. And I wouldn’t have come back, you know, if you hadn’t kept looking for me.’
I ran my fingers through her hair, marvelled at how beautiful she was in the morning. ‘I came because you said goodbye. If you hadn’t wanted me to find you, you wouldn’t have said goodbye.’
‘I know, but it doesn’t matter now, does it? I’ve had a lot of time to think. You’ll never be able to trust me again, no one will trust me, and it’s not your fault, it’s mine. I’ve thought about it every which way, but it’s true. I’ve made too many mistakes . . . You deserve better than this . . .’
‘Let’s leave,’ I said suddenly. ‘Let’s get up, get dressed and leave.’
The last time I had asked her to leave with me, she had been struck dumb. This time, she did exactly as she was told.
We didn’t meet anyone in the hallway or in the lift. The caretaker didn’t seem to be around. It was 2.30 p.m. When we stepped out into the street, a surge of warm air enveloped us.
‘God, it’s hot.’ She looked at me and I nodded, not just because I agreed with her, but because the triviality of the remark made me feel better.
It was true, it was hot. The sun beat down, and it wasn’t just the sun, there was the blare of horns, the smoke, exhaust fumes from the cars, children struggling with schoolbags, a fifty-something couple kissing on the corner of the street, the shrill jangle of a slot machine as we passed a bar, three men standing in a doorway laughing, a mother scolding her son, two drivers arguing over a parking space, fragments of conversation, the street, life itself, the blissfully anaesthetising effects of chaos.
I put my arm round Raquel’s shoulder and she shrugged momentarily when she felt the weight of it. ‘It’s really hot.’
Raquel had been right to meet me at that unfamiliar apartment which, now that we were away from it, seemed artificial, like a stage set. We both knew that everything would be easier away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, the air conditioning, the stultifying atmosphere of a place no one lives in. Raquel had made a lot of mistakes, but on this point she had been right. We walked down the Calle Jorge Juan in silence, enveloped by the heat, the noise, the smells, walking in a straight line towards the other side of Madrid, our side. When at last we saw it on the far side of Recoletos, silence gave way to reality.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘You’re always hungry, Raquel.’
‘That’s true . . .’ She sounded apologetic. ‘Aren’t you hungry? I didn’t eat yesterday and we didn’t have breakfast this morning. It’s nearly three o’clock.’
‘I could murder a coffee.’
‘Just a coffee?’
We sat on the terrace of a café, and when the waiter brought the menus she held him back. ‘Don’t go, we’ll order straight away. Two white coffees and a bottle of mineral water and I’ll have some tapas. I’ll have a large portion of Iberian ham on wholegrain toast, and a tortilla.
‘Would you like bread with the tortilla?’
‘Please . . .’ She turned to me. ‘What are you having?’
‘Um, I don’t know . . . I’ll have the tortilla as well.’
When the waiter disappeared, I looked at Raquel. I knew how to tell when she was hungry, recognised the supremely confident way she addressed waiters only to profusely thank them later for their attentiveness, as though she had some reason to apologise, but today everything was different. Twenty-four hours ago, thirty-six hours ago, or seventy-two, or a hundred and twenty, I would have given anything to be here with her. Her disappearance had reduced my life to a single sentence, ‘anything to be with Raquel’, anything to find Raquel, anything to hear her say she was hungry, anything to be sitting opposite her at a table on the terrace of a café, to watch her eat. But now the happiness was gone, and I didn’t know what to do.
‘I told you,’ her expression faded, her eyes became troubled, shifting from the sky to the tablecloth, the trees, before settling on me again, ‘I told you it would be hard . . .’
‘It’s not you, Raquel. At least you’re alive, I can talk to you, ask questions, listen to your answers, I can stay with you or I can leave. You’re alive and you’re slightly problematic.’ The half-burned candles around the Jacuzzi, the rubber dildo, the blue pills in the scuffed silver box. ‘But you’re a problem that’s easy to solve. There’s so much more than that, a lot more, and I can’t get my head round it. That’s what’s hard.’
Hearing myself say this aloud made it easier, but I didn’t continue; I sat, trying to work out how much of what I had said was true, the part I wanted to
believe, the part that would save me. My father was a more extraordinary man than we, his children, would ever be, I remembered, and I knew this better than anyone, since of his children I was the only one who had never tried to be like him. The waiter came back with the coffees and the omelettes. ‘I’ll be right back with the ham,’ he said. Raquel didn’t look at him, she went on staring into my eyes with an expression of abandon, of fear and love that I knew well. Very well. Now, I knew everything there was to know about those eyes which burned me, hurt me, and which should have been able to heal me.
‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ The waiter had just set down a slice of toast half the size of the table, but she hadn’t even picked up her knife and fork.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ I smiled.
‘Really,’ she looked as though she was about to cry again, ‘I’m not hungry any more . . .’
I observed Raquel, the line of her jaw, her neat chin, the gentle, perfect curve of her long neck, the curious, shadowy colour of her big, dark eyes. A clever girl, so beautiful you had to look twice to take it in, because the perfect harmony of her beauty was invisible to the casual glance, to eyes that did not deserve to see it. I looked at Raquel, and everything was so sad, so arid, so grey and so fearful, and we were so used to laughing, that there would never be a moment worse than, crueller than, this terror, louder than this silence.
The Frozen Heart Page 76