The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said simply, giving her an ambiguous smile tinged with surprise and something which, in other circumstances, Raquel might have interpreted as complicity.

  ‘See you soon,’ Madame Chair replied, thinking that at least they had sent someone intelligent.

  ‘Girl, you were amazing!’ Sergio’s girlfriend rushed over and hugged Raquel.

  ‘But why did you hike up the price? That’s not what we agreed,’ Sergio said.

  ‘I know, but suddenly ... I don’t know ... I got the impression that they weren’t going to cut off the water and the electricity. I’ll bet you anything they’ll want to settle long before it comes to that. That’s why I jacked up the price, because if I’m right, we’ve got a decent margin to play with.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  This was what she thought, but she did not think it would be easy. It wasn’t easy, but resistance still seemed to be the surest path to victory. There were other meetings, with lawyers and without, with experts and without, both sides bluffed when they needed to, and sometimes the game seemed to go one way and sometimes the other. Spring ended, summer passed, autumn came and it began to grow cold.

  Until this point, Sebastián López Parra, who had begun negotiating with the owners individually the day after he met the new chair of the residents’ committee, had managed to persuade only the pensioners on the first floor, who were terrified and who immediately moved to their house in Guadalajara to avoid any trouble. The others preferred to trust Raquel when she assured them that, if they stood their ground, victory was theirs. It was a simple calculation and she was convinced that they would win out. They had to: 2004 was about to end and the ruling was due to come into force early in the new year. Resist, resist, resist. On 10 January 2005, Sebastián López Parra made his final proposal. It was four per cent below the figure which Sergio and Raquel had decided was their bottom line a year earlier, but they treated it as if it were a victory. Which it was. Resistance is victory, and they had been victorious.

  ‘Don’t even think about baking a cake today, Nati.’ Three days later, a courier delivered purchase and sale agreements to each apartment, and when Nati called to tell Raquel she had received hers, Raquel decided they should celebrate. ‘I’m going to buy cakes and some of that Majorcan chorizo you really like. And a bottle of Baileys.’

  ‘Olé!’ Nati somehow managed to applaud into the telephone.

  ‘You go and invite Maruja, I’ll talk to Sergio.’

  In fact, it was no big deal. Raquel smiled as she hung up. But at least they weren’t going to be thrown out on the street. What they stood to make for each apartment would not be enough to buy a similar apartment in the new building, but it would be enough for a large deposit, leaving them with a small mortgage. When Raquel looked at it like that, it seemed a pyrrhic victory, but they had negotiated a much better deal than any of their neighbours in Tetuán, all those who had given up without a fight.

  The strangest thing was that none of them intended to live in this place they had so staunchly defended. Nati had decided she would just take the money, and if she didn’t like living in Tenerife, it would give her the freedom to come back. She now talked excitedly about the move because it no longer seemed like a surrender but a change of scenery. Sergio was moving to Aluche to live with his fiancée. They had already put her apartment up for sale and planned to use their combined resources to buy somewhere else in Madrid. Raquel was almost certain that her grandmother would sell her the apartment on the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps, which had been standing empty for a year, since Anita had decided she couldn’t bear to live there now that her husband was dead.

  Anita had moved to Canillejas to live with her daughter Olga, who had come back from Paris, unable to go on living there after the traffic accident that had left her a widow. Everyone, including Raquel, had tried to persuade Anita to rent out the apartment. ‘Maybe later,’ she would say, ‘maybe later,’ but the truth was she could not bear the thought of a stranger living there. This was why Raquel was convinced that she would sell to her, even though at first her grandmother refused.

  Anita was nervous whenever Raquel mentioned the subject. ‘You’re family, how can I do business with you? I can’t sell you the apartment, hija. I’d happily give it to you if I could ...’

  ‘But you’ve only got one apartment and you have two children, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren and it wouldn’t be fair on them. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded without much conviction.

  ‘Then sell it to me, Grandma! I’ll buy it, you can keep the money, and give it to whoever you like.’

  ‘But you’re family, how can I do business with you?’ Anita would say, and it would start all over again, until the day when Ignacio Fernández Salgado decided he was tired of listening to the same thing.

  ‘It’s easy, Mamá, you just sign a contract.’ He faced down his mother’s shocked glare. ‘Don’t you see, it’s better for everyone. Nobody wants the apartment except her, and she’s about to be chucked out of her place ... Do you really want Raquel to live somewhere she won’t be happy and have a stranger buy your apartment?’ After her father intervened on her behalf, Raquel knew it was just a matter of time before her grandmother agreed to sell. That afternoon, as she arrived home laden with trays, she was more excited at the prospect that she would soon be moving to the apartment where as a girl she had spent every Saturday with her Grandfather Ignacio than she was at having negotiated an agreement with the developers. For her, this was the happy end to her relationship with Sebastián López Parra, his tie and his John Lennon glasses. She kissed Nati, Sergio, his girlfriend and Maruja, the single mother from the third floor, set the trays down on the kitchen table, poured drinks for everyone, and began to read aloud:

  ‘Madrid, 17 January 2005, We the undersigned Doña ...’

  ‘But today is on the thirteenth,’ Nati protested.

  ‘We’ll go and see the lawyer on Monday,’ Sergio said. ‘Let her finish reading, we can ask questions afterwards.’

  ‘We the undersigned Dona Natividad Melero Domínguez, vendor, and Don Julio Carrion González, purchaser ...’ Raquel paused. It’s impossible, it can’t be him, it’s too much of a coincidence.

  ‘What is it?’ Nati asked

  ‘Nothing, it’s just ...’ Raquel quickly recovered her composure, telling herself that it couldn’t be him, the world was full of people named Julio, named Carrion, there was even a vineyard called Bodegas Marqués de Carrion, it had to be a coincidence. ‘I just thought I recognised the name ... Anyway, Don Julio Carrion González, purchaser, hereby agree ...’ She read the contract to its conclusion and smiled and clapped with the others, but although Nati, Sergio and Maruja signed their contracts, having checked that each copy mentioned the same amount, Raquel did not sign in the space reserved above her printed name. For two hours, she looked after her guests, she laughed, she talked, she listened, she topped up their glasses, but never for one single moment did she stop thinking about the name Julio Carrion González.

  She was almost certain that she had never known the complete name of the man who had made lollipops magically appear from her ears that distant afternoon in May 1977, because she rarely heard the name after that day. At her parents’ house, no one talked about the war, about their years in exile. It was as though none of it had really happened, as though the Fernández family had never left Madrid, as though the Pereas had always lived in Torre del Mar, as though her father had not been born in Toulouse and her mother in Nimes.

  Her parents did not like to talk about such things, and when they had no choice but to talk about that period of their lives, they couched the experience in words so vague that it sounded as though they had gone to France to study, or on holiday. Julio Carrion was a particularly good example of this tendency to obscure the facts. ‘During that whole thing with Carrion,’ her father would say, or ‘before that whole Carrion episode’, and if one of his children asked who he m
eant, he would say, no one, just one of his father’s colleagues who had done the dirty on him. Raquel, however, knew more about the story than her brother and sister. She had heard her grandfather call the man a bastard and she had seen him cry, she also knew what Ignacio Fernández Muñoz had told her years ago, as they walked hand in hand down the Paseo de Recoletos.

  ‘Would you like an ice cream?’ She had been nineteen at the time, though she still spent every Saturday afternoon with her grandparents. ‘I’m buying.’

  ‘No, I’ll buy.’

  ‘OK, but ...’ She realised that this was as good a time as any to ask him. ‘Tell me something, abuelo, do you remember that day we went to visit the apartment with all the children, the place where they gave me the doll?’ He smiled bitterly, which she took for assent. ‘You’re never going to tell me, are you ...?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘What happened that afternoon.’

  ‘You’re so stubborn, Raquel.’ Ignacio Fernández Muñoz stopped in the middle of the boulevard and looked at his granddaughter. ‘You must have asked me ...’

  ‘... a thousand times, I know,’ she nodded, ‘but you’ve never given me an answer.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ He handed her an ice cream, tasted his own, and walked on. ‘I always answer. I went to see that man because I needed to talk to him. And I talked to him. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘So, you talked to him just like we’re talking now.’

  ‘And you think that doesn’t mean anything?’

  ‘You see?’ Raquel smiled in spite of herself. ‘There you go again, trying to sidetrack me. I don’t know why I even bother to ask.’

  He laughed and they walked on for a bit, eating their ice creams. Raquel thought that, as usual, she would not get another word from him. But this time, it was different.

  ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Ignacio suggested as they reached the Plaza de Cibeles. ‘I’ll tell you the important parts if you don’t ask any questions, OK?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That question is not part of the deal.’

  ‘Oh, Grandad, you can be so stubborn.’

  ‘So can you ...’

  They both laughed, but Raquel was the first to speak.

  ‘Agreed. No questions.’

  ‘Let’s walk down the boulevard, it’ll be nicer.’ Raquel nodded. ‘That afternoon I went to see a man named Julio Carrion. We’d been friends years before in Paris, at least I thought of him as a friend. So when he said he was going back to Spain, we asked him to sell the family properties and send us the proceeds. You see, when they lived in Spain my parents were rich, but in Paris we were poor. Julio promised to take care of it, but he kept everything for himself.’

  ‘He stole from you?’ Raquel asked, and her grandfather nodded. ‘Everything? But how did he ...?’

  ‘We had a deal, señorita.’

  ‘I know, but...’

  ‘No buts.’ Ignacio Fernández put his arm around his granddaughter’s shoulder. ‘A deal’s a deal.’

  This was all Raquel Fernández Perea knew about Julio Carrion when she saw his name next to hers on the contract. It had been sixteen years since that afternoon when she had persuaded her grandfather to confide in her, and in the meantime she had barely thought about it, because when they got to the Neptune fountain, her grandfather had made her promise that she would never mention it to anyone. Raquel realised that the reason he did not want to talk about it had nothing to do with her grandmother, but with her father, and she was happy to agree. Her father did not like his daughter knowing things he would prefer not to talk about, and since he could not criticise his father, it was Raquel who bore the brunt of his anger if she let slip some name or some date she was supposed to keep to herself. In 1988, by the time Raquel finally discovered what the phrase ‘the Carrion business’ actually meant, talking about the past was considered to be in poor taste, and Raquel had lots of other things she was happier to think about.

  At nineteen, Raquel Fernández Perea had been happy about most things, even about Spain. At thirty-five, however, Julio Carrion’s name bothered her so much that, after her neighbours left, she sat down at her computer, crossed her fingers and typed in the name of the company that was buying her apartment.

  Promociones del Noreste, SA, had a stylish, modern website with some sophisticated animation. It had clearly been designed to persuade people to buy: there were comprehensive floor plans and virtual tours of the apartments. In the navigation bar on the left was a button that read Who We Are, which directed her to a link to the Grupo Carrion, which owned the company, along with five others. In the section marked Human Resources, Raquel found a link to the management team: Don Julio Carrion González, President, Señor Rafael Carrion Otero, CEO, and Señor Julio Carrion Otero, Managing Director. Next to each name was a link, Find out more ... She clicked and found out more. There they were, the magician who made lollipops appear, and his elder sons, still almost as blond as they had been as teenagers, though they had considerably less hair. She read:Don Julio Carrion González was born in Torrelodones, Madrid, in 1922. A self-made man, he founded his first company, Carrion Construction, in 1947 ...

  She stared at the photos for a long time, read the biographies over and over, wondered what had become of the dark-haired boy, the youngest son, then sat, staring at the screen. She thought about her grandfather, who had died of a brain haemorrhage in the spring of 2003 as he was about to celebrate eighty-five years of a life that had been both beautiful and terrible; beautiful, because he had made it so, terrible because of what others had done to him. The death of Ignacio Fernández Muñoz had been the hardest blow his granddaughter had ever suffered, because she loved her grandfather more than anyone in the world and still needed him. Now, sitting in front of her computer, she missed him more than ever, and she didn’t know how to react to this joke that fate had played on her.

  ‘What should I do, Grandad?’ She said it aloud, but there was no answer, so she gathered up the dirty glasses, emptied the ashtrays, washed them all and went to bed, but she could not get to sleep.

  She could choose to do nothing, sign the contract, sell the apartment, move to the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps and get on with her life as though she had never seen the name Julio Carrion González on the agreement. She imagined she could hear her grandfather: Don’t do anything, Raquel. Why? What good would it do? This had been more or less the advice he had given her when she was eight. ‘We’ve come back here, haven’t we? If things were different, if things had been normal, you would have lived here all your life. But to live here, there are some things it’s better not to know. Things it’s better not to understand.’ She could choose to do nothing, it’s always possible to do nothing, to know nothing, to want nothing, but she was not eight years old any more, and it was her grandfather who had made her the strong, determined woman she had become. Don’t do anything, Raquel, there’s nothing to be done. Raquel felt exhausted, ill at ease in her own body. But I have to know, Grandad, even if I don’t do anything about it, I have to know, can’t you see? She fell asleep still talking to her grandfather and dreamed that her alarm was ringing. Then she woke up, and her alarm went off.

  ‘What should I do, Grandad?’

  As she made breakfast, she heard his voice again, but in the cold light of day, what she had found out the previous night seemed so cruel and unfair. The same name, the same man, the same story all these years later, and nothing had changed, he still had the law on his side. She needed to know. If she was to judge calmly, even if she did nothing, she had to know.

  ‘What are you doing tonight, Grandma?’ By now, it was II a.m. and she’d had a lot of time to think but had come up with nothing that would change her mind.

  ‘Raquel! I’m so happy you called ... I was just about to call you.’ Anita Salgado laughed and her granddaughter felt the warmth of her voice. ‘I think you know why ...’

  ‘Really? Oh, that’s wonderful,’ but at that moment she wa
sn’t particularly interested in the apartment on the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps. ‘I need to talk to you, Grandma. Can we meet up this afternoon?’

  ‘I can’t, Olga and your mother and I are going to the theatre this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, let’s have lunch tomorrow, then. I’ll take you to that Chinese restaurant.’

  Anita thought it was a wonderful idea. Raquel had discovered that both her grandmothers had a weakness for Chinese food, and she still got a kick out of taking them. ‘It’s all so pretty,’ Grandma Anita had said. ‘The little bowls, the porcelain spoons and the colours, the deep red of that sauce just makes you want to run up a dress in the same colour, and it’s so delicious.’ Her granddaughter smiled and nodded. At the end of the meal, she would always say: ‘Let’s not mention this to your brother ...’

  Ignacio, the doctor of the family, was constantly worried about his grandmother’s weight, because she suffered from high blood pressure. Raquel knew her brother was right, but she was more worried that Anita, who was almost eighty now, might give up on life altogether, something she had almost done after her husband died, refusing to dye her hair, paint her nails or leave the house. That period, when she had taken to her bed for days, had scared everyone. Since then, her daughter, or her daughter-in-law or both, would take her to the theatre once a week, her son took her to bullfights when they were on, and her grandchildren would visit on Saturday or Sunday. Mateo would take his children along, Ignacio would show up with his daughter and a blood pressure monitor. But it was Raquel, who had no children and didn’t work afternoons, who spent the most time with her. They saw each other twice a week and went to the cinema or to the hairdresser, and sometimes they had lunch at a Chinese restaurant.