The Frozen Heart (119 page)

‘Doesn’t matter.’ He signed before Raquel had even finished speaking.

As he said goodbye, Raquel realised that he was looking at her as though she were a piece of furniture. At the time, she did not think about it, but she was reminded of his expression a week later when she compared it to the focused, smiling, slightly worried face of his brother as he sat across the table from her in the Japanese restaurant.

She had been expecting Álvaro to call her to return the key, but aside from buying a short dress with a plunging neckline and a pink jacket which admirably highlighted what it appeared to conceal, she had prepared no strategy, no new offensive for their next meeting.

If someone had shown her the scene two weeks earlier, if she had been able to see herself, hear what she was saying, she would have laughed and said, ‘It’s ridiculous, he’s the last man in the world I’d consider sleeping with.’ But Alvaro Carrion Otero knew how to look at her, he was funny, he was charming as he struggled to find the right words so as not to hurt her, he was touching when he told her he had packed up all the stuff in the apartment so his brothers and his mother wouldn’t find out, and he was disarming when he lowered his voice to a whisper and stared into her eyes and asked her whether she had loved his father. It had been years since she had felt such electricity in her body, and he could set it off so easily that, by dessert, she was already thinking about the worst possible plan the world had to offer.

He was thinking the same thing, she could tell, and that evening, this gave her pause. But even as she glanced at her watch, pretending to be worried about how late it was, muttering about some early morning meeting, already she was no longer sure of anything. That evening, Alvaro Carrion Otero had been himself, not a ghost, not the shadow of his father, and Raquel Fernández Perea could no longer use her Aunt Paloma’s fragility to mask her own vulnerability. She had managed to brush him off, gently, wordlessly, burning no bridges, and she was certain she had done the right thing. She didn’t want to think about the fact that never in her life had she wanted to sleep with someone as much as she did with him. When she got home, she was so depressed that she did not even have the energy to lay into herself for being such a fool.

As she fell sleep, she tried to absolve herself of her sins. It doesn’t matter, I’ll get over it. When she got up the next day, she consoled herself with the same words. But it did matter, and she did not get over it. The days passed, and her conviction that she would get over it began to dissolve in the acid of her unsatisfied desire, to which she offered an antidote.

So what? So I sleep with him? I’m not about to tell him anything and it’s not like anyone in my family will ever find out ... This first small dose was so exhilarating that she began to take the antidote by the spoonful: It would only be a one-off, anyway, he’s married, it would just be an affair ... until she realised it was easiest to drink straight from the bottle. It’s not as if I’m going to get addicted, is it? I’m past that stage ... I mean, it should just be a quick fuck, and that’s it done, it’s not like it would happen again ... Actually, it’s much better to sleep with him and get it out of my system instead of mooning round for the rest of my life thinking he might have been the one, I mean, obviously he’s not, how could he be, I mean, what are the chances that one of Carrión’s sons would turn out to be The One? It’s ridiculous ... I don’t know anything about him, about his life, I can’t just ... The easiest thing would be if he knocked me back, that way it would be over and done with ... I’ll call him, tell him I have a couple of thing belonging to his father, though he might ask me to send them by courier, I mean, that’s what they’re there for ...

Raquel Fernández Perea would never know that on 4 April 1947, as he stepped off the train at the Gare du Nord in Paris, Julio Carrion González had had a similar conversation with himself, although the outcome had been very different. And yet she realised that, whatever else might happen, Alvaro had saved her, because it was only after that dinner, when he had begun to be himself, that Raquel had realised she was dealing with a man, a delicate, defenceless creature of flesh and blood as innocent of the guilt of the ghost he resembled as Paloma had been the moment Julio betrayed her. Álvaro’s words, his smiles, his looks convinced her that she was not dealing with his father, but with him. And the more she thought, the more she shuddered, and things began to fall apart, her plans, her ambitions, her desire for revenge.

‘I didn’t say anything about the money.’ The morning after her dinner with Alvaro, Paco Molinero reacted to her news with a stunned silence. ‘It just wasn’t the right moment. Anyway ... It doesn’t matter, I don’t care any more, I honestly don’t care. I’m starting to think the whole thing was a mistake. I think a lot about my grandfather, you know? I think he would have wanted it this way, and I’m starting to understand him, to understand his reasons ...’

Paco was unconvinced.

‘What do you mean, you don’t care about a million euros, Raquel? It’s impossible, nobody just loses interest in a million euros.

At that moment, Raquel realised they were no longer a team, more like two radio stations on different frequencies. It was her fault, because she had not told him the truth. This was why Paco didn’t understand, he couldn’t.

‘You’re hiding something,’ he said a couple of days later. ‘There’s something going on. What did I just say to you?’

‘Um?’ He can tell, Raquel thought, he can see it, this is terrible because it means we won’t be able to work together. ‘I don’t know, I didn’t catch it. Something about the cement works?’

‘You see?’

‘There’s nothing going on ... I’m just a bit preoccupied ...’

A chaos pendulum had appeared in her life.

A week after they had sushi together, Raquel Fernández Perea called Álvaro Carrion Otero and suggested they meet the following day. He did not say no, but Raquel had forgotten that she was supposed to be spending the afternoon with Berta.

‘I thought you said Jaime was an insufferable egotist who never talked about anything except himself.’ Berta rattled this off before she even said hello.

‘What are you talking about?’ Raquel was surprised to see her friend show up at her place at 5.50 p.m.

‘You’re wearing your lucky skirt.’

Raquel looked down and saw that she was wearing the skirt with the small yellow flowers, her favourite, the one she called her lucky skirt because it suited her. But that did not explain why Berta was here or why she was talking about some actor Raquel had slept with on New Year’s Eve.

‘So, I’m wearing my favourite skirt ... That doesn’t mean ...’ Then she remembered. ‘Oh God, we’re supposed to be going to the theatre to see Jaime tonight.’ She clapped both hands to her face. ‘Jesus, Berta!’

‘You forgot?’

‘Yes ... I don’t know, lately I’ve been all over the place.’

‘You’re meeting someone.’

‘Yes.’ Raquel looked at Berta and laughed. ‘Listen, I’m meeting him at a quarter past six, why don’t you come down with me and I’ll introduce you. We’re going to an exhibition about black holes.’

‘What?’

‘Black holes,’ Raquel laughed again, ‘outer space, you know ... He’s a physicist — science, levers, pulleys, forces, all that ... He’s the one organising the exhibition.’

Now it was Berta’s turn to laugh.

‘And you fancy him?’

‘Something rotten ...’

Later, fate, in the form of an ugly little girl who couldn’t work out some contraption with water jets and levers, provided Raquel with a moment to think. As Álvaro was explaining the machine to the girl, Raquel felt two intense but contradictory urges. Either I kiss him right now, she thought, or I get the hell out of here. There was a third possibility — she could tell him the whole story — but she immediately discarded this one. Nor did she want to run away, so she decided to trust the intuition that had so dazzled her the last time she had seen him. Álvaro was not upset to be told that he was nothing like his father, and he agreed with her that it was probably best if they didn’t talk about him. This would have been the moment to show her cards, to tell him some part of the truth. ‘The first thing my Grandfather Ignacio did after he slept with my grandmother Anita was to teach her how to read and write.’ She composed this sentence in her head, but she knew that Alvaro was Spanish too, he was well used to mysteries and silences, and she wasn’t lying to him any more. It was true that at school there had been a science test in which they were shown two almost identical drawings of housewives hoovering and that one of them was holding the handle much higher than the other, that she had made a mistake which had cost her a good mark in science. Álvaro knew the right answer, of course, he was a good teacher and she genuinely liked him, liked him so much she wanted to sleep with him, after all, it was just a fuck, an affair, nothing important. But inside the gift-wrapped box he placed on the table before dinner were two pendulums, a classic, ordinary pendulum that swung predictably over and back, over and back, and a second pendulum that was chaotic, unpredictable, yet they moved in harmony, and in all eternity, even with an infinite number of decimal places, it would have been impossible to predict what happened to Raquel Fernandez Perea that night.

‘Are you mad?’ Berta looked at her, astonished.

By the time Raquel told Berta, but only Berta, the whole truth, she was already in so deep she did not even know what madness might mean.

She had told nobody until now, she did not even want to think about it, did not want to gauge the dimensions of this trap in which she felt so comfortable, so happy. When she was alone, she preferred to imagine a different scenario, a Saturday morning, light spilling in through the balcony widows, Álvaro in the kitchen in his pyjamas as she came back from the market carrying bunches of flowers that she arranged in crystal vases. This was what she preferred to imagine, but the night before, the three of them had had dinner and Raquel had pretended to feel ill in order to stop Alvaro and Berta talking. But she knew that Berta had not been fooled. She could have phoned her, made something up, she could have said she and Alvaro had had a row before they came out or that the story he was telling was so touching it had made her cry. She could have told Berta anything, but time had passed, barely three months in ordinary time, but to her they felt like a lifetime. The night before, when he was talking about himself, Alvaro had been talking about her too, because it was bound to happen some day, and some day she would have to tell somebody the truth. She had decided to start with Berta.

‘Jesus Christ, Raquel, what are you saying?’ Berta, who could never pick a man who was right for her, stared at Raquel, her face as pale as wax. ‘I don’t believe this. How did you get yourself into such a mess?’

‘I didn’t get myself into a mess.’ At first Raquel tried to defend herself. ‘It just happened ... How was I supposed to know I was going to fall in love with him? I don’t understand any of it ... it all seemed so simple, everything was going so well and I didn’t realise ...’

She was not a good person, she knew she was not a good person, that she would never convince anyone that she was blameless in all this, but Berta did not challenge her, she simply came over, put her arms around Raquel, and tried to sound upbeat.

‘It’s OK, it doesn’t matter,’ Raquel could tell Berta did not believe this, ‘it’s not so bad, because ... well, you can still make it right.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Of course you can.’ Berta hugged her again. ‘So what are you going to do? Just see how it goes, I suppose?’

‘What else can I do?’ Raquel felt better. ‘He’s married, he has a kid, he’s not going to give all that up for me, is he? Married men never leave their wives. Besides, we’ve been seeing a lot of each other recently because he doesn’t have lectures, but when term starts, things will go back to the way they were before. I’m not going to say anything ... I can’t tell him, Berta, I can’t tell him the sort of man his father was, the things he did, he’d end up hating me ... And if he ever found out, he’d never be able to trust me again. I’d never be able to face him, I’d die of shame. I love him, Berta, I love him so much that I couldn’t bear him to think any less of me.’

Raquel realised that if she carried on, she would end up crying, and she could not let herself cry because to do so would be to admit that it was all over, that her relationship with Álvaro was doomed to fail sooner or later, so she shook her head and tried to look on the bright side.

‘But if things go on the way they’re going, if we’re still together and he gets to know me properly, forgets about his father, then maybe ... Maybe I can just never tell him ... Or maybe a time will come when it doesn’t seem so important. And if it’s going to end, then it’s going to end. I just want it to last as long as possible. I don’t know, Berta, I don’t know what to think ...’

‘I’m guessing you’ve got to be the only woman in history to sleep with a married man and hope that he doesn’t leave his wife,’ Berta said philosophically, and they both laughed

But that night, when she was alone, Raquel thought about things again and she felt drained, empty, as though there were a gaping void eating her up inside, because she loved this man, loved him more than anyone in the world, but all her love was useless. She no longer dreamed of sunny Saturday mornings, of bouquets of flowers in crystal vases, but until that night she had not realised that this dream with which she had lulled herself to sleep was much more than a simple fantasy, some vestige of her romantic teenage dreams. The imaginary flowers she arranged in imaginary vases were her lifeline, a guarantee that she would survive.

That night, when Berta left, Raquel Fernández Perea died a little. And when the life that she had dreamed of lay before her, when Alvaro Carrion Otero lay like a carpet at her feet, when he offered her everything he had, and she refused him, Raquel felt herself die a little more, and she did not want to die, not tonight, not in front of him.