The Frozen Heart (30 page)

On one of the last days of school when I was eleven or twelve, the playground started to shrink before the bell rang for our first class, and by lunchtime, it was half its original size. All morning, trucks kept coming and going, with men unloading bricks and bags of cement, to the amusement of the children sitting beside the windows - unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them - and the despair of the teachers. Term was nearly over and the headmaster had finally decided to put up what he pompously called a sports complex - a far cry from the basketball court flanked by three miserable stands which we found when we got back after the holidays. I barely remembered the building itself, but what I did remember was the huge mountain of sand which grew bigger every day like some fantastical sand dune in the far corner of the playground. The idea of climbing it was Roberto’s, my best friend since nursery school, but when we got to the top, I was the one who stood calmly at the edge of the precipice, head high, arms outstretched. ‘What are you doing, Álvaro?’ he asked. ‘Shut up,’ I said, ‘wait and see . . .’ The first time was the best, because the sand had only recently been piled up, it was hard, compacted and held my weight for a long time - a minute, maybe more. I felt it shifting under the soles of my feet a second before the landslide; I stood tall, head high, arms out, and at first it seemed to slide slowly, almost imperceptibly, then faster, recklessly, vertiginously, but I was not afraid, my feet tensed, my arms outstretched, my heart in my throat, exhilaration thrilling through every inch of my body. The first time was the best, but it lacked the excitement of the second, the third, the fourth, because something new was added to the experience every time, and sliding down the mountain was exhilarating, but standing on the edge, controlling your breathing, senses alert, savouring the moment when the ground would fall away under your feet, was even more intense. I know, because that morning I did it over and over while the short-sighted, lenient playground monitor, Father Sebas, looked at me and smiled serenely. Later, when the workmen complained because they had to recompact the sand we had scattered all over the place, they told Father Sebas we could easily have broken a leg. After that, we were forbidden from playing there again - Roberto chickened out, but I didn’t. I liked doing it so much that on prize-giving day, I slipped away from my parents and brothers so I could do it one last time, and when I went up on stage to collect the first prize for mental arithmetic, I left a trail of sand behind me. My mother was furious but I didn’t care, because it was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done in my life. But I soon forgot about that mountain, surfing down the sand, the ground opening up beneath my feet, forgot how exhilarating, how wonderful danger could be, until almost thirty years later, when Raquel Fernández Perea, tired of clinking the ice around her glass, looked up at me and said:

‘You come from an interesting family.’

‘You don’t know the half of it . . .’

From that moment the countdown began. Ten, nine, eight, I’m falling, I’m going to fall. I wanted it, but she wasn’t ready to give in, not yet. Just as I was about to suggest we go and get a drink somewhere else, she put her glass on the table with a decisive gesture and looked at her watch.

‘Quarter to one, shit, and I’ve got to be up early tomorrow . . .’ She gave me a nervous glance somewhere between relief and sadness, as though she was unsure. ‘I didn’t notice the time.’

‘Yes.’ Maybe it’s for the best, I thought, it is for the best, but I didn’t believe it. ‘Me neither.’

My name is Álvaro Carrión Otero, in November I will be forty-one, I am the son of Julio Carrión González, a poor man addicted to the benign and possibly fatal trickery of chemicals, the woman sitting opposite me is Raquel Fernández Perea, she is about thirty-five, an age which might easily make her my father’s daughter or even his granddaughter, but she was his lover, the lover of an old man with a weakness for believing that the most important thing was not getting laid but knowing that the next time would not be the last - a battle so unequal, so clearly lost before it had begun, that it could only end in a victory for death, and death had triumphed, my father was dead. But I am not, I am alive, I have a profession I love, a house I love, a son I love, a wife I love. My wife’s name is Mai, she is thirty-seven though she doesn’t look it, and her name isn’t short for Maite, as everyone seems to think, her real name is Inmaculada, but her little sister couldn’t pronounce it and made up a nickname which she liked much more, I love my wife, I love my son, I love my job, I love my work, I love my life, and my life is not like this, clouds and guilt, surprises and lies, this is not my life, this is not for me, I am nothing like this angry, irritated, worn-out man scared by intense, fearsome, perverse desires, my name is Álvaro Carrión Otero, in November I will be forty-one, I am the son of Julio Carrión González . . .

I repeated this warning to myself as I asked for the bill, I repeated it over and over as I paid, followed Raquel to the door, asked whether she had come by car, as she asked me where I lived, as she told me that she lived opposite the Cuartel del Conde-Duque, as we discovered we were practically neighbours, as we decided to share a taxi, as I offered to drop her off at her place before going on to mine, as she refused my offer, claiming my place was closer, as the taxi double-parked, as I kissed her goodbye, even more carefully than before, as I opened the door and stepped into my apartment, as I took off my clothes, brushed my sharp teeth and got into bed, as I noticed the warmth beside me, Mai, asleep, her skin soft, and fragrant, as I lay there unable to sleep, I was still repeating this little mantra, repeating the same warning over and over, but it was useless.

My name used to be Álvaro Carrión Otero, of course. Julio Carrión González was my father. To lust after Raquel Fernández Perea, who had been his lover, was utterly despicable, but I didn’t care.

 

The following day, everything was clearer.

Everybody liked the exhibition. I had been fairly sure they would. Although I humbly accepted the praise lavished on me, making no distinctions as to the quality of the opinions - ‘It’s incredible,’ said a bank manager’s wife with diamond rings on every finger, ‘even I can understand it’ - the truth was that rarely in my life had the correlation between effort expended, which had been considerable, and the results, which had been spectacular, been so gratifying. José Ignacio Carmona, who, before he had taken the post as museum director and enlisted me as an adviser, had been my teacher, almost my guru and the chief influence during my years as a student, was thrilled. ‘Of course,’ I said as an aside, ‘we’ll both get the credit for this.’ ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he answered, and I realised that he felt a little bit proud of me. I was even more surprised by Fernando Cisneros’s reaction. He showed up late, his burly frame squeezed into a suit that made him look like an excited bear.

‘Congratulations, Álvaro, this is fucking incredible. Seriously.’

Fernando had been José Ignacio’s other pet pupil at university, and although all three of us were still good friends, from time to time Fernando almost seemed childishly jealous of the bond between our old professor and me. ‘No, no, you two are the disciples of science,’ he would say, ‘you’re the real scientists, not me, I’m just a lowly civil servant . . .’ I never took him seriously, but José Ignacio occasionally felt guilty and would offer Fernando a project that he would invariably refuse, though it would shut him up for a while. Black holes had been the most recent offer, and I had ended up taking it on myself a couple of days after my father’s second and fatal heart attack. At the time I would have been grateful for a hand to get it finished; Fernando didn’t exactly say no, but wondered aloud how long we had before the upcoming elections for head of department. I told him to forget about it for the time being, that I’d get back to him if I thought I couldn’t meet the deadline. I did make the deadline, but I knew Fernando Cisneros well, he was my best friend. I knew he felt guilty for not having helped out, but also that, on its own, no amount of guilt would have elicited a eulogy as warm and sincere for an exhibition which, by its very nature, did not belong to the kind of successes he valued.

‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ he had asked when I first told him I had accepted Carmona’s job offer. ‘Have you gone fucking nuts as well ?’ I didn’t answer, but he carried on regardless. ‘First José Ignacio loses the plot, now he’s taking you down with him.’ ‘But what’s so bad about it, Fernando? I don’t see what you’re getting at . . .’ ‘What’s bad,’ he explained condescendingly, ‘is a physicist of José Ignacio’s calibre giving up his career to put on exhibitions for ten-year-olds. It’s bullshit,’ he said, ‘a waste of space.’ ‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘First off, José Ignacio is not giving up anything for the museum, he’ll be the director and curator, and when it’s up and running all that will mean is he has to attend a couple of meetings a week. Secondly, a museum like this is not a waste of space, Fernando, I can’t believe you’d even say that. You spend your whole life bleating about how difficult it is to be a scientist in a society that’s not interested in science . . .’ ‘Listen, Álvaro,’ he shot back, ‘José Ignacio is one thing, he’s already had his career, but you . . . you should be aiming for head of department, not pissing about with physics as entertainment.’ At that point I laughed. The only major obstacle in Fernando Cisneros’s political career was his utter lack of interest in anything other than politics. It wasn’t that he didn’t do the research, publish the papers, he simply read less and less. Next to him, I was the Midas of research, the queen bee of publishing. ‘The one who needs to do more reading is you, Fernando, you’re the one who wants to be head of department,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, my museum work counts towards academic credit.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Of course,’ I assured him, although at that point I didn’t know that this was true, nor that José Ignacio would manage to persuade the museum’s board of trustees to sign a sponsorship deal to finance several research projects at the university.

‘Hey, you! I’m trying to congratulate you here,’ Fernando said, grabbing me by the shoulders when I responded to his initial congratulations with a shrug. ‘Con-gra-tu-late, get it? I am publicly admitting that I might have been wrong. If that’s not enough to flatter your vanity, I don’t know what is . . .’

‘I know, and I’m grateful, honestly,’ I said. ‘How’s the campaign going?’

‘The campaign?’ He frowned and stroked his chin. ‘The campaign’s fine, we’re bound to win, but you look like shit, Álvaro.’

‘Yeah, I know, things aren’t going too well.’

I looked around and saw Mai at the far end of the room, chatting to a group of people. She probably wouldn’t miss me for a while, so I grabbed Fernando and dragged him into a corner behind the display.

‘You’re not going to believe this but . . .’

He looked at me, his face concerned, an expression utterly unlike the mischievous grin he had given me when he had asked whether I was having an affair a couple of weeks earlier. He was clearly expecting some dramatic revelation, a serious illness or a fuck-up at work. Over the years, Fernando had cultivated a systematic pessimism which overlaid his naturally feisty personality and would drag him down into bouts of depression so intense that sometimes he was forced to switch to automatic pilot and become his own doppelgänger, a man who taught his classes with the mechanical reliability of a robot and spent his free time in his office doing nothing, a bitter taste in his mouth from constantly repeating that everything was shit. Until some departmental squabble emerged, at which point he would hurl himself into the breach with a passion that astonished even me, a zeal more intense than he had been capable of at the age of twenty. Back then, I had once joked with Fernando that his fundamental character trait was his need to plot and scheme, that he had been born a conspirator the way others are born artists, and time had proved me right.

‘OK, basically . . .’ I leaped into the void without a parachute, ‘my father had a lover.’

‘Fucking hell - good for him. You bastard, you had me worried there . . .’ He rubbed his face and shot me a wicked smile. ‘So your father had a lover, who would have thought . . . So was she around his whole life, or was she younger than him?’

‘She’s younger than me.’ I decided to repeat myself for emphasis. ‘Younger than both of us, Fernando.’

‘What!?’ This piece of information stunned him. ‘Fucking hell, Julio, you old dog, there he was, going around all stiff and starched, and secretly he was a dirty bastard . . .’

‘Yes.’ His reaction reminded me of my glee when I had first found out and I laughed with him. ‘But that’s not the worst part.’

He stared at me, astonished. ‘Do the others know about this? I mean, does your mother know?’

‘Nobody knows, not even Mai. I’m the only person who knows, and now you.’

In as few words as possible, I told him everything that had happened, from the day of the funeral up to the night before, and I told him that none of what I was telling him was as important as it seemed.

‘And that’s not the worst part?’ he asked when I had finished, bewildered.

‘The worst part . . .’ I took a deep breath and decided to see it through to the end, ‘is that last night I came this close to sleeping with her. Seriously, I mean
this close
. You know what this close means? It means she realised, and she looked at her watch and said it was getting late. If it wasn’t for that . . . it’s been a very long time since I’ve been this attracted to a girl, and it’s not just that . . .’ I paused, avoiding his eyes, and I made another decision, without knowing whether it was for the best. ‘I don’t know if I’ve
ever
been so attracted to a girl in my whole life. And yes, I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the truth.’

I looked up and his face was almost completely blank.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes.’