The Frozen Heart (68 page)

I had learned two things from this encounter. The first was that had the person who had seen us together in the café been potentially compromising, I would have done exactly the same thing, and knowing this absolved me of the sleazy calculatedness of the inveterate womaniser. The second was that Raquel had been thrilled by my performance, all the more so because Berta had been there to witness it. This may have been the reason why she chose that evening to tell me something she could have told me earlier as we crossed the same square. When we finished our beers, I announced that I would pay. Berta went to the toilet and Raquel took my hand and led me out of the café. We stood on the pavement, between the newspaper kiosk and the entrance to the metro, and she pointed to something.

‘You see that house?’ I nodded, not really looking at the building, which I had seen a thousand times before. ‘That’s where my grandfather Ignacio was born.’

‘Really?’ I said, genuinely surprised. It wasn’t a palace, but it was a mansion.

‘Really. They lived on the second floor, in a huge corner apartment, with two balconies looking out over the Glorieta and the Calle Carranza . . .’ She pointed confidently to the apartment in question. ‘That one there, see?’

‘I didn’t think anyone lived there, I thought the whole building belonged to an insurance company,’ I murmured.

‘Now maybe, but not back then.’

‘What happened ? I mean, if he owned that apartment, it doesn’t make sense that your grandfather would live where you live now. Did they sell this place?’

‘No. They lost everything they had in the war, this apartment, their place in the mountains, my great-grandmother’s land . . .’ She stared straight ahead. ‘To be more precise, they were robbed of everything they had.’

At that moment, Berta had emerged from the café and said something to Raquel that I didn’t quite catch, because Raquel looked at me with the same smile she had hidden behind the first time she had talked to me about her Grandfather Ignacio. There was something compelling about that smile, a desolate, hopeless tenderness; I could not resist that smile and at that moment I would have given anything to comfort Raquel, to save her from her own expression, snatch that pained rictus from her face and make her laugh out loud.

‘If I wanted to join you for dinner . . .’ I said apprehensively. ‘Would that ruin things . . .?’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Berta looked at Raquel with the same brazenness she had displayed the first time we met. ‘. . . the thing is, you were the first item for discussion on the agenda.’

‘It would ruin everything,’ Raquel said, pressing herself against me. ‘But I’m sure we can find something else to talk about . . .’

We had already ordered when I got up to phone Mai. I told her I had run into an old friend at the library, someone she knew, who at that moment was probably sitting quietly in his office in Columbus, Ohio. Before I could even say that I was calling not to suggest she come and join us, but to let her know I wouldn’t be home for dinner, she had yawned and told me there was no point expecting her to come, that she was tired and was on her way to bed. When I went back and sat down, Raquel laid her head on my shoulder and let it rest there a moment. I realised that she knew precisely what I had been doing when I said I had to go to the toilet, and for the first time, despite the trivial nature of my offence, I felt I owed her more than I owed Mai. The feeling was a first step on the slippery slope, the plateau from which I began my descent, but that evening all I could think about was Raquel. The star of the evening, however, was my Grandmother Teresa.

‘OK, I propose we move straight to the second item on the agenda,’ I said, breaking the somewhat awkward silence that followed.

‘There is no second item,’ said Raquel.

‘Really? I didn’t realise that I was such a complex subject . . .’

They both laughed, but neither of them said anything, so it was left to me to speak. I could have waited for a more propitious moment, for a quieter, more private place, but I had been holding my silence for a long time. Too long.

‘In that case, I’d like to suggest a topic. Earlier on, when you showed me the house where your grandfather was born, it reminded me . . . Actually, I didn’t need to be reminded because it’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since I found out . . . Strange things have been happening to me recently and I had always thought my grandmother, my father’s mother, died in 1937 during the civil war. Then two months ago, while I was going through my father’s papers, I found out it wasn’t true . . .’

That evening I was the one who spoke, who brought Teresa González Puerto back from the grave in which her son had buried her, and I told them everything, what I had thought I knew, and what I now knew, what I had been told, and what I had discovered. It was something I knew I would have to do sooner or later because the secret about my grandmother was suffocating me, because my jealous, loving silence made me complicit with my father’s unjust, unjustifiable silence, and because I could not stay silent any longer. I had to talk about it so that my grandmother could live again, if only through my words, so that her true life could be restored to her, the path she had chosen, which had cost her her life. And the more I talked the better I felt; I felt like a better, a braver, person, more like the son she would have wanted, this gentle, moving presence that hovered over us like an ancient blessing, outlasting the horrors of the war, the deathly silence of cemeteries, the still smiles of photographs.

This was what I felt, and I felt her, my Grandmother Teresa, not the meek wife of a brutal husband but the adulterous girlfriend of a magician, the incorrigible young girl who, at the age of thirty, had decided to let down her hair and spend her days shouting in the streets, the woman who had dared to write that perhaps she was wrong, but she was doing what she felt she had to do, and she was doing it out of love. That Teresa was a part of me, she was with me as I told her story; she had been brought back from the dead by my love, my pride, and she would go on living through the love, the pride, of my children and my grandchildren. Because the end of the chapter is not necessarily the end of the story and the life of a brave woman does not end with her death. I felt all this, talked about it, her voice through mine, so that my grandmother might return and win her war that night. And Teresa González Puerto did win, and in winning, reason won through and the light for which she had so long fought glinted in the startled actress’s eyes while the woman her grandson loved listened in silence, burying her face in her hands.

‘It’s amazing,’ Berta was the first to speak, ‘you must have been ... it must have been awful for you, I know because I come from a pretty fascist family myself, and if I found out something like that, well . . . On one hand I’d feel terrible, but on the other hand I think I’d feel proud . . . it’s like you said, but it must be tough, thinking about your father in retrospect?’ I nodded and glanced at Raquel but she hadn’t moved and her hands were still pressed to her face. ‘Could you make a photocopy of her letter for me? I’ve got loads of letters like that, from people who were in prison, who were executed, from soldiers. I’ve often thought of putting on a play about them, I’m not sure exactly what. It’s not easy, because you can’t read a lot of the letters straight through. They’re full of mistakes, clichés, they can be muddled and repetitive. They’re letters written by people who didn’t read, who weren’t used to writing. But that’s not the thing I find most surprising. What I find surprising is that anyone reading those letters should be able to tell that this country has gone to the dogs.’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling, ‘that’s what I thought.’

‘I mean, I know your grandmother’s letter is well written, you can tell she was a teacher. It’s nearly as good as the letter Raquel’s uncle wrote to his wife when he was sentenced to death. You’d like that one . . .’

‘I don’t feel well . . .’

Raquel stared at us, shoulders hunched, face ashen.

‘What’s the matter ?’

‘Raquel, you’re white as a sheet . . .’

‘It’s really hot in here. I just felt faint for a minute, I don’t know ... I’d like to go home.’

‘Of course,’ Berta and I answered together, but Raquel looked only at me.

‘Could you walk me back? I think some fresh air would do me good.’

‘Of course,’ I said again, and asked for the bill.

We split the bill before going our separate ways; Berta grabbed a taxi outside the café and we waited until it had driven away before setting off on foot.

‘We can take a taxi if you want . . .’ I suggested, but she shook her head.

‘No, I feel like walking. I’m a lot better, and it’s a beautiful night ... especially given how hot it was in the restaurant ...’

I respected her wishes and made no comment. We headed towards the Glorieta de Bilbao, past her grandfather’s house, turned up the Calle Carranza, and I found myself thinking aloud.

‘It’s weird how things change, isn’t it? There’s your family, who lived in Madrid, owned that big apartment and then lost everything. And then there’s my father, the son of a shepherd and a penniless schoolteacher who grew up in some village in the mountains and never even went to university. He wound up so rich he could buy that building, and others, all within the space of a couple of generations, and now here we are, you and me . . .’

She didn’t say anything. I hadn’t expected her to, nor had I expected her to start crying, which is what she did, crying like a little girl, giving in to great heaving sobs that needed no words. Her tears left me defenceless, lost, almost naked there in the street.

‘What’s wrong, Raquel ?’ I pushed back her hair, dried her tears, took her face in my hands, and I felt a twinge of panic when I realised I couldn’t bear to see her like this. ‘Don’t cry, Raquel, please don’t cry . . .’

I held her tight and she buried her face in my neck. All I could do was wait, and I waited. I waited and watched as she gradually calmed herself, stopped trembling, then drew back and said to me in that thick, guttural voice that follows tears, ‘What must you think of me?’ Her words, the frailty of her voice, the deathly pallor of her face, terrified me.

‘I think the world of you, you know that,’ I said, stroking her face again.

‘No!’ She shook her head, her gesture emphatic, almost childlike. ‘You can’t possibly think I’m wonderful. At least not tonight. Earlier on, when I was listening to you talk about your grandmother, I was wondering what you could possibly think of someone like me, of me being with your father, and the only answers I could come up with were horrible . . .’

‘No, Raquel . . .’ I hugged her again, kissed her forehead, ‘I never think of you being with my father. The only person I can think of you with is me. I don’t care about anything else.’

She wrapped herself around my neck and kissed me for a long time, and when she finished, she looked up at me with a look of such complete surrender that it seemed to say her life was in my hands. I kissed her again, and then we walked on, clinging to each other as we walked.

‘I’m sorry, Álvaro, please forgive me. I shouldn’t have made a scene . . . It’s just that . . . sometimes I can’t cope with things.’

‘Am I so very difficult?’ I suggested, because although I had heard her, I didn’t want to talk about my father.

‘No,’ she smiled, ‘it’s not you, you’re easy to cope with . . .’

I didn’t say anything else, I didn’t need to. Sometimes the love I felt for this woman confused and overwhelmed me, and sometimes, as this time, she realised it.

‘Can I ask you something?’ We were almost at her place and she didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘What did you say to your wife? When you called her earlier . . .’

‘I said that I’d run into a friend from Bilbao I’d met when I was living in Boston, that I was having dinner with him.’

‘Has it been a long time since you’ve seen him?’

‘Nearly three years.’ I didn’t need to lie, not then and not later. She laughed as though I’d invented the whole thing to cheer her up. ‘He used to come over every summer, he married an aerobics instructor called Ingrid, she’s black and has a body to die for. He brought her over once to show her off and he hasn’t been back since. He’s working in Columbus, Ohio, these days. He emailed me some photos of his son, he’s really cute . . .’

‘So if you were really having dinner with him, you’d have a lot of catching up to do.’

‘A whole lot . . .’

‘And after that, you’d go for a drink . . .’

‘Not one, at least two or three . . .’

‘Do you want to come up?’

‘Yes.’

Before, I had told her that I could imagine her being only with me, that what had happened before we met didn’t interest me. I had said it without thinking, as though no one before me had ever trotted out these hackneyed words rendered all but meaningless by millions of men and women who had felt just as I did and who said the same words, in different languages, in different epochs, in every country in the world.

Afterwards, having gone back with her to this place where the past did not exist, where everything was now, I felt at one with this woman; felt as though we were one, that we made up something whole, some perfect number, something precisely equal to the sum of its parts. Loving Raquel was as easy, as ineluctable, as breathing. It was enough for me to gently stroke her perfect skin to be reborn again and again, for every word I knew to be born again, so that ‘before’ no longer existed and ‘after’ would never exist.

‘About your father, Álvaro . . .’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘You might not be, but I am.’ I didn’t want to let her go on, but she pulled away, stretched out on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. ‘My affair with your father was the stupidest thing I ever did, Álvaro, the biggest mistake of my life.’ She looked at me then and I was afraid she would start to cry. ‘Please, listen . . . It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, I can’t talk about it, I can’t even remember it. I can’t bear it and now I can’t even understand how it happened . . . There are times in life when everything is weird, when you forget everything you ever knew . . . It’s difficult to explain, but I just want you to know that it wasn’t
me
. Honestly, it wasn’t me. You know me, Álvaro, I’m not like that. The woman you know, that’s me.’