The Frozen Heart (69 page)

At that moment, I didn’t realise the full significance of the words I had just heard. I was so moved, so much in love, that all I could do was kiss her, hold her. It was the only thing that mattered, the only thing that could banish ‘before’ and ‘after’. But two weeks later, as I was sitting at a table pretending to listen to Fernando Cisneros at the Argüelles bar and once again doubting my celebrated intelligence, that obscure, episodic conversation peppered with allusions took on a greater significance.

Raquel’s curious, partial confession, ‘this is who I am, that wasn’t me’, meant not only that Fernando was right, it placed the figure of my father on a different plane. Having said that she had never loved him Raquel Fernández Perea had not mentioned Julio Carrión González again, leaving in the air only an agreeable, rose-tinted trace, his charm, the innate gift for seduction that had made my father popular. At the end of the long, exhausting night we spent together with our ghosts, Raquel had spoken of him as an enemy, or worse, as someone capable of making her an enemy of herself, making her forget everything she knew. And I, unable to understand what I was hearing, accepted it unquestioningly; in fact I was foolish enough to think myself lucky to have heard it.

When Raquel told me who she was and who she wasn’t, all that mattered to me was that her words confirmed the intuition that had led me across the threshold of madness, the certainty that this woman was mine; mine and not my father’s. It was not merely an illusion, it was stupid; I had been single-minded and, more than that, I had been a fool; for the one thing I knew, I had known from the first, was that my father was lying in wait, watching this ridiculous, absurd infatuation. His immense, daunting shadow turned it into a necessity, a rite of passage, though I had never aspired to be like him. I had had no problem isolating Raquel from the other upheavals associated with his death, but I could not rid myself of him completely. I could not bring myself to do it, until Raquel did it for me, obliterating him with a few words; this was what I had thought when I heard them, that my father was gone, that he would never again come between me and this woman

As I glanced at my watch as though I needed to be elsewhere, and said goodbye to Fernando Cisneros as though nothing had happened, and started down Cea Bermúdez as though heading somewhere, and turned into the first side street without knowing why, and turned again at the next intersection, wandering aimlessly, I tried to fit the pieces together. Raquel had never seemed worried about what I might think of her until my Grandmother Teresa had sat down with us in that restaurant, but my father’s role in that story seemed too insignificant to have triggered such a response, even if it heightened her feeling that her relationship with my father was a betrayal of her grandfather, a distant, dead man whose very name lit up her face with an expression that was like no other. Raquel had exploded that night, and she had said things that took on new meaning in the light of the unease Fernando Cisneros’s words had left in my mind.

‘Sometimes I just can’t cope with things,’ she had said, and then stopped. I had assumed she was talking about my father and me, about the fact that we had both been her lovers - it seemed logical that in such a situation you might feel overwhelmed, the way I felt overwhelmed, though I refused to think about it. What did surprise me was that I had never noticed even the slightest sign of awkwardness or tension in her. On the contrary, it seemed she didn’t find it difficult not to think about my father, didn’t have to
make
herself forget. Between Raquel and me everything was now, and everything was easy, as though we had both been born the moment we met. But she had a past, I had a past. ‘Don’t say anything to Berta, she doesn’t know anything about it,’ she’d said when she told me what sort of woman she really was. ‘She doesn’t know about my father ?’ I asked, astonished, because they told each other everything. She hesitated for a moment then said: ‘She knows about him, she just doesn’t know he was your father.’ ‘Then who am I?’ I asked. ‘You’re the son of some client or other, you showed up at the bank one day and started flirting with me.’ Then she smiled. ‘That’s more or less the truth, isn’t it?’

She had a past, I had a past, though I didn’t know what to do with it. I still had no solution when I looked at my watch again and realised that I had completely lost my skills in mental arithmetic.

‘You’re late.’ She was leaning against the wall and didn’t move.

‘It’s not even five minutes. In Spain that’s not considered late,’ I argued. ‘How are you?’

‘Pff ! . . .’ She stepped away from the wall with a weary, almost pained expression. ‘I’m exhausted. I don’t even feel like eating, that says something . . .’

Stepping into her apartment, she didn’t even hang her bag on the coat hook by the door as usual, but carried it over her shoulder into the bedroom, where she let it fall to the floor before collapsing on the bed. I went over and took off her shoes.

‘Do you want me to take off your clothes?’

‘Yes.’ She opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘Please.’

‘It’s like I said to Fernando, she has only one fault,’ I talked as I undressed her, ‘don’t get me wrong, she’s a wonderful girl, but she has one failing, she drinks, but what can you do? She likes a drink, and when she drinks, well . . .’

I lay down next to her but she was already asleep. I fell asleep shortly afterwards, and still everything seemed OK. It was only later that the screw came loose, that cracks began to appear, that the well-oiled machine we had been until then began to creak. I was awake and Raquel slept on; I liked to watch her sleep; Raquel slept naked, abandoned to her nakedness, so accessible, and vulnerable, so confident and desirable that it was almost painful to look at her. And my eyes yielded to the dictates of this painful desire, wounded by this hostile, alien image, this other image, something I had never seen when looking at Raquel, this extraordinary woman who was so ordinary if ordinary was defined by me.

That afternoon, as I watched Raquel, I imagined her, conjured her in gestures, positions and situations which, to someone other than me, would have seemed perverse and obscene, a young woman slipping into a Jacuzzi surrounded by candles where a man old enough to be her grandfather was waiting. To someone other than me, because I had appropriated these images, my gaze had incorporated them as useful elements in the creation of an intimacy which had its rules, its own language, its own grammar, its own syntax. Raquel and I didn’t talk about sex, we didn’t need to, but she liked to describe her pleasure, to define it with an expression of almost childlike joy: wow, that’s great, that’s . . . We didn’t talk about sex, we had sex, spontaneously, impulsively, wordlessly, to the point of exhaustion. I had never known such pleasure, or given such pleasure to any woman. This had been the nucleus of the endless ties that bound us. Every day, I learned new things about Raquel, and nothing had induced me to change even the smallest detail of the rules of our shared intimacy.

Nor did it happen that afternoon, by which time I knew of the woman sleeping next to me the way a talented musician knows his instrument. It wasn’t that, nor was it the fault of some
thing -
the Jacuzzi, the candles, the purple rubber dildo. No, it was something else, something vague and difficult to pin down, something about the precise point where three identities intersected - mine, Raquel’s and my father’s - but where there were only two attitudes, two ways of seeing the world, of thinking about things including sex. It was a question of identity, of attitude. If Raquel Fernández Perea was truly the woman I knew, the body with which my own body intertwined, which opened to my least touch, then she could not be this other woman, the woman I imagined alone in the apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan, the stranger lighting the last candle before slipping naked into the water, resting her head against a pile of pillows, her legs spread wide and a broad smile that showed the gap between her teeth.

At that moment, Raquel woke; she smiled without opening her eyes and pulled me to her, reached out her hand until it grazed my penis, stroked it with a finger, then two, caressed it with her palm before closing her hand around it, and only then did she meet my gaze, her eyes wide, her lips an almost perfect circle. She breathed a sigh and began to purr as she often did. I recognised the signs; what I did not recognise was myself, the unfamiliar, borrowed gestures with which I tried to put her to the test and succeeded only in proving my own weakness.

‘Stop, Álvaro.’ She opened her eyes and drew her legs together.

Raquel Fernández Perea had never done anything to stop me, had never imposed limits, but this was not me, and she realised that.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re looking at me the way your father did.’ She covered herself with the sheet, turned her back and stared at the wall. ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later. And the worst thing is, it’s only what I deserve.’

I loved this woman. I loved her so much that sometimes it confused and overwhelmed me. Suddenly I was myself again, and I went to her, slipped under the sheet, put my arms around her and kissed her over and over, begged her to forgive me, told her I loved her. ‘Say it again,’ she said, and I said it over and over until I was hoarse.

At that moment I understood the full meaning of what I had said, something I would have to learn to live with, to love her in spite of Fernando’s disbelief, just as I had learned to love her in the shadow of my father’s ghost. And as the world resumed its course, running gently like water, I realised that the best thing for both of us would be if I never found out the true nature of Raquel Fernández Perea’s relationship with Julio Carrión González, I realised that the solution to the problem we were both thinking about at that moment had nothing to do with me.

And so I discovered the precise colour of fear, felt in the pit of my stomach the exact volume of nothingness it takes to fill the void.

O
n 12 September 1949, the sky clouded over suddenly in mid-afternoon. When the first clap of thunder came, Julio Carrión González was leaning against the granite columns of the porch of the Casa Rosa, the most beautiful house in the village, watching the taxi driver struggle to secure the boxes and trunks on the roof of the car. The second thunderclap boomed a few seconds before the rain came and the taxi driver gave up.

‘I’m sorry, señora, but you’re going to have to take this one with you.’

Mariana Fernández Viu did not reply. She took no notice of the suitcase he set down at her feet. Taut, like a dead woman, she stared at her enemy and clutched her bag as though it contained her last hope, the one thing that might save her from tumbling into the abyss. But there was nothing in her bag that could save her. Julio knew that, and so he could stand, patient, smiling, and stare into those eyes that burned with hate. He had seen much greater hatred in eyes more beautiful than these. ‘Ruin her, destroy her, and when you’re done, tell her I sent you. This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Paloma?’ he thought as he lit a cigarette. ‘Never let it be said that I don’t keep my promises . . .’

‘
Señora
, please! Get a move on, we’ll get drenched!’

The taxi driver ventured to put a hand on her shoulder as the rain began to fall. Finally, Mariana lowered her head and climbed into the car. When, a moment later, the engine roared into life, the man smoking on the porch thrilled at the sound. That man had come to the end of his journey, a journey that had been long and tortuous, but none of that mattered now. He had finally made it: Julio Carrión González, the son of an alcoholic shepherd and a political prisoner who had died in jail, was rich, he was a gentleman.

‘It’s theft, Julio,’ Eugenio had said, in his eyes the fierce glint of integrity he knew of old. ‘Even if it’s legal, even if everyone is doing it, it’s still theft and I’ll have nothing to do with it.’

Eugenio Sánchez Delgado was the first person Julio sought out when he returned to Madrid in April 1947. Before that, he had gone to see his father, or what was left of his father, a gaunt, bewildered thing, just one more useless stick of furniture in a house that was filthy, filled with broken fragments salvaged from a previous life that were carefully arranged on the same tables and shelves as before.

‘Father . . .’

The first thing Julio recognised was a cracked glass vase, then the yellowed tablecloth, an old coffee grinder with the handle missing. Everything was dark with layers of dust, slick with rancid grease. The air stank of mildew and misery.

‘Father . . .’

Julio crossed the room and noticed that Benigno smelled even worse than his surroundings. The old man did not look up, did not move when a gust of wind whipped away the old newspapers, sending terrified cockroaches scattering for safety. Julio had to shake his father, but Benigno was so drunk he didn’t recognise him.

‘How did you get in here? Who are you?’ It was painful to make out what he was saying, more difficult still to see the blackened teeth, smell the stale breath.

‘It’s Julio, Father, your son.’ Benigno studied him more carefully. ‘How can you live like this, Father ?’ In answer, he got only a weak, befuddled look. ‘You didn’t spend my money, did you, Father?’ Neither of them moved, fused in a moment of permanent sadness. Then Benigno lowered his head to sip from a glass of clear iridescent liquid. Julio ripped it from his hands, dipped his fingers into it and smelled them. At least it was cheap, the dregs.

‘All right, Father, I’ve had enough of this.’ Benigno did not even try to move his head. ‘Come on, get up!’

Julio lifted him by his armpits and hauled his father to his feet. It was 11 a.m., but Julio couldn’t tell whether his father had been to bed, or had got up early and started drinking, or had been so drunk the night before he hadn’t made it to bed. It didn’t matter. There was a mattress with a filthy blanket on the floor by the kitchen door. Julio was so heartsick, he laid his father there and went out into the yard. There were no chickens now, just rows of empty cages, most of the doors hanging open. But the bags were where they had always been. He filled one with out-of-date newspapers and all the broken ornaments he had seen when he first arrived, then headed upstairs. His old bedroom was as dusty as the rest of the house, but no one had touched it. His bed was made, his old school books and few toys were untouched, and a handful of photos of naked women remained at the back of the drawer where he had hidden them. This did not console him - quite the opposite. He suddenly felt faint, and opened a window, splashed water on his face, then went out into the street, where he could breathe.