The Frozen Heart (77 page)

That morning, Mai arrived to see how the work was going. She came during her lunch break every two or three days, and never stayed longer than ten minutes or so.

‘It’s like a madhouse!’ She hugged me and laughed. ‘I don’t know how you get any work done.’

‘This is nothing! The jackhammer in the early stages was much worse!’

The Poles were conscientious and hard working, and I had no problems with them. Mai was thrilled with the results, and talked about them on the way back to her office. Sometimes we had lunch together, sometimes with Angélica, sometimes just the two of us, and recently, for reasons she never quite explained, Mai sometimes had a little extra free time. On one of these afternoons, she skipped dessert, ordered coffee with an ice cube so she could drink it immediately, smiled at me and wondered aloud whether I might not reschedule by half an hour, since the library was hardly likely to be invaded by hordes of knowledge-hungry physicists mercilessly commandeering every book I needed.

At which point, my body suffered something akin to frostbite. It was the middle of summer, the weather was warm, but I felt my blood drain away and my veins fill up with some icy, metallic gas. But I would smile, and everything would be fine. It had to be fine, since Mai was still looking at me with the same expectant smile she had when giving Miguelito a surprise present. ‘I thought you might enjoy a less - um - cerebral siesta.’ I realised that that was precisely what she was doing: giving me a surprise present. And I tried to behave like a well-mannered child, I was effusive in my thanks, displaying a gallantry that at the time she did not find suspect.

These impromptu quickies had the virtue of being so infrequent that it was as though my wife and my mistress had swapped roles, and were also impeded by the collusion of the Polish builders, hammering, pounding and drilling, and chattering in a foreign language on the other side of the bedroom door.

‘I suppose it is difficult to concentrate here these days,’ Mai admitted.

I nodded enthusiastically and continued applying myself to this bizarre exercise in concentration until I had delivered satisfactory results, although it was beginning to require more and more effort on my part.

Mai didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. At first, the state of frenzied excitement aroused in me by the mere existence of Raquel meant that conjugal duties were no problem. Later, my cock became a little more demanding, but by then the pressure of this professorship I was working towards came to my rescue. In the end, even during the act itself, I would feel the terrible void of the holidays looming and start to tremble, but even then Mai seemed to see nothing worrying about my sudden lack of muscle tone. Raquel, on the other hand, recognised the symptoms.

‘You’ve been fucking your wife.’

She would guess even before I stepped inside, as she stood in the doorway.

‘No,’ I’d lie brazenly. After all, how could she know?

‘Yes . . .’ She would step aside to let me in, close the door, put her arms around me and gaze deeply into my eyes. ‘Yes you fucking have.’

‘How can you tell ?’

‘Because . . . I can tell. I can smell it, Álvaro.’

‘I’ve just had a shower.’

‘You see? That’s how I can tell.’

‘I took a shower because it’s five o’clock, its sweltering outside, and I knew I had to walk here,’ I explained, adopting my most scholarly tone.

‘OK. And because you’ve just been fucking your wife.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’ Her certainty rattled me; I was so angry that she was right that I responded with the abrupt and insolent logic of a child.

‘If you’re going to be like that, I’m going home.’ But she just laughed harder.

‘You don’t have to go. I’ve got TV. And I’ve got microwave popcorn ...’

But we didn’t turn on the TV, we didn’t microwave the popcorn, we went to bed, and we fucked, and we fucked, because the earth turned in her bed, because Time, molten and shifting, suspended the laws of physics in this bed where we made love, and because I loved this woman, loved her so much that afterwards, when she lay serene and silent next to me, I could calculate with blinding, almost painful accuracy the precise nature of fate.

Happiness is priceless. There is no task, no effort, no blame, no problem, that cannot be overcome when the goal is happiness. I knew this because I had been intimately familiar with greyness during my years of poverty, those years of believing my life was a life and that it was mine. So, when Raquel sat up and looked at me, and when I saw in her eyes a light that was the same and yet different, I realised that this sudden insistence had initiated the countdown, and I knew what I had to do, what I would do.

And yet there was something else. There was something more, something unrelated to Raquel, something beyond the scope of those looks that terrified me, insisting that I never again look at another woman. There was something more, but it was far beyond Madrid, outside this city, away from this refuge, which gradually faded as my car carried me closer to Castellana, away from her, to a place that seemed increasingly alien and strange, a place that made me ache me even before my son came running down the gravel driveway towards me like a bull out of a pen.

‘Papá!’ he yelled. I crouched down beside the garage and flung my arms wide.

‘Miguelito!’ He leapt frantically into my arms, trying to knock me down.

I had begun to understand my brother Julio a little better, his embarrassing, almost maternal love for his children, his constant, systematic self-denial designed to reassure them that he would always be their father, that they could always count on him, even when their respective mothers were no more than faint notches on his gun belt. It made my brother seem simultaneously more noble and more grudging, although it was good for his kids, obviously - and maybe that was the only thing that was important. Because one Sunday that summer, I no longer knew what to think of him, or me, or anything.

I had arrived at La Moraleja before lunch with a plan that I implemented as soon as I arrived. I put on my swimming trunks and went to find Mai at the pool. She was lying with her eyes closed, tanning herself, and she smiled when she felt my finger slowly travel down her body from her collarbone to her belly button. She sat up and said my name, and everything went according to plan. I hadn’t reckoned on Julio being there, so I didn’t pay him any attention when we sat down to lunch, Mai smiling and still flushed, me as happy as I was when I was a kid, after I’d done my homework and knew I could spend all day Sunday playing. I casually told Mai that I had to go back to Madrid that night, then she went for a siesta with Miguelito. While I was settling myself on the porch to read the paper, my brother stopped me.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked out of the blue.

‘Who?’

‘The girl who’s got you so worked up.’

‘Julio!’

I sat up with a jolt, looked around but saw we were alone.

‘Don’t worry, everyone else is taking a nap.’ He laughed, and proffered one of the Cuba libres he was holding. ‘Let’s try again: what’s her name?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Álvaro, please! I’m the expert in this family.’

‘Her name is Raquel, but tell me how you knew.’

‘You’re fairly good at hiding it, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ We heard a door close somewhere inside the house, and Julio dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I wasn’t completely sure, to be honest. I’ve thought you were behaving oddly, but what with the professorship and the fact that you always were a bit odd . . . But this morning . . . it was glaringly obvious, Álvaro . . .’

‘What was?’ I knew exactly what he was saying, but I wasn’t sure how he had spotted it.’

‘The defensive fuck.’ It was so funny, I laughed in spite of myself.

‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ I said, and he nodded.

‘Absolutely, no doubt about it. Do you know how often I’ve pulled that one? The spur-of-the-moment fuck to make sure I had the evening free, or the morning-after fuck so I’d be forgiven before anyone started asking awkward questions? Best thing you can do - a quick, hot-blooded fuck. Works every time. When I saw you down at the pool, I thought,
ah-ha!
And the best thing is, we’re only too happy to fuck them.’

‘Who?’ I was still laughing.

‘Our wives, who do you think?’

‘I’m not.’ Suddenly I was serious, and I saw the worry in his eyes. ‘I mean, maybe it’s because I’m odd, but more and more I’m finding I don’t want to.’

‘That’s worse, Álvaro.’ He came over and squeezed my shoulder. ‘Or better, depending how you look at it . . .’

The conversation left a bad taste in my mouth. I had never wanted to be like my father, nor did I want to be like my brother Julio, and yet I was starting to understand him. I thought about him when I was with Miguelito, I found I was more attentive to my son, and enjoyed my time with him more. Miguelito hadn’t yet turned five, and by the time he grew up, he would have only the vaguest memory of this summer, but I did my best to make sure my unconditional love was a part of that memory because sometimes, when I looked at him, I would unintentionally imagine myself with other children, mine and Raquel’s, and suddenly I felt a surge of pain and guilt, all the feelings Mai could not stir in me. This was why, when I arrived at La Moraleja, the first thing I did was crouch down, arms wide, and wait for him to throw himself at me.

There we stood on the porch, my whole family - or what I thought of as my whole family - my mother, my brothers, my sisters and their wives, their husbands, all happy to see me. And then I suddenly remembered what I knew and what I did not want to know, what I had wanted to forget and should not have forgotten, what Fernando Cisneros had noticed and what I had suspected. Raquel’s voice when she said I looked at her the way my father did. And I realised that the best thing, perhaps the only thing, would be if I never found out what had brought together my father and the woman I loved.

Then my mother kissed me, my wife kissed me, my brothers kissed me and we missed him, we would always miss him, our grief was a part of us, as I settled into telling them how well my life was going. ‘You must be thrilled, Mamá, having a son who might be a professor . . .’ Clara said. My mother looked at me and nodded, but I knew it did not matter to her. What was surprising was that it no longer mattered to me, because Raquel Fernández Perea had come into my life, as fate or death might come into your life.

And yet I sensed my father’s ghost more strongly in his house than anywhere else, a place I could be sure Raquel had never been, where she was his mistress, not mine. My grandparents’ wedding photo still hung in the same place, Teresa, young and confident, smiling broadly for the camera; the photo of my grandmother Mariana, who had not a whit of mystery about her, hugging my older brothers and sisters. I had never really looked at it before. I studied their faces, looked carefully at Mai and at my mother, and suddenly I saw Raquel, young, naked, slipping into the arms of an old man in a Jacuzzi surrounded by candles, and the image was so shocking, so unbearable, that I could not reconcile it with my memories. I started to choke, I felt as though I was suffocating, so I went to find Miguelito, to take him to buy sweets, to play football at the bottom of the garden, anything to get as far away as possible from this porch.

I thought that was enough, but one afternoon Lisette came down to the pool to talk to me. She was wearing one of those Brazilian bikinis that all but gave Julio a heart attack, and she was carrying Clara’s baby. She did not say anything until Miguelito was in the water, out of earshot.

‘Álvaro, baby, what’s the matter ? I can tell something’s up.’ Her smile was mischievous, almost malicious.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘what kind of thing?’

‘You don’t look at me any more.’

‘I’m looking at you right now, Lisette.’

‘I know, but you don’t look at me the way you used to.’

‘Oh, I see . . .’ I smiled back at her. ‘Well, I’ll try and do better in future . . .’

It was a Wednesday, one of my nephew’s birthdays, which was why I had come down to La Moraleja. I had been thinking of staying the night - so I would not have to stay on Saturday night - but Lisette’s comments had unsettled me and I couldn’t find the energy to make love to Mai before I left.

‘Jesus, this is a complete bitch.’ Staring at my mobile, I wandered over to Mai just as the strains of ‘Happy Birthday’ died away. ‘This is going to sound stupid, but I have to get back to Madrid tonight. I’ve just remembered that I’ve got a meeting with the director of the museum at half eight tomorrow morning.’

‘In July?’ My wife’s expression was less surprised than sardonic.

‘It’s a planning meeting for next term’s courses,’ I came back coolly.

‘But surely you can go straight from here,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s not much farther than it is from our place.’

‘I know, but the meeting is at the headquarters of the bank.’ I could see that she wasn’t convinced. ‘José Ignacio just sent me a text to remind me.’

Mai did not say anything, but she gave me a cold look, the first, and I thought this was bound to happen sooner or later. This was why I hadn’t blamed my quick getaway on the pressures of work or my nervousness at my fictitious but hugely useful application for professorship. I never forgot important meetings, as my wife knew only too well, having lived with me for almost ten years. I didn’t want to say any more, but I grabbed a phone and a sandwich and went into the bathroom to call José Ignacio before I left, because I knew that Mai would call him as soon as I was out of sight.

‘Put a sock in it, Álvaro,’ he said before I’d even had time to explain.

‘Please, José Ignacio, just this once. I’ve never asked you to do anything like this before.’

‘I don’t like the idea.’

‘I know, but I’m not asking you to lie, or to make something up ... all you have to do is say yes. A simple answer to a simple question, that’s all. I’m not even sure that Mai will phone you.’