The Frozen Heart (95 page)

In 1958, Rafael, their first child, was born; he was blond and pale with blue eyes like his mother. A year later, Angélica arrived, with green eyes and a complexion of translucent pink, utterly unlike her father. Finally, in 1961, he had a son who seemed to look like him, and they christened him Julio, after his father. But although Julio had dark eyes and resembled his father in his gestures, as time went by his hair grew lighter and his skin paler. Then, in 1965, Angélica became pregnant for the fourth time.

In November, she gave birth to another son. He had black hair, olive skin and, beyond the usual ambiguity of all babies, he had something about him that made all those who came to see him at the hospital exclaim, ‘He’s the spitting image of you, Julio, honestly, I’ve never seen a baby who looks so like his father . . .’

Julio would simply smile, but he felt a particular satisfaction when he held his fourth child, Álvaro Carrión Otero, who would, in time, become his favourite son.

‘
I
never slept with your father, Álvaro.’

Suddenly I felt a terrible urge to laugh and a terrible urge to cry, but I did neither. I sat motionless, unable to think, to speak, to feel anything at all. I was here, and I had heard. Raquel was here and she had spoken. This was all that I knew, all I could grasp. Then, seeing her curled into a ball on the far edge of the bed with her back to me, like a lost, abandoned girl, I knew I had to do something.

I moved towards her, put a hand on her shoulder and turned her towards me, and she let me, not helping, not resisting, as though her body were uncoupled from her spirit. Raquel Fernández Perea, the love of my life, belonged to me and me alone, she belonged to me not to my father, she was mine more than she had ever been. I hugged her hard, pressed her to me, I held her for a long time, but I could not save her from this stillness as absolute as that of sleep or death. I watched her breathe, felt her breath against my neck, savoured the peace of this embrace, but I could still see the eyes of the man who had shadowed her through the streets, in doorways, by telephone, as though searching for his own life. The man who at this very moment should be kissing this woman, wanted to kiss her, yet couldn’t.

I had to do something, but my mind was teeming with memories, some static, some moving, whole scenes and fragments of scenes, whole sentences and isolated words.
I’m sorry, I was expecting your mother ... Álvaro, for a physicist, you have a vivid imagination ... Aren’t you scared? ... When he smiled, your father looked like a child’s drawing of the sun ... What must you think of me? ... She is right for you, Álvaro, you’re right for each other. But you’re nothing like your father. The person she’s wrong for - I mean absolutely wrong for - is him. Don’t tell me it hadn’t occurred to you . . .

Somewhere beyond my consciousness, beyond the shock, the urge to lash out, the blind fury of a bull that, having realised the cape is just a decoy, now longs for revenge, I could feel the faint throb of my pride, this useless but persistent relic of the honest, ordinary guy I used to be. I didn’t want to think, but I could remember the sequence of my intuitions, and I remembered the moment when I realised that the worst thing that could happen would be for me to know the true nature of Raquel’s relationship with my father. Now, on the brink of that abyss, I was overjoyed to know that I had never shared this woman with Julio Carrión González, and that joy terrified me, it threatened the future I had been prepared to live out in the unbearable shadow of a repugnant passion.

Without wanting to, I thought about all these things as I held Raquel in my arms. I could tell she was more terrified than I was, because she knew everything, she had known from the start, known everything except maybe that she would fall in love with me, and that I would fall in love with her. It was then that I realised the true extent of my misfortune, the pitiless cruelty of a defeat I had not even begun to suffer because love, my love, would never be enough to slay the dragon, because all my love, all my ordinary words, would never be enough to fill the silence it was born in, the silence in which it had grown strong. And I was guilty of not wanting to know, of not asking, of evading those questions which had only one answer. It would have been easy: When did you first meet my father, Raquel ? Where? How did you end up having an affair with him? How long did it last? It would have been easy, but I had chosen an easier path.

For a moment, I thought that maybe I could choose to do nothing. I pictured the scenario: ‘It doesn’t matter, nothing matters, I don’t need to know, all that matters is that I love you, Raquel, so let’s get up, get dressed, and let’s go home, let’s go and sleep in your apartment on the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps, and we’ll never mention this again . . .’

It’s not easy to bury the dead, to watch the gravediggers, the predictable, hypocritical expression of condolence they put on when their eyes accidentally meet those of the bereaved, the sound of the shovels, the grating of the coffin against the sides of the grave, the quiet whisper of the ropes being paid out. It’s not easy to bury the dead, but it is easy to put them in a tomb deeper than the earth, deeper than any cemetery.
Your grandmother was a schoolteacher, she was a good woman, she loved her husband, she loved to play the piano
. I could do the same thing, I could take my head from Raquel’s shoulder, kiss her with all the care that such a kiss requires, then, asking no questions, I could lay my head on her shoulder again, in the warm security my love had built for her.

I could choose to do nothing, I could pretend to do nothing, behave as though I had forgotten her dishonesty, convince myself that I had not colluded in her lies, and go on living in the convivial silence of those who prefer not to act, not to know, not to ask. But I loved this woman. Loved her so much that, sometimes, the love I felt for her confused and overwhelmed me. I loved her so much that I could not disregard the reason she had run away, her secret, nor could I condemn her to some half-life, a fantasy content in what it did not know.

‘Talk to me, Raquel.’ I lifted my head from her. ‘Say something, please ...’

‘I don’t know where to start . . .’

I leaned back against the pillows, lit a cigarette and waited.

Raquel is hurting more than you are, Berta had told me, and I hadn’t believed her, I couldn’t imagine anything could hurt more than the uncertainty I felt, but now, as I watched her suffer, watched her grow paler, and more distraught, as frightened as a lab rat in a cage, I did not like it.

‘It doesn’t matter where you start. I’m on your side.’

‘You don’t know that yet, Álvaro.’

‘I do know,’ she was right, I didn’t know, but I could compensate for this lie with a greater truth, ‘because I don’t want you to leave me again.’

She closed her eyes and nodded several times, like a little girl accepting her punishment.

‘The first thing my grandfather Ignacio did after he slept with my grandmother Anita was to teach her to read and write.’ She spoke calmly, with no hesitation, with no trace of shame, or tears. ‘She was eighteen years old, but she was illiterate because she’d grown up in the mountains, miles from the nearest village. Her father was a forester, and he couldn’t afford to send her to school. Ignacio was six years older than she was, he was a law student, but he gave up his degree in his third year in order to enlist. They met in Toulouse, during the Second World War, my grandmother had no papers and my great-grandmother had taken her in, and he was hiding there, because he had just escaped from a labour camp. He escaped a lot of times from a lot of different places. Since they didn’t have any Spanish reading books, my grandfather sent Anita out to buy two exercise books and then he made one for her. He’d taught a lot of soldiers to read and write, so he knew the books by heart. The first sentence my grandmother ever read by herself was: Anita is a little apple. He wrote it to make her laugh.’

She stopped with her grandmother’s laugh and looked at me to gauge my reaction. I was in no hurry, and when she saw this, she nodded again.

‘This was the first thing I should have told you. And I nearly did tell you that afternoon when you took me to the museum, when that ugly little girl who’d found something she didn’t understand came over to talk to us . . .’

‘Was she ugly?’ I interrupted her, and saw her smile for the first time in a long while.

‘Very ugly. Don’t you remember ?’

‘I remember her, but I don’t remember thinking she was ugly.’

‘Well, she was. She had a face like a fish . . .’

‘And was very intelligent.’

‘Yes,’ Raquel said, ‘that’s what you said at the time, an intelligent girl, it makes all my work worthwhile. Remember ? And you were so happy that I nearly told you about my grandmother, about the exercise books, because . . . suddenly you reminded me of them, of the people I was always hearing stories about . . . It was like I’d seen it before - no, it was like I’d been told the story before. When I was little, I heard a lot of stories like that. Maybe you don’t understand, but that was all they had left, their culture. Education, education, education, they always said, it was like their motto, it was like a magic spell that could change the world, make everybody happy. They’d lost everything and they’d come through it by working in schools, in bakeries, as telephone operators, things they were grossly overqualified for, but at least they had their education. At least they’d always have that, and they never forgot, not even afterwards, when my grandfather finished his law studies, when he got a job with a legal practice, or when he set up on his own with a French friend and finally started to make some money. My grandmother was even more amazing, because she qualified as a nursery school teacher. She did it for years and years, she was the one who taught me the alphabet - well, not just me, my brother, my sister, all our cousins . . .’

‘She taught Annette?’

‘Yes. Actually, now that I think of it, Annette really liked you. When she came to say goodbye and gave me your note, she was completely on your side. She said you were very charming, and practically suicidal. She asked me how I could treat you like that, what you’d done that I was being so hard on you. And I told her you hadn’t done anything . . .’ Her voice trailed off and she looked away. ‘I told her I was the one who had done something . . . I should have told you about my grandparents that first afternoon, Álvaro, but I didn’t dare. I was afraid you’d ask questions . . . That’s why I always said I didn’t want to talk about your father. I really liked you, it had been a long time since I’d really been attracted to someone, and I didn’t want to spoil it, I didn’t want to ruin everything before it had even started, and since you’d said you didn’t want to talk about him either, I just thought, fine. I was an idiot. I should have known. Everything that happened after that point was my fault. I should have told you the truth from the very beginning. But I was afraid and now . . . It’s all my fault.’

Until that moment, the smiles in Raquel’s voice had soothed my bruised soul, had sutured my wounds with the promise that they would heal completely. We were in the apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan, the apartment my father had given Raquel, though I didn’t yet know when or why. I hadn’t forgotten, but I didn’t want to lose Raquel, I didn’t want to give up on this story, which seemed too long, too long ago, to end up in a place as small as the distance between us. So I sat up and hugged her, pulled her to me, and I threw her a lifeline she had not asked for.

‘You were at your grandmother’s place in Madrid ?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew it, I swear I knew you were there . . .’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, I just knew. And I drove through Canillejas often, believe me. Not for any particular reason, obviously, I don’t know the area well, I was just driving around hoping I might see you. Did you see me?’

‘No.’

‘But you wouldn’t have spoken to me anyway.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you were at your grandmother’s place, I’m sure you would have, I’m sure she would have sided with me . . .’

‘Don’t you believe it. She . . . oh . . .’

Then she did exactly what she had done when I had begged her to say something, as though she couldn’t talk and hold me at the same time; she pulled away, covered her face with her hands then let them slip down her until they were resting on her thighs.

‘Tell me one thing, Álvaro.’ Her voice was suddenly grown up, serious. ‘Do you know who I am?

‘Well . . .’ I was so flustered that I couldn’t bring myself to give the obvious answer, but she understood my silence.

‘No, I don’t mean that, obviously you know who I am, I’m Raquel Fernández Perea, I live on the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps. I mean . . . before you knew me. Didn’t you ever hear the name Fernández Muñoz? Did your parents ever mention it?’

‘I don’t know . . .’ I thought for a moment because I sensed that this question was vitally important, and I wanted to be certain before I answered. ‘No, I don’t think so. I mean, they’re common enough names, but . . . No, I don’t remember my parents ever mentioning it.’

‘You didn’t talk about us at all,’ she said with a sad, bitter smile. ‘Well, that’s better for me, but not so good for you.’

‘Why?’

She didn’t answer straight away, as though she needed time to think.

‘Because what I’m going to say will catch you off guard, and you won’t like it,’ she spoke very slowly, ‘but otherwise it would have been worse for me. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, and I knew it wasn’t possible, I knew you couldn’t have known and had an affair with me without saying something . . . I knew it wasn’t possible, but I was afraid to ask you. Though, of course, it was possible, because . . .’ I didn’t dare interrupt because she was somewhere far off, in a place where all I could do was see her, hear her voice without understanding what she was saying, and then she suddenly looked up, looked into my eyes. ‘Do you remember me, Álvaro?’