The Frozen Heart (114 page)

My blood was pumping so fast it felt as if my veins were about to collapse.

‘That’s not true, Rafa. I did my first thesis with a scholarship from the university, and by the time I went to Boston, I was a professor and I’d been earning a salary for four years.’

‘Oh yes, your salary! I’m sorry, I forgot.’ He laughed again. ‘You get a state subsidy, Alvaro, as if you were a motorway ... You’d prefer to think it was that instead of thinking it was Papá’s money. That way you can be pure and good and enlightened, that way Alvaro can concentrate on important things and all the little immigrant kids from San Sebastián de los Reyes get to enjoy the fruits of capitalism once a month pissing about in your fucking museum: “Why does the ramp thing go down? Why does that light go out? Why is it moving more slowly now?’”

‘Shut up, Rafa!’ I launched myself at him, grabbed the lapel of his jacket in both hands. ‘You should be ashamed, talking like that, I’m ashamed to listen to you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, look,’ still mimicking a high-pitched voice, his eyes wide in feigned astonishment, ‘the earth is going round and round.’

‘Shut the fuck up.’ Then suddenly I found myself saying what I had long thought. ‘You’re the lowest of the low, do you know that? You’re contemptible, Rafa. You disgust me. You’re proud of being what you are, an animal. You’re ignorant and you’re happy knowing nothing, you wish everyone was like you, you want people to live without ever wondering why things happen ... You’re worse than Papá.’

‘Get your hands off me, Alvaro.’

‘Much worse, you’re harder, more cynical ... And it’s different for you, because you had the choice.’ I relaxed my grip. ‘You represent everything I despise in this world, you and people like you ...’

‘Let go of me!’

I let go, and he punched me. He swung hard and hit my right eye, but I didn’t feel anything, because by now my body was filled with violence, power, anger. I took the blow and ran at him like an enraged bull. He fell and I hurled myself on top of him, lashing out with both fists, so focused that there was nothing he could do to defend himself. He covered his face with his hands but I went on hitting him, one two, one two, his head juddering from side to side as the blows rained down, and I felt the sinister thrill of my strength, his weakness, the insatiable desire to keep hitting him and never stop.

‘Álvaro, please ... for God’s sake.’

My sister’s voice brought me back from that distant place. I heard Angelica screaming, saw her fall to her knees beside me. She was crying now, tugging at my sleeve, I could hear her, feel the pressure of her fingers, but I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t, because I could not take my eyes from Rafa, lying there under me, his face covered in blood, his arms lying lifeless by his sides. There was blood on my hands, I could feel an ache in my knuckles, but there was nothing more. Suddenly all the confusion, the anger, the emotion vanished and I found myself alone with my own version of horror. It had been more than twenty years since I’d been in a fight, and I had never hit anyone the way I hit Rafa.

‘I knew it.’

Then I heard someone come up behind me, grip me under the arms, and haul me off Rafa.

‘I told you, Alvaro, I knew this would happen, I know him a lot better than you do ...’

It was Julio. As soon as we had started yelling, the secretary had opened the door and was so terrified by what she saw that she had rushed off to find him. Now here he was, his arm still holding me in a bear hug. Rafa struggled to sit up, brought his hands to his face and howled in pain. ‘You’ve broken my fucking nose, you bastard!’ His voice was thick and slurred.

‘Let me have a look ...’ Angelica touched his face gingerly, ignoring his protests. ‘No ... I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s very swollen. We’ll have to put something on it. Come on, get up, here, let me help you.’ She tried but she could not move him. ‘Julio, give me a hand.’

They each took one arm and pulled Rafa to his feet. I watched, like an innocent bystander looking at the pain someone else had caused.

‘I’m taking you to the hospital, Rafa, you need to be checked over. That cut on your lip is going to need stitches, and your eyebrow too, but it’s nothing serious, there are no broken bones, so there’s no need to worry ...’ For the first time in my life, I was grateful for my sister’s punctilious, overbearing character. ‘But first I need to clean up your face, let’s go to the bathroom, Julio, you come with us ...’ Then she turned to me. ‘Don’t go anywhere, Alvaro, please ... I want to talk to you.’

Julio turned to me as though he’d forgotten I was still there and before I could follow them, he came over, put his hand on my head and kissed me on the cheek. He didn’t say anything, he just walked away, leaving me alone in this vast office where it had all started, Papá and Raquel, truth and lies. My sister quickly reappeared.

‘Alvaro ...’

I was expecting her to read me the Riot Act and I was prepared to accept it, because I deserved it. Rafa had hit me first, but I didn’t just hit him back, I had lost control. As she said my name, however, wiping her hands on a paper towel, I sensed in her voice a nervous tremor of confession.

‘Álvaro, I just wanted to say ...’ She twisted the paper towel in her hands, staring at it as though it demanded all her attention, but then she had a better idea. ‘Here, let me take a look at that eye first.’

She came over to me and wiped my face with a clean corner of a tissue, then touched it gently.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, ‘you’ll have a black eye, but there’s no bleeding ... Álvaro, I want to ask you a favour, all those things you told us about Papá, about Grandma ... well, I realise how important it is to you, honestly, I do, but ... Maybe you don’t understand, I know he wouldn’t understand but I’d really rather Adolfo didn’t find out, I’d be grateful if you didn’t say anything, because ...’ By now the paper tissue was a sodden mass and she balled it into her fist. ‘A lot of time has passed and Adolfo, well, he still thinks about his grandfather a lot, he’s obsessed with him, and it wouldn’t do him any good to know ...’

She finally looked at me, and what she saw in my eyes spurred her on. A moment earlier, I had felt no more solid than the paper towel she had just ripped to shreds, but now I could feel a warmth coursing through my body and a sudden, mysterious serenity.

‘Go to hell, Angelica.’

I said it calmly, without raising my voice, then I turned and walked out.

W
hen Mariví buzzed through to say someone had arrived to discuss the letter she had sent to Julio Carrión’s widow, Raquel Fernández Perea was so nervous she felt sick, but she composed herself quickly, as though her visitor was already sitting on the other side of the desk. She picked up the phone and quickly dialled an extension number.

‘Aunt Angelica is here. She’s here.’

‘But,’ Paco Molinero hesitated only for a second, ‘surely she should have phoned to make an appointment?’

‘She should have, but she’s clearly decided just to show up. It can’t be a good sign.’

‘Why do you think that? Don’t worry, Raquel, I’m sure everything will be fine.’

But it was Alvaro Carrion Otero and not his mother who was knocking on the door of her office.

‘She’s here. I’ve got to go ...’

‘Good luck.’

When she had left the solicitor’s office, the proud owner of a luxury apartment she had no intention of ever living in, Raquel had already sensed that Julio Carrion would not survive his heart attack. She knew that there was a good chance her second visit had been the death of this man, but although she found it hard to believe, she didn’t care. If he had spent fifty years without feeling so much as a shred of guilt, she was not about to start feeling guilty now. On the contrary, it would have been a fitting, even a happy, ending to her grandfather’s story were it not for the fact that Carrión’s death would put paid to her plans.

Dead dogs don’t bite. As the man who should have been her victim lay dying, Raquel often thought of this expression, which she had heard so often in Paris in every Spanish accent possible after Franco died, as her family dragged her to visit hundreds of friends, and each time there would be a glass of champagne, a slice of tortilla, and always the same toast:
‘Muerto el perro, se acabó la rabia’.
But it was not true, and she felt a rage well within her at the thought that Julio Carrion was going to win again, though it would cost him his life. Just the thought of it made her angry, but her anger provided the solution. When she realised that the anger she felt was not her, but a passion she had inherited from her grandfather, it reminded her that while neither sin nor blame can be inherited, debts can be. Working as she did for a bank, it was something she knew better than anyone.

It would have been easy for her to attack Julio Carrión’s children since she knew what they looked like, where they worked. Sebastian would kick up a fuss, but in the end he would take her to their offices. It seemed a workable hypothesis, but she shelved the idea, not because it was unfair, but because she thought she might be wrong about them, because she had never forgotten the incident with the red-haired doll in the green dress. Clara Carrion was the same age as she was, and though her brothers were older, they were all of the same generation, the first generation of Spaniards not to live in fear. And fear was key, it was a necessary condition if her plan was to succeed. Were it not for the fact that Julio Carrion González had been afraid — that same fear which had paralysed Anita Salgado Pérez at the mere thought of her husband visiting Carrion thirty years previously — then the speech Raquel had learned by heart, rehearsed in front of a mirror, would barely have raised a worried smile. Everything she had said was true. The bookshops were full of books about the war and the post-war period, every month there was some new documentary about it, judges were constantly issuing exhumation orders for victims of Franco’s reign of terror, the state was paying reparations to republican organisations and unions whose assets had been seized after the civil war, but to take advantage of this upheaval would require more than a battered leather folder full of documents in the hands of an economist with no publishing contacts.

What Raquel had, though important to her, would have seemed trivial to a journalist because there were so many stories like it — stories more shocking, more incredible, more spectacular — that the tragedy the Fernández Muñoz family had suffered would seem unremarkable in the face of the great national tragedy. It was brutal, it was hard, but that was how it was. She knew this, and she knew that even if she went out herself and staked out the offices of every publisher and newspaper in the country and finally found someone prepared to publish her story, the consequences, far from destroying the Carrion family, would be little more than a temporary hitch. The future of the Grupo Carrion would not be tainted by revelations about its founder’s past, Raquel Fernández Perea was certain of that, but she had played and she had won, or she would have had death not snatched victory from her.

Raquel had bet everything on Julio Carrion González’s fear and he was afraid, he had always been afraid. That morning, in his office, Raquel realised that his reaction had nothing to do with her threats, it was the result of a deep-rooted fear. For years and years, Julio Carrion had been waiting for Ignacio Fernández Muñoz to carry out his threat, steeling himself to withstand the final blow. Her grandfather had been right after all. He had robbed Julio of his sleep and in doing so he had fostered the ideal circumstances in which his granddaughter could finish the task.

But what had worked on the father would not work on his children. Raquel could picture herself giving her little speech and imagined their response: ‘Really? Fine, you go ahead, do what you like.’ They would not be afraid, and their equanimity would leave her defenceless. All that remained was the mother, the widow, the chief beneficiary of Julio Carrion Gonzalez’s fortune, the daughter of ‘The Toad’, the blonde, blue-eyed girl whom everyone in the house had been worried about because she was never scared when she heard the air-raid sirens, she would stay wherever she was and go on playing. For Angelica, born in 1935, the wail of the sirens was so routine there had seemed little point in being scared. This was all that Raquel knew about this woman, that and the fact that she had found fine food difficult to digest. Her constitution was so accustomed to eating black bread and lentils that the first time they gave her anything more nourishing, she went to bed with severe stomach cramps.

Anita, her grandmother, had never told Raquel how Angelica had come to marry Carrion. She did not know that Mariana Fernandez Viu did not contact her uncle and aunt either before or after Julio Carrion came home, but in 1949, the night before she took the train back to her parents’ house in Galicia, Mariana had gone to see Casilda García Guerrero, her cousin Mateo’s widow. Casilda had kept in constant contact with the Fernández Muñoz family since the war ended, even after she remarried. During the hard times, when she lived alone with her son in a dingy attic flat on the Calle Ventura de la Vega, she had sometimes been forced to go cap in hand to Mariana when she had no work, or her son was ill. Whenever she did, The Toad gave her barely enough to survive on and she had never dared ask for more.

It was through Casilda that the Fernández family found out what was happening in Madrid. It was Casilda who wrote to relay what Mariana - having tracked her down through one of her brothers who worked in a café — had told her. By then, Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva and his wife and children already knew, from the lawyer they had hired, that Julio Carrion González had robbed them of everything they owned except the house in Torrelodones. It was Casilda who informed them that Julio Carrion had just thrown their niece out on the street, that Mariana had suggested she might represent their legal interests in Spain to try to claw back what she could, and that Casilda had told her to go to hell. ‘Maybe I was wrong,’ she wrote, ‘but I’m sure that bastard Carrion has arranged things so that there’s no way of getting anything back. If you want me to write to The Toad, I have her address ...’ They all knew there was nothing to be done, and that even if there had been, it would have been to Mariana’s advantage, not theirs. They did not trust her any more than they trusted Carrion, and they somehow felt happier to think that things had ended like this, rather than the two of them dividing the spoils. And so, when the news came, they were caught unawares.