The Frozen Heart (17 page)

‘Fine. But what use is it?’

‘I don’t know how anyone puts up with you . . .’ She laughed, she was much more beautiful when she laughed. ‘What use is it? It’s useful for knowing how things happen. It’s useful for trying to formulate rules that alleviate the existential angst of our existence on this insignificant speck of dust lost in the infinite universe. But, to bring it down to basics that even an economist can understand, it’s useful for determining natural disasters, for example. A disaster is what happens when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’

‘Wonderful,’ she applauded, clapping politely.

‘It is . . .’ I said. ‘Much more wonderful than what my brothers do for a living. Though a lot less useful to you, I’m afraid.’

At that moment, a symbolic bell announced the third and final round. She had won the first, I had won the second. The third was to be much longer than either of us could have known, there would be no winner, and it would change our lives for ever.

‘You think I’ve brought you here to get information from you about your father’s business,’ she ventured cautiously after a moment. ‘Things you don’t know, but your brothers could have told me.’

‘I don’t think that,’ I answered, grateful for the fact that for once she had decided to meet me head on. ‘I know it. You told me so earlier.’

‘Not exactly.’ She seemed calm.

‘But you knew my father through your work.’

‘Is that what you think?’ She smiled.

‘It’s one of the theories I’ve considered.’ Her smile had unsettled me, but I couldn’t back out now. ‘ . . . that my father was mixed up in some shady deal you were involved with. As his broker or his accessory or maybe just as a witness.’

She weighed my words for a moment.

‘Do you fancy dessert?’ I shook my head. ‘Coffee, then?’ She signalled to a waiter and ordered two coffees. ‘Your father was mixed up in some shady deals - every successful businessman is. But my relationship with your father had nothing to do with his business - shady or otherwise.’

‘Or . . .’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

‘Or?’ she asked.

‘Or . . .’

I tried a second time, and for a second time I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I had another theory, but I had been so sure that my first theory was right that the second had been no more than an act of masochism, a wild guess with nothing to back it up except that it was consistent with the evidence. The consequences, while not disastrous, nor beyond the bounds of possibility - in fact it was all too possible, especially in Spain, back then - would be difficult for my family to accept. I had had a nagging suspicion that had stayed with me since that moment when I first saw her in the cemetery at Torrelodones, before I even saw her up close, before I had had time to study her and notice a faint family resemblance in her profile, something vague and fleeting. Now that she was sitting opposite me, the feeling vanished like a bubble, and yet that first day something had prompted me to ask my mother whether she might be some distant relation, and that question had made her uncomfortable. Since then, I had become obsessed with the gap between her front teeth - something that linked her not to my father but to my mother, yet I could not get the idea out of my mind.

‘Or . . .’ I said eventually, ‘we could be related.’

‘Really?’ She smiled at first, and then looked serious. ‘How?’

‘No offence but . . . it occurred to me . . .’ I took a deep breath and said, ‘You might be my father’s daughter.’

She was drinking water and her immediate reaction, halfway between a gasp and a giggle, sent a spray of water over the table, and me.

‘Sorry.’ She laughed, wiping her face with her napkin. ‘You see? This is what happens when you have lunch with someone who doesn’t trust you.’

‘So you’re not my sister?’ I said, relieved, as she reached over and, with a dry corner of her napkin, wiped my chin. At that moment, in spite of the tension that hung over the apparently light-hearted scene, I realised that - leaving aside Thursday’s polite handshake - this was the first time Raquel Fernández Perea had touched me.

‘No, of course not.’ She laughed again. ‘It’s just that I thought about my father, poor man, and . . . My father’s name is Ignacio, he’s a telecommunications engineer and he’s twenty years younger than your father. They have nothing in common, really - I mean, it would be hard to imagine two more different men. My mother’s name is also Raquel, she studied history of art, she runs a picture-framing shop and as far as I know she’s always been a model wife.’

I kept my mouth shut. She went on laughing and shaking her head. I thought she was protesting too much, but nothing could have prepared me for what came next.

‘I have to say, Álvaro, that for a physicist, you have a vivid imagination . . .’

‘Physics requires a great deal of imagination,’ I said solemnly, though I realised I had already lost any last shred of authority. ‘Without it, there would be no progress.’

‘In any case . . . I don’t suppose I should have been too surprised. I was afraid you’d come out with something like that from the start.’ She looked at the waiter, scribbling in the air to indicate she wanted the bill. ‘I told you the story was trite and you’d be disappointed. At the end of the day human beings are boring and predictable . . . Besides, you explained it better than I ever could. The whole is only equal to the sum of its parts when the parts do not interact.’ She paused and looked at me. ‘Until now, you and I have been two parts of a whole, though we knew nothing about each other.’

The waiter brought the bill, she glanced at it, dropped two notes on to the tray, put her belongings back into her bag and took out a large, flashy, state-of-the-art key with a blue plastic tag.

‘Your father and I were lovers, Álvaro. So this . . .’ she pushed the key across the table ‘ . . . this is yours. The address is on the key ring.’

She looked at me one last time, then got up and walked out.

The Popular Front manifesto began with these words: ‘The Republic as conceived by the parties which make up the Popular Front is not a republic governed by motives of social or economic class, but a regime of democratic freedom motivated by the interests of the people and social progress.’

Constancia de la Mora,
In Place of Splendor
(New York, 1939-Mexico, 1944-Madrid 2004)

One night, in the café Gayango, we were drinking coffee, Juan Tomás, then leader of the ‘
flechas
’, airmen Terviño and Bergali and capitán Martínez from the Division. Díaz Criado arrived [. . .] Some moments later, a policeman arrived in a car - a man I had often seen at the Comisaría - with a folder. He sat beside him, took out some papers and started to read out a list of names. Díaz Criado nodded: ‘Him, him, OK. No, not him. That one, maybe, tomorrow.’ I remember perfectly that the policeman, so he would remember, made him clarify: ‘This one has a brother in custody too.’ ‘Yes, that one, yes.’ ‘He’s the one you saw the other day, the fat, bald one.’ ‘No, not him. Hang on . . . That one too.’ [. . .]

He said that, once he got going, it was all the same whether he signed a hundred death warrants or three hundred, what was important was to ‘rid Spain of the Marxists’. I heard him say: ‘Here, no one’s moved in thirty years.’

Antonio Bahamonde,
A Year with Queipo de Llano
(Memories of a Nationalist)
(Barcelona-Buenos Aires, 1938-Sevilla, 2005)

S
he has great legs. That was my first thought as I watched her walk away, say goodbye to the manager, and disappear through the door.

She fucked my father. That was my second thought, a split second before a wave of words, ideas, images, memories, suspicions and feelings broke over me. I called the waiter over and ordered a whisky, a double.

By the time I had downed half of it, I had remembered that I was not my brother Julio, nor was I my brother Rafa. So there would be no scandal, I said to myself. Poor Papá, it was his life, who was I to judge him, but what a bastard - eighty-three years old, fucking hell . . . Then I started to laugh, in a sort of euphoria mingled with astonishment, it was the only possible way I could react to news that shocking, so unexpected, so utterly irreconcilable with everything I knew, with the fragile, grief-stricken face of my mother as she told us over and over that she and my father had slept together for forty-nine years, forty-nine years in the same bed, and now what?

But, after all, what did I know? I thought about my own son Miguel, who wasn’t even four years old when I had gone, in mid-November 2004, to La Coruña for a three-day conference. I’d had no more desire to go than I had to throw myself out of a window, because my father had just come out of hospital and I was worried and, more than anything, exhausted. But still, I went to La Coruña, because the guy organising it was a friend of mine and I didn’t want to leave him in the lurch.

I’ll try to wangle it so I’m only there for one day, I’d told Mai before I left, I’ll see if they can bring the round-table discussion forward, and I did, I talked to the secretary as soon as I got there, but afterwards, over dinner, I ran into a delegate from Valencia I’d never met before but had heard a lot about from my colleagues - mostly bad things from the women, good things from most of the men, better than good in some cases. Naturally, I sided with the men on this one; not only was she attractive, she was intelligent, she was funny, she was married and she knew exactly what she wanted.

‘I’m a completely different person at conferences, you know,’ she said to me over a drink in the bar later. ‘It’s a strange phenomenon. I leave my house feeling good, feeling calm, but as soon as I arrive, I can’t help it . . . I look around thinking, let’s see . . . who am I going to fuck tonight? I’m mean, physics conferences are full of men, and there are so few women. I’ve no idea how art historians survive these things,’ she added, ‘I suppose they end up slashing their wrists . . .’

She was so straight with me that I wondered whether she had already slept with every other delegate at the conference, but I didn’t care, because in situations like this it didn’t matter to me if I was just another notch on someone’s gun. The next morning, over breakfast, I realised that I’d been wrong; it became obvious that although many were called few were actually chosen. Though this did not change the way I saw things, it put me in a good mood, made all the better when the conference secretary told me that they could change the time of the round table but not for that day, because one of the guests was not arriving until Friday morning. ‘Oh, never mind, then!’ I said. ‘I’ll hang on, let’s keep to the original schedule.’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mai said to me. ‘It’s OK, Álvaro, it’ll take your mind off things, try to have fun.’

And I did have fun, so much fun that I didn’t have time to look for a toy shop to buy a present for my son. I ended up buying him a truck at the airport just before my flight left. Next to it in the shop window I saw a velvet-lined shawl in tones of red with long silk fringes that looked perfect for my wife. I was so sure she would like it I bought it in spite of the price - more than half of what I’d earned from the conference and the round table put together. As I paid, I felt calm, sure of what I was doing and my reasons for doing it, and guilt was not one of them. I’d often brought Mai gifts from trips when it had never even occurred to me to hook up with someone; just as often I’d not brought her anything, including after a trip to the Universidad de la Laguna when I didn’t even make it back to my hotel room the whole weekend. Although it wasn’t as much fun as La Coruña. Mai didn’t care if I didn’t bring her a present, but she always thanked me when I did. Although this shawl was something else.

This was why, when Raquel walked out that afternoon, leaving me alone with a double whisky, I thought about Miguelito, who wasn’t even four years old when he’d watched his mother take off the shiny red wrapping paper, shriek, take the shawl delicately between her fingers, then throw her arms around my neck and cover me in kisses. My son didn’t remember it, he would have been too young, but perhaps the image of that shawl was engraved on his memory, because Mai cared for it more than she cared for herself, and always put it on when she got dressed up to go out. If he did remember it, I thought, then he would realise that it had been a present from me, something beautiful, rare and expensive, and it would never cross his mind that his father, who loved his mother so much he couldn’t even walk past a shop window if he saw something she might like, had spent the previous three days fucking like an animal with some professor from Valencia.

Miguel will never know, I thought, he will never have to listen to his mother say in that calm, neutral tone with which she had once told me, ‘It’s a big world out there, and life is very short, and very long.’ The first time I heard them, the words were like a healing balm after the Chinese water torture of Lorna’s jealousy.

‘There’s no point in me hoping you’ll never come across another woman you find attractive, Álvaro,’ and she seemed calm, sure of what she was saying. ‘There are so many women in the world, so many men, so many people . . . But what we have together is important. It’s important to me, too important to throw it away over some stupid little thing, don’t you think?’

‘Um, I don’t know. Yes . . .’ I said, unsure of where this conversation was heading.

‘Well then . . .’ She smiled. ‘I’ve always thought it’s better to do stupid little things and get them over with, otherwise if you bottle them up they grow into something much bigger. That’s why all I ask is that you be loyal, that you love me, and do not humiliate me or degrade me, and whatever stupid little things you do with other people are not important to me.’

The first time I heard them, these words were like a healing balm, the second time I liked them less, and the third time I asked why she always talked as if it was just me, why she never mentioned herself.