The Frozen Heart (29 page)

‘Do you mind if we order before we start?’ I suggested, unable to suppress a smile.

‘What are we playing?’ She smiled too. ‘Follow My Leader?’

‘Yes, but you’re not my leader . . .’

‘Thankfully . . .’

‘Anyway,’ I ignored her last comment, ‘this evening, I have a lot of things to tell you.’

We both ordered sushi - Raquel pronouncing the Japanese for each dish, me prodding the menu and saying ‘this one, this one, this one’. This was how I always ordered in Asian restaurants, but Raquel thought it was a joke and laughed, and she was much more beautiful when she laughed. So much so, that I was sorry when she listened seriously as I explained things to her in a calculated order, beginning with the will, the meeting with the solicitor, my surprise when I noticed that the apartment was not on the list of my father’s assets, my discovery that she had been the owner for almost three months.

‘He told me that once,’ she remarked, a mysterious longing in her voice, ‘but I didn’t believe him. That’s the truth, I really didn’t believe him.’

‘Well, he was telling the truth. It’s in your name at the Land Registry.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘My wife told me.’ She frowned when she heard the word. ‘She works for Madrid City Council, in the Department of Public Health.

‘Your wife?’ she repeated. ‘I didn’t know you were married, you never mentioned her.’

‘Well . . .’ I smiled, ‘never is a big word - this is only the third time I’ve talked to you.’

‘I suppose that’s true, still . . .’ She struggled to find some other way to explain herself. ‘I don’t know, you don’t look like a married man. So, is she a doctor ?’

‘No, she’s . . .’ I paused. ‘She’s an economist.’

‘You don’t say!’ She laughed, and then tossed her head as though she was no longer interested in my wife. ‘You know something, Álvaro? You remind me a lot of your father. Not just physically, although you’re the spitting image of him. In other ways. A minute ago, when you were saying ‘this one, this one’ it was like a drum roll at the circus - do you do magic tricks too?’

‘No, I’m too clumsy. I tried to learn once, but I gave up.’

‘The first time I saw your father,’ she looked at me intensely and I saw an excitement in her eyes I had never seen before, ‘he pulled lollipops from my ears. An orange one and a strawberry one. I’ll never forget it.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Never . . .’ She glanced away, as though she could not go on looking at me and talking at the same time. ‘I thought he was a charming man, extraordinary, a man I could trust, and he was so kind . . . I’ve never known anyone as charismatic as your father. He inspired affection, didn’t he? He made you want to be with him. And when he hugged you, he made you feel safe. I don’t know how to explain it, but he wasn’t like other men.’

She paused, silently doodling with her finger on the tablecloth. I didn’t say anything. I was lost, navigating with no map, no compass, through a voice that was at once heartbroken and fretful, gentle and brutal. She had drowned in her own words, in a flood of adjectives that were overstated, accurate, precise yet ambiguous; they were a fair description of the man she remembered, but unfair on me because I did not know how to interpret them. I could not see Raquel’s eyes as she spoke, she would not let me see them, but I could see her mouth, those feminine lips so used to smiling, a slight emotionless smile underlining every point, every syllable, in every tribute she heaped upon a man who deserved them, but a man whose memory could not light up this beautiful face. Raquel Fernández Perea finally looked up from the tablecloth, and she knew what I had to ask.

‘Did you love him?’

‘No.’

She said it straight away, without hesitating, looking me in the eyes, and her answer did not surprise me, though I could not say why.

‘It wasn’t that exactly, it’s not as simple as that . . .’ she added, then paused. ‘Let’s just say that when he wanted to be, your father could be irresistible. He only had to smile.’

‘That’s true. It’s the one thing we don’t have in common.’

‘You’re right, but I prefer the way you smile, it’s more restrained, less aggressive . . . When he smiled, your father looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, a big yellow ball with sunbeams streaming out of it. Oh, it was irresistible, but it was too much, almost brutal . . . No, brutal isn’t the right word . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘Humiliating. Your father’s smile was humiliating, Álvaro.’

I nodded slowly, realising that I was seeing her for the first time. I had finally met Raquel Fernández Perea, peered behind the plastic veneer of the businesswoman accustomed to dealing with people then dismissing them, beyond the unvarnished bluntness tinged with a seductive irony, beyond the well-rehearsed roles, the pregnant pauses, to the woman herself, a person with no tricks, no trappings, no excuses. I could not know if she had consciously, even deliberately, removed the last of the dark veils, or if she had simply been overcome by her own sincerity, but it didn’t matter. I had seen her, was looking at her for the first time, and as she was looking at me, she could see me, or perhaps there was some other reason why the spark of fierceness disappeared from her eyes and they were suddenly sad.

‘I’m sorry, Álvaro,’

‘What for?’

‘I shouldn’t have told you that I didn’t love him.’ I held her gaze. She could have said ‘Take a knife and slash your wrists’, and I wouldn’t have thought it was a bad idea. ‘After all, he was your father.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say. For a moment, I felt the urge to run away. But then I remembered who she was, who I was, why we were having dinner together, the question that had brought us together and the answer to that question. I wasn’t a child, a vulnerable teenager lost in the confusion of his own desire. From the first moment, I had known that something like this would happen, and from the first moment, I had preferred not to know.

‘You didn’t offend me, Raquel,’ I said, my voice intact. ‘I have no right to criticise your feelings, and besides . . . I’m grateful to you for telling me the truth.’

‘OK . . .’ She looked at her plate and then at mine. ‘You haven’t eaten anything.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You should at least try . . .’ She carefully examined the sushi on her plate and chose one she hadn’t tasted yet, deftly picked it up with her chopsticks, dipped it in soy sauce and popped it into her mouth with a little sigh of pleasure, ‘ . . . because this meal is going to cost you a fortune.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve just inherited a fortune, as you well know. Of course . . .’ I took the key from my pocket and put it on the table ‘ . . . you’ve inherited too. There’s something else . . . I went there.’

‘Oh . . . I’m sorry about that too, Álvaro. I’m afraid you have a lot to forgive me for. I suppose I should have gone over and collected my things before I gave you the keys, but, I don’t know . . . It all happened so fast.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I didn’t want to imagine her in that apartment, satiating my father’s ruined lust. ‘I did it. That’s what I wanted to tell you, I . . .’

‘You?’ she interrupted me, her eyes wide, smiling like a little girl. ‘You tidied the apartment, opened the wardrobes, emptied the drawers, got rid of all the stuff?’

‘Yes, me . . . why, what’s the matter ?’ She closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘It’s hardly surprising, is it? I didn’t want my mother or my brothers . . . I don’t know, I just thought it was the right thing to do.’

‘Álvaro!’ She looked at me as though I were a winning lottery ticket. ‘Of course it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t expect . . . that’s so sweet!’ She started waving her hands as though to erase her infantile expression of joy. ‘No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that . . . what I meant to say was thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it. And don’t get your hopes up, I’m not that sweet, I left the whole lot in two bin bags and dumped them in the hall.’ She raised her eyebrows in astonishment, so I tried to explain. ‘When you told me the apartment was ours, I put everything in two black bin bags. At first I thought I’d throw it all out, then I realised I should give you back your things, it was only fair, so you could decide what to do with them. Then, when I left the solicitor’s office, convinced that the place must belong to you, it seemed stupid to cart the bags around until I next saw you, so I went back and left them there, in the hall. I did throw out a whole lot of stuff before I went to the meeting with the lawyer - the food, the half-empty bottles of shower gel and shampoo, the magazines, the candles in the bathroom . . . sorry. Everything else is there. I just hope I didn’t break anything.’

‘It wouldn’t really matter,’ her smile faded slowly, ‘almost everything belonged to your father, or at least, he bought it . . .’

‘Even the crockery?’ I already knew the answer, but I missed the sound of her laughter.

‘No!’ She laughed. ‘The crockery was mine.’

‘Just as well, because if not, I could believe anything.’

I took my plate, still almost full, and put it on her empty plate, but she barely noticed.

‘Doesn’t it scare you?’ she asked, looking me in the eye with that intensity I had seen earlier when she was talking about the first time she met my father.

‘What?’ You scare me, I thought, I scare myself.

‘Being able to believe anything.’

Later, these words came back to haunt me, when they both helped and hurt me, when they sustained and crushed me, when I found myself alone among the living. ‘
To believe
’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb, this was something I would learn, when I could believe and when I wanted to believe, when I found out what other people could and would believe, when that mattered more than anything. When I was left with nothing the words came back to haunt me, and that night, when Raquel spoke them, I sensed their importance, their transcendence, but I did not interpret them correctly. Although I did not want to recognise it, I wanted her too much to separate her question from my desire.

‘Should it scare me?’ I smiled, thinking we were flirting.

‘I don’t know. I’m not your father’s daughter.’ I wasn’t expecting this answer, and she realised it. ‘In any case, the truth is . . . The truth is I like you a lot, Álvaro. I like you the way you are, the way you think, what you do, what you say, the way you say it. I never expected your father to have a son like you.’

‘I think I’ll have a drink now . . .’

She was a clever girl, I knew that, she was a clever, disconcerting girl, a complex, unpredictable woman, not two but lots of women rolled into one, but now I began to doubt my earlier confidence. I was still convinced that that night I had seen Raquel Fernández Perea for the first time, but that didn’t mean anything, it was of no use to me if I didn’t understand her, and I couldn’t understand her, I couldn’t decipher her words, fit the sound to the sense. ‘You know a lot about me and I know almost nothing about you,’ she had said the day we had lunch together. At the time I knew nothing about her, but I had learned, I had watched, I had studied, only to discover that everything I had learned was useless. The consummate professional, the stuttering little girl, the tank crushing the pavements of Calle Arenal beneath her caterpillar treads, the scatterbrain, the cunning weaver of fictitious intimacies, her naked body slipping into a Jacuzzi surrounded by candles; I could touch her, I had to see her, I had to hear her; I had kissed her, but I did not know which of these people was her.

‘Your older brother, on the other hand, I never liked,’ she said after a moment, handing me back my plate, on which a couple of rolls remained. ‘You won’t believe this, but I can’t eat any more.’

‘You are human,’ I crowed, raising my glass to toast her.

‘Yes I am. Nobody’s perfect . . .’ She pointed at my glass. ‘I’ll have one of those.’

‘Sure.’ I ordered another whisky and looked at her to see whether she wanted to play again. ‘I can’t say I’m all that keen myself.’

‘On what, whisky?’

‘No, my brother Rafa.’

‘Oh yes, that’s who we were talking about! He came to see me, you know.’ I could imagine, but simply nodded. ‘Last week. Of course, he
did
make an appointment, and he was on time. The minute he walked in he told me he was in a hurry, said nothing

I could say would change his mind, that the heirs had been unanimous in deciding to recoup the capital, and then he closed the accounts. He treated me as if I were a shop assistant. I’m sure he’d address a girl in a bakery as “hey, you”. I thought he was arrogant and . . . predictable. The typical moron who looks at himself in the mirror every morning and says to himself, you’re a rich and powerful man, never forget that.’

‘That’s a fairly good description.’

‘But . . . I don’t know. Your father was nothing like that, he was charming, he was nice, intelligent, he treated everyone with respect, he knew how to tell people exactly what they wanted to hear. But your brother didn’t surprise me the way you have surprised me, because making a fortune and inheriting a fortune are two different things, and a man like your father usually winds up with sons like your brother. You probably don’t understand what I’m getting at . . .’

‘No, I understand,’ I assured her. ‘The trouble is that the first person you met from the family was the odd man out - me. You would get on well with my brother Julio, he’s just as rich and powerful as Rafa, but he’s a party animal, he’s funny, a nice guy, almost as nice as my father. Plus . . .’ my voice dropped all by itself as I let my imagination run riot, ‘Julio would have wheeled out his charm the minute he saw you.’

‘Really?’ She smiled, and asked the question I was expecting. ‘Why?’

‘To get you into bed. He never misses a trick.’

‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’ She didn’t answer, but laughed. ‘I’m not much like either of them. But I have more in common with Julio . . .’