The Frozen Heart (67 page)

‘None,’ I answered, ‘but they emigrated to France and fought in the Second World . . .’

‘Aw,’ he cut me short, ‘her poor grandparents had to emigrate ...’

‘Look, she’s my girlfriend and they’re my rules - either you agree to them, or dinner’s off.’

He agreed to my conditions, he didn’t even regale us with one of the long conspiracy theories about academic politics he loved so much. I steered the conversation and as we both wheeled out tried and tested stories to make Raquel laugh, I noticed that she was drinking more she usually did.

That night, Raquel got drunk. Having delicately suggested who should pay - ‘This is on you, isn’t it, you old bastard ?’ - Fernando suggested we have a drink on the terrace of the first bar we found and she agreed with an enthusiasm that marked everything she did that evening: knocking back her first whisky, slowly sipping the second, complaining to Fernando about women who hoovered during IQ tests; recounting her frustrating experiences in the theatre, kissing me, holding my hand, suggesting she manage our finances and make both of us millionaires, explaining the details of a fabulous scam she’d planned with a colleague called Paco Molinero who was her best friend and my worst fear, ordering another whisky, realising she’d had too much to drink, telling Fernando that it was all his fault because seeing us give each other sidelong glances made her nervous, insisting on paying and agreeing when Professor Cisneros refused to let her. ‘It’s the least I can do, given that it’s my fault you’re in this state,’ he explained. ‘I think you should take me home,’ she said to me finally.

‘Don’t leave me . . . the room is moving.’ Lying on her bed back at her apartment, she flung her arm out vaguely in my direction.

‘I’ll be right back . . .’ I promised. ‘Have you got any Alka-Seltzer ?’

‘Yeah, I think so, in the kitchen or maybe . . . I don’t know.’

I found it straight away, dissolved two tablets in a large glass of water and made her drink it.

‘Would you like to take my clothes off?’ she asked when the glass was empty.

‘I’d like that very much.’

‘Can you pull the duvet over me and come to bed, is that OK?’

‘That’s very OK.’

‘I won’t be able to fuck,’ she said when she’d finally found a comfortable position, her head in the crook of my neck, her right arm and leg flung across me, clinging like a castaway to the only timber floating on the ocean. ‘I don’t feel very well.’

‘Really? I hadn’t noticed . . .’

‘Yes . . .’ She managed to laugh. ‘I did think about it - fucking, I mean - but I can’t move, I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for.’

‘But you’ve got a hard-on.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

‘No, go to sleep.’

‘I love you, Álvaro.’

She’d never told me that she loved me before. I could feel the heavy rhythm of her breathing against my chest; my fingers rested lightly on her waist, her arm and her leg anchored me to the bed. A feeling of deep peace compelled me to stay awake so I could appreciate the experience, capture every second of this disconcerting gentleness. Eventually I did fall asleep and, four hours later, when the alarm went off, I could still feel that low-grade fever. ‘I love you, Álvaro.’ Raquel opened her eyes, and the words she said were different, different and yet somehow the same.

‘You know what? Despite everything I had to drink last night, I feel great. No hangover, just a bit tired. I think getting drunk with you is good for me, Álvaro.’

She took a shower, dressed and had breakfast, then came back into the bedroom in executive mode: white trouser suit, flat, sensible shoes, leather briefcase.

‘I’ve made some coffee.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and kissed me on the lips. ‘If you’re not having lunch with that muckraker Fernando, we could meet up back here for a siesta.’

‘All right,’ I said, slipping my arms around her waist and pulling her - still clutching her briefcase - on to the bed. ‘I’ll tell Fernando we’ll meet for a drink later.’

She let me hug her, not complaining that I was creasing her suit. I dressed and got back to my house just as the Polish builders were arriving. Fernando called at 10 a.m. and refused to meet me any later than 1 p.m. on the dot. When I met him at the Argüelles, he wasn’t sitting at his usual place by the bar, but at a table: clearly there was a lot he wanted to say.

‘So?’ I asked, taking a seat opposite him.

‘Astonishing!’ he said, and began to tell me how much he liked Raquel.

His reaction didn’t surprise me, I’d been expecting it, but ‘Astonishing’ was a curious word to begin with and it hovered over everything else he said, watching, lying in wait for the next phrase.

‘All in all,’ he said, ‘I think she’s the best thing you’ve pulled in your life.’

‘But . . .?’

‘... but it’s weird ...’ Seeing me frown, he shook his head and quickly rephrased. ‘Not that she’s weird - like I said, she’s great.
That’s
what’s weird.’ He shook his head again. ‘No, that’s not it either, it’s like there’s something weird about her.’

‘What’s weird is that she’s not weird ?’ I suggested jokingly, and he didn’t seem offended.

‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what it is. The weird thing is she seems completely normal - by normal I mean like you and me.’

‘What is this, a riddle?’

‘No.’ He looked serious, almost solemn, now. ‘Think about her and think about you, Álvaro.’

‘She’s not right for me?’ I guessed.

‘No, she is right for you, you make a great couple, I realised that watching the two of you together last night.’

‘So?’

‘Well, that’s what’s weird . . .’ My best friend looked at me, closed his eyes and said something it seemed he had hoped he would never have to say: ‘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.’ He paused and looked up at me. ‘Don’t tell me it hadn’t occurred to you.’

 

It hadn’t occurred to me.

‘I don’t want to talk about your father,’ she’d said. I didn’t want to talk about him either, so that had been that. The last thing I had thought with my old head, the head I lost the moment I laid it on the pillow in that bed where he had never been, was that I wasn’t going to think about him. I had followed my own orders to such an extent that I had not been tempted to link the figure of my mother with the flimsy cable given to me by a frail old woman. I was in bed with Raquel and that was all that mattered. Since then, I had not spent any time alone with my mother, I hadn’t wanted to, and I was not about to let some mystery about my father’s life ruin my own.

Conscious of the long, horrified silence with which I greeted his words, Fernando Cisneros told me to take no notice of what he’d said. ‘What do I know?’ he muttered, but it was already too late. I knew what he meant.

That was the worst of it. I completely understood his surprise, the radical disparity between what he knew and what he had imagined. Raquel turned up and everything about her was completely normal, the way she looked, the way she talked, the way she moved - she was an ordinary girl. That was why I’d fallen in love with her, why it had been easy for me to evict my father’s ghost from her bed. The worst thing was that I understood Fernando, I could easily imagine what he had been thinking, visualise the woman he had been expecting to meet; there was no vampire sucking my blood at night, no big-breasted floozy trying to make me forget she was an airhead, no cold, calculating bitch trying to lure me into her web, no brazen schemer after me for my money. Raquel Fernández Perea was none of these things, I had known that from the beginning, just as I’d known that I was not attracted to her because she had been Julio Carrión González’s lover, quite the reverse.

As we ordered two more beers and went back to talking about trivial things, I began to feel again the happiness I had felt the first time I had seen Raquel’s room, and this feeling became a problem that I should have considered before now. It was a beautiful room, agreeable, furnished with a few well-chosen pieces: an antique, hand-painted lamp, a richly coloured Turkish or Moroccan kilim. The stark contrast between this room and the vaulted bedroom with its stucco walls and plaster niches and the vast plasma TV positioned so that it could be watched from the bed underscored what Fernando had said with a thick red line. The first time I had thought about both rooms, I had thought only about my privileged position, that I had exclusive access to a place in Raquel’s life, I didn’t stop to wonder what a girl like her with a beautiful apartment in an old but well-maintained building in a historic area of Madrid had been doing in the type of slick bachelor pad where married millionaires took their mistresses - usually married women of the same social class, or younger women of modest means determined to improve their lot. Raquel did not fit into either category, but seeing the alarm clock on the nightstand, I reminded myself that she wasn’t some lost little girl and I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she had had other motives - ambition, maybe, or greed.

The man who had shared Raquel Fernández Perea’s bed before me had left no trace in her life. The chaos pendulum in his lover’s apartment hid a photo of an old German tank, there were no photos of him, nothing that belonged to him. I’d given Raquel other cheap presents:
Physics for Dummies
, a set of magnets I’d bought long ago in the Natural History Museum in New York, a wooden box she’d admired on a stall one afternoon and the photo of me receiving a prize for arithmetic at school in which I stood, hair neatly combed, in front of a statue depicting the Virgin Mary hovering above a plaster cloud; I was dressed in a blue blazer, white shirt, striped tie and grey trousers, and was holding the trophy in one hand and a certificate tied with a red ribbon in the other.

‘Go on, give it to me, please,’ Raquel had asked when I showed it to her, ‘I love it. What year was it taken?’

‘I don’t know. I know it sounds conceited, but I won the prize every year. How old do I look? Ten, maybe eleven?’

‘Something like that . . . Go, on, let me have it . . .’

‘OK, I’ll have a copy made for you.’

‘No! That’s not the same at all! I don’t want a copy, anyone could have a copy . . .’

I’d always had the photo in my wallet, but she asked for it and I gave it to her. She put it on a shelf in her bedroom next to a photo of her with her friend Berta - unrecognisable, both of them, with white faces, red plastic noses and black baggy trousers. Sitting next to each other on the shelf, my photo and hers, the swot and the clown, made the perfect comic coupling; a photo of my father would have ruined the effect. After less than three months, even a bungling detective would have noticed clues that a physicist who won prizes for mental arithmetic as a boy had been here. Souvenirs of the physicist coexisted with those of her heroic grandparents, her moronic ex-husband, ‘I got that rug in Tangiers with Josechu ... Why are you laughing? I don’t see what’s so funny about his name . . .’, her actor ex-boyfriend, ‘he designed the poster too’, and actress friend, ‘Berta lent me that wig and liked it so much I hung on to it’, a close friend - too close for my liking - ‘the software is Paco’s, he came to help me buy the computer, and the manual belongs to him too. I told you we slept together, didn’t I? But it’s no big deal, we’re just friends. I know you don’t go round sleeping with all your friends but this was different, I’d just got divorced . . .’, and a number of other men, ‘the mirror was a present from an old boyfriend, Felipe, he brought it back from Peru, that’s from Manolito, my next-door neighbour, he gave it to me the day I said I’d go steady with him . . .’, but nowhere were there any gifts from an elderly, rich businessman.

In Raquel’s bathroom there was only one perfume bottle, the only perfume she ever wore, expensive, but in keeping with her income, nor was her apartment crammed with antiques, all the pieces of furniture, books, albums, figurines, ornaments and oriental vases that exiles leave behind whenever they leave home. It was the same with her jewellery, she kept only what she wore, pieces that she liked, whether antique or modern, but none of the opulent pieces a filthy-rich sugar daddy might have chosen. There was one exception, a bracelet, but it was too precious to have come from him. She had worn it the night we had dinner at the Japanese restaurant. The night when all the laws of physics were suspended, it lay on the bedside table as though Raquel had intended to wear it but had changed her mind at the last minute. The afternoon after the storm, I noticed it again and asked:

‘Does it mean a lot to you?’ She looked at me, mystified. ‘. . . the bracelet?’

‘Of course it does!’ She picked it up and handed it to me. It was very old, a simple band encrusted with a spectacular constellation of precious stones, waves of diamonds, sapphires and more diamonds, with a single, enormous pearl in the centre. ‘It was an engagement present to my great-grandmother María, the mother of my grandfather Ignacio.’

‘The one who lived on the Glorieta de Bilbao?’

‘That’s her. It’s all that’s left of the family fortune, the only thing that survived the shipwreck.’

The previous evening, when I had got dressed to go home, Raquel had asked me to wait. ‘I’ll go with you,’ she said, ‘I’m meeting someone at the Café Commercial.’ ‘Who are you meeting? ’ I asked, spinelessly, thinking of Paco, and she answered with a question, ‘What the fuck do you care?’, then she laughed and told me she was having dinner with Berta.

As we arrived at the café, we saw Berta inside, waiting at the bar. She waved at us. ‘Do you want to come in for a drink?’ I followed her inside and immediately ran into one of my fifth-year students, a dull boy I barely recognised, who had come to my office a couple of weeks earlier to ask whether I would supervise his thesis. He said hello and I stopped to talk to him for a minute, but Raquel didn’t wait. When I went to join her, she apologised. ‘What for?’ I asked, kissing Berta. ‘I’m sorry you were seen with me,’ she said. She was so obviously joking, half-flirting with me, that I laughed, took her in my arms and gave her a long, hard kiss, long enough for everyone at the bar to turn and stare, including the tedious physics student, who had never met Mai and probably didn’t even know that I was married.