The Frozen Heart (86 page)

She looked at her nephew and he nodded without quite knowing why, because he did not yet understand, but she sighed as though she had finally reached a place where she might rest.

‘It’s not enough for them that he’s dead, they want him never to have been born, that’s why they claim he was never married to me, that his son has no right to take his name, that’s why there’s no tombstone. But Mateo did live, and I lived with him, and that’s the only reason I go on . . . “How can you go on like this, Mamá? What good do you think all this hatred, this bitterness, will do?” That’s what my son asks me.’ She closed her eyes then and smiled a bitter smile. ‘He doesn’t understand that it’s the only thing that keeps me going in this fucking awful country, until all this is over, until your father comes back, until your grandparents come back, the people he knew, the people he loved. For the moment, he only has me, but I’ll go on wearing mourning, I’ll go on buying flowers, I’ll go on writing his name in chalk on the wall where they shot him until the day I die. Tell that to your grandparents, Ignacio, and tell Paloma that whenever I have time - because sometimes the guards move me on straight away - I write her husband’s name, I don’t remember the year he was born, but I write 1910, because he was older than Mateo.’

‘He was born in 1911.’ Ignacio would never know where the voice came from that uttered these words, but he knew that he could not leave without saying them. ‘It had to be 1911, because he was twenty-eight when they shot him.’

‘From now on, I’ll write 1911.’ She brought her hands to her face again as though to wipe away her tears, her anger, as though to put things in place. ‘I’m so happy to have met you, Ignacio.’ In 1971, when their first son was born, Ignacio Fernández Salgado and Raquel Perea Millán would decide to name him Mateo. No one asked them why, but everyone assumed that it was to close the gap that had opened in September 1944 when Ignacio Fernández Muñoz said to Anita Salgado Pérez that he would have preferred his firstborn son to have taken his older brother’s name rather than his own.

No one saw them on that April evening in 1964, as they walked together along the deserted pavements, in this deserted district of a city they did not know. She was watching out for taxis but there were none, he was wondering whether he was going mad or whether he had miraculously recovered his sanity.

‘Tell your father I think about him all the time.’ This was the last thing Casilda had said to him, hugging him fiercely. ‘No one would think it to see us now, but once upon a time we did something great here, something truly magnificent. They were the best years of our lives, despite the war, the bombings, the starvation, because we were doing something important and we believed that what we were doing was worthy of the sacrifice ...’

Casilda’s words resonated in Ignacio’s head and brought back other words he had often heard but did not understand until that afternoon.
No, Gloria, not with the rabble. With the people of Madrid - The first man to run, I’ll shoot him - We’re not like them, Mamá, they were the ones who started it - Don’t cry, silly, nothing’s going to happen to me, I haven’t done anything - We are what we are, María, and our place is here with our own people - The fascists won’t set foot here, not even over my dead body, because even if they kill me, I’ll come back from the grave - and the
salchichón
. . . ‘why don’t you hang it up in the pantry and we can worship it for a few days before we eat it?’ - ‘I’ve thought about you so much, Papá . . . After I was arrested in Madrid, I thought about you all the time, I was so happy that you weren’t there to see it, to see how we were betrayed’ - I have loved you with all my strength, Paloma - Mateo was killed not just for being who he was, but for being Papá’s son, Mamá’s son, for being your brother, Ignacio, for being Carlos’s brother-in-law - We have nothing to be sorry for, Ignacio . .
. That afternoon, his grandfather’s voice seemed to be speaking not to his father, but to him.
I don’t regret anything
, hijo.

Ignacio Fernández Salgado - who was not Spanish, who was not French, who did not know where he was from and who had been born into a fucking tribe - finally realised that his mother was right, that this trip had been dangerous for him, because he could not go back to being the person he was before. Suddenly face to face with the maelstrom of contradictions that he had spent a lifetime avoiding, when Ignacio finally accepted his destiny, he found he was at peace with himself and, though he hardly realised it, he was crying.

They were standing at a traffic light.

‘I’m not crying because I’m sad,’ he said. ‘It’s not because I’m sad.’ And Raquel kissed him.

After that, everything happened quickly, easily, even the taxi ride was merely a formality between two halves of a single kiss.

They did not get back to the city centre until 9.15 p.m. and neither of them wasted time asking the other whether they wanted to go for dinner. From that night, Laurent shared a room with his sister and Ignacio and Raquel slept together, first in Madrid, then in Barcelona. When they got back to Paris, Raquel dumped her boyfriend, and her parents were as delighted as Ignacio’s were the first time their son brought her home to lunch. They were married two years later, and in the spring of 1969, their first child, a girl, was born.

When Ignacio Fernández Muñoz took the baby in his arms for the first time, he felt proud and emotional at being a grandfather for the first time. It was a feeling he would relive with the birth of each of his grandchildren, but he would never love any of them as much as he loved his first granddaughter, whom they named Raquel Fernández Perea.

‘
E
xcuse me ...?’ It wasn’t her voice.

‘Raquel?’

‘No, Raquel’s not here ...’ It wasn’t her voice, it wasn’t her voice.

‘I’m sorry.’ It was a young woman who spoke with a French accent. ‘ ’Bye.’

When I saw the light shining out across the balcony, I felt so nervous that I didn’t know what to do and I walked around the block three times, the first time quickly, then more and more slowly, my heart in my mouth. Then I went into a bar, ordered a drink and downed it quickly, never taking my eyes off the door to the building. I had been watching the apartment for almost a fortnight but until that night, nothing had happened.

I was looking for Raquel. I was searching for her because she wanted me to search for her. This was the one thing I felt sure of when I got back to Madrid on 26 August, exactly a week after receiving her last text message:
Goodbye, Álvaro, I love you. I LOVE YOU, Raquel
. I hadn’t erased the message, and sometimes I would pick up my mobile just to make sure it was still there, to be sure she had definitely sent it. Definitely. I no longer knew anything for definite, no longer knew what was true and what was a lie, but every time I pressed the message button, those seven words appeared, and they comforted me. Raquel had written this message and she had sent it to me, just as suicides who don’t really want to die pick up the phone immediately after swallowing the bottle of sleeping pills. The message was not a message, it was a cry for help. Raquel had left, she had disconnected the answering machine on her landline, had changed her mobile phone number, changed offices and moved away, but before she did all these things, on 19 August 2005 at 11.39 a.m., she sent me that message.

‘I’m afraid Señora Fernández Perea no longer works here.’

On 1 September at five past nine, I stepped out of the lift into the foyer, but this time the receptionist at the Department of Asset Management at the Administrative Society of Cooperative Investment Institutions, SA, did not direct me to Raquel’s office.

‘She applied for a transfer to another office.’ Mariví, as over-made-up as she had been in April and considerably fatter, anticipated my first question.

‘Could you tell me where she’s working now?’ Mariví looked at me, shook her head, and I was surprised to see a glimmer of compassion in her eyes. ‘Please . . .’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she looked away, ‘I’m only a secretary, I can’t ...’

‘I wouldn’t tell her you told me . . .’

‘Let me finish,’ she smiled, and I knew then that I was lost, ‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know. Nobody told me and I didn’t ask. It’s a big company, and people get transferred all the time. I’m really sorry, but I can’t help you.’

She wasn’t telling me the whole truth. Shocked as I was, I realised that Mariví was lying, but I also saw there was sympathy in her gaze.

‘However . . .’ she lowered her voice and leaned across the desk as though to indicate that she was on my side, ‘when you first came, it was something to do with settling an estate, wasn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you know, sometimes these things can drag on for ever.’

When she was twenty years old, thirty kilos lighter and smoked only after meals, her childhood sweetheart had left her for another guy while her wedding dress was still hanging in the dining room of her parents’ home. Raquel had told me the story once, and Mariví told me it again that morning. Heading back to the lift, after I had thanked her, I felt exhausted.

I walked back to my place, shambling along, dragging my twin temptations with me - the urge to give up hope and the need to salvage the slender thread of hope I still held between my fingers. I wanted to go on believing. ‘
To believe
’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb; even condemned men walking to the gallows prick up their ears and die waiting for a last-minute pardon. When I resigned myself to the incomprehensible, that Raquel had wanted to disappear, I could still see a light at the end of the well shaft into which I was tumbling. They were black, terrible days, heavy and slow, made up of heavy, interminable grains of damp sand, one last grain then another last grain and another falling on my head.

‘What’s the matter, Papá?’ Miguelito asked. ‘Are you not feeling well ?’

‘No, I’m not feeling well,’ I said, and he went off to the beach with his mother.

The weather had improved and everyone was happy, everyone except me. So I went back to bed before they came back for lunch and when they went out again, I got up and sat on the sofa. I spent one day like this, two days, three days, and when I woke at dawn on the fourth day, convinced that anything was better than this uncertainty, I realised the significance of that light in the distance. ‘
To believe
’ is more ambiguous and more precise than any other verb, more compassionate and treacherous. Anything would have been better that this uncertainty, I thought, it would have been better if she’d told me she was seeing someone else, if she’d told me she didn’t love me, if she’d dumped me. I would have preferred it if she’d dumped me, but that was something she hadn’t been prepared to do . . . I thought about this.

Raquel had disappeared, but she hadn’t dumped me. At first this sounded like a ludicrous theory, a fool’s comfort, but thinking about it carefully the logic made a certain sense: it was shaky, but it held up better than anything else I could think of. If Raquel had wanted to dump me, she would have done so. It would have been easy. It would have been as simple as not asking me to stay on that last stormy night when she stood crucified in the doorway of her flat begging me not to leave. All she had to do was let me leave, but she had begged me to stay.

Why? I wondered as I got up from the sofa, washed my face, brushed my teeth, put on my clothes and went out. Why? Raquel had disappeared but she hadn’t left me. She had disappeared, but before doing so she’d taken the precaution of saying goodbye, of telling me she loved me. If you said it over and over, it was almost like music, like a dreamy old melody.
Goodbye, I love you
. It was warm and sunny out and as I wandered slowly along the seafront, I soaked up the sunlight, the sight of people bathing, like a convalescent.

Raquel wasn’t dying, she wasn’t married, she didn’t have a boyfriend who’d just come back from the far side of the world, she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t have an incurable illness, wasn’t about to be sent to prison, she wasn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic, she didn’t have a secret love child, she wasn’t a member of some religious cult or a terrorist cell. I examined and rejected each of these possibilities in turn. ‘For a physicist, you have a vivid imagination . . .’ And maybe I had, but I harried my imagination, I twisted it, wringing out every possibility, and I came up with nothing. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she had a secret lover, some dark, shady connection that made it impossible for her to share her life with me or any other man, but if such a man had existed she would have told me. Raquel Fernández Perea was a normal woman, if by normal you meant like me. She had been working for the same company for years, had been living in the same apartment, everyone in her district knew her, she was on first-name terms with her local shopkeepers. There was nothing strange about her, and yet her disappearance confirmed Fernando Cisneros’s pronouncement, a verdict that sounded like a riddle: the strange thing about her was that there was nothing strange about her; that she did such strange things without being strange. If Raquel had really wanted to disappear, she wouldn’t have picked up the phone like a half-hearted suicide. If she hadn’t wanted me to look for her, she wouldn’t have said goodbye.

This conclusion gave me back the decisiveness that I’d lost during the sterile period of exhaustion. If Raquel wanted me to look for her, I would look for her. Uncertainty is a cold, unwelcoming house full of invisible terrors. Better to suffer, better humiliation, anger or ice, better the taste of blood in my mouth, any of these was better than this limbo of stale air. I wanted to know and I was prepared to pay the price for that knowledge. At times, Raquel had looked at me as though I held her life in my hands and I had felt that was true. Now, I held my life and hers in my own hands, and the archived message on my mobile phone was a white kerchief, the ensign of a knight urged on by a fair maiden to slay the dragon. I was prepared to slay that dragon, but before I could, I had to find it, to know who or what it was. That night, I went out to dinner with my wife and son, I sat on a terrace and stared at the sea, added my voice to the voices ripping me to pieces, and on the way back, I announced that I was going back to Madrid. ‘OK,’ Mai did not even look at me, ‘but I’m keeping the car.’