The Frozen Heart (96 page)

‘You know very well I’ve been doing nothing else for the last month ...’

‘No, a long time before that.’ She paused and glanced around her like a hunted animal. ‘It was in May 1977.’

‘May 1977?’ I laughed at the absurdity of this date so far in the past that it didn’t even seem real. ‘But Raquel, in 1977 I was only ...’

‘You were twelve,’ she interrupted me, ‘I was eight. You were living on the Calle Argensola, in a huge, beautiful apartment with a long corridor, and right at the end of the corridor was the kitchen, it had folding wooden doors painted white with round windows like the portholes on a boat.’

Now it was my turn to look away. I did not know how to respond.

‘It was a Saturday,’ Raquel went on, her voice clear, each word carefully chosen, ‘I came to your house with Ignacio, my grandfather. I didn’t know who you were, I’d never heard of you before. Every Saturday afternoon, my grandfather would take me for a walk, and that day he told me he had to go and see a friend. That’s not going to be much fun, I said, and he told me it would be fine, he said his friend had children the same age as me. When we got there, your mother asked if I wanted to go into the kitchen to have a snack with you and your sister Clara. I didn’t really want to, but my grandfather said I should and I didn’t dare argue because it was all so weird. Your mother was scared stiff when she saw us, she was really nervous.’ Raquel paused and I heard a tremor of fear in her voice. ‘You don’t remember ?’

‘No.’

‘There was a wooden table in the middle of the kitchen and you and your sister were already sitting there. The first thing I remember thinking was that you didn’t look anything like each other, then I thought how pretty she was, blonde with deep blue eyes and pale skin and long eyelashes. Then the maid, her name was Fuensanta, gave us hot chocolate and she put two bowls on the table, one with
ensaïmadas
and one full of
picatostes
, and she told us not to eat them all because your brothers would be back from football soon. We ate quite a lot, because the chocolate was really good, and you asked me if I was your niece.’

‘Me? But why would I have asked you that?’

This nonsense made me react, but she didn’t seem to notice, she just nodded her head as I struggled with the obscure urge to reject this ridiculous story, which couldn’t possibly be true, however much she insisted that it was, as she went on nodding slowly.

‘What are we playing at, Raquel? Don’t talk such rubbish, honestly . . . I don’t see what you’re getting at, I don’t know where all this is coming from, who told you all this stuff, how you know Fuensanta’s name and what the house was like, but I don’t believe a word of it, OK? That’s enough now ...’

‘You don’t remember anything?’ Her persistence had made me furious, and she realised this, but the fact that I could not remember affected her much more, and she began to rattle off details like machine-gun fire. ‘I can’t believe you don’t remember, Álvaro, you have to remember, I was there for ages. After we had our snack we went into a room where there was an electric train set on a big platform between two balconies. Your bedroom was on the left, Clara’s was on the right. She wanted me to come and play with her dolls, they were twins, she got them for Christmas, a blonde doll in a blue dress and a red-haired doll in a green dress, but you wouldn’t let her play with me, you wanted to show me the train set, you were really proud of it, you had two engines and you showed me the tunnels and the signals and then your father showed up and he made two lollipops appear from my ears, an orange one and a strawberry one, and then your mother came to get him. You have to remember, Álvaro. When I was leaving I was still holding one of the dolls and Clara wanted it back, but your mother made her give it to me as a present, I didn’t want it, but your mother wouldn’t let her take it back and your sister was crying. “But Mamá, they’re twins! If there’s two of them how can I give her one?” And then . . .’ Raquel saw my face change. ‘You remember now?’

‘That was you?’ I said, hardly able to believe my own voice. ‘The little girl with the doll, that was you?’

‘Yes,’ she closed her eyes and her body suddenly went limp, ‘that was me.’

‘But I don’t remember you, Raquel,’ I shook my head, too stunned to think, ‘I didn’t know it was you . . . Talk about fate . . . All I remember is the doll - actually, my sister throwing a tantrum when she saw the caretaker’s daughter, Mariloli with it. I remember she went and asked for it back and Mariloli wouldn’t give it to her, she said she’d found it in the street.’

‘I didn’t throw it away, I left it on a bench with a lollipop on either side.’

‘It doesn’t matter. All I remember is that Clara was really upset. Clara was the youngest and she was completely spoiled so she went and told my father, but Mamá was there, and she didn’t even let her finish, she gave her a slap across the face. I’d never seen my mother slap any of us before and I never saw it happen again. I remember that, and my sister remembers it. She still talks about it sometimes. We all laugh about it now, but at the time she cried for weeks.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, for no reason, Raquel’s eyes welled with tears. ‘I’m really sorry. Clara was right. I said so to your mother, but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘But that means . . .’ It was only now I knew that the story was true that I realised the consequences. ‘That means you and I . . .’

‘We’re cousins . . .’ she said with a simplicity that to me seemed almost insulting. ‘Second or third cousins, I don’t know . . . My grandfather Ignacio’s father, Mateo, was the brother of Lucas, your grandmother Mariana’s father. Our great-great-grandmother was clearly very religious and named her sons after the apostles . . .’ She faltered again and I could hear a mounting anxiety in her voice. ‘But you didn’t know any of this, Álvaro, did you? You couldn’t have known. When you asked me if we were related, that first time we had lunch together, you didn’t know . . .’

‘No, I had no idea . . .’ I was still shaken by the words ‘our great-great-grandmother’.

‘But, that afternoon, when I first met you and Clara, you both liked the idea. I remember Clara saying, “We haven’t got any cousins.” And I told you I had lots of cousins, that some of them lived in Paris, I told you about Annette, and I told you I was born there and you decided that meant I couldn’t be Spanish. You said, “People who are born in France are French.” You don’t remember ?’

‘No, but it hardly matters, you seem to remember enough for both of us.’

‘I remember everything. I’m sure for you it was just an ordinary Saturday, some little girl comes and has a snack with you and goes away again . . . I’ve often thought about it. I wouldn’t remember either, if I were you. I don’t remember the children who used to come to my house when I was little, I don’t even really remember my parents’ French friends who used to stay with us for weekends. But I remember everything about that day because it was important to me. That afternoon, when we left your house, I saw my grandfather cry . . . And my grandfather never cried, never . . . He didn’t cry the day Franco died or the day they came back to Spain after thirty-seven years of exile, or even when he ordered
vermú de grifo
on the terrace of a café in Vistillas, because that meant he really was back in Madrid after all those years, even then he didn’t shed a single tear. But, when we left your apartment that Saturday in May 1977, he sat down on a bench on the Plaza des las Salesas and he cried . . .’

Now she was crying too, but she did not let it stop her.

‘I asked him what had happened, I asked . . . He’d bought us ice creams, he was calmer now, we were walking down Recoletos towards Cibeles eating our ice creams and I said, “What happened, Grandpa?” I thought he wasn’t going to answer ...’

I watched her cry and I did nothing, I didn’t comfort her, I didn’t dare touch her because her tears were utterly unfathomable to me.

‘I was only eight, but he liked talking to me . . . We talked about everything, all the time. I was sure he wasn’t going to answer but he did. He said, “Oh, it’s a long story. A very long, very old story. You wouldn’t understand, and anyway, I think it’s for the best if you don’t know.” I asked him why and again I thought he wouldn’t tell me but he did, he said . . . he said . . .’

Suddenly, she broke down, sobbing uncontrollably with the catastrophic inevitability of a dam bursting. Tears flooded down her face, but still she went on speaking, trampling down her grief with words, and I listened, I went on listening.

‘ “OK . . . We’ve come back, haven’t we?” This is what he said to me. He said if things had been different, if things had been normal, I would have lived here all my life. But to live here . . . To live here there are some things it’s better not to know . . . That’s what my grandfather told me, and he knew why he was telling me this, he knew and it’s . . . It’s the most important thing . . . Nobody’s ever told me anything as important as that in my life . . . But time passed and he died . . . I didn’t listen, he was right, but I didn’t listen . . .’

Then she paused, but this time it was deliberate, very different from those moments when her tears had forced her to stop.

‘And if I had listened, if I hadn’t forgotten his words, what they meant, I’d never have met you, Álvaro, I’d never have met you . . .’

By the time Raquel fell asleep, it was almost daylight. I found it harder to get to sleep than she did, and I woke up before her.

It was late, the room was hot, the sun insinuating itself through the closed venetian blinds, and I could hear the faint sounds of rush hour from the street below, the horns, the brakes, the trucks. These sounds surprised me, and I didn’t know whether to welcome them as proof of the outside world, or regret the fact that they had interrupted my perfect solitude. I was alone, Raquel was sleeping next to me and I liked to watch her sleep. Raquel was still sleeping and I was alone. Absolutely, terrifyingly alone. Alone in the middle of a desert, a battlefield laid waste, at the centre of the void. Alone.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ I had asked Raquel towards the end, as the truth began to take shape like a giant mass of grey dust, a shapeless ball of filth spattered with dried blood, old blood, but blood just the same. ‘I don’t like this place.’

I had begun to gauge the sickening nature of this ugly mass of frozen truth that blackened my tongue and slipped down my throat, infecting my gullet, my stomach, my lungs. I was inhaling dust, could feel it weighing on my eyelashes, sticking between my teeth, see it under my fingernails, feel it filling every cavity, and still I asked her why she had brought me here, I thought this, I said it, it was my voice, my eyes looking at her. I felt the sting of tears, I who almost never cry. ‘Take this,’ I remembered my sister Angélica saying on the morning of my father’s funeral, ‘you haven’t cried, Álvaro, take this, it’ll help.’ I never cry, I hardly ever cry. That night I didn’t cry, but I could feel the sting of Raquel’s tears in my own eyes.

‘I don’t like it either,’ she said, ‘but I thought that if one day we manage to come through this thing . . . If some day you can forget what sort of woman I am, what I’m capable of, if you can look at me without thinking that I’m cheating on you, that I’ve been cheating since the start, well . . . I thought it would be good for us to have talked here, because neither of us likes this place, and we’ll never come back here.’

We’ll never come back. When I woke, it was late, but Raquel was still sleeping and I was alone. I couldn’t stand myself, couldn’t stand my memory, its intolerable, relentless activity now that I no longer knew who I was, now that everything had expanded until it burst the bounds of chaos, a small, domestic quantity faced with the incomparable vastness of order. I’m a physicist and I need to be able to predict. This definition had imploded like all the calculations, all the principles, all the axioms I’d ever learned, loved and wielded in the first part of my life. The only thing I could be certain of now, at this moment, as Raquel slept and the sun warmed the room through the closed blinds, was that the second part of my life was beginning, a blank, empty horizon with immense boundaries I could make out only hazily, like a newborn, my eyes not yet conscious of their purpose.

My life had changed so much, so quickly. And yet my memory bombarded me with images, gestures, words, some old, some recent, but all ancient, all obsolete now, and I could feel the joy of ignorance, the excitement and the exhaustion of the man who had arrived here only a few hours earlier. I no longer knew who I was, what I should expect, what I should do, when the woman sleeping next to me woke up. ‘Forgive me, Álvaro, please, forgive me . . .’ I hadn’t said anything, but I had taken her in my arms and had held her for a long time. I loved this woman. The only thing I knew was that I loved this woman and still I did not know what to do, what to decide when she woke up. It had been almost daylight when Raquel fell asleep, but it was harder for me.

‘Make no mistake, Álvaro, it wasn’t revenge,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t looking for revenge. Too much time had passed, I was too far from Paris, from 1946, 1947 . . . I’m not saying that to defend what I did, on the contrary. Revenge is noble, it’s a passion. A stupid, feeble, useless passion, because you never get back what you invest, but it’s an emotion nonetheless, and I . . . What I did was without passion, Álvaro, it was all calculated. I’m an economist, you know that.’