The Frozen Heart (16 page)

I was so dumbstruck I couldn’t even answer this simple question. I felt as though everything was getting out of hand before it had even started.

‘I should have checked with you, Álvaro,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have a phone number.’

‘No, it’s not that . . .’ I finally managed to say. ‘It’s just I didn’t realise we’d be having lunch.’

‘I know,’ she said, and walked on. I followed her like a well-trained puppy. ‘That what I mean when I said I should have called you. But you needn’t be so shocked.’ She smiled. ‘People do eat at three o’clock in Spain, you know, or at least I do. I’m always starving by the time I leave work. If you haven’t had lunch, so much the better.’

‘It’s just . . .’

‘Don’t worry,’ she laughed, ‘I’m not expecting you to pay, Álvaro. We’ll go Dutch. After all, it is a business lunch of sorts.’

‘By the way, I do like sushi,’ I said after a moment.

‘Glad to hear it. I’ll bear that in mind the next time.’ She looked at me as though she already knew there would be other occasions. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me using your Christian name?’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

We had almost arrived at Ópera, and were standing waiting for the traffic lights to change. She gave me an enigmatic smile and we didn’t speak again until we got to the restaurant.

It wasn’t a long walk - only three or four minutes - but it was enough for me to realise a few things. The first being that the woman I was walking alongside was not the same woman I had met the previous Thursday. She had the same face, the same hair, the same body, this time clothed in a cotton print dress which suited her better than the jeans. There seemed to be nothing left of her earlier vulnerability or her fake smile, and yet I was not entirely convinced by her sudden artlessness, the spontaneous, faintly ironic candour which was clearly designed to be charming. And it was charming, but there was something too polished, too eloquent, about it, something that reminded me of someone playing a well-rehearsed role.

The second thing I realised was about myself, the memory of the thrill of the chase she had awakened in me, a feeling I had never had before and which had since faded, though not completely. I could still remember the sensation, could still feel the tingling of the hunter’s excitement and the furious energy with which he tried to hide it. No one who saw us as we went down the short flight of steps that gave the Calle Escalinata its name would have believed that only four days earlier I - the tense man shuffling gingerly along the street - had had this tank of a woman, who now steamrollered all before her, cornered behind her desk. And yet I could still feel the thrill of being that man, a thrill that only she could awaken.

The third and most important thing I realised on that short walk to the restaurant derived from numbers one and two. But it was not a fact, merely an intuition - that neither of us was really the person the other thought we were.

‘Here we are.’

She pushed open the wooden door. I waved for her to go in first; she nodded gracefully and smiled before stepping inside. The restaurant was not full, but all the empty tables were reserved. Raquel didn’t like the table that had been reserved for us and asked the maître d’ for a table in the corner by the window.

‘Do you mind if we order first?’ She went on talking without waiting to see whether or not I minded. ‘The place is half empty now, but at three-thirty when the people from Alcalá get here it’s always jammed and it takes ages to be served.’ She looked up from the menu. ‘Do you fancy sharing something?’

Everything was so absurd, the conversation, the place, the food, the two of us sitting at the same table as if we knew each other, as if we had lunch together all the time, as if there were something more between us than a single question and a single answer, that this last question, which sounded both terribly innocent and terribly intimate, took on a grotesque meaning and I burst out laughing. I was nervous. She wasn’t.

‘I meant share something to eat.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’

‘OK, I know what you meant.’ I opened the menu and scanned through the starters.

‘The anchovies are extraordinary. I’m serious . . . What about deep-fried courgette flowers - have you ever tasted them?’ I shook my head. ‘Oh, you’ve got to try them.’

In the end, she chose what she wanted; she picked the wine, tasted it and held her glass out for me to take a sip.

‘I think it’s fine,’ she said, ‘but maybe it’s a little too cold for you?’

‘No, no, it’s very nice,’ I said, because it was, although I had no intention of letting this new display of warlike intimacy pass unnoticed. ‘But I’ll stick to my own glass, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Of course,’ she said, taking back her glass and filling mine. She put her elbows on the table and stared at me. ‘Do you want to know why I decided to call you by your Christian name?’

‘Please.’

‘Well, first off, on account of your father.’ She paused to see what effect these words might have, but I didn’t blink. ‘Your father and I were on first-name terms, and you’re his son. But, apart from that . . . When I realised the only thing to do was have lunch with you, because when I get off work I can’t do anything without eating first, it seemed . . . I don’t know. I’ve always thought that eating is something that should really be done in private, because eating with someone, no matter how discreet or polite you are, means showing them the insides of your body - your tongue, your teeth, your palate . . .’ By now, I knew we were playing out a scene, and I felt vaguely flattered by the passion she brought to her role. ‘Have you ever thought that? When you eat with someone, they see you chewing, swallowing, maybe even choking on your food if you’re unlucky. I’ve always found eating with someone who’s not a friend strange, doing something as intimate as eating when I don’t even know their Christian name. Of course, I have to do it all the time for work, but I don’t like it.’ She paused again, more briefly this time. Fuck, you’re in trouble now, I thought, and she smiled as though she knew what I was thinking. ‘What I mean is, I don’t eat with just anyone.’

‘Me neither. But I’m not used to being here, eating with you.’

After this mutual confession, there was a silence I found uncomfortable but she found easier to deal with since there were lots of things she could do to fill the void: she picked up her bag, took out a pouch of tobacco, a lighter, her mobile phone, a PDA. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said, tapping on the screen of her PDA with the plastic pen.

‘What? I look like Bank Manager Barbie with all the accessories, don’t I?’ she said, and laughed, but I didn’t laugh with her. Too right, I thought.

‘Why did you come to my father’s funeral, Raquel ?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Álvaro, don’t be so impatient.’ She looked at me as though I’d said something startling, when all I had done was repeat a question I had asked her before. ‘I know you’re probably expecting some terrible revelation, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. It’s a boring story. At the end of the day human beings are boring and predictable, our lives are pretty much the same, we all have about half a dozen things in common.’

‘Like what?’

She clicked her tongue and shot me a weary look. ‘Look, we’ve ordered now. This is a really good restaurant, but it’s not cheap, so it would be a pity to waste our money. We’ve got an hour, maybe an hour and a half, together, and what I have to tell you will only take about two minutes. I don’t want you to be angry with me ahead of time. We’ve only just met, and you seem like a decent guy. Why don’t we talk about you instead? You know lots about me, but I don’t know anything about you. It doesn’t seem fair.’

At that moment, I stopped feeling nervous and I stopped feeling scared, because I was starting to feel like the most stupid, incompetent, needy, arrogant fuckwit in the whole world. ‘Just walk away, Álvaro,’ I thought, furious with myself. ‘Fuck her!’ But I didn’t move. I looked at her, and I didn’t move. She’d tricked me, she’d won me over to her side, by making me a promise that she might never keep, she was toying with me, playing me for a fool to make herself feel like she was in control, the same way she had decided where I was eating, what I was eating and with whom. ‘Just walk away, Álvaro,’ I thought, ‘let her pay for everything - she ordered it!’ But I stayed, because she had put on lipstick before leaving the office, because she held the answers to all my questions, and because I couldn’t stop looking at her.

‘What do you want to know?’

She answered with a radiant smile, as though she had been listening to my inner conflict and was celebrating her victory.

‘I don’t know . . . Tell me about the family business. What do you do?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, and I felt much better.

‘Nothing? But I thought . . .’

‘I don’t do anything,’ and for the first time I was the one to smile. ‘I’m the only one of us - well, of the brothers, I mean - who doesn’t work for my father’s business. My elder sister is a doctor, she works in intensive care. My little sister doesn’t work - well, I suppose she’d say she was a homemaker.’

‘Oh!’ She quickly tried to hide her disappointment. ‘And . . . and what do you do?’

‘I teach.’ In spite of her efforts to hide it, I had to laugh at her reaction. ‘It’s not that bad, you know, lots of people do it.’

‘I know, it’s just that . . . I don’t know . . . Of course, that’s why you’ve always got that briefcase with you . . . What do you teach, secondary school ?’

‘No, I’m a professor.’ She seemed happier to hear this. ‘I teach at UAM, in the physics department.’

‘Physics . . . And you enjoy it?’

‘More than anything.’

‘I nearly always failed it at school . . . For someone who always got top marks in maths . . .’

‘You had a bad teacher.’

At that moment, the waiter arrived with the starters and she busied herself serving them out. She was rethinking her strategy, I realised, looking for another way to get the information she was interested in. But just as I was about to take pity on her, she came up with a question.

‘And what
exactly
do you teach?’ Anyone listening would have thought she really wanted to know.

‘Well, this year, I’m teaching an introductory course called Principles of Physics, two one-term advanced courses and a doctoral course.’

‘Did you have a lecture today?’

I nodded.

‘So, what did you talk about?’

‘About the whole. And its complex relationship to its parts.’ I took one of the pieces of toast she had put on my plate and bit into it. ‘You were right, the anchovies are good . . .’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How can the relationship between the whole and its parts be complicated ? I mean, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, isn’t it? Even a child in primary school knows that. And it has nothing to do with physics.’

‘Really?’ I was enjoying this. I didn’t yet realise how far I was about to fall. ‘Are you sure?’

It was obvious she’d just been playing for time, and whatever her plan had been, it had failed. But what she had said was also true. We’d already ordered, the waiter would bring the food and we’d eat; we had a whole hour ahead of us and we had to fill it with words, and I was the only one who could do it. So I decided to have some fun.

‘From what you’ve said, I think I can work out that you studied that debased, theoretically redundant pseudoscience known as economics, am I right?’ She laughed and nodded. ‘OK. The problem with economists is that they are extraordinarily arrogant, utterly lacking in the intellectual humility you learn when you work on a broader scale. I’m not going to question the fact that Marx was a genius, or that money makes the world go round, but you have to remember that the world is only one thing in a vast universe, a simple pinprick in something whose totality we cannot begin to understand. Beyond the limited scope of economics, which is confined to this world, the whole is not necessarily the sum of its parts. In fact, one might say that the whole is only the sum of its parts when those parts do not interact.’

‘Do you speak Sanskrit too?’ She was enjoying this as much as I was.

‘It’s not that difficult. I’ll explain it to you. I’ll give you a classic example directly related to everyday life, the same example I gave my students this morning. They were only first-years, so even though you’re only an economist, you should be able to follow it.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Let’s assume we have two rooms with a connecting door. In the first room, there is a little boy crying. We’ll call him A. In the other room is another little boy, who is also crying, we’ll call him B. The door is closed, and the sum of A plus B we will call X, this being the crying that we can hear.’ I paused while the waiter brought our main course, pan-fried dorado for her, grilled veal sirloin for me. ‘Now, let’s see what happens if we open the door, that is to say, if we allow the parts to interact with one another. Now things become more complicated, because A and B could decide to ignore each other and carry on crying. But it’s also possible that when he hears B crying, A will be curious and stop crying to go and see what’s happening, or maybe B will stop crying when he hears A crying. Best-case scenario, A or B will wander into the other room hoping to play with the other boy, and if he manages to convince the other boy, there will be no more crying. Worst-case scenario: A or B, angry at hearing the tantrum, will attack the other boy, a fight will break out, they’ll thump each other, and the crying will go on, louder and more desperate than before. Get it?’

‘Yes. You’re a good teacher.’

‘Of course I’m a good teacher.’ I smiled. ‘Consequently, I assume you’ve learned that X can be equal to, greater than or less than the sum of A plus B. It depends on the interrelation of the parts. This is why we can only ever state that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts when those parts do not interact.’