The Frozen Heart (99 page)

‘It’s not that, Álvaro, I don’t want you to leave . . . It’s just . . . it’s all so fucked up, everything is so completely fucked up . . .’

She hugged me and I couldn’t see her face any more, but in her voice I could hear my own defeat.

‘I knew it would turn out like this, and it’s all my fault . . . but I love you, Álvaro, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you ... I nearly went out of my mind, I was thinking, I don’t know, I imagined what it would be like if everyone else was dead, your mother, your wife, and it was just the two of us, that you’d had an accident and lost your memory . . . It sounds stupid, doesn’t it? I thought about us meeting in a different country, imagined we weren’t related, I pictured us meeting at some dinner or at a party, because sooner or later things were bound to turn out like this . . . But I couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to imagine this . . . all this pain. That’s why I imagined everyone was dead, that it was just you and me, living in this apartment, with the sun streaming in through the windows on Saturday morning, me bringing back flowers from the market, the two of us laughing because we were happy, because I’d never gone insane, because I’d never filled a box full of things, gone round to the Calle Jorge Juan, bought two dozen candles in the little Chinese shop next door, never arranged them around the Jacuzzi, never lit them and blown them out one by one, as if it were my birthday . . .’

This sadness, as much mine as hers, coursed through me like some deadly, merciful drug I was powerless to resist.

‘And I imagined us being happy because you trusted me, Álvaro, because I’d never lied to you. That’s how I pictured it, not this . . . not this fucked-up mess, even though I knew it would turn out like this, that it would never be just the two of us, Álvaro, that it would never be just you and me. There would always be too many people with us, the living and the dead, ruining everything . . . I knew it would turn out this way, but it’s just so unfair, so horrible . . .’

I never cry, I hardly ever cry, but I was crying now.

She wiped away my tears, pulled me to her and buried her face in my neck.

‘Can you get through this, Álvaro?’

‘I don’t know, Raquel.’ My brief, meek, silent tears had stopped. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

The old folks say that in this country
There once was a war,
That there are two Spains now that nurture
Old grudges and old doubts
[...] But all I have seen are people
who suffer in silence, pain and fear
people with just one desire
their bread, their wife, their peace.
[...] The old folks say
that we do what we please
and that this means it’s impossible
for a government to govern anything
[...] But all I have seen are people
who are obedient even in their beds
people who ask only
to live their lives, with no more lies, in peace.
Freedom, freedom without anger
Keep your fear, your anger to yourself
Because there’s freedom without anger, freedom
(And if there’s not, there will be).

José Luis Armenteros Sánchez, Rafael Baladés Rocafull
and Pablo Herrero Ibarz
Libertad sin ira,
(1976)

In the last days of summer indolence, I was twice reminded of a poem by Antonio Machado which I had not thought about for some time: the sonnet To
Líster, Chief of the armies
of the Ebro
[...] Any poetry written for specific circumstances can be terrible, but this reservation aside, all poetry is specific. Jorge Manrique’s
Lines on the Death of his Father
is specific, and so is García Lorca’s
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias
and Antonio Machado’s poem about the assassination of Lorca. [...] Why then was this particular sonnet so badly received? Why, nowadays, does anyone who wants to praise its beauty have to find some excuse ...? [...] Later, during the second world war, Líster, true to his vocation, found on the battlefields of Europe, now, so many years later, his loyalty may seem anachronistic; these days, the sonnet Machado dedicated to him inspires a feeling of vague disquiet. We are so discreet these days! We’re so much above such things!

Francisco Ayala (1988)

M
ai had tidied the house before she left, but as I stepped into the bedroom, I tripped on a little yellow cement mixer with plastic wheels hidden in the doorway. I picked it up and put it back where it belonged, between the fire engine and the red Ferrari on the shelf where my son kept his fleet of cars. Everything about the room pained me, its smell, the duvet cover that matched the curtains, even the web that Spiderman was climbing. I left the room quickly, soundlessly, as if it were night-time, a different time, but Miguelito wasn’t in his bed sleeping, and I didn’t feel any better. As I moved down the corridor towards what was now my ex-wife’s bedroom, I could almost see him, see his mother, hear her voice, the laughter, the footsteps, the echoes of my former life. I could remember every word of the conversation we had had the night before.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Mai, it’s Álvaro ...’

‘Yes, I do still recognise your voice.’

A conversation that brought to an end one of the cruellest, most brutal, most unpleasant days of my life, although I’d lost count of the contenders for that title. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back,’ Raquel said when she opened the door at 8 p.m. on that fateful day, 30 September. It was a Friday, a day that had begun when the alarm rang at 7 a.m.

‘I have to go to work,’ she announced. ‘I took the day off yesterday because I imagined I’d need it, but today ... I don’t have a choice.’

‘It’s OK.’ She waited for a minute to see whether I had anything else to say, but I could think of nothing.

Watching her get up and leave without turning back, I remembered her words, the brilliant, terrifying prognosis of what awaited me.
I knew things would turn out this way, they were bound to turn out this way, but I didn’t want it to be like this, I imagined that it was always Saturday morning, always sunny.
I didn’t get up to have breakfast with her. I should have, but I was too tired. I hadn’t slept any better at the Plaza de los Guardias de Corps than I had at the Calle Jorge Juan.

At five past eight she came back into the bedroom in her business clothes — trouser suit, high heels, brown leather briefcase — but this time I didn’t pull her down on to the bed, creasing her clothes. Not that she had been expecting me to. She appeared with a piece of toast in her hand, popped it into her mouth and then sat down on the bed.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Today? I’m not sure ... I should go home, take a shower, get some clothes, though I don’t feel like it. Afterwards, I honestly don’t know.’

‘Well,’ she kissed me, ‘when I get out of work, I’ll be here ...’

I simply nodded. She left and I found myself alone, surrounded by the stillness of things, the silence of the empty house.

I realised the second part of my life had not begun in that strange, uninhabited room with Raquel’s confession. The second part of my life would begin when I got out of this bed where I had so often slept to face the routine which Raquel was lucky enough to have recovered already.

We had slept next to each other, and made love silently, feverishly, at about four or five o’clock when our mutual insomnia coincided, but this was of no help when the alarm clock went off. I looked at it again and realised it was already 9.40 a.m. I couldn’t spend the whole day in bed, so I told myself the best thing to do would be to begin at the beginning.

I should have phoned Mai. This was the first thing I should have done that day, but it was the last thing I did. I didn’t regret it. ‘You’re the only good guy in this sorry mess, Alvaro,’ Raquel had said to me. This was not exactly true. To my wife, to my son, I was the bad guy. This was why I should have phoned Mai, but I had a shower instead, rummaged in the wardrobe and the drawers until I found a blue T-shirt of Raquel’s that fitted me. Then I sat down to breakfast at the kitchen table and surrendered to the fantasy time-travel, reliving the tender scene a few short hours after I had left her that first afternoon, when nothing was at stake, almost nothing, only my freedom and her perfect skin, velvety as a rare peach.

I should have phoned Mai, but I didn’t feel like it. I needed to phone Fernando but I couldn’t. If I can’t bring myself to believe it, how can I tell anyone else? The bitter echo of my own words floated over the flowers Raquel hadn’t bought; it wasn’t Saturday morning, even if the sun was streaming through the windows with an infuriating, almost cruel joy. I finished what, under normal circumstances, would be my one cup of coffee and poured a second one. There would be a third cup later.

I was an ordinary, reasonable guy whose only quirk was a morbid aversion to funerals. My life was a little patch of garden, where there was nothing to trouble my eyes or my conscience. It’s a long story. A very long, very old story, and to live here, there are some things it’s better not to know. Things it’s better not to understand. If I wanted I could choose to do nothing. It’s always possible to do nothing, to learn to live with no questions, no answers, no anger, no pity. It’s always possible not to live but to pretend to live, at least it’s possible here in Spain, a country where the laws of gravity, the laws of cause and effect, did not apply, a country where no one had ever seen an apple fall from a tree, because the apples had always been on the ground, it was more practical that way, it was better for everyone, for as long as the hand was quicker than the eye, as long as the simplest illusions worked in favour of those who held the lens, as long as the good name of the little people who did what they had to in order to survive was held in contrast to the outmoded reputation of ‘honourable’ men and women, who were so ineffective in reality, so boring in the sterility of their sacrifice, because if they had done nothing, if they had simply surrendered, if they had not vainly risked their lives again and again, nothing would have happened anyway. They might not have been honourable, perhaps, but we would have understood them just the same.

Little Spanish boy being born into this world, may God protect you. Because to live here, there are some things it’s better not to know. But I love you, I have faith in you, I know you will grow up to be a good man, an honourable man, brave enough to forgive your mother, who will always love you and who will never completely be able to forgive herself.

Little Spanish girl coming into this world, may God protect you. You don’t even have the right to know who you are, because to live here, there are some things it’s better not to know. Best to leave everything as it is: the bare branches of the apple tree, the fruit carefully arranged, a clever trick by a set designer who likes to work when there are no witnesses, for those who remain are already dead from fright. Not even the right to know who I am because in those days it was difficult being the child of certain people, it could even be dangerous ... Through love or sheer calculation, so many years come down to this, one, two, three whole generations, almost a century of pain and pride. This is the point where the memories of the victors and of the vanquished meet, different viewpoints, but with only one result for the children, the grandchildren of everyone.

Little Spanish boy born into this world, don’t count on God to protect you. Protect yourself from the questions, from the answers, from their reasons, or one of the two Spains will freeze your heart.
³

There was a third cup of coffee, then a fourth. I called my brother Julio. When I left the house, I felt like a stranger in my own body, as though I wasn’t sure that this was me, this man standing on a corner, raising his hand to hail a taxi. But this man was me, the same yet different, and I would never be anyone else. This was the one thing I knew for certain.

Julio told me to meet him in a café near his office on the Paseo de la Habana. I arrived thinking there wasn’t much more that could go wrong, but a few hours later, as I crossed La Castellana, I was so angry that I decided to walk home. The walk did me good, but by the time I was halfway there, my knuckles and the side of my face started to hurt and the pain was so bad I had to stop. I went into a bar, had a drink, but afterwards I couldn’t find a taxi. I was too tired to go on walking, so I took the metro. I was so late back that Raquel didn’t have time to compose herself when she buzzed me through the front door and I found her standing waiting for me, tearful and with an indescribable expression on her face.

‘I thought you weren’t coming back,’ she said, and I remember thinking it sounded as if she were talking to a soldier coming home from war.

‘But I did come back,’ I said, I was home from the war.

She hugged me and I hugged her. I could feel her warmth, her pleasure, the pale echo of an ancient happiness.

‘What happened to you, Alvaro?’ Raquel looked at me and frowned. ‘Did you fall or something?’ She brought her fingers to my face and gently touched my eyelid. ‘Your eye is all red and swollen.’

‘It’s nothing, I just ... I talked to my brothers,’ I was laughing, though I didn’t know why, ‘I got into a punch-up with Rafa. It’s funny, you know, I haven’t been in a fight for twenty years and I thought he’d come off best, but in the end, he was the one who came off worst, I’m sure he’ll need stitches. I’ve had a lot to drink, but I could do with another. Do you fancy one?’

She took my hands and looked at my grazed, swollen knuckles. ‘My God ... What did you do, Alvaro, tell me ...’ She was scared and my smile did little to reassure her. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘A bit, it’s nothing serious. I’m just going to get myself a drink because I have to phone Mai. I’ll be right back.’

I went into the kitchen with my mobile phone and slowly, deliberately, clumsily, I put a tray on the counter with a glass, some ice and a bottle of whisky. This isn’t going to help, I thought; it wasn’t going to help and I hadn’t had any lunch. But the first sip warmed me from inside and settled me.