The Frozen Heart (89 page)

‘They’ve obviously decided to perform all three as a single piece,’ Fernando had said, but they were performing them in chronological order over several days. They had spent the summer touring the production around Spain, but had taken a break in September, which was why Fernando’s friend had taken so long to track them down.

That morning, I bought a ticket in the fifth row of the stalls for the first performance of
Silver Face
, then I went to the library in the Department of Philology, took out a critical edition of the three plays and spent the next few days reading them from start to finish. Mai did not comment on my sudden interest in the plays of Ramón del Valle-Inclán, didn’t bat an eyelid when I told her I had to go to Salamanca on Saturday on some university junket, though I was vague about the details. In the end, the play which, when I bought the ticket, I’d no intention of seeing, now fascinated me.

‘Open the door, Pichona!’

‘I am naked in my bed.’

‘That should save me some little time!’

‘Oh, Moorish king! Tell me who you are.’

‘You know all too well.’

‘I tell you I do not know you.’

‘Open the door!’

‘Let me put on a petticoat. Do not break down the door, my darling.’ But Berta, who was indeed naked in her bed, simply slipped her arms into a white lace bedjacket, which she did not even button as she crossed the stage to open the door. I remembered Raquel telling me, ‘Directors are always getting her to take her clothes off, she’s stunning when she’s naked.’ She had been right on both counts.

Raquel had also said that Berta was a fine actress, and she was, so much so that as she crossed the stage, it seemed that she was fully clothed by the talent of the playwright whose lines she spoke with such artlessness, such conviction. Her nakedness was less arousing than it was poignant, and her performance overshadowed the other actor.

I felt that this guy didn’t really understand the shadows of the passions that motivated his character, the impotence of a younger son challenging his father for a woman they both desired, the malevolence that pushed him towards La Pichona, his casual betrayal of his beloved Sabelita, a girl more faint-hearted than feeble, whom his father, Don Montenegro, would seduce then cast aside in a heartless show of arrogance that broke every law, human and divine. Silver Face was handsome, strong, young, ambitious, capable of inspiring in Sabelita that same love that he felt for her, a love he was prepared to swear before God, to commit to for life, but his father was more powerful and wanted the girl for himself. His desire marked the alpha and omega of all things. When I bought my ticket, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the play before I’d had a chance to speak to Berta. But I’d finished correcting my exam papers and needed to find some other way of killing time, and so I read this brutal, brilliant, savage play. I remembered Raquel saying, ‘Spanish stories ruin everything.’ This particular Spanish story seemed to have been written in a frame of mind that precisely anticipated my own mood when I arrived to see it.

‘Álvaro!’ Berta emerged, dressed now, with no make-up, from the stage door where I had been waiting for about a quarter of an hour. ‘How are you?’

She looked exhausted but elated. She had been a great success, if an actor’s success can be judged by the bravos and the applause at the last curtain call. I’d watched her smiling, looking down into the stalls, then her eyes happened on me and her face suddenly became serious. That was what I thought I had seen, but when she appeared she kissed me so spontaneously that I gave a truthful answer to her question.

‘Not good. Not good at all, that’s why I’m here.’

‘I’m not surprised . . .’ She started walking and I followed her. ‘Let’s go for something to eat, I’m starving. Did you see the play?’ I nodded. ‘Did you like it?’

‘I liked it a lot.’ I wasn’t lying, and she thanked me with a smile. ‘Given my situation, it’s pretty close to the bone.’

‘Really?’ I realised she hadn’t understood but then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean because of the relationship between the father ...’

‘And the son,’ I finished the sentence, ‘except I’m not planning to head off to war.’

‘I see you’ve read the plays.’ She sounded surprised.

‘Yes. I started reading
Silver Face
to see what the story was about but then I had to find out how it ends.’

‘It’s not exactly a happy ending.’

‘It’s a very unhappy ending, but at least your character is one of the good guys.’

‘That’s true.’ She slipped her arm through mine and led me to a bustling café. ‘Poor little Pichona, living on the streets, hardly better than a whore, but she’s big hearted and she’s the only one in the play who’s really capable of love. That’s the genius of Valle-Inclán. There’s always a whore, or a tramp, or a child, or a lunatic that he treats with such tenderness it compensates for his cruelty to everyone else. Anyway, Álvaro . . . you shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Silver Face is good in his own way, he’s a better man than his father and he’s a saint compared to his brothers. That’s why Valle-Inclán has him go off to war, to redeem him, so he plays no part in pillaging his mother’s inheritance, so that Montenegro doesn’t get to curse him the way he does his other sons. But Silver Face is nothing like you, whatever you might think. Shall we take this table?’

The café looked jammed, but Berta found a table at the back, and ordered a club sandwich and a beer.

‘Berta, where’s Raquel ?’ I asked as soon as the waiter left.

‘Um . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘She’s in Madrid.’

‘Where in Madrid?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that. Raquel’s my friend and you don’t betray a friend.’

‘But ...’

‘Don’t push it, Álvaro . . . If you keep asking me questions, I might just start telling you any old shit. I’m good at that, I’m an actress, remember ? The whole thing was madness . . . All I can say is I didn’t know anything about it until that dinner when you showed up at the pizzeria with her and she had a funny turn, remember?’ I remembered, and I believed her, I could sense that she was telling the truth. ‘When I found out, I was thunderstruck. Until then, I’d had no idea and the whole thing seemed incredible. If I’d known I’d never have let her . . .’ She let the sentence trail off. ‘Raquel’s always been the sensible one in our group. I was always the one who fucked up, got involved with unsuitable men, married with sick children and wives, all that baggage . . .’

‘But I’m willing to get divorced, I want to marry her if she’ll have me, and Raquel knows that . . .’

‘Álvaro . . . Oh, Jesus . . . Álvaro!’ She said my name as though it pained her, then stretched out her arms and took my face in her hands, as though to shut me up and console me.

‘Then that’s not the problem?’

‘No, that’s not the problem.’ She let go of my face, but in her eyes I could see a guilty compassion.

Our order arrived, forcing us to stop for a moment. Berta was frowning, she didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

‘What happened Berta?’

She took her sandwich in both hands, then closed her eyes and bit off as much as she could.

‘I can’t tell you, Álvaro, really I can’t . . .’ She began the sentence with her mouth full, then waved her hand, signalling me to wait until she was finished. ‘. . . it’s not my place to say, you wouldn’t want to hear it from me. This is something Raquel has to do. What I can tell you is . . .’ She took another bite, and I realised she was not starving so much as giving herself time to choose her words. ‘. . . Raquel’s in a bad way, Álvaro. As bad as you, maybe worse, because this is all her fault. She left because she doesn’t want to hurt, but, I don’t know . . . Sometimes I think the cure is worse than the disease, because, in the beginning, it did seem that leaving was the best thing she could do, even I thought that, but now . . . How was I to know how things would turn out? The guys I fall for never chase after me, not to this extent. How could I have known you’d be so persistent? I stayed with her a couple of nights ago and she showed me your note . . . She was devastated, she wanted to call you, and I . . . Maybe you’ll hit me for this, but I was the one who persuaded her not to, because she has to think things through, she can’t just call you without knowing what she’s going to say . . . Don’t be angry with me, Álvaro, please . . . I just want things to work out, and I can’t always be there for her, because I’m touring . . . Anyway, what I’m trying to say is Raquel will come back, she’ll show up when you least expect it. She’ll come back because it’s the last thing she should do, and in the state she’s in people never do what they ought to.’

‘What do you mean . . .?’

‘Don’t ask me any more, Álvaro.’ She raised her hand. ‘I’ve said too much already . . .’ But before she left, she told me one more thing, after she’d insisted on paying, after I’d told her yet again that honestly, no, honestly, I wasn’t angry with her. I hadn’t left. I watched her from the doorway of the café, silently betting that she’d take out her mobile phone and call Raquel before she got to the middle of the square, but suddenly she came back.

‘One more thing, Álvaro . . . There isn’t another man, not now, not before the summer, there’s never been anybody else. I’m just telling you because . . . Well, I know we’re all grown-ups, but I’m telling you because if I were you, it would be something I’d be happy to know.’

‘Thanks, Berta.’ It was something I was happy to know.

We kissed goodbye again and she left, and before she’d even reached the place where she had been, she took something out of her bag. A second later I could see she had her phone pressed to her ear. For a second I thought of running after her, ripping the phone out of her hands and talking to Raquel. But we both knew I wouldn’t do that. So I just watched her go until she disappeared beneath one of the arcades on the square, then I went to my car and headed back to Madrid.

As I drove, I tried to make sense of what she’d told me. It seemed very little and yet it was more than I had been able to find out in a month. Berta’s silences, the irregular sequence of hesitations, the dot-dot-dots of sentences that trailed out into silence had seemed more revealing than her words, and what she did say seemed to me more darkness than light, except for her last comment. It may not have seemed important to her, but it meant a lot to me, not so much to my sense of pride, but because it refuted a hypothesis which had begun to form in my imagination. The vague language with which Berta had predicted that Raquel would come back, her discreet, convoluted way of letting me know that Raquel loved only me, was useful too, especially the bit about the phone call she had persuaded Raquel not to make, proof that my most awkward words had also been the most effective. And yet none of this new data took me to any place other than where I had been the moment I found out that Raquel had disappeared. I had to wait, that was my only conclusion, the only thing I learned. I couldn’t have imagined that I would not have long to wait.

In the taxi that took me back to the place where everything had begun, the opulent apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan, the last place I would have expected to see her, I felt a strange sense of nostalgia for that wait, an incomprehensible desire to postpone the moment for a few more hours.
I’m not afraid of anything
, I’d said in my awkward, clumsy note to Raquel,
I’m not afraid of anything
, but it wasn’t true. The taxi driver, however, took less than ten minutes to get to the building, pulling up in front of the cold marble doorway. The door was closed, but I took the precaution of pushing it before gently touching the doorbell for Apartment E with a trembling finger. I felt a sense of unreality that was intensely physical yet light, a frothy whitish mist, like the nebulous light of dreams.

This isn’t real, I thought. But I pressed the button and someone upstairs released the catch. My shoes made a soft squeaking sound on the freshly polished marble, and the lift screeched as it came to a halt on the ground floor. As it climbed towards the seventh floor, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt a surge of pity for this face which I understood better than before. It was the face of a man who was terrified, hysterical, alone, exhausted. But when I got to the seventh floor, I found myself standing before an open door and, on the other side, Raquel, dressed exactly as she had been the first time I met her: a black T-shirt with a white pattern and a pair of black jeans that did little justice to the shimmering asymmetry of her hips. She seemed thinner, paler, her eyes were puffy and the skin around them was as translucent as parchment. Looking at her, I saw a woman who was terrified, hysterical, alone, exhausted, a face so like my own yet so different. But I also saw Raquel, a clever girl, so beautiful you had to look twice. I saw the love of my life.

‘Álvaro.’ She took a few steps towards me, so slowly my whole body ached. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I could do nothing but stare at her. ‘Álvaro, there’s something I need to tell you . . .’

‘Don’t ever do that to me again, Raquel.’

My arms took the initiative, wrapping themselves around her and hugging her hard, my hands moved over her back, slowly recognising her, recognising myself. I could now become myself again as I breathed her in, as I touched her, I was intensely aware that I was about to kiss her, and when I kissed her everything was calm once more, flowing gently like water.

‘Don’t ever do that to me again . . .’

Clinging to my neck like a castaway, she hugged me, kissed me, gazed at me as though I held her life in my hands.

‘If I could, I’d eat you right now, I’d swallow you up so that you’d always be inside me, so I’d always know where you were, because I was dead, Raquel, it was like I died, and I can’t bear it, I couldn’t bear it if . . . Don’t ever do that to me again, ever, for the love of God.’

Then, without letting go, she looked into my eyes and said the only thing I needed to hear.