The Frozen Heart (84 page)

The performers said as much -
¡olé! ¡olé! you have a gift, hija!
She twirled, moving her feet and her arms to the rhythm of the music, leaned down to flick the ruffled pleats of her imaginary skirt, then straightened quickly, and strode across the stage in quick graceful steps, as though about to step down, but she did not, she started all over again,
¡olé! ¡olé!
, they said,
just look at the girl dance
. Raquel was dancing, and dancing extremely well, so well that it was as though she had only ever danced here, now, with the tall, dark-skinned gypsy, who moved with unerring instinct, matching his movements to her body. They came together and parted with the tense languor of an animal in heat, as his arms encircled her, never touching her, to envelop her in the grace that enveloped him. The singer clapped his hands, gazing at the couple, everyone was staring at them, they seemed aware of nothing and no one else, they did not need to look at anyone else, only at each other, lips parted, in an expression of fierce, almost savage recognition that excluded all those who were not part of the reality they shared, of the only thing that existed for them in that moment.

‘So, where are you from?’ the gypsy asked her, after the show was over and the performers mingled with the audience. ‘Dancing the way you did is something you can’t learn.’

‘I’m from Málaga,’ said Raquel, her back to Ignacio, oblivious to the look of astonishment he gave her, ‘I live in France but I’m
malagueña
.’

‘Of course.’ The gypsy smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. ‘It shows.’

Me cago en tu padre, cabrón!
I shit on your father, you bastard! As he half-turned to evaluate the situation, Ignacio realised he was no longer even swearing in French. Nor was he cheered by what he saw. He couldn’t count on Philippe, whose unconditional devotion to Raquel had proved in vain. He was completely drunk - Laurent was trying to hold him up and calling to Ignacio for help. Nor was he the only casualty. One of the girls had had to be taken out just before she threw up, and all the others had their jackets on. In the meantime, the gypsy had made some progress, as could be seen in the flushed cheeks of his prey. Ignacio took a deep breath and walked over to them.

‘Raquel,’ he said, barely touching her elbow and addressing her in Spanish, ‘we’re going.’

She looked from him to the gypsy and back again. She was hesitating, as both men realised; they both had the same desire in their eyes, each aware of her power and her frailty, the symbols of their respective tribes, at once exotic and distinct.

‘Are you leaving with the Frenchie?’ The gypsy was the first to crack.

‘He’s not French,’ she said at length, ‘he’s Spanish . . .’ She looked at the dancer and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m going to go too, we’re setting off for Madrid early tomorrow, and we’ve had a lot of late nights.’

He accepted the decision with good grace, Ignacio was forced to admit, as he watched the man take Raquel’s hand in his, slowly kiss it and say a simple
adíos
before turning away and leaving the two of them alone. Then, because he needed to do something, Ignacio placed his hand on Raquel’s arm again and led her very gently towards the door. When they got outside and found themselves flayed by the dry, icy wind of the Sierra, which in the early hours belies the benevolent constancy of the noonday sun in Granada, he turned to her but had not expected her teasing smile, which made him think that, perhaps, she had realised her great conquest on this trip would not be Philippe, but himself.

‘I thought you were from Nîmes,’ he said after a moment, returning her smile.

‘And I thought you hated flamenco.’ They both laughed.

‘Now I like it,’ he confessed, ‘thanks to you.’

‘I’m glad, because . . . I have to say that when we were little, I didn’t like you very much, Ignacio. I can still remember at the
L’Humanité
parties, every time I saw you I felt ill. You were the only person who never clapped. I’d dance, because I loved dancing, and in France I didn’t have much opportunity, so I’d spend the whole year waiting for those parties, practising in my bedroom on my own. And then, bam! There you’d be, in your red-and-black scarf with your jug ears, and suddenly I’d get nervous, because I knew what was coming next. What I never understood was why you always gave me that look of contempt. When I finished your mother would come over and kiss me, and every year she’d tell me I was getting better, and there you were, standing next to her with your
cachirulo
and that pained expression like you’d been tortured ...’

They were walking down the Cuesta del Chapiz, towards the Paseo de los Tristes, when she stopped and turned to him.

‘Why did you hate me so much, Ignacio? And why did you always watch if you didn’t like my dancing?’

He did not know, but he knew what he had to do, knew what she was expecting.

The kiss did not last as long as the one Raquel and her boyfriend had shared at the airport in Paris, but it was as sweet and crisp as the first bite of a piece of fruit, and its intensity surprised them both. They were coming to the hotel; neither of them spoke, they could think of nothing to say. Ignacio was wondering what had happened, what might happen next. Raquel, walking a pace in front, was simply wondering when, how and where it would happen. It would not be in Granada, but neither would it be in circumstances she could have imagined.

 

‘I’m not crying because I’m sad.’ Ignacio looked at her as they stood at a traffic light in Madrid. ‘It’s not because I’m sad.’

And at that moment, Raquel Perea Millán, who had a tall, stocky boyfriend waiting for her back in France, gorging himself on foie gras, realised that her life was about to change.

‘Where are we going?’ she had asked Ignacio that afternoon, after the others had gone off to spend their free time shopping.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really know.’ He smiled, still dazed by how lucky he was. ‘My aunt told my father she lives at the end of the Moratalaz, but he couldn’t remember where that is . . . The best thing would be to take a taxi.’

‘I have to go and visit someone this afternoon,’ Ignacio had told her over breakfast on their first day in Madrid. ‘Who are you going to see?’ she asked him later, as they were walking down the Paseo del Prado. ‘My uncle’s wife,’ he said, and told her the story of this woman he had never met, whom no one in the Fernández family had seen since 19 February 1939, but whom he had grown up calling Aunt Casilda. ‘Well, maybe I could go with you . . .’ she said, as though it had just occurred to her. ‘I mean, we’ve been here a whole week, and we haven’t really seen how people live . . . if you don’t mind,’ she added quickly, because they had not kissed again since that strange night, and were not close enough to dispense with formalities. ‘No, of course not,’ Ignacio said quickly, ‘I’d love you to come.’

‘Where did you say you wanted to go?’ The taxi driver turned to him, astonished, and he slowly repeated the address. ‘Well, I have no idea where that is.’

‘It’s at the other end of Moratalaz,’ said Ignacio. ‘At least that’s what I was told.’

‘OK,’ he started the car, ‘well, let’s head for Moratalaz, and after that, we’ll see . . .’

They headed down Gran Vía and turned on to an even wider boulevard with La Cibeles in the distance, passed the Puerta de Alcalá and drove for a while alongside the Retiro; this was Madrid, Ignacio knew that, had seen it a thousand times in photographs and films, and heard about it even more. Perhaps this was why he felt more at home here than Andalucía because here, finally, in the buildings and the street names, in the trees, the
palacios
, the boulevards and the statues, his two countries finally came together.

Arriving in Madrid, he found it exactly as he had expected it to be, a sprawling city with too many houses, too many shops, too much passion to be disrupted by this new thing called tourism, and he liked that. He liked Madrid, and so did Raquel, though her approval barely counted since she had even claimed to love the monotonous scenery of La Mancha they had seen from the bus. And yet, beyond the Retiro and the Calle O’Donnell, Madrid began to blur and fade. Ignacio had the impression that he was no longer in his father’s city, and yet this was still a city, new areas of cheap, ugly houses, tower blocks, it could have been any city in the world, but it was Madrid. The taxi driver was still driving fast, he knew his way here, but he did not linger when he stopped and rolled down his window to ask for directions. If what they had been driving through was Moratalaz, they had clearly arrived at the far end of it, because before them were fields, an arid wasteland of building sites with a train track in the distance. ‘I think we might have passed it,’ said the taxi driver, and turned the car around, drove a little way, stopped and asked for directions, announced they had taken the wrong turning again, and this sequence of events was repeated twice more before they came to the house they had been looking for.

‘Well, here we are at the end of the world.’

It was an ugly, three-storey building running the whole length of the block with several narrow aluminium doorways. The walls were of whitish brick, and on the terraces and the balconies there was laundry, bits of junk, ladders, and here and there a withered plant, utterly unlike Granada with its geraniums. This was not a pleasant place to live, thought Ignacio as he pushed open the door and found himself in a narrow hall lit by two bare bulbs. On the right-hand wall was a row of postboxes, two of the doors were hanging off and others were missing, one of the latter had once been his aunt’s mailbox, but Ignacio already had her full address: staircase C, second floor, left-hand door.

‘Are you nervous?’ Raquel asked as he rang the doorbell.

‘Yes.’

She took his hand and squeezed it as they heard the sound of a bolt being shot back.

‘Hello, you must be Ignacio . . .’

In the doorway was a rather tall young man with the Fernández family nose which Ignacio had been lucky enough not to inherit, and the misty eyes which, unfortunately, he had not inherited either.

‘Yes, I’m Ignacio. You must be Mateo.’

‘Yeah . . .’ The young man smiled then stood aside to let them pass. ‘Who’s the girl ?’

‘This is Raquel. Her parents are Spanish too, they’re good friends of my parents. I asked her to come. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘No, course not ... anyway, don’t stand there, come in.’

The pressure of Raquel’s fingers relaxed, but he shot her a glance, pleading for her not to let him go. She nodded as they stepped into the hall. On the right, a door with a wooden architrave led to a narrow living room where there was barely space to move between the furniture: a three-piece suite, a low table with four chairs at the end next to the door to the terrace, and a sideboard opposite the sofa. Hanging on the wall above the sideboard there was a rug. Ignacio was so taken aback he had to look twice - a wool rug with a picture of two stags woven in darker wool, with long white tassels: a carpet on the wall, and a hideous one at that. He was standing, dazed by the sheer awfulness of the decor, when he heard a shout and turned and saw a woman who could not be much older than his mother, but who seemed much older. Short and stocky with dark curly hair, she came into the living room, wiping her hands on a dishcloth which she dropped on to one of the chairs so that she could hug Ignacio with such force it was as though they had been through some disaster together.

‘Ignacio! Oh, my God! Ignacio.’ She took a step back to to look at him and he could see tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it, let me look at you,
hijo
. You look just like your father. How old are you now?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘That’s how old he was the last time I saw him, I still remember, every day ...
ay!
’ Her eyes no longer held back the welling tears. ‘You’re just the same, your eyes, that forehead, your ears . . . It’s like looking at your father!’ Then finally she turned and saw Raquel. ‘Who’s this girl ? She can’t be your sister ?’

‘No, no . . .’ Ignacio cut in. ‘She’s the daughter of some Spanish friends of my parents, her name’s Raquel.’

‘Oh! It doesn’t matter,
hija
, my home is your home.’ She kissed Raquel on both cheeks, then picked up the dishcloth and gestured to the sofa. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, take a seat . . . What would you like to drink? I’ve just made a sponge cake. Maybe you’d prefer beer ?’

Just then a thin man of about fifty, prematurely old with sparse grey hair and a sad, drooping moustache, came in and crossed the living room without a word. His rubber-soled slippers glided soundlessly over the tiles as though he were floating.

‘That’s Andrés,’ Casilda looked at him coolly, ‘my husband. Andrés, this lad is . . .’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know . . .’ He looked from his wife to the new arrivals. ‘Hello.’ He slumped into an armchair.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Ignacio, then everyone fell silent.

‘Well, I’ll just pop into the kitchen . . .’

Casilda disappeared and the silence remained unbroken until her son asked: ‘So, what have you been doing? Do you like Spain?’

‘Oh yes,’ Raquel smiled, ‘very much.’

‘You know what I think?’ Mateo focused his attention on the girl, ignoring his cousin. ‘Nowhere in the world can you live the way we do here. Just look at all the building work in Alicante, you wouldn’t believe how many tourists come in the summer. And that’s just the beginning . . . We live like kings here, honestly, the weather is perfect, the sun shines all the time, it’s not like those northern cities where you get up to grey skies and rain . . . And the food ? What did you think of the food ? I’ve got a friend who’s just moved to Cologne and he’s already sick to death of eating pork and sausages and potatoes, it’s just not the same. I mean, obviously, he earns a lot more money there, but I don’t think he’ll stick it out ... It’s just we have everything here, just look at the fruit ... And then there’s the ham, I don’t know how anyone could live in a country where there’s no
jamón Serrano
. And it’s so peaceful too, you can walk the streets any time of the day or night . . .’