The Frozen Heart Read Online Free

leave?’
    ‘No. She was right at the back. I thought she’d come up to us afterwards, but I didn’t see her again. I only noticed her because . . . well, she was pretty, wasn’t she?’
    ‘It’s strange . . .’ My brother Rafa looked from his son to my mother and then to me.
    ‘Could she be related to us, Mamá?’ I persisted. ‘A distant cousin or something . . .’
    ‘No,’ my mother snapped, then paused for a moment before saying, ‘Please, hijo , I think I’d recognise my own relatives. I may be old, but I’m not completely gaga.’
    ‘Yes, but . . .’ I didn’t dare continue, because I saw something in those eyes I did not expect. ‘It doesn’t matter . . .’
    ‘Álvaro, are you on something?’ my sister Angélica interrupted in that slyly solicitous tone everyone in the family recognised from births, hospital visits and convalescences. ‘The pill I gave you this morning wouldn’t make you act like this . . .’
    I had been waiting to see the woman up close, to look into her eyes and see their colour, find out who she was, why she was there, why she studied us so closely - but all the fur coats and woollen jackets had converged, hugging friends and strangers, kissing smooth cheeks, and the woman did not appear. Then my mother, looking more shattered than she had even in her husband’s final hours, asked whether one of us would help her back to the car. Julio and I had each slipped an arm around her, felt the astonishing weightlessness of her body, and manoeuvred her out of the cemetery. ‘Forty-nine years,’ she murmured, ‘forty-nine years we lived together, forty-nine years we slept in the same bed, and now . . .’ ‘Now you have Clara’s baby on the way, Mamá, you get to watch your grandchildren grow up,’ Julio babbled, ‘you have five children and twelve grandchildren, and we all love you and need you. We need you so we can go on loving Papá, so that Papá carries on living, you know that . . .’ My mother walked slowly, Julio trying to console her with sweet, slow words. From time to time I kissed her, pressing my lips to her face as I glanced around to find the mysterious woman, although I suspected she was already gone. I was certain that this woman had known exactly what she was doing, turning up at the last minute when the mourners had their backs to the cemetery gates, when the family was gathered around the priest, leaving her free to watch the funeral from a distance, shielded by the last paroxysm of grief, only to disappear as those unaffected by the death came forward to offer their condolences. She had anticipated all this, but she could not have reckoned on me, my one phobia, the morbid aversion to funerals that had frustrated her clever plan. I had seen her - just me, and a fourteen-year-old boy - and I might have forgotten all about her were it not for the fact that, as I left the cemetery, I became convinced that her appearance at the funeral had not been a mistake, an accident, or any of the names we give to such chance events. She had come, and she had looked at us as though she knew us, and when I had looked at her, I had seen something familiar in her profile, a vague, fleeting impression I could not put my finger on, in the same way that I could not say what it was that had made my mother’s eyes flare a deeper, purer blue when I had asked my innocent question.
    ‘Why didn’t you say something at the time, Álvaro?’
    ‘Say something about what?’ Miguelito was struggling in my arms like an animal as I tried to strap him into the child seat in the car. By the time I had managed to buckle him in, he was fast asleep.
    ‘About the girl . . .’ Mai started the car.
    I slipped into the passenger seat. My sister Angélica, in her usual hysterical way, had insisted that I wasn’t fit to drive. Besides, I didn’t feel like it.
    ‘You could have told me at the time, or when we went to pick up Miguelito, or on the way to the restaurant.’
    ‘I suppose so .