The Frozen Heart Read Online Free Page B

write in either language. ‘ Se Ven-de , Mamá, look,’ but her mother was already making a note of the phone number. ‘Come on,’ her mother said, ‘maybe there’s a caretaker.’ There was, and he had the key. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘We’ve just had a lift installed, see, they brought it all the way from Germany and, of course, these old houses, well, they’re not geared up for all these new-fangled gadgets . . .’
    They went up to the apartment in the strangest lift Raquel had ever seen in her seven short years. The lift was so small it looked like a toy, and they had to go in Indian file - first the caretaker, then Raquel, with her mother bringing up the rear. ‘You’ll see,’ the man said. ‘It’s a beautiful flat, it’s just been done up. They took out the partition walls to make the rooms bigger, and put an extension on at the side - there used to be a little terrace there, and they put in a kitchen and a second bathroom . . .’ In the month and a half they had been scouring Madrid for an apartment for her grandparents, they had heard this all before, but this time it turned out to be true. They stepped into a large rectangular living room with two large balconies and a round, wrought-iron pillar in the centre. ‘It might get in the way a bit when they try to arrange the furniture,’ said her mother, ‘but it’s nice.’ When she had first seen the apartment on that October afternoon in 1976, with the light of the weary sun thrown like a translucent gauze over the dying leaves of the trees, the room that Raquel had liked best was this room at the end of the corridor. It too had an iron pillar, with the same capital of leaves and tendrils, but here the pillar was not in the centre of the room, but slightly to one side. Facing the wall where the bed would be, a row of windows opened on to a sea of rooftops and terraces, waves of red, ochre and yellow surging towards the distant horizon above what seemed to be an empty space, but was actually a large terrace, almost a garden, since the tops of the acacias reached the third floor.
    From here, Raquel could look out over Madrid, the red roof tiles dancing between light and shadow, all alike and yet different, like scales or petals, cunning mirrors that absorbed the sunlight to reflect it on a whim. The slender, jagged spires of churches rose humbly over an undulating cityscape which danced around them like a boat, like a dragon, like the ancient, throbbing heart of a sky more beautiful than any Raquel had ever seen. How big the sky is here, she thought, as she looked out at an infinite expanse of blue so intense, so pure, that it didn’t seem to be a colour but a thing, the true image of every sky. A few high clouds formed a wispy veil so delicate that the light passed through unaffected, the clouds looked hand-picked, placed in the sky deliberately to accentuate the blue. This sky which had greeted her towards the end of the day was the same sky which, years ago, her grandfather Ignacio had bid farewell to at dawn, not knowing that he would carry it in his heart wherever he went for such a long time to come.
    Raquel already knew that sun and light and blue were important to Spanish people. ‘I’m dying, Rafaela,’ her grandfather Aurelio, her mother’s father, had said to his wife, stepping out of the surgery where the doctor had just diagnosed him with a serious, inoperable heart condition. ‘You heard me. I’m dying, and I want to die in the sun.’ Rafaela had not wanted to tell her only daughter the truth. Her daughter, who had married here in France, before her brothers, and who had just fallen pregnant. ‘We’re going back,’ she had said simply. ‘We’re going to sell our house and buy a house by the sea, in Malaga maybe, or Torre del Mar, wherever your father wants . . .’ We’re going back, we’re not going back, I think they’re going back, I’d like to go back but my father doesn’t want to, I think my family will go back