Read Online The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes - Free Book Online Page B

Nobody, that is, except me, when I saw myself reflected in him and felt overwhelmed by the difference, crushed by his superiority. I did not even manage to be taller than him, and the inch I never grew, the inch that would have made me as tall as him, expanded in my adolescent mind to become a symbol of my failure to live up to him.
    Sometimes, I felt proud of myself, but I never felt that my father would be proud of me. And yet, despite the fact that I was the only one of his children to question him, the values that he stood for, he had always been more magnanimous to me than I had been to him, as though he could tell that my defiance was not a whim, but a need that grew out of my own sense of inferiority. It was not easy to be the son of a man like that, at least it had not been easy for me, and all that forgotten pain, long buried in the sands of all the days that had passed, since the time when he had been the most important person in my life, now spouted again with every memory of him. Death is terrible; it is savage and impious, insensitive and cynical, but most of all it is dishonest.
    ‘Is that all there is?’ Lisette nodded as I picked up the pile of letters which lay on the desk. ‘I’ll take them into the living room.’
    I didn’t want to sit in his chair, didn’t want to lean over his desk and touch his things, but as I was leaving, I could not help but notice the empty spaces on the wall.
    ‘Where are the photos?’ I asked, referring to three framed portraits, one of my father in a German Army uniform posing beside a plane, one in which he and my mother stood facing each other, smiling, she almost a woman, he already a man, the name and address of a photographer on the Gran Vía in the bottom right-hand corner, and a snapshot, yellowing at the edges, of my father standing between my two older brothers in their school football kit.
    ‘Rafa took them,’ Lisette said, her voice hesitant until she saw my smile. ‘Julio took the photo of your mother on the desk, the one in the silver frame, you remember . . . The girls haven’t been yet. Aren’t you going to take anything?’
    I took a moment to digest what she had said. Death, I realised, had magnified my brother Rafa’s unconditional, extreme worship of my father’s personality. I shook my head.
    ‘Not now,’ I said at last, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
    It didn’t take long to sort through the post, about thirty letters, the junk mail outnumbered by the smart white hand-addressed envelopes bearing yet more belated condolences. There were a few invoices, which I gave to Lisette to file with the others, and five letters from five different banks, four of them in ordinary windowed envelopes and the other in a sealed envelope which I opened in case it was just a leaflet offering a loan. When I realised it was a personal letter from a financial adviser, I put it with the others. I said goodbye to Lisette, kissing her absent-mindedly, and headed back to Madrid.
    The traffic was so heavy on the motorway to Burgos that as I passed Alcobendas I was able to see that the interactive museum I had been working with for a few years had now taken down the banners that had advertised the exhibition on Mars on loan from a German museum. The next exhibition, on black holes, was one I had curated myself. I was happy with the way it had turned out, yet, long before I reached Madrid, I found myself thinking about the woman at the cemetery again, as I had done at some point every day for almost a month.
    I thought about her and I thought about me, and when I did, I remembered the strange state I had been in when I saw her, that sudden heightened awareness which had fixed her in my memory like some posthumous facet, dark and secret, of my own father.
    I didn’t dare to talk to anyone about this, because I realised that there was something unhealthy about my curiosity, something I did not quite understand myself, but something that had led me to the town hall