Free The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes

in Torrelodones to check that there had been no other funerals that day or the previous day. Two people had, however, been buried the following day - a nineteen-year-old motorcyclist killed in a traffic accident and an elderly woman who had been born in the village. The official who dealt with me, and who unquestioningly accepted my garbled excuses about some mix-up over the invoice for the hearse, told me that the population of Torrelodones had grown considerably, but that most of the new-comers were from Madrid, with families who tended to bring them back when they died. ‘Your father was different, of course, but then he was born here,’ he said.
    I knew that there was something unhealthy about my fixation, but my visit to the town hall completely did away with the reassuring possibility that what had happened was down to chance, since a road accident was news and the relatives of someone who had died of old age would know each other in a village like that. The presence of a strange woman at my father’s funeral was not a mistake, a slip-up, or a mix-up of any kind. I should have been troubled, but I felt oddly reassured, almost happy at the thought. I didn’t say anything to anyone, not even to Mai, and yet she was the one who unwittingly steered me in an unexpected direction.
    ‘Álvaro,’ she said that night, when Miguelito was in bed and the two of us were eating together in the kitchen, ‘I’ve been thinking . . . How old was your father when he married your mother ?’
    ‘I don’t know . . . Let me think . . . he was born in ’22, and they were married in ’56 . . . Thirty-four.
    ‘Thirty-four.’ She nodded slowly, as though chewing over the number along with her salad. ‘That’s what I thought.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s just extraordinary, isn’t it? A man who lived to be eighty-three, who didn’t marry until he was thirty-four, who lived through so much, the civil war, the Second World War . . . And it seems normal to us, obviously, because that is who he was, and we knew him. But there are lots of things we don’t know about his life, or at least things I don’t know. I mean, he must have had a lot of girlfriends before your mother, mustn’t he, when he was in Russia and so on? Think about it . . . I wish we’d talked to him more about his life, I feel we’ve missed an opportunity to get to know him . . . Maybe it’s just that I miss him.’ She reached across the table, took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I loved him very much, Alvaro, you know that . . .’
    ‘And he loved you . . .’ I said, squeezing her hand in return.
    Mai had been one of my father’s greatest conquests. When I met her, a few months after I came back from Boston, I was still getting over a complicated relationship with an Asian-American girl called Lorna, who could go from charming to insufferable, often in the same day, occasionally in the same hour and sometimes from one minute to the next. At first, I thought that this was what people meant when they talked about passion, but after a while I became convinced that it was more likely a nervous disorder of some sort, so I dumped her, and she set about trying to ruin my life. I had never really thought about spending the rest of my life in the United States, but Lorna was the deciding factor in my return to Spain. When I got back to Madrid, the last thing I wanted was another relationship, but I was thirty, I was single and I was employed, so the whole world was secretly plotting to pair me off. Mai had no part in this scheming, but she did sleep with me the first night I met her.
    ‘What a shame!’ she said the next morning. ‘But that’s life, I suppose. I’ve been waiting for years for an interesting man to appear and now that I’m almost engaged to someone else, you show up . . .’ We kissed goodbye, a long, languid kiss filled with the melancholy of those destined never to meet again, but less than eight months later my friend Fernando, who