The Frozen Heart Read Online Free PDF

each passing year because every year there were more French people and fewer Spaniards. The tenses of the verb ‘to go back’ accelerated, quickly moving from the future to the present. After years of inactivity, of the permanent listlessness of sleeping in another man’s bed, everything suddenly began to change for the Spanish. Raquel was very young, but she understood.
    We’re going back, even her father used the verb, though he had been born in Toulouse and his wife had been born in Nîmes. We’re going back too. It was September 1975, they had spent August in Torre del Mar and her father had found a job in Spain, not in Malaga, where Grandfather Aurelio lived, but in Madrid, Grandfather Ignacio’s city. I’m going to go out there next week, Papá, just me. Everyone else will stay until Christmas while I look for an apartment, a school and so forth. Since it’s just Raquel and the boys, and since Mamá goes to work in Aubervilliers every day, I was thinking that, if you don’t mind, they could stay with you for a few months, that way we wouldn’t have to wait until the last minute to move our things. You wouldn’t mind dropping the kids off at school and picking them up again, would you, Mamá?
    Her brother Mateo was so young he wouldn’t remember Paris, but Raquel was six years old, and although they had not even left, she was already beginning to miss the place.
    ‘What is it, niña , don’t you want to go?’ Grandma Anita, chopping nuts for Uncle Hervé’s salad, looked worriedly at her granddaughter, who was quiet and withdrawn. ‘You’ll be happy in Spain, you’ll see, and don’t worry about school. Do you remember how you cried when I told you you wouldn’t be going back to kindergarten? And what happened? Nothing. You met lovely Mademoiselle Françoise and you made lots of friends. Well, it’ll be the same in Spain, it’ll be better, because it’s your own country, our country. We’re Spanish, you know that.’
    I’m not, she was about so say, you all might be, but I’m Parisian, I was born here and I don’t want to go back, I’m scared of leaving my friends, my school, my home, the streets and the TV programmes. This is what she thought, and if in the end she resigned herself to voicing a more restrained objection, it was not because at six years old she could not clearly formulate her thoughts, but because she knew that in this house such things simply were not said.
    ‘I wish we were at least going to Malaga. My grandparents are there.’
    ‘So what? Your Grandpa Ignacio comes from Madrid. Ask him, he’ll tell you all about it.’
    ‘Why don’t you come with us, Grandma?’
    ‘Because . . . because some must work and some must play, that’s why.’ She finished chopping the walnuts, tossed them into a bowl and put her hands on her hips. ‘Because your grandfather doesn’t want to go, he’s the most stubborn man in the whole world, and I should know, I’m from Aragon, and they say we’re stubborn as mules. When they wanted to make him a French citizen, he didn’t want it, when we were able to save a bit of money, he refused to buy an apartment, and look at your Grandpa Aurelio, with the little he made on the house in Villeneuve, and even with everything he had to pay off, he still had more than enough to buy the place in Torre del Mar. But not your Grandpa Ignacio, oh no. I’ve always had to lead him round by the nose. And for what? I ask myself. For nothing. Where’s you Grandpa Aurelio, the one who was stupid enough to put down roots in France? Back in Spain. And where’s your Grandpa Ignacio, the one who always refused to invest a centime here? In France. So here we are and here we’ll stay.’
    ‘But you want to go back . . .’
    ‘Of course . . .’ Her grandmother sat down and took the girl in her arms. ‘If I’d married a Frenchman like Olga, maybe not, but . . . I married your grandfather, I was lucky enough to marry your grandfather, because we’ve been