The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Julio Carrión had never loved his father that much, but from that day on he loved him a little more and a little less than he had done, having discovered his weakness, his inability to impose his will on his own family, and the roots of his powerlessness, which were nothing more than fear, fear that his wife would talk, would tell people in the market, in the shops, in the Casa del Pueblo that she went to every week, what went on in their home, now that divorce was legal and women had the right to vote, now that the world had been turned upside down.

  You’re a coward, Father, thought Julio, feeling a contempt tinged with a vague solidarity as he watched his father close his mouth, choke back his desire to scream, to beat his head against the wall every time his wife walked out of the house and slammed the door. And all this just so nobody would know, so that no one in the association would gossip, so that his wife would not leave him, and people would continue to greet him in the street with a respect he was not prepared to give up for anything. Honour, he called it, my honour, during the screaming matches with Teresa. ‘You honour ?’ She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Benigno, I’m not sleeping with anybody, you should know that better than anyone.’ This mockery wounded her son, the brazen sarcasm of a woman who has no need of anyone by her side. You’re nothing but a coward, Father, thought Julio, realising that he loved his mother a little more and a little less than he had before, more because it was impossible not to love her, less because she was the one he was now afraid of.

  Julio did not know how to explain what was happening to Teresa, he did not have the words to describe the difference in her, the incredible, impossible way her face, her body, her mind seemed to be growing younger, as though time were running backwards. The woman who had seemed too old to have a child as young as he, the well-dressed lady, her hair always perfect, who moved slowly, her body heavy, who was constantly tired and wore a hat whenever she came to collect him from school, then collapsed into a chair as soon as they got home, who waited for her husband to come home so she could serve dinner. That woman had vanished, had been shed like a useless skin to reveal the lithe, tireless body of a young woman with the face of a girl, her dark hair now worn loose and tousled.

  This woman was not the same woman, though she was still his mother, and every night she slept a little less, and every day she worked a little more, and after her husband went to bed, she would sit in the rocking chair and read, or sit at the kitchen table with Don Julio’s fountain pen and some paper working for hours, writing things down, scoring them out and rewriting them, always beginning with the same word: Comrades. It was as though Teresa González had been reborn not only on the inside, but on the outside. She had no time now to get dressed up before going out and would leave the house in whatever she happened to be wearing, never had she cared less about how she looked, and yet every day she seemed to grow younger, stronger and more beautiful. She was his mother, and every day she was more courageous, speaking in public, organising collections, appearing at demonstrations, eliciting murmurs of affection and admiration from the men and women of the village as she passed by, murmurs of contempt and scandal from other men, other women who no longer greeted her. ‘Oh well, what a shame,’ she murmured as she passed them, head held high, though they still treated her husband with respect.

  ‘Now listen to me, Teresa! This nonsense is over!’ The first time he saw his wife’s name in small but unmistakable letters on the list of those who were to speak at a meeting of the Popular Front - all the more humiliating for her being the only woman - Benigno Carrión stood by the door with his rifle in his hand. ‘You are not setting foot outside this house today.’

  ‘Do you want a divorce, Benigno?’ she said in a mocking tone as she stood before the mirror in the hall, for once doing her make-up. ‘I’ll give you one, with pleasure.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant!’ he shouted, then he calmed down. ‘I don’t want a divorce, I won’t let you divorce me.’

  ‘In that case, stop talking such nonsense . . . And move away from the door, please, I don’t want to be late.’

  Teresa González, utterly calm, stood in front of her husband, who raised his hand as if to slap her until she forced him to put it down.

  ‘Don’t you ever raise your hand to me, Benigno,’ she said, looking straight into his eyes, her every syllable filled with a menacing, controlled rage. ‘Don’t even think of laying a hand on me, or I swear you’ll regret it.’

  ‘What could you do?’ Her husband’s voice quavered. ‘Tell your gangster friends and have them kill me?’

  ‘Ha!’ His wife smiled. ‘So I have gangster friends, do I? Well, well . . . You really have no shame, Benigno! Now move!’

  She gave her husband a shove, opened the door, and left. Julio, who had seen everything, heard the clatter of her heels on the cobblestones and then nothing, nothing except his father’s sobs, which he did not want to see or hear; he did not want to have to remember this snivelling old man, struggling with his rifle every day, cleaning it, loading it, aiming it, now slumped on the floor, so beaten, so broken, that his fourteen-year-old son could not bear to look at him. A son who did, and did not, want everything to go back to the way it was.

  ‘Father!’ he shouted, so that his father would at least get up off the floor, but he received nothing in return but the bewildered look of an old man, with no future, he thought, no dignity. ‘Why don’t you do something, Father ?’

  His father looked at him as though he did not understand and his face crumpled.

  ‘Shoot myself,’ he said finally, his voice thin, weak and foolish. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘You’re not even capable of that,’ muttered Julio, and for a moment he didn’t know where to go.

  But it was only a moment. Because then Julio Carrión González realised that there was only one place he could go. He ran to the Casa del Pueblo and got there five minutes before the time announced on the posters. There were so many people pushing and shoving that he did not think he would get in, but one of the men on the door recognised him.

  ‘Hold up, lad,’ he shouted, ‘you’re Teresa’s son, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Nobody calls me sir.’ The man laughed. ‘Have you come to listen to your mother ?’ Julio nodded. ‘Good lad, there aren’t many like your mother. In you go, there are seats reserved in the front row, they’re probably all taken now, but it doesn’t matter. Just tell the comrades you’re your mother’s son and they’ll let you through . . .’

  Julio Carrión González had never felt so important. And his mother had never looked at him the way she did that afternoon as she saw him make his way through the people crowding the aisles until he reached the foot of the stage where she seemed to be enthroned, two men on her left, two others on her right, the order in which they were to speak. She had never tried to inveigle her son with bribes and punishments, as did her husband, who would only give the boy his pocket money on Sunday after mass. She had never even talked to him about politics, unless Julio asked her something. She justified this minor weakness by reminding herself that the children already had enough on their plate, given who she was, and married as she was to Benigno Carrión, but that was not the whole truth. In her heart, Teresa González felt guilty, and though she knew inside out the lecture about the harmful vestiges of reactionary Catholic orthodoxy, how they infiltrated a woman’s subconscious and had to be rooted out at all costs, she felt much more comfortable when she was not at home, indeed when she was as far from her family as possible. This was why she was so moved when she saw Julio sitting on the floor waiting to hear her speak. So certain was she of her cause that she did not even consider that there might be other reasons why her son had come, because he wanted to be by her side - not holding her hand, not following in her footsteps, not tied to her apron strings, but standing by her side, which was something much more precious. I just hope I don’t put my foot in it, she thought, the one time they let me take the stand, and
with two candidates from Madrid . . .

  ‘You were great, Mamá!’ said Julio when the meeting was over, as she hugged him to her.

  ‘Really?’ she asked, although she knew she had spoken well, everyone had applauded. ‘Did you like the speech?’

  ‘I liked it a lot, everyone did. Some of them even came up and congratulated me!’

  ‘They didn’t really let me talk at all. Ten minutes, they told me when I got here. Ten minutes!’ You’re so beautiful, thought Julio, and you scare me so much. ‘But I’m under no illusions, I know they only asked me to speak because I’m a woman, they like to have a woman speak at every meeting to get the female vote and they were hoping to get someone important, but of course those women are all busy, and that’s why they selected me . . . And they only wanted me to talk about women’s issues, it’s always the same, as if we don’t have opinions about other issues . . . That’s why I went on for twice as long as I should have, I talked about what I wanted to talk about. If I can stand up to your father at home, I have to stand up to them here, that’s what I thought . . . But, you know, they didn’t mind. I was a success.’

  And it was true. As they walked towards the door, people applauded, patted them on the back, offered congratulations and words of encouragement, to her, for being who she was, and to Julio for being her son. Julio had never felt so important, so proud of his mother. Nor had he ever felt so close to the abyss, when he realised that things were coming to their inevitable conclusion, because his home, his family, his life could not go on like this. He was no longer a child, but he was not yet a man, and although he understood things he could not bring himself to take his mother’s side, he could not do it because all he wanted was for things to go back to how they used to be.

  ‘Anyway,’ she was still talking as they turned into their street, ‘that’s not what’s important right now, all that’s important now is to win the elections . . .’ And suddenly she stopped and looked at him. ‘What about your father ?’

  ‘He stayed at home.’

  ‘It’s not that I’m not sorry, hijo, honestly, but there was nothing else I could do. Not now . . .’ And she hugged him again, held him close for a long time until he thought she had nothing left to say. ‘I have no choice, I have to keep going or die.’

  Julio, too, was sorry the next day when he saw his father, silent, mortified, broken, unable to look his son in the eye. Why do you have to be such a weakling, Father? was what he thought, and then he thought that it was humiliating to have a mother like his. From that day, his father confirmed his worst fears, slowly erasing himself, shutting himself away, a silent, impassive witness to his own ignominy. Now it was his mother who shouted. She shouted when the left-wing Popular Front won the elections, when the treacherous conservative generals rebelled against the republic, when the people begged for arms to defend themselves, when the first slogans blasted out - Every man at the front, Every woman in the factory, Every effort to win the war, They shall not pass!

  ‘I’m starting work tomorrow,’ Teresa informed her family over breakfast on the last day of September 1936, ‘I’ve been asked to be a teacher - teaching infants. I hope I can handle them. Their usual teacher has enlisted and is setting off for Madrid this afternoon.’

  Benigno Carrión said nothing, not then, nor some weeks later when the war finally arrived in Torrelodones in an unexpected form, not simply the uniforms of soldiers on leave, the military convoys driving through, the command post where farmers went to sell their vegetables and lambs, and the German planes that had begun to streak the sky twice a day - on their way to bomb Madrid, and on their way back. These had been the only signs of war in Torrelodones, but now there were people, hordes of people, whole fatherless families, women and children loaded down with furniture, mattresses, clothes, saucepans, a cow led by a rope, and old men who brought the contents of their offices in case they found work. The government had evacuated the towns nearest the capital: Pozuelo, Aravaca, Húmera, Las Rozas. Even Las Rozas.

  ‘I have something to tell you.’ Teresa chose to be blunt, showing up one day at dinner time with a thin, dark-skinned man of about forty who carried a suitcase in each hand. ‘From today, we’ll have a guest staying with us. His name is Manuel Castro, he was a teacher in Las Rozas. He came with the rest of the people from the village and he’ll be teaching the children who’ve been evacuated. They asked if anyone could put him up and I said of course, because there’s nothing in the attic room . . . Are you listening to me, Benigno?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Welcome.’ Julio watched as his father stood up, shook hands with the stranger and gave a feeble smile, before adding, in a whisper his wife did not hear, ‘For as long as it lasts . . .’

  It was the evening of 13 November and the revolutionaries of the nationalist army were about to enter Madrid at any moment. There had already been too many delays. In fact two weeks earlier, Don Pedro, the priest, had laughingly told his friend Benigno that a Seville newspaper had announced that Franco was ‘a four-and-a-half-peseta taxi ride from the Puerta del Sol’. Julio knew this because his father had told him, ‘Everything will be all right, you’ll see, after we win the war, I’ll sort your mother out . . .’

  Julio had not liked his father’s words, or his tone of voice; there was something sinister about his father’s sudden resurrection, something cruel in the way he bared his teeth as he smiled. You needed Franco to show up to save your bacon, Father, he thought, and despised him all the more, but he also believed him, and he feared for his mother, not for her cause, nor for her friends, her comrades, the people who had filled her head with rubbish and had ripped him from his life. But it would not be long before he discovered his fears were unfounded, because his father was a weakling to the last.

  ‘It’s only a matter of hours, days, weeks,’ his father said, and the hours and the days and the weeks passed and nothing happened. ‘Whenever they like,’ he said, ‘they can march into Madrid whenever they like.’ Bullshit, thought Julio. ‘They’re purifying the city, they have to raze it to the ground, bring it to its knees, so that it can rise again, pure and clean.’ Bullshit, thought Julio. ‘They haven’t given up on Madrid, oh no! But first they want to take El Escorial, it makes sense, El Escorial is the spiritual heart of the empire.’ Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. ‘Whenever they like,’ said Benigno. ‘I don’t know what they’re waiting for, but they know, that’s for sure, and there’s more to Spain than Madrid.’

  ‘Look, Father,’ Julio finally interrupted him when he could stand it no longer, ‘have they taken El Escorial ?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Well then, shut up! They haven’t taken it because they can’t. End of story.’

  ‘You’re wrong, hijo, you don’t know how wrong you are.’

  In January 1937, Julio’s life began to change once more, not in the way he had hoped, but branching off in a direction he could not possibly have foreseen. As the days, the hours, the weeks pushed back his retribution to distant horizons his faith could not curtail, Benigno Carrión disappeared from the day-to-day existence of his wife and his children, becoming a sort of ghost, a flesh-and-blood apparition that vanished in the early morning and did not return until they were asleep, drunk on anisette and slogans heard on Radio Castilla de Burgos, which he listened to secretly in the rectory. And so he did not realise that at home no one missed him. Not even Julio.

  ‘Watch carefully . . . the hand is quicker than the eye.’

  Manuel carefully tore a sheet of newspaper in half and then tore each half into little pieces. His fingers tracing arabesques in the air, he stuffed the pieces into his fist and blew on it, then with slow, mysterious gestures he unfolded the paper crumpled in his fist to reveal, whole, untouched, magical, the very page he had started with. Teresa and her children, his only audience, clapped until their hands hurt.

  ‘How did you do it?’ asked Julio.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’ He smiled. ‘A magician never reveals his secrets. Here,
pick a card, but don’t show it to me - show it to your mother and your sister. OK? Good, now put it back into the pack, anywhere you like.’

  The two Teresas, mother and daughter, saw the jack of diamonds before Julio hid it carefully in the pack. Manuel’s face was turned away, although even if he had been facing them he could not have seen the card because his victim held it carefully in the palm of one hand, covering it with the other, as he slipped it back into the deck.

  ‘Let’s see . . .’ said Manuel, studying the cards and frowning as he deliberately misled them. ‘This is difficult, very tricky, I’m not sure . . . Could it be the ace of spades - no, no, it’s not that. The seven of clubs maybe, but no, it’s not that either . . . And it’s not the three of diamonds . . . So it has to be the jack of diamonds, doesn’t it?’

  Manuel Castro was Leonese, from La Bañeza, but he had left his village at the age of six when his father, who worked on the railways, was posted as stationmaster to Las Matas. When he arrived in Torrelodones, he had just turned thirty-nine and had been a socialist for almost twenty years. When he was being serious, he looked older, because he had a long, grave, angular face, but when he smiled his face lit up like that of a greedy child watching someone unwrap a toffee. Being scrawny rather than thin, though not remotely frail, he was convalescing from a bout of osseous tuberculosis that had all but killed him - ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he would explain, ‘they wouldn’t let me enlist.’ He had many reasons to worry, but Julio saw him smile every day. His wife and daughters had gone to Valencia and wrote long, detailed letters to him, but each of his replies was shorter than the last. So as not to be too sad, thought Julio, so that he could preserve his energy, not lose the smile that had made their home habitable again. Julio liked Manuel, admired his strength because it was an inner strength, with none of the bragging or the pathetic theatrics his father used, and he also liked his serenity, his slow way of thinking that managed to calm, and even prevail over, his mother’s vehemence. Above all, he liked the man’s composure, his ability to control his own reactions without having to raise his voice or resort to any tricks other than those in which the hand was quicker than the eye.