The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Mateo, who was still a sergeant first class, stretched out his legs, hooked his thumbs into his belt and in an ironic, almost philosophical tone, carried on as though he were thinking aloud. ‘Of course, only communists get promoted in this army.’

  ‘Come on, Mateo, you’ve no right to say that, you know very well that Ignacio was promoted because he deserved it.’ María Fernández Muñoz, who had joined the Spanish Communist Party, the PCE, at the same time as her fiancé, and only a few months after Ignacio, snorted indignantly before looking up at her older brother. ‘Really, I don’t know how anyone puts up with him.’

  Ignoring his sister’s gesture of appeasement, Ignacio stepped forward.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, his tone as ironic as that used by his brother, ‘that is because communists devote themselves to killing fascists rather than inviting them for coffee to sue for peace, running away and leaving everyone else in the stockade.’

  Hearing this, Mateo got to his feet. He had deliberately hurt his brother, had known how much his words would hurt. Not being a communist himself, Mateo had been angry listening to Ignacio talk about anarchists and more recently about their own comrades. And had Mateo stopped a moment to think, he would have anticipated his brother’s response, this accusation which had blown up in his face, because such rumours were now circulating in Madrid.

  ‘Maybe I’ll smash your face in.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll smash yours.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Their brother-in-law stepped between them, warding Mateo off with his left arm and pressing his shoulder against Ignacio. ‘Have you both gone mad? That’s all we need now . . .’

  ‘Shut up, everyone, Mamá’s coming.’

  Paloma’s warning as she rushed towards her husband came too late for them to move away, and knowing nothing about the argument that had provoked the scene, tears welled in María Muñoz’s eyes when she saw her sons standing together, embracing, a close-knit family there in her living room.

  ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Mateo slipped his arm around his brother’s shoulder and the other around his wife’s waist. ‘They’ve promoted your son to captain and he’s invited us all to dinner to celebrate.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ignacio allowed himself to be hugged, ‘I thought we might go to Lhardy, but if you’d prefer somewhere else, just say the word.’

  ‘Are we really going to a restaurant?’ chimed in his sister María, who, being the youngest, had rarely had the opportunity. Everyone laughed.

  ‘We’ll see . . .’ her mother replied. ‘What a curious sense of humour you have, hijos.’

  María Muñoz, who had spent twenty years dieting with results so astonishing that she could now wear some of the skirts her daughters had worn before the war, kissed them quickly then rushed back into the kitchen so they would not see her cry. She thought that this was going to be the worst night of her life, but she was wrong. A few short months from now, she would look back on this memory as the best of times, a time of hunger, of danger, of worry and uncertainty and righteous anger, but also a time when her sons were young, strong and alive. Tonight, on the eve of her departure, the escape she and her husband had postponed until the last possible moment, she could not know that she would never see Mateo again, that she would never see Carlos nor Casilda, that she would agonise about Ignacio’s fate for years in a foreign country, where Paloma, though she was not dead, would gradually give up on living.

  Sometimes, when she looked back, the way her life had changed in these last years seemed impossible, incredible. She, too, had learned what it was to hate, and so she regretted nothing, but she did not quite understand what had happened to that solitary little girl who had seemed doomed to a very different fate, a calm, conventional future for one so educated. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father, of whom this child had only a vague, almost mythical memory, had died during a typhus epidemic before the girl was seven years old. After that, María had lived with her father’s two spinster sisters in a remote farmhouse in Jaén, an enormous old house as large as a palace, surrounded by olive groves.

  When they allowed her to climb up on to the terraced roof, all she could see were the rolling hills of olive trees flowing like water, like waves rising and falling as far as the horizon, an olive-green ocean flecked with silver and ochre on which the farmhouse sailed like an ark, closed off from the world. It was a magnificent sight, but its beauty frightened María, penned her into a terrifying loneliness. There were no houses to disrupt this sea of riches. There was no one to talk to, no one to play with. When she was small, she would spend her afternoons with the children of the caretakers, two boys a little older than she was, who were boorish but entertaining. They taught her to steal birds’ nests, to cut the tails off small lizards, but all that ended on the day one of her aunts pronounced the momentous words: young lady. She was now a young lady and would have to learn to make something of herself. First she was taught by a governess, then another governess, then the convent boarding school in Jaén.

  It was María’s voice that saved her. When it seemed as though her luck had run out, as though all she might aspire to was a life in which every day was the same as the last, her voice with its extraordinary range, colour and power opened the door to a new world. ‘María’s voice is a gift from God,’ the mother superior told her aunts just before the girl turned fifteen. ‘We cannot teach her any more here. It would be a terrible shame not to nurture and hone such a voice, the girl should take singing lessons . . .’ María’s aunts looked at each other, perplexed. ‘What for ?’ asked Amparo, the elder of the two, who had remained single through choice when her father had refused to allow her to enter a convent. ‘She will inherit more than enough money to live on, won’t she?’ She looked to her younger sister for support but did not find it. Margarita, who had still not recovered from her failure to find a husband and who lay awake at night worrying that her niece would run the risk of ending up like her if she did not escape from the social wilderness of the farm, gently contradicted her sister. ‘Of course,’ she admitted, ‘but you know a good singing voice is a valuable asset in polite society, and María has family in Madrid - our sister and her mother’s brothers - and she will have to stay with them sooner or later, she can hardly be expected to spend her whole life with us. And even if she is rich, if she outshines others with her singing voice, she is all the more likely to make a good match. I think she should do it . . .’

  María had always thought that the features that would best serve her in finding a spouse were her pleasing face, the soft, velvety skin she had inherited from her mother, and most of all her strong, sleek, chestnut hair, which she never wore up, not so much to show it off as to hide her ears, which still stuck out despite years of fixing them down with sticking plaster every night before she went to sleep. She had never really liked her Aunt María Pilar, nor her snobbish cousins Pili and Gloria, who could barely spend five minutes at the farmhouse in Jaén before they wanted to leave, but when Amparo finally asked whether she would like to go and live with them, she could have kissed all three. And so she went to Madrid, she took singing lessons and she stopped thinking of her cousins as snobbish, she became good friends with Gloria, and she enjoyed herself more than she ever had. She learned that, though she was not a beauty, she was far from ugly, but she had never kissed a boy until that afternoon in June 1911 when, at the age of seventeen, she kissed a boy who had fallen in love with her as he listened to her sing the ‘Drinking Song’ from La Traviata in her aunt’s living room. His name was Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva, he was from a very good family, was the best friend of her cousin’s fiancé, and was seven years older than her.

  ‘You know I’m a republican.’

  At which point, Gloria, who knew one of the ladies-in-waiting to Princess Victoria Eugenia, burst out laughing.

  ‘Come off it, Mateo, don’t talk such nonsense - you a republican a
nd your grandfather a count? You’ll do anything to get attention . . .’

  They were sipping drinks at a refreshment stand they stopped at on their daily walks down Castellana, one of the favoured haunts of the fashionable when the weather grew warm. It was certainly a strange place to make such an admission, but the incongruity was so obvious that he simply smiled while the others made fun of him. María, who had realised he was attracted to her, had watched him attentively and concluded that if he talked little and did not defend himself, it was because he felt superior to her cousins and his friends, so he did not bother to waste his breath. Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva was blond and fair skinned, his nose was large and his neck a little too long, but he was tall, slim and elegant after a fashion, and María had loved him from the first moment she raised Verdi’s symbolic cup and her eyes met his and saw that they were filled with genuine passion, which set him apart from the polite, almost indifferent applause of Aunt María Pilar’s other guests. That afternoon, as she watched him smile at the infantile jokes of people who suddenly seemed to be fools, she loved him all the more, because she found him interesting, mysterious, almost dangerous. And so, as they walked back, she stayed beside him and let her cousins walk on ahead.

  ‘So you’re a republican?’ The rich little country girl who had grown up alone, surrounded by olive groves, felt a shiver run down her spine as she uttered this fiery, forbidden word.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered artlessly.

  ‘Really?’ she persisted, making him smile. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I believe that all men are equal.’ She realised that he was being serious, though he was still grinning broadly. ‘Because I believe we should all have the same rights. Because I am ashamed of what is happening in Africa. Because it is unjust that poor men die like flies while rich men pay to avoid having to fight in a war that benefits only them. Because this country needs to be rebuilt from top to bottom.’

  ‘Is your grandfather really a count?’ He nodded. ‘And you don’t think that’s good ?’

  ‘I think my grandfather is good, I’m very fond of him. I think you’d like him too, he’s a music lover, honest, generous, almost a freethinker, although he would never admit to it. What I don’t like is the existence of counts and dukes and marquises. But he’s my mother’s father so, unfortunately, I won’t inherit the title.’

  ‘But . . .’ María frowned. ‘I don’t understand, you’re a republican, but you want to be a count?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to be a count. Because then, I could request an audience with the king, and I would go and see Alfonso and I’d say, here, you bastard, take your countship and shove it up your arse.’

  Without realising it, María blushed, clapped her hands to her face and burst out laughing, her feet making a few ridiculous little hops. With this instinctive, almost childlike series of actions she reawakened an old, almost forgotten memory, a lizard’s tail wriggling on a rock as her blood sang in her veins, her body instinctively thirsting for dark, secret pleasures.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her cheeks still blazing, ‘it’s just . . . I’ve never heard anyone call the king Alfonso, or insult him . . . It sounds like blasphemy, doesn’t it?’ He smiled as though he liked what he was hearing. ‘And you’re the first republican I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Do I scare you?’

  ‘No, it’s not that, just the opposite, it seems really . . .’ She fell silent, weighed up the risk, weighed the word she had been about to utter, tried to think of a milder synonym but could not find one, ‘it’s really romantic.’

  And then he kissed her, his lips barely grazing her cheek, like a foretaste, a pledge of true kisses, those that would not endanger the reputation of a young lady of good family on the most crowded boulevard in Madrid. And María was so reassured by that fleeting, chivalrous kiss - so conventional compared to the words that came from those same lips - that she recklessly put her arm through his as they walked back.

  When they got home, her cousins rushed into the living room singing ‘María has a boyfriend’, and it was now her turn to endure their mockery with a stoic smile.

  ‘Well, well . . . I shall write to my sister Margarita straight away,’ exclaimed her Aunt María Pilar, as amused by the news as her daughters were, ‘I’ll tell her she can stop taking eggs to the nuns at La Carolina . . . But seriously, I’m very happy for you, María, I’m told he is a sensible and polite young man. He is an engineer, I believe. I would have been delighted . . .’ she smiled at her eldest daughter, ‘if he had settled on one of my own girls.’

  ‘Well, at least my boyfriend isn’t a republican,’ countered Pili, who was hopelessly in love with a dashing young army officer who her mother had heard had a wife in Alcalá de Henares.

  ‘And Mateo is?’ María Pilar looked at her niece, as though she had just heard a joke. ‘Really? What foolishness!’

  ‘It comes from his mother’s side, she is one of the Gómez de la Riva,’ commented her husband, who until that point had been ignoring the gaggle of women. ‘Almost everyone in that family is half crazed. Oh, they’re good people, amusing, cultivated, but a little odd. And to think that her father is a count . . . I don’t know how poor Fernández puts up with it. His wife is all right, but the brothers-in-law - the youngest one is trying to build one of those flying machines, and someone told me that one of the sisters is a spiritualist.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, María,’ her aunt laughed, ‘it’s nothing more than a childish whim, and in any case . . . Better a republican than a drinker or a gambler or a philanderer. I cannot tolerate fleshly vices, but childish caprices of the spirit, well, they will heal with time.’

  ‘And with his inheritance . . .’

  This pronouncement by the head of the family settled the matter of Mateo Fernández’s political ideas. They were not even mentioned when, in September 1912, Gloria achieved a long-held dream and was invited to attend a royal shooting party and told she could bring a close friend. María declined to accompany her. ‘Well, really,’ her cousin said, ‘stupidity is clearly contagious.’ By that time, Mateo was her fiancé, and she had kissed parts of his body even the most insolent officer in the army had not seen. He had a good job at the Ministry of Public Works and was held in high regard by her family. Aside from this, María’s life was much like that of her cousins, nor did this similarity diminish after her wedding. They were married in March 1913, a glittering affair with the Count de la Riva and his many children in attendance, though the one eccentric thing about the wedding was the groom’s refusal to take communion. On 14 April 1931, the day the republic was proclaimed, when she and her cousin Gloria argued for the first time, they shared the same pleasures and preoccupations, they cared for their children, they went to the opera and the theatre, they accompanied their husbands to dinners and receptions though the hosts of these events were not merely different, they were enemies. Gloria did good works, supported soup kitchens, schools for the underprivileged and charities distributing clothes to the poor, while María sat on committees campaigning for women’s suffrage, compulsory education and public assistance for working mothers. Her children attended modern, secular, co-educational schools which were as exclusive as the religious, segregated, traditional schools their cousins attended, and so their lives were already radically different long before they found themselves fighting for opposing armies. But when she picked up the phone that day, María was not conscious that she had grown up to be so very different from her cousin.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Gloria was so incensed she did not even bother to say hello. ‘You’ve deposed the king. I hope you’re happy.’

  ‘Not just happy, we’re ecstatic.’ She felt so confident that she laughed as she said it. ‘Mateo says it’s the happiest day of his life.’

  ‘So, what are you planning to do now?’ Gloria enunciated each syllable carefully as though biting it off before spitting it out. ‘I mean, assuming the republicans have a plan for what they intend to do with this count
ry - other than run it into the ground.’

  ‘Well, what we plan to do right now,’ María’s voice had suddenly become so hard she barely recognised it, ‘is take to the streets and celebrate. I’ve already got my hat on.’

  ‘Take to the streets, with the rabble . . . Go on, that’s all you’re good for.’

  ‘The rabble?’ At that moment, María Muñoz discovered that her indignation was both cold and hot, bitter on the palate. ‘No, Gloria, not with the rabble. With the people of Madrid. The rabble, as you call them, are the ones hightailing it across the border. If you like them so much better than us, you know the way.’

  She hung up the phone and sat looking at it, unable to believe what she had just done. Meanwhile, her husband, who had overheard the conversation from where he stood in the doorway with the children, all dressed up ready to go out, came over and hugged her, laughing.

  But she was not laughing, and had left the house anxious, worried by the uncontrollable rage that had flared in her, and her cousin’s reaction, every word, every pause like the sound of breaking glass, alarming, sinister, but most of all unjust. They have no right, thought María, no right to talk like that. And yet she wished she had not been at home, had not answered the phone. She loved Gloria, they had always been close, and although with the passing years they had seen less and less of each other and their husbands, who had once been inseparable, barely spoke, she still thought of Gloria as a friend. And it was true that her journey to political radicalism had been faster than Mateo’s, for when she married him the republic had simply been a romantic dream, and while her husband had worked and plotted and met with people at the ministry, in cafés, in homes, addresses he did not confide even to her, María had continued to enjoy the comfortable life of a happily married woman. She had had to intuit the change, touch it with her fingertips, to realise that the republic could be something more, a duty, a goal, an opportunity to live and raise her children in a different country. But she did not feel it as passionately as her husband, who needed no one on this, the happiest day of his life.