The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘In war, cowards die before the brave, Mamá,’ he told her, as though that might console her.

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Ignacio.’

  But his father smiled. He understood his wife’s anxiety all too well and yet he was proud of this son he had once feared for. Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva had always been a pacifist. To him, war had always seemed a terrible catastrophe and this war the worst calamity of his life, and yet every time he saw Ignacio’s name in the newspapers, he felt a pride he could not hide.

  ‘If your son were fighting with the rebels, the enemies would be falling over themselves to serve under his command.’ Even the commander of the armed forces, for whom Mateo senior worked as an adviser, talked to him about Ignacio. ‘They’re very superstitious, they believe that some soldiers are destined to survive, they even have a name for them . . . We’re just as superstitious, but we explain things differently. We say war is unpredictable. How many times has your son been wounded ? Quite a few. But always flesh wounds, nothing serious enough to put him in hospital, a few stitches and he’s off again . . . Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about him. I’ve seen it many times, trust me. Ignacio has luck on his side.’

  And yet, although he would walk with his son down the Calle Fuencarral, watching as people threw their arms round him, listening to the whispers of admiration, Mateo Fernández had never trusted luck, nor had he ever forgotten that war is a terrible calamity. And he was thinking of Ignacio, as were his wife, his daughters and his son-in-law, when his firstborn stepped into the living room on that autumn evening in 1938. But war is also unpredictable, and Mateo went straight over to María, pressed his forehead against hers, and asked her to forgive him.

  Esteban Durán was not even twenty years old when a single, stray bullet pierced his skull. He was too young, and he was bored in this trench, which seemed as deep as the moat of a derelict castle, bored with the stillness of these last days, when it seemed as though the enemy had surrendered and forgotten to tell them, as though the fascists had deserted en masse out of sheer boredom. In the beginning, it had all been different. The trenches at Usera had been hell, then there had come glory, and finally exhaustion. The enemy had not passed, nor had they retreated, they had simply stopped, and now they waited just across the rise, like a flock of vultures. Some days, there was sporadic gunfire to prove that the enemy was still there, other days there was nothing.

  ‘Look at the head on that.’

  The corporals screamed like playground bullies, the sergeants scolded them like irritable aunts and the officers tried not to forget how young and hotheaded their charges were, though they no longer cursed their luck at having to leading a battalion of students who had never expected to be called up. After two years of war, the survivors had developed a maturity, except in their adolescent inability to cope with the inaction of a battle that had been fought to a standstill.

  ‘Get your head down, you fool, or they’ll blow it off!’

  Behind him was Madrid, the streets, the buildings, the trams that no longer ran quite as often. Some afternoons, when she knew that all was quiet at the front because her brother Mateo was home on leave, María Fernández Muñoz would wash her hair, put on her high high-heels and take the tram to war. ‘I’m the sister of Corporal (later Sergeant, finally Sergeant First-Class) Fernández and I have an urgent communiqué for Ernesto Durán . . .’ The duty officer would smile and she would giggle when she heard him shout, ‘Hey! Someone tell Esteban his girlfriend’s here!’ Towards the end, when the enemy seemed to have given up firing, Esteban would take María to one of the deserted buildings near the trenches and there, for half an hour, everything stopped: the fighting, the fear, the boredom, the bad news from other fronts, the screams that split the silent days.

  ‘Get your head down, you fucking idiot!’

  Esteban Durán, who had been in love with his sister’s best friend ever since he went with his mother to pick up his sister at the school gates, enjoyed María’s visits more than his furloughs, he remembered them as luminous drops of intense, unadulterated happiness floating in the vast and desolate sea of days. He was not the only soldier to wake up every morning feeling as though his life depended on the tram, but many were unfortunate enough to be loved by cautious or reckless women, and every one of María’s kisses seemed to hold him, bind him to the land of the living.

  ‘I can still see heads!’

  War was interminable, ugly, hard. María’s visits were life, beauty, happiness; everything that war was not. And that afternoon, although Mateo Fernández Muñoz was on duty, he was lookout, Esteban sensed her presence. It was a sensation he had had on other afternoons; sometimes he was right, sometimes not. In the beginning, when the fear, the bombs, the hunger were new, María, who was mad but far from stupid, never came to see him if there was a chance she might encounter her brother. But in the autumn of 1938, the only reality was the war, and now María did not come to see him whenever she wanted to, but whenever she could, and every day he saved half of his rations in case he was lucky. ‘Esteban, you’ve got a visitor.’ In this topsy-turvy world, the soldiers had more to eat than the civilians.

  ‘For Christ’s sake get your head down!’

  Now the baby of the family no longer tried to conceal her visits from her big brother, and he no longer felt it necessary to watch out for her, to ask, to worry. Not that they loved each other less, if anything they loved each other more, but it was different, because the only thing that existed now was the war, and they were losing the war. This was not the first afternoon on which he heard the rumble and raised himself up to look for the tram, the truck, the car that might be bringing María. It was not the first time he had popped his head out of the trench, and he had never suffered anything more serious than the ache of not being able to hold her in his arms. In the silence of this stagnant war, even the faint rumble of a vehicle in the distance brought the thrill of good news he had been waiting to hear.

  ‘Esteban, get your hea . . . !’

  Mateo Fernández Muñoz, who had promised his sister he would look after her boyfriend the moment he found out they were fighting on the same front, finished the sentence, but the man he was speaking to did not hear it.

  By the last week of 1936, María was already in love with Esteban Durán. It had not been his uniform, but what it represented, the courage of a judge’s son, of this timid, well-mannered medical student who had all but asked her permission before he kissed her, but who had won her over with a determination and a passion greater than others who had much less to lose. She did not know that this was the romantic longing that had led her mother to fall in love with her father, nor did she know that she would have to pay a terrible price for yielding to it.

  ‘When they killed him, they killed my Esteban,’ she would say, and that possessive stuck in her mother’s memory, in her sister Paloma’s memory, like a thorn they would never be able to remove. Mateo, who grieved with her for Esteban, never told his sister that his death has been a foolish accident. The first thing you learn in war is that no death is foolish, all deaths are equally heroic, equally pointless, equally wretched. Seeing them cry, united in their grief, her mother remembered the respect she had felt for María on the afternoon she had seen her sitting on that same sofa, talking to Paloma as though she were the older sister, the afternoon she realised that her little girl was now a grown woman.

  Carlos was still in hospital, though he was out of danger. At the beginning of 1937, he had been expected to die, but a month and a half later, Paloma was weeping as if she had forgotten that fact.

  ‘The doctors have told me his right arm will be paralysed, and he’ll be crippled, he’ll be in pain for the rest of his life . . .’

  ‘So . . .?’ María tried to cheer her, taking Paloma’s face in her hands and forcing her to look up. ‘He’s alive, Paloma, he’s going to live. So, he’ll have a limp but he’ll still be able to walk. He’ll have only one arm, but he’ll still have the other arm. And he d
oesn’t need two arms to teach. He’s twenty-six years old and the best thing is that next year he’ll be twenty-seven, and then twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Don’t you understand? Nothing can happen to him now.’ She went on stroking her sister’s hands, squeezing them to let Paloma know she believed she would be happy. ‘They didn’t kill him and now they won’t get the chance to kill him, because he won’t be sent back to the front. They’ll give him a job in an office like Papá’s, he’ll be here in Madrid, he’ll go to work in the morning and come home every night. Think about that, Paloma . . . Don’t you see? You won’t have to be afraid any more . . .’

  As she listened, her mother realised how wrong she had been, and she felt sorry that she had doubted María, that she had doubted everything on that afternoon in that last week of 1936.

  ‘Well, with your boyfriend or without him,’ she had said that afternoon, ‘I think you should still go to Levante. Believe me, I’d miss you more than anyone, but I would sleep easier knowing you were safe.’

  ‘No, Mamá, I’m not leaving.’ María had spoken slowly, without raising her voice, but with a determination her mother had never heard before. ‘It’s not just Esteban. I’ve got a job in a government nursery. They need people, and I’m not just going to sit here twiddling my thumbs.’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ Mateo Fernández had unexpectedly agreed.

  ‘But . . .’ his mother turned towards her husband, ‘can we stop all this foolishness, please?’ Then she turned to her daughter. ‘I won’t hear of it, María. How can you have a job? You’re still at school, you should be studying, you’re only sixteen, hija.’

  ‘I turned seventeen in October, Mamá. Ignacio is only fourteen months older than me and he’s out in La Coruña with a rifle. The caretaker’s niece, who’s the same age as Ignacio, is learning to be a tram driver. And you’re telling me I can’t go and tell stories to a few children who are all alone in the world because those bastards . . .’ she lifted her arm and pointed towards the balcony, as though German pilots were listening outside the window ‘. . . those bastards bombed their houses and murdered their mothers.’

  ‘María! I will not have you talking like that!’

  ‘How do you want me to talk, Mamá?’

  ‘All right,’ her father raised his palm, calmly interrupting her, ‘your mother wants you to be polite. For example, say “murderers” when you’re talking about those evil fucking bastards.’

  ‘Very funny, Mateo,’ but although she did not join in her daughters’ laughter, his wife smiled as she scolded him, ‘but that’s exactly what I do mean, María. Because it could be dangerous . . .’

  ‘Everything is dangerous, Mamá.’ María adopted a gentle, more persuasive tone, trying not to think of what would happen if her mother found out that she took the tram to the front to visit her boyfriend. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these days Madrid ends just down the street at the Glorieta de San Bernardo. They’ve already taken everything else. And since they’re moving in a straight line from the Sierra, we’ll be next. The nursery I’ll be working at is just past Cuatro Caminos, but I could just as easily be killed by a bomb on La Corredera when I go shopping. Those ... murderers,’ she glanced at her father, ‘will only spare El Viso and the Barrio de Salamanca. And anyway, I’m not going on my own. Charito will be working with me and Emilia is thinking about it. I was going to talk to Dorita about it too, even if she’s a fascist, because she’s good with children, but when I met her on the stairs we got into a terrible argument . . .’ She paused and then continued in a voice very like the one her sister had used when mimicking her. ‘I’m so happy to see you, María, I’ve got a little message for your brother Ignacio, and since I never see him now he’s so busy killing people . . . “Killing people?” I said. “Yes, in the war,” she said. She asked me to tell Ignacio that she was dumping him and that when she agreed to go out with him, she didn’t realise it meant being some commie’s girlfriend. You tell him, she said to me, that way he doesn’t have to bother . . . You’re right, I said, it’s better if I tell him, that way my brother doesn’t have to bother talking to a little bitch like you . . .’ Her mother gave a sharp scream but María did not stop. ‘ . . . because there are hundreds of women throwing themselves at his feet. And do you know why? Because my brother is a real man, a hero, not like your brothers, who are cowards. Do you really think we don’t know the bastards are hiding in a trunk in your house?!’

  ‘You said that?’ Paloma’s eyes shone as her sister nodded. ‘Good for you!’

  ‘Paloma! Really, what is going on in this house? Have you all gone mad?’ María Muñoz slapped her hands on the table, got to her feet and looked at her family. ‘How could you do such a thing, María, how could you?’

  ‘But I wasn’t thinking of turning them in, what do you take me for ?’ Her youngest daughter suddenly seemed as surprised as her mother. ‘I swear, I wouldn’t have denounced them. It never even occurred to me, I promise.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter! Don’t you realise, it doesn’t matter? They don’t know that . . . Poor Doña Adoración, she’ll be scared to death now, it’s too awful to think about . . .’

  ‘They’d do the same to us if they could, Mamá,’ Paloma said harshly.

  ‘But we’re not like them!’

  ‘No, we’re not!’ Paloma vehemently agreed. ‘They were the ones who started it, they’re the ones who wanted all this. We’re only defending ourselves.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean!’ Her mother suddenly felt terribly tired, and bitter tears welled in her eyes. ‘It’s not that,’ she repeated, sitting down again, sadder now and calmer. ‘We’ve never been like them, we’ve never done the sort of things they do, everything we stand for is the exact opposite of what they stand for. Your father will tell you . . .’

  Mateo Fernández loved his wife. He came close to her, hugged her and held her in his arms with the tenderness of a father cradling his newborn daughter, because suddenly he felt more sure of himself, more sure of the woman who loved him and their love, which could thrive even when times were hard.

  ‘Your mother is right,’ he said, still holding her. ‘What is going on out there is shameful. And we cannot look the other way, because we are not like them. You know how I feel about this. I’ve said it often enough, but I’ll say it again - I’d rather see your brothers dead than shooting people . . .’ he looked gravely at his elder daughter, then his youngest ‘ . . . no matter how fascist, how dangerous or how guilty they are. That’s something for a judge to decide, not people running around with guns. But, María, your daughters have a point . . .’ He lifted his wife’s head from his chest, brushed her hair from her face. ‘This is a war, and we didn’t start it. They attacked us, we are defending ourselves, and you have sons at the front, María, and your eldest daughter’s husband and your youngest daughter’s fiancé, and you should be proud of them, because all they are doing is their duty. Your sons are fighting for everything you and I stand for, everything we have always stood for. Unfortunately this is not politics, this is war.’

  She got to her feet and straightened her dress, then, without stopping to think, she kissed her husband and went out.

  ‘I’m just going to talk to Doña Adoración for a minute . . .’ When she reached the door, she turned back and looked at her daughters. ‘For the love of God . . .’

  ‘Leave God out of this, Mamá,’ Paloma’s voice echoed in the hallway, ‘he’s not on our side.’

  Doña Adoración was reluctant to open the door to her. María heard the woman’s footsteps, or maybe her daughter’s, as she rapped on the door, and tried to explain. Then she heard the footsteps walking away again quickly. She went back upstairs and sat on her own in the kitchen, until her husband came and found her there. He took her hands in his and said something she would never forget: ‘We are what we are, María, for good or bad, and our place is here with our own people.’ On 19 February1939, when she saw her children gathered in the Madrid house
for the last time, this was perhaps another reason why she believed that this would be the worst night of her life.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Ignacio, who was exhausted, and who genuinely loved his brother and did not want to fight with him, had followed her into the kitchen. ‘That’s some spread. If I’d known you had made all this, I wouldn’t have invited everyone to Lhardy ...’

  María Muñoz smiled and looked at the feast she had prepared, a four-egg tortilla de patatas, fried sweet peppers, two quarters of a roast chicken torn into fine strips so that it would stretch a little farther, three onions cut into rings and seasoned with olive oil, salt and a little paprika and half a loaf of brown bread for the nine of them, ten if you counted her sister’s niece, though she had bought some milk to make a little white sauce for her, because although poor little Angélica ate everything, she was only four.

  ‘This is the last time we’ll eat together for a long while,’ she said. ‘I was hardly going to serve lentils, we’re all sick of eating lentils ... But every day it’s getting harder. This cost me a fortune, and even then, the onions are the last of the ones you sent us, the olive oil too . . .’ María Muñoz paused and looked at her son, then finally said, ‘Are you still seeing that woman?’ He nodded. ‘Be careful, hijo.’

  ‘Of course I’m careful, Mamá.’ Ignacio sighed and shook his head. ‘Careful not to get myself killed. That’s all you need to worry about, not poor Edu. She’s not going to hurt me.’

  Mateo had married Casilda some months earlier, after her father had been killed on the Ebro. ‘I don’t want her to be all alone, and that way, if something happens to me too . . . It’s always better to be married than single, isn’t it, I think it will make things easier for her.’ It had been a brief, hurried wedding, there were no guests, and it lasted only as long as it took to fill out the form and sign their names. It had also been a sad wedding, but by then María Muñoz was accustomed to sadness, and Casilda, the eldest daughter of a typesetter and a seamstress whose father had set her to work in a printer’s before she was fourteen, was nothing like the sort of girl her firstborn would have chosen as a wife if things had been different. But Mateo loved his wife and Casilda deserved his love, and things were not the same as before. She knew this, and yet even now she could not get used to the idea that her younger son was living with a married woman ten years older than he was. In spite of that, she regretted having mentioned her that evening, because Ignacio was right, he was still alive, and nothing else mattered.