The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Ignacio looked at his watch and hurried up the Paso Fuencarral; he had to be at El Pardo by midnight, but he still had time to go to Edu’s house, to spend a quarter of an hour there, half an hour if he hurried. As he came to the Calle Alburquerque, he turned and saw Carlos and Paloma kissing on the corner where he had left them; he could not know that this would be the last time he would see his brother-in-law. Nor would he remember Carlos’s warning until 6 March 1939, when he was woken in the early hours by a sound he could not quite identify. He had arrived home, on leave, the night before, so exhausted that he lay down on the bed without even bothering to take off his clothes. Edu undressed him, took off his boots. ‘Wait for me, I’ll be right back,’ she said, but by the time she got back he was already sleeping. But now, at 6 a.m., she was sleeping while he was trying to identify the sound he had heard. At first he thought it was a sniper, but then he heard shouts, orders, machine-gun fire. They have passed, he thought; no, like fuck they’ve passed, it’s not possible. Less than eight hours ago, he had been at the front and everything had been normal. ‘What did you say?’ Edu turned towards him and opened her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ said Ignacio, who had not even realised he had spoken aloud. ‘I have to go back to El Pardo.’ He got up, dressed hurriedly, grabbed his gun and rushed out into the early morning.

  ‘Hands up!’

  The shout exploded from behind him. Very slowly, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz raised his arms, very slowly he turned to stare at the four militiamen from the Iberian Anarchist Federation, their uniforms glittering with badges as they pointed their rifles at him. Ignacio smiled and lowered his hands.

  ‘Jesus, you scared me . . .’

  ‘I said put your hands up!’ The man giving orders said something to an older man, who glared at the prisoner, his face a mask of hatred that was almost comical. ‘Take his weapons, Facundo.’

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’ but Ignacio had had enough experience of war to know that they were serious. ‘You guys are . . .’

  ‘On your side? Oh, no . . .’ and to underscore his words the man named Facundo pistol-whipped him.

  ‘Hands on top of your head where I can see them,’ said the other man.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, a prisoner of his own side, marched down the Calle Bravo Murillo. He was not afraid, he was certain that this was a misunderstanding, an absurd mistake. ‘Aren’t you even going to tell me why I’m being held ?’

  ‘As a communist. Better still, as an enemy of the people, a bourgeois, a counter-revolutionary and a queer, because that’s all you communists are, a bunch of queers . . . Anyway, you’re not in charge any more, all this shit about resistance and the Popular Front can wait, all that matters now is winning the war. The city has had enough of you, and it won’t forgive your betrayal of the leader Negrín.’

  These words hurt Ignacio more than the pistol-whipping he had received a moment before, so much so that he turned to challenge them.

  ‘That’s a lie!’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s a lie and what’s not!’ He felt the rap of Facundo’s pistol butt against his skull again but he did not cry out.

  ‘There’s a new government defending Madrid now,’ the older one continued, ‘a genuinely revolutionary government of the people, with no communists, no bourgeois traitors and no cowards.’

  This can’t be happening, thought Ignacio, not now, not today . . . They bundled him into a truck with half a dozen other men as bewildered and indignant as he was and locked them up in a cell at Puerta del Sol.

  ‘What’s going on?’ ‘There’s been a coup.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Casado.’ ‘Casado?’ ‘He had the anarchists and the socialists behind him.’ ‘Casado! . . . a coup?’ ‘Against the government.’ ‘Against us, they sold us out, it was just like the coup in ’36.’ ‘But why?’ ‘What do I know?’ ‘They said that the communists were the only ones getting promoted in the army.’ ‘Then let them complain, but did they really need to stage a coup d’état!’ ‘That’s what they’re saying.’ ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you something, if they’d put us in charge of the army at the beginning, I mean really in charge, it’d be a different story now.’ ‘And what’s going to happen to us?’ ‘I’ve heard they’re going to court-martial us.’ ‘What for ?’ ‘I don’t know, they’re saying we are insurrectionaries.’ ‘Us?’ ‘Like the fascists in ’36?’ ‘Exactly, but since I was in bed when I heard the shooting, I’d like to know how I could have been part of an insurrection, and an insurrection against who exactly?’ ‘I thought they were the ones who’d organised the coup?’ ‘I don’t get it.’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘Of course, Franco will be rubbing his hands with glee, they’re going to hand us over to the fascists tied up with a red ribbon.’ ‘No, they’re planning to execute us themselves.’ ‘What difference does it make? Franco still comes out the winner.’ ‘I don’t understand, what the fuck went wrong?’ ‘Nobody understands.’

  I’m glad my father isn’t here to see this, thought Ignacio. At 11 p.m., the door opened and someone came in who did know what was going on. It was a journalist from the communist newspaper, Mundo Obrero, and Ignacio knew him, they had played football together once or twice when they were children. I’m glad my father isn’t here to see this.

  ‘They came and arrested me at home a while ago,’ the man began, ‘but I had time to find out what’s going on. Treason, fucking treason, a military coup just like the one in ’36. Casado’s taken charge, the socialist Besteiro is telling him what to do, and the head of the army, Mera, has fallen in with them, but apparently it’s García Pradas, the head of the National Confederation of Labour, who’s writing the speeches . . . They were all on the radio last night, they said that now that Azaña has resigned, Negrín has no right to govern, that Negrín is lying when he says he’ll resist, that they’re all running away like cowards . . .’

  ‘Negrín a coward?’ several angry, helpless voices protested.

  ‘It’s fucking unbelievable.’

  ‘Jesus, they’ve no shame.’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying,’ Ignacio’s neighbour continued, ‘so they’ve set up what they call the “Junta de Defensa”. Most of the councillors are socialists, but there are anarchists involved, and they’re all fired up. The socialists less so, and the ones who supported Negrín are opposed to it, then the rest of them are spilt. Most people don’t know what’s going on - I’m talking about the members, obviously. The leaders are the ones who organised the whole thing, and the anarchists seem to think that the coup is just the first stage in their stupid fucking revolution, but they’re wrong, they hate us so much that they can’t see past the end of their noses, because what Casado is really doing is negotiating with Franco’s government in Burgos. Even Mera said, yesterday, that his goal was to reach an honourable peace with no reprisals, or maybe they’ll just surrender . . . Why would Franco negotiate peace with us now we’re killing each other ? You think that when he can smell victory he’s going to negotiate? Did he negotiate in Asturias in ’34, did he negotiate when he took Badajoz, did he negotiate when he got German planes to bomb the refugees on the road to Malaga and Almería? Like fuck! No one believes he will - and if they do believe that then they’re stupid. That’s why they have us locked up here. We’d never surrender, we’d never offer Franco half of Spain on a plate, and they know it. They can call us cowards until they’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t change anything. They’re going to throw open the city gates to Franco, you know they are, and the fascists will pass without having to fire a shot. Oh, I know they say they’re trying to minimise the number of victims, but they’ve called up reinforcements to replace the men they’ve arrested. They’re taking men from the front lines and posting them to Nuevos Ministerios, to Fuencarral and Chamartín, where we were fighting. They’re calling up rebels, but they haven’t arrested them, and why? Because to them, communists are cannon fodder, there’s no other explanation. You’d better all get used to the idea, we are Casado’s gift to Franco
to keep him happy.’

  I’m glad you’re not here to see this, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz thought, picturing his father, his gaunt, unshaven face, his lifeless eyes, refusing to eat, taking only small sips of water at that last family dinner when he had said that he was ashamed to leave. I’m glad you’re not here to see our disgrace, our last humiliation . . . But the worst was yet to come. The worst they were spared until the following day. The worst turned up in the form of a lieutenant who had refused to go quietly, holding them off at his apartment on the Calle Ríos Rosas until he finally ran out of ammunition.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ he said by way of greeting, ‘we’re completely fucked. The guys who arrested me at least had the balls to tell me that. Franco has given orders to his troops to let the anarchists from the Fourteenth Division in Guadalajara through. Franco told his men not to fire so that they’d come running. The fuckers have got Mera’s men to come and shoot us, all thanks to Franco, of course.’

  ‘The bastards!’

  ‘Traitors!’

  After that no one said anything else. There was nothing else to say.

  As the news sank in, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz slumped back against the wall, slid slowly to the ground and beat his head against the stone once, twice, three times. Ignacio thought about his father, his mother, the great joy they had shared for such a short time. I’m glad you don’t know that we waged war on fascism for this, that we worked and slaved and screamed, dug trenches, choked back our fear, endured the bombings and the hunger, buried so many dead for this . . . Madrid, still holding out while others ate, others slept, others surrendered . . .

  Ignacio closed his eyes, his ears against the clamour of a thousand silences. My family stopped fascism. What neither Rome nor Berlin could do, the Fernández Muñoz family had achieved. We stopped fascism at the front lines of Usera, at La Moncloa, in the university, in our dining room at home, ‘The Patriotic Cook’ . . . In other cities, there was no need to fool your stomach. In other cities there was food, he’d seen it with his own eyes, fruit and lettuce and bread rolls. They said there was a football league at the front lines in Aragón, they said the soldiers were so bored they played football. Being at war and not fighting is boring, he knew that, but in Madrid, even the boredom was different, panicky, dark, dangerous. Because he was bored, my sister’s fiancé was killed. Our wives endured the boredom of standing in the queue for milk, the queue for bread, for coal, but in Madrid it was simply one more part of the struggle, because we had to fight and fight hard, and all for this . . . I’m glad you’re not here to see it, Papá, I’m glad you’re not here to see it, Mamá, because none of us deserves this, Madrid doesn’t deserve this ugly, heartbreaking, humiliating defeat. But it was better to wind up here than to be out there, better to die a victim of treason than to live as a traitor.

  He had joined the communists because he wanted to win the war, he had joined instinctively, intuitively, for very different reasons to Mateo, who had come to socialism through books. This was why he had volunteered for the Quinto Regimiento, why he was proud when they accepted him, because they did not take everyone. The Quinto Regimiento recruited only soldiers, real men, men like Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, who knew what they wanted. And when he joined the Quinto Regimiento he felt at home. Other regiments discussed orders, voted on them, refused to submit to army discipline, but not the Quinto Regimiento. He served under Modesto, and was so dazzled by the man’s courage, his authority, his sangfroid, that he became a communist so he could be like him, and serve under men like him, men who were prepared to do anything to win the war, who never stopped, never tired, never complained. And he fought when he was eighteen, when he was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, he fought to win, with those determined to win, men who screamed as he did, in silence, in that dank prison cell in Puerta del Sol.

  When he heard his name, he thought he was about to die, but he did not care.

  ‘Your brother-in-law’s got balls, you know, for a guy who works behind a desk . . .’ said the soldier who dragged him from the cell. ‘From what I heard, he’s got that general he works for wrapped around his little finger. And he’s been asking about you . . .’ He looked round at his comrades and winked. ‘Maybe it’s because you look like his wife, is that it?’

  They laughed at him, but he did not care.

  ‘So I’m free to go?’ he asked, though he did not care.

  ‘No way. You think you’re free? You were a captain by the time you were twenty. You like giving orders, getting promoted, bossing other people about.’

  They put him in another cell, ‘with the big shots’, they told him. But there were no big shots in the cell, only his friend Vicente Dalmases, who had recently been promoted to captain and posted to El Pardo, and a couple of men he didn’t know, lone men who were shattered, crushed, empty inside. The officer who worked the morning shift did not speak to them. The night guard, Rogelio, was a union man and gave them cigarettes because, Ignacio realised, he could not bear to see them locked up.

  ‘They’re transferring you all to the jail in Polier tomorrow,’ he said one night.

  ‘Don’t do this to me, Rogelio.’ Ignacio clutched the bars and looked into the man’s eyes. ‘You kill me. I’d rather be killed by you than Franco. Shoot me or get one of your comrades to do it, but not Franco, Rogelio. Don’t hand us over to them, don’t let them take us alive. You do it, or give me your gun and I’ll shoot myself right now.’

  He would happily have killed himself, he didn’t care, but Rogelio was staring at him in silence, his eyes filled with tears. He walked away and came back almost immediately, quietly opened the door to the cell, then closed it, making it look as though it was still locked.

  ‘Wait twenty minutes,’ he said, ‘then make a run for it. There are guns in the cabinet in the hall, I’ve left it unlocked. Get rid of your badges, and don’t let anyone know you’re communists.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper, his face close to Ignacio’s. ‘There are usually trucks in Las Vistillas about this time . . .’

  Ignacio didn’t thank him. It was something he would never forgive himself for, but it was all so fast, so sad, so sombre, and he was no longer himself, no longer capable of feeling anything, caring about anything, believing in anything. But he was capable of stealing a truck, capable of creeping up on the driver like some furtive, vicious predator, some animal with no scruples. ‘Hands up.’ It was his turn to say the words, and he remembered Facundo and his captain. The truck driver made a sudden movement and Ignacio killed him, but he did not care, because he was not a man any more, he did not think, did not believe, did not feel.

  Three years later, in the pantry in a house in Toulouse, there was a bed and in it, by his side, a slight woman with black hair and large black eyes as beautiful as her hands, as her body, as the face she now lifted from his chest.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ignacio? Why are you crying?’

  He gazed at her with a love he had never felt before, a love that had budded inside that stone that rolled among other stones, a stone that did not think, did not feel, did not believe in anything, until it found a love that made it possible for him to be reborn, to be a man again.

  ‘I killed a man, Anita.’

  ‘Just one?’ She smiled. ‘You killed a lot of men, didn’t you?’

  ‘No. The war killed the rest of them, but I was the one who killed that anarchist . . . I killed him because I wanted to. My life had been saved twice, first by Carlos, my brother-in-law, then by a socialist named Rogelio. They saved my life and I never thanked them, and I couldn’t bring myself to forgive that man . . . Maybe that’s the only reason I’m here. Maybe he would have killed me, he did something with his hands, I didn’t know if he was armed - he had a pistol inside his jacket, I saw it when he fell. Maybe he would have killed me, but I’ll never know because I shot him. They had betrayed us, they were murdering us, so I hated him, even though I didn’t know him. I aimed at his head and I killed him, I couldn’t bring myself to spare his lif
e . . .’

  ‘Don’t cry, Ignacio.’ Anita pressed herself against him, comforted him, using the same words his granddaughter Raquel would use many years later before promising never to tell her grandmother. ‘Don’t cry, please, don’t cry.’

  It was warm in that field in Albatera in mid-May, but Ignacio’s blood froze in his veins as he watched his brother Mateo climb into a truck, turn and look for him, then seeing him, bring the hand that was not handcuffed to his lips, kiss the palm gently and turn it towards him to say goodbye.

  At that moment, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised that his heart was broken.

  And that it was no longer a human heart.

  The first thing I found out that morning was that María Victoria Suárez Mena, a girl from Zaragoza and a member of the women’s branch of the Falange, had offered to be my father’s ‘war godmother’ after seeing his picture in the paper. A thin, lanky thing with a nose like a hawk’s beak and a shock of red hair, she had enclosed a photo with the first letter she sent to him at the Grafenwöhr camp in Bavaria. It was a stupendous, deeply patriotic picture, framed by a wide clear sky, with a handful of decorative clouds, and a thin strip of bare, arid earth at the bottom. In the foreground stood a flagpole and, next to it, there she was in a blue shirt, a shapeless skirt and bare legs. Although her nose was a little too big, she wasn’t ugly, though she had no breasts to speak of. In any case her looks were much less inspiring than her prose, a heady mix of inane bloodthirsty rhetoric which - in the name of the mothers of Spain, those kindly old women who sit around an open fire sewing with never a word about the terrible worry they feel for the sons they have given up for their country - encouraged him to crush, exterminate, eradicate, destroy, thrash and kill the culpable rabble of Russia.