The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Jesus, what a country! I thought, bored by the endless repetition, how can they be so fascist and so pompous - the loving arms, the puffed-out chests, the smell of home-made bread, the tots clinging to the apron strings of Mamá as she bids her son farewell with a heroic smile that is sensitive yet strong, not to mention the Virgin Mary, I thought, remembering Father Aizpuru, our mother in Heaven, who might not wear an apron, but is determined to drape her protective mantle over the German tanks, all hail Europe, hail to the Führer, to his iron fist, to the defenders of civilisation, death to Marxism, to the tyrannical beast . . .

  My father’s ‘godmother’, like most of them, was barely seventeen years old, her spelling was shaky and utterly at odds with the limpid, extravagant passages she carefully copied out in handwriting as naive as her parting advice: don’t forget to wrap up warm, from what I hear it’s cold out there in Russia. Until she got annoyed and her letters became more entertaining: Dear Julio, I haven’t had a reply from you in some time, Dear Julio, I’m scared because I haven’t heard from you for so long, Dear Julio, I know you are fine, but I haven’t heard anything for months now, Dear Julio, if you didn’t want me to write to you, you could have told me, this is the last time I’m going to write, Julio, and it was.

  That peaceful morning, I had no classes so I began my day with María Victoria Suárez Mena’s letters. I was alone in the house and sunlight streamed into the room my son called ‘the room with Daddy’s books’, a study lined with bookshelves that was bigger than the living room, but so oddly shaped that Mai could not think what to do with it. I liked it, because it was a corner room with two windows opening on to a quiet terrace from which I could see the sky, and it was at the end of a long hallway, far from the living room, Miguelito’s bedroom and the kitchen. I also liked it because it had two desks, something that intrigued the cleaner, though she never dared come in if I was there. Ignoring the desk with the computer on it, I cleared the books and papers from the other one and set down the blue cardboard folder and the small brown leather folder whose lock I had been trying to pick the previous afternoon.

  The cardboard folder contained papers relating to Julio Carrión González: his military record bearing the date that he enlisted, noting that he was a minor but had his parents’ approval, a physical description, height, weight, colour of eyes, vaccinations, date and place of birth, and his profession, listed as mechanic - all in duplicate - a German document corresponding to each document in Spanish, medicals, pay slips, a form detailing his admission to the Spanish hospital in Riga and a form discharging him when he left. There were photos too, lots of photos: my father wearing a Spanish Army uniform, a German uniform, at attention, at ease, my father with snow up to his knees, mud up to his knees, fooling around next to a signpost with arrows pointing in opposite directions - Berlin 1485 km, St Petersburg 70 km - partying in a bar somewhere, flanked by two beautiful blonde women who seemed to be doing a lot more for his patriotism than poor Señorita Suárez ever could, and later, when the fun was over, wrapped in a greatcoat, blankets, the only thing visible a pair of eyes that might have been his, might have been anybody’s, standing guard beside a trench as the snow fell. His friend Eugenio was in many of the photos, the skinny lad who wore glasses and looked like an intellectual; my father told me that he had failed his physical but his family - all Falangists apart from his father - had pulled strings so that Eugenio could enlist.

  I hadn’t seen Eugenio at the burial, but he had been at the funeral, as skinny as ever, formal, elegant and exquisitely polite as he offered his condolences, first to my mother, then to his god-daughter Angélica, and then to the rest of us, whispering precisely the right words to each of us. I’d always liked him, and I couldn’t imagine him bellowing out the advice my father’s war godmother had appended to her letters, but he did, he must have done, because he wore the Falangist Yoke and Arrows on his lapel, until one winter night in the year that I was born. It was a night like any other until the phone rang and he heard his brother Romualdo’s voice. It was his brother who, in less than five minutes, told him that his daughter was a communist, that she had been arrested in a dawn raid at Moncloa and taken for questioning, that an officer whose name he would never discover had ruptured her spleen with a kick and dragged her out of there naked, that she was currently undergoing surgery at El Clínico and that the prognosis was bad. She ran away, so did he.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ was all my father would say, ‘his children destroyed him. If ever this country produced an honourable man it was Eugenio Sánchez Delgado. If ever there was a man who could have exploited people but never did, could have robbed but never did, a man who genuinely believed in what he did, it was Eugenio, and for what? So that a couple of ungrateful brats could ruin his life . . .’

  Anyone listening to him might have thought that his children’s clandestine militancy had ruined him financially, but he was the one who walked away, he was the one who could not bear the fact that the regime in which he had invested such faith could arrest a defenceless eighteen-year-old girl, strip her naked and rupture her spleen.

  The Sunday after the Communist Party was legalised, he and his wife came to lunch at our house. We all lived on the Calle Argensola, I was twelve, but I still remember the look on his face, the patience with which he handled the protestations of my father to whom the recent events in Spain seemed acceptable, even desirable - everything except this.

  ‘Democracy?’ He voiced the question only to answer it himself. ‘OK. Elections? Fine, I’m all in favour. Unions? If we have to. Socialists? Well, I suppose there has to be a left wing . . . But this? No, damn it! No Communist Party. Anything but that . . . Fucking hell. They’ve got democracy in the United States, haven’t they? And what about England, that’s a democracy, isn’t it?’ His tone grew louder, more passionate, more dramatic, as he stared into his friend’s eyes, looking for an approval he did not find. ‘But do they have a Communist Party? No, of course they don’t! I can’t believe it . . .’ he eventually gave up, tired of asking questions that only he seemed to want to answer, ‘it’s as if you don’t care.’

  ‘That’s because I don’t care, Julio,’ his old comrade answered, his voice unruffled. ‘I don’t like communism, but two of my children are communists, and I love them. They’re young, they’re passionate, and they fervently believe in what they say. Maybe they’re making a mistake, but I made mistakes too when I was their age. So while I’m not happy about it, I’m not worried about it. I don’t owe anyone anything, as you well know.’

  My father fell silent and my mother changed the subject, and there was no mention of politics again until after they left, when Father said how much he pitied them. ‘Poor Eugenio,’ he told us, ‘his children have ruined his life.’ He concluded with his usual threat: ‘If one of you gets involved in politics, I’ll put you out on the street.’

  My two eldest siblings had experienced the last rounds of resistance against the dictatorship since Rafa went to university a few months before Franco died and Angélica one year later, but Rafa talked as if nothing had happened there, and in the years before she left her first husband, the only thing Angélica remembered was the fact that until the day she finished her studies, she was paralysed with fear every time she saw a poster or an advertisement for the Youth Movement run by a young militant named Adolfo Cerezo. My brother Julio, who was born in 1961, was much more interested in politics, but he was drawn to the other side. He was the one who was the most eager to find out more about Papá’s adventures in Russia.

  ‘Were you in Possad, Papá? Did you cross the Voljov? Did you swim across Lake Ilmen?’

  ‘I was there, yes, I crossed the River Voljov more than once, but I wasn’t at Ilmen, thankfully . . .’

  Julio, who had learned German military vocabulary by heart, would take any opportunity to toss out battalions of words - Kommandaturs, Oberkommandos, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, Sturmbannführers and Stablieters, his extravagant pronunciation mangling the words so they w
ere incomprehensible.

  ‘Did you get frostbite, Papá? Did they give you a medal ?’

  ‘Will you shut up, for God’s sake! You’re such a pest . . .’

  Being four years younger than Julio, I sat in silence and observed their bickering, and every time Julio would come away convinced that our father had been a hero, but one Saturday night, after watching a film about the war in the Pacific on television, I dared to ask a question of my own.

  ‘Why were you fighting for the bad guys, Papá?’

  He glanced at me with a look of fear that resolved itself into a smile when he remembered I was only ten years old.

  ‘And who told you they were the bad guys?’

  ‘In the films, they’re always the bad guys, aren’t they? Besides, they lost the war. The good guys always win in the end, don’t they?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, ‘in the end, the strongest always win, but they’re not always good. And after they win, they have lots of money and they spend it making films, and in the films the bad guys are always the ones who lose.’

  ‘Maybe, but what about the Jews?’ I persisted.

  ‘You’re right,’ he nodded, ‘but we had nothing to do with that. And a lot of the Germans we fought with had nothing to do with it either.’

  ‘So the Nazis weren’t bad guys?’

  ‘Of course there were bad guys. But the other side had bad guys too. And there were good guys on both sides, and sometimes it was hard to know who the bad guys were and which ones were less bad. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘No,’ I said honestly, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’re only little, Álvaro, you’ll understand when you grow up.’

  Time passed. One day Julio took down all the swastikas from the walls of the bedroom we shared and never mentioned them again. For several years, I had to study German and I learned to pronounce words that I had never felt tempted to say out loud, so I felt a shudder when I read - first in German, then in Spanish - the oath I found in the blue cardboard folder. ‘Do you, before God and upon your honour as Spanish citizens, swear obedience to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German armed forces, in his fight against communism, and do you swear to fight as valiant soldiers, prepared at any moment to give your lives to fulfil this oath?’ Underneath, first in Spanish, then in German, was the reply that my father, along with thousands upon thousands of Spanish men, bellowed in 1941 at the moment they became German soldiers: ‘I swear!’ On that sunny, peaceful morning in April 2005, I still did not understand.

  ‘You know Álvaro’s father was in the Blue Division?’

  Fernando Cisneros understood better than I did. When I first went to university and met this tall, bearded bear of a man, talking about the civil war in the first person plural, I began to understand some things, although there were others I would never understand, and I made the mistake of admitting to him that my father had been in the Blue Division.

  ‘Álvaro’s father fought alongside the Nazis in Russia ...’

  This was at the beginning of the 1980s, while the dust of the dictatorship still clung to our shoes, and whichever girl he was talking to would stop talking and shoot me a look of amazement mingled with compassion, if I was lucky, or disgust if I wasn’t. Then he would invariably seize the opportunity to tell the story of his own fearless grandfather.

  ‘OK, Fernando, that’s enough now,’ I grumbled from time to time.

  ‘Enough of what?’ he would counter. ‘What are you saying? That it’s a lie?’

  ‘No, it’s not a lie, but I don’t want every girl on campus finding out. I’d like to get laid too, you know, and you’re not making it easy ...’

  ‘I don’t see why.’ He shot me a look of smiling wonderment. ‘You’ve still got the Falangists. They’re pretty hot, or so I’m told.’

  ‘Maybe, but aside from the fact that we don’t know any Falangists, they’re not my type. I get enough of that shit from my sister Angélica.’

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ he said, laughing, ‘you shouldn’t have had a Nazi for a father.’

  On the day his grandson presented his doctoral thesis, I met the fearless Máximo Cisneros and his equally admirable wife Paula. I had presented my own thesis some months earlier, though it did not even occur to my family to attend, although my father paid for dinner afterwards at a restaurant so overpriced it was beyond the means of anyone other than him. The whole Cisneros family came to the presentation of Fernando’s thesis. His grandparents on his father’s side were almost eighty, his mother’s father was older still, but all three climbed the stairs to the hall and sat through the ceremony, although it was unlikely they understood a word of what their grandson said during his presentation. When Fernando finally introduced me to Máximo, whose courageous story I knew by heart, I realised it had been worth postponing my return trip to Boston by five days. Changing my flight had cost me a fortune, but it had cost him much more to come here to see his grandson graduate cum laude, something that clearly made him happier than it made Fernando himself. I was excited to meet him, and I told him so, so much so that I didn’t mention how many times his grandson had used the story of his suffering to get laid.

  The last time he told the story we were both already over thirty. I’d just come back from the States, Fernando had got married, and his grandfather had died. We had gone for dinner, José Ignacio Carmona hadn’t been able to come with us, and Elena Galván was complaining about having to shell out a third of her salary renting a place in Tres Cantos because her parents lived in Getafe on the other side of Madrid. She had casually added that she was from a military family. I had long since realised that Fernando was a law unto himself, but this time he caught me completely off guard.

  ‘Really? You have something in common with Álvaro, then . . . His father was in the Blue Division. I suppose your grandparents were too?’

  ‘No,’ said Professor Galván, completely unaware of where he was heading, ‘my grandparents stayed here in Spain. They’d had enough of war.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fernando smiled back at her, ‘I suppose that’s why they started it. Because if your father made it to colonel, that must mean both your parents were part of the revolution.’ She nodded, still smiling. ‘Where?’

  ‘My father’s father fought in Morocco, my mother’s in Santander. ’

  ‘Did we shoot him?’

  Elena laughed. ‘No, you didn’t shoot him. But he spent nearly a year in prison.’

  Fernando paused for dramatic effect, looked down at the table, then looked up into Elena’s eyes and shook his head, his smiling fading until it was just a memory. I’d seen him do it so many times that I knew every gesture, every sigh. ‘Mine spent sixteen.’

  ‘Sixteen . . .’ Elena looked serious all of a sudden, while Fernando was laying it on thick. ‘You mean your grandfather spent sixteen years in prison?’

  ‘Fifteen, actually. Fifteen years, nine months and three days.’ He paused again, then took a deep breath before making his final play, like a centre forward eyeing the wide expanse of the goal. ‘He could have got out any time, you know. All he had to do was apologise. He was a journalist, self-taught, his father worked in the printworks for a newspaper and got him a job as a runner, but he learned fast and was good with words. He was editor in chief of Abc, the republican newspaper in Madrid, during the war. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison, and he was moved from one prison to another until finally he ended up back here in Madrid. Then it occurred to him to set up his own paper in prison - a magazine, really. He did it pretty much all by himself and managed to publish an issue every month. It wasn’t much - you can imagine - but he was happy. And the magazine had a good reputation among other journalists. So the governor of the prison offered him a deal. If he apologised - meaning, if he was prepared to write a series of editorials in which he admitted he was wrong, and flattered Franco - the governor guaranteed he’d be out within the year. My grandfather had been banged up for nine y
ears by then. He said he needed time to think about it. He wrote to his wife and told her everything and my grandmother, who was on her own with two children, wrote back just sixteen words: “Dear Máximo, don’t do anything for me you wouldn’t do for yourself, I love you, Paula.” He served seven more years in prison because he wouldn’t apologise.’

  ‘Fuck ...’

  Elena Galván, a genuinely liberal girl from a genuinely fascist family - an ideal subject, in other words, for what we called the ‘Cisneros experiment’ - was so shocked that she began to call us by our first names.

  ‘After that, they took his newspaper away from him and gave it to another prisoner, someone who was prepared to write the sort of editorials they wanted, but they left his name on the byline.’ Elena closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they seemed bigger. ‘They did it to humiliate him, obviously, but he didn’t give in, they couldn’t break him. Nobody could, until he finally got out of jail and had a breakdown. “I can’t do anything else, Paula,” he said to my grandmother, “the only thing I know how to do is write.” ’ Fernando spoke as though it was something that had happened to him, every syllable causing him pain. ‘He was blacklisted everywhere and was never able to publish in a newspaper again. Of course, he wrote articles for the underground press but under a pseudonym. He took a job in a hardware shop, and that’s where he worked for the rest of his life, selling screws and nails . . .’