The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Elena gazed at him as though there was nothing else, no one else, but Fernando’s eyes, his hands, his voice, and I - because I was there - I could think only of one thing: he’s going to fuck her, the bastard’s going to fuck her . . .

  ‘Why don’t you tell her the story of your other grandfather?’ I suggested, kicking him under the table. ‘He was in prison too.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, Álvarito.’ He stamped down hard on my foot.

  A couple of years earlier, in a moment of weakness that he would always regret, Fernando had let slip that his other grandfather, Pepe, wasn’t his mother’s real father. ‘Unfortunately, my real grandfather’s name was Florencio Jiménez,’ he admitted, ‘and he wasn’t a fascist, he wasn’t anything, he was a shit . . . He had a grocery shop in Legazpi and made a fortune on the black market during the war. His brothers were unimpeachable socialists,’ Fernando added, trying to salvage the family’s reputation, ‘and they never suspected a thing, because he was always careful to do his black market business outside the neighbourhood, but everyone in Legazpi knew him so, instead of keeping his head down, on the first of April 1939 he stepped out on the balcony of his house wearing a blue shirt and singing the anthem of the Falangists, “Cara al sol”. When the Falangists arrested him, he bought his freedom by giving them the names of every communist he knew, and a few that he made up. The day he was released, he went back to his shop and waited for it to get dark. This was where he had stashed the jewellery, the silver, the watches he had accepted as payment for food and medicine. He didn’t even go home to say goodbye, he just took off and no one ever heard from him again, until his wife, who had been living in sin for thirty years with her brother-in-law Pepe, applied for a divorce. That’s when they found out that Florencio was in Majorca, that he owned two hotels and a villa with a swimming pool and was living with a girl half his age. He said she could have a divorce as long as it didn’t cost him a penny.’

  The story of Florencio Jiménez was much worse than my father’s, but maybe even that would not have put off Professor Galván, who, by the time the coffees arrived, looked as though she were about to fall to the floor and cling to Fernando Cisneros’s knees, offering herself in reparation for the sins of her ancestors. Which is what she did, more or less. ‘Do you fancy coming back to my place for a drink?’ she said as we got up to leave. Fernando got in before I had time to make up an excuse. ‘Álvaro can’t . . .’ he said simply, ‘but I’d love to.’

  I thought about that story and the other stories I had heard about Fernando’s grandparents as I read the letters that my own grandfather, Benigno Carrión, had sent his son Julio from Torrelodones. There were only five of them, and they were dreary, full of spelling mistakes and clumsy syntax, ‘Dear son, I hope that this letter finds you well, I am fine, thank God’ but these did not surprise me as much as the fact that there was no mention of politics, no reference to murderous Marxism, or the bestial tyranny of Russia. Instead, every line was steeped in the profound faith of a man more worried about his son’s soul than his survival. ‘Remember to go to mass every day, do not lust after women, don’t be ashamed to pray because to pray is to talk to God, remember that death lies in wait and you can never know when it will come, so prepare your soul so that you may die in a state of grace.’ That’s cheerful, I thought; poor Papá, you go off to war and your father sends you stuff like this . . .

  I hadn’t realised that my grandfather had been quite so religious, although it was always the first thing my father mentioned about him. It was not a trait his son had inherited, just as - at least in my presence - he had never paid lip-service to the ideals that had had him posted to Russia. My father was not a fascist, because his politics had more to do with fighting the things he despised than with trying to mould the world. He was anti-communist, yes, but more than anything he despised politics and politicians - the women more than the men. ‘Look at her!’ he’d say when some election candidate appeared on television. ‘She should be at home cooking the dinner and looking after her children instead of mouthing off on television.’ Still, he managed to get on famously with them.

  Although things had been going well for him for a long time, my father only truly grew rich during the last years of Franco’s regime, especially after he rode out the storm of the energy crisis in the first years of democracy. For a man as charming as he was, the teams of military and the technocrats of the Opus Dei, who were unimpressed by magic tricks and silly jokes, had been difficult customers. The young, inexperienced democrats who had just come to power were much easier. He told them what they wanted to hear, presented himself as anti-Franco to a greater or lesser extent, hand-picked anecdotes from his repertoire that he thought they would like and effortlessly turned himself into the star of whatever event he was attending. Every morning when I came down to breakfast I’d find him in the kitchen with a glass and a couple of Alka-Seltzers. ‘Jesus, I’ve never gone out so much in my life. From what I can tell democracy means staying up all night . . .’ My mother, who would go back to bed after Clara and I had taken the bus to school, was thrilled. And yet when Antonio Tejero Molino stormed the Congress with all guns blazing in 1981, she seemed much less worried than he was - he paced up and down the living room with his hands on his head repeating, ‘This can’t be happening, those bastards are going to fuck me over now, fuck, fuck . . .’ He was so devastated and so furious that Mamá didn’t dare tell him not to swear in front of us. That was how we found out, during the six long hours it took the king to prepare his speech for the television cameras, that the reason he was so upset was on account of some fantastic contract he’d been offered that hadn’t yet been signed.

  I was very young at the time, and I found my father’s cynicism amusing. His manner made him an ideal parent: accommodating, patient, generous and beneficent - anything for a quiet life as long as none of his children thought him a fool. There were few things my father forbade us, because he usually managed to dissuade us in advance. He was a brilliant man, and even though it was impossible not to love him, the cold, calculating cynicism I had found so amusing as a teenager was what kept me from being truly close to him. It also confirmed my suspicion that Julio Ignacio Carrión could never have been a fascist, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

  The evidence was spread out on the desk in front of me, but I was less surprised by what was in the documents than by the simple fact that they existed at all. The fact that my father hadn’t destroyed them, had filed them away in a cardboard folder and had not even bothered to hide them, seemed unbelievable at first. A fraction of a second later it seemed perfectly reasonable since it simply served to underline the implausibility of the life of Julio Carrión González. I was certain that he had felt no nostalgia for that time, that he had not thought about it for thirty years. I had often seen him fob off my brother Julio, parrying his questions with monosyllabic replies. We knew he did not like talking about the Blue Division, yet he had not destroyed the evidence, hadn’t locked it up in a safe deposit box. His silence on the subject, which had always seemed understandable to me, made what I had found all the more implausible, as though the papers belonged to someone else. Then I understood that if Julio Carrión González had not bothered to get rid of them, it had nothing to do with nostalgia or carelessness, it was simple laziness. Because these documents weren’t dangerous.

  ‘As all of you probably know, once upon a time this country had an opportunity . . .’ So began the first class I ever had with José Ignacio Carmona ‘... and this country was robbed of that opportunity. It was not just the poets who went into exile, but the scientists, the physicists, the chemists, the biologists, the doctors, the mathematicians . . . So what? you might say, that was a long time ago, and you’d be right, but we still have the dust of the dictatorship clinging to our shoes, even you, though you might not think so. It takes a long time for plants in a desert to grow back, and unfortunately, the sciences do not recover as quickly as literature. That’s why I wo
uld rather tell you this now so that you don’t come back to me later and say I didn’t warn you how difficult it is to be a physicist in Spain. Bear that in mind if you’re having doubts about studying it, because there’s still time.’

  When he had finished his speech, he stared at us, frowning, then he turned, picked up the chalk and started outlining the course on the blackboard. Nobody walked out, no one asked questions, though a couple of people laughed quietly at this young professor who seemed so old-fashioned, so out of touch with the joy, the euphoria in the air now that the left was coming to power. But José Ignacio Carmona was right, as we would quickly come to realise, when we peered into the abyss to which all progress had been consigned. ‘Do you still give the same speech to the first-years?’ I asked him at the beginning of the year. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m more optimistic these days, but I still do the whole spiel about opportunity and deserts. The funny thing is, these days, when I finish the speech, they clap.’ He smiled. ‘It means they’re more intelligent than we were,’ I said. ‘No, they’re not,’ he replied, ‘it’s just that they’re looking at it from a greater distance. Optics is a paradoxical science.’

  By one of the paradoxes of optics, my eyes were focused on a point somewhere beyond the edges of the blue folder, towards a horizon that had never come so clearly into focus. Once upon a time, this country had an opportunity, I remembered, once upon a time, this was a country of honourable men and women who did not keep documents in folders to justify themselves, they burned them. To such men and women these documents were dangerous, but not to my father. Because there were no longer honourable men and women, only little men and women in a poor, pitiful, backward country doing whatever it took to survive, so that one day they might live in a great country, in a rich, First World country in which everything happens by magic.

  The hand is quicker than the eye, my father used to say, and he should know. One day, there was a war, then one day it was over, one day, slowly, thanks to the work and effort of a few, grass began to grow again in one small corner of the desert, but everyone got the credit, and how could you not understand, how could you not admit the benefit of understanding to so many little people struggling to survive, where the laws of arithmetic did not apply, where the credit due to a few could be divided among everyone, and the guilt of a few could be multiplied to everyone so that no one took any credit and no one accepted any blame. It was something my father always counted on, that Spain was a country where the laws of gravity, the laws of cause and effect, did not apply, a country where no one had ever seen an apple fall from a tree, because the apples had always been on the ground, it was more practical that way, more convenient.

  It was because they were not dangerous that my father hadn’t bothered to destroy these documents, why he hadn’t bothered to sort through them. But optics is a paradoxical science and magic an inconsistent art, an artifice that sooner or later crumbles under the inexorable force of the laws of physics. Lenses stick, they hide things, they get dirty. The bare branches of the apple tree, and the fruit carefully arranged on the ground, are a clever trick staged by a set designer when there’s no one around. It takes time for a desert to grow back, because the grass must push up through the earth before the eye can see it, which is why time, a lot of time, has to pass before the day comes when someone remembers that apples don’t grow on the ground, they must fall from trees, and first-year students applaud José Ignacio Carmona.

  I closed the cardboard folder and set it aside. I had planned to track Raquel Fernández Perea through her lover’s secret files, but what I had found here did not make me want to carry on. Suddenly, I needed fresh air, I needed to get out, away from the uniforms, the letters, the oath written in two different languages, away from my own suspicions. I was about to leave when I remembered that I didn’t have another free morning until the following Tuesday and the lock on the leather folder needed only two taps with a hammer to get it open.

  There were no cheque stubs inside, just a pouch filled with tissue paper, a single handwritten sheet of paper that had been torn up and stuck back together with Sellotape and a photograph of me standing behind the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, in front of a crowded café that looked strange for some obscure reason. On the back of the photograph, in an elegant, feminine hand, it read: ‘So you won’t forget me. Paloma’ and underneath, ‘Paris, May 1947’. Reading this, I worked out that the man in the photo wasn’t me, and that the terrace had seemed strange because the tables - unlike those on the terraces of Madrid - were round.

  Paloma, I thought, Paris. ‘You ought to have been in Russia, or Poland, now that was cold’, my father had always said when we complained about the cold. He had been in Russia and in Poland, he’d been to Latvia twice, the first time when he was wounded, and the second just before he flew back to Spain, but Riga had been the last stop on his journey and he didn’t fly back via Paris, nor had his journey home taken three years. I got up and scanned the bookshelves for an encyclopedia but sat down again before I found one. Idiot! I said to myself, you know that the last troops from the Blue Division were back in Spain over a year before the Second World War ended. That wasn’t the problem.

  The problem had pale eyes and dark, glossy hair that framed her face like a ring of dark water. Her face was so beautiful that it was difficult to describe, to pick out a single crucial detail between the high cheekbones and the gentle curve of the lips, between the softness of her eyes and the stark purity of her jawline; between the elegant perfection of her nose and the perfect curve of her eyebrows. She looked directly into the camera with the trace of a smile, but it was her eyes, the cruel, enthralling flames that burn in the eyes of the huntress, which lit up the photograph. Her dress, made of some shimmering weightless fabric, hugged her body, marking out the perfect curve of her hips. She was as dazzling as the goddesses of the silver screen, the sort of woman they didn’t make any more. But even that did not shock me as much as that first glimpse of myself standing beside her until I realised that this man who had my face was not me, but my father.

  My father had been in Paris in 1947 with a Spanish girl named Paloma, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, so that next to her he looked ordinary, shorter, weaker, smaller than he really was. Maybe because he was younger than she was. It can be hard to guess the age of a beautiful woman, but she looked as though she was over thirty, while he had just turned twenty-five. He was wearing dark trousers and a white shirt with a couple of buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. He looked curiously scruffy, this young man I had seen so often in uniform, let alone compared to the elegant gentleman he would become. Standing behind her, he looked like an errand boy, while she sat on a high stool, her body turned towards the camera, her legs to the side, her head thrown back a little, resting against her companion’s chest. And it was not just the way he was dressed. There was something curious in the man’s bearing, in the arrogant, defiant curl of his lips, the determination in his dark eyes, a ferocity or perhaps a flicker of emotion, love, I thought, or desire or perhaps simply pride at having been chosen from so many.

  The Spaniards living in Paris in 1947 had not gone there in the spirit of adventure, but I didn’t know who she was, where she lived, nor which side she was on. All I knew was that this photo had been important to my father, since he had not destroyed it, and that it was dangerous, because he had taken the trouble to hide it. If I’d stumbled on this photograph among a stranger’s papers, I would have thought he had a twin brother, someone identical but different to the smiling soldier in the German uniform posing at the crossroads, Berlin 1485 km, St Petersburg 70 km. I was certain that they were the same person and yet I leafed through the cardboard folder again and took out one or two photos to compare them. I could find no document that might explain what my father was doing in a hostile country at such a difficult time. Nor were there any other photos of this woman. So I took out the letter that had been in the same pocket of the leather folder and placed it carefully on the d
esk.

  My dearest, darling son, but this letter - from the familiar old-fashioned handwriting - seemed to be from my grandmother Teresa, please forgive me for the pain I have caused you, I did not do so deliberately for I love you with all my heart. At first I was disappointed, because Paloma’s beauty deserved more. And I will love you until the day I die. And it was Paloma I was still thinking about, trying to work out her age, where she was from, why he had kept the picture all these years, Please try to understand me. And some day, when you are a man, when you have been in love, until I realised that this was a letter of goodbye, when you have suffered for love and you know the pain of heartbreak, maybe you will understand. If you can find it in your heart, forgive me. I made a mistake in marrying the man I married, but I thought Grandma Teresa died of tuberculosis, but not in having two children whom I love more than anything in the world, but you didn’t have any other children, only Papá, you don’t understand it now, how can this letter be dated 2 June 1937, the day you died, Grandma, but you’ll grow up, you’ll get older and you’ll have principles of your own, maybe mine, maybe your father’s, and you’ll realise that there is more to principles than there seems, you’ll realise that your principles determine how you live your life, how you fall in love, how you see the world, people, everything, but the only thing he ever told me about his mother was that she played the piano badly, never be afraid of ideals, Julio, because a man with no principles is not a man, that she was good, that she was a teacher, that she loved her husband, men who have no principles are puppets, or worse, that she was a tart, like so many women, they become immoral, dishonourable, heartless, but this is not the voice of a tart, do not be like them; be a good man, a brave man, an honourable man, my grandmother was not a tart, and my father stole her from me, be brave, Julio, and forgive me. We were unlucky, hijo, but one day the war will be over, reason and justice and liberty will win through, and when all of this is over, I will come and find you; we’ll talk, and maybe by then you will think differently, I never knew what my father thought, and you’ll understand me, I hope you’ll understand, all I knew was that he couldn’t abide politics, maybe I am wrong, but I am doing what I feel I have to do, and I am doing it out of love, out of love for Manuel, for myself, for my country, out of love for my principles and out of love for both of you, so that you might have a better life, there’s nothing worse than politics, nothing more sordid, more disgusting, so that in your life you might know more freedom, happiness, justice, if you want to ruin your life, you want to throw your life away, then go into politics, I know you don’t understand that now, that was what my father used to tell us, the son of a woman capable of writing this letter, but I love you, I have faith in you, I know you will grow up to be a good man, a brave and honourable man. Were you a good man, Papá? I wondered. Were you brave and honourable? Brave enough to forgive your mother, as brave and good as she was? This woman you never mentioned, this woman who will always love you and who will therefore never completely forgive herself, yours, in socialism, Mamá, she was your mother, Papá, for fuck’s sake, she was your mother. My dearest, darling son, as I started reading again from the beginning, my hands were shaking. I would have loved you, Grandma, I would have been a better man if I’d known you earlier, if I’d been allowed to read this letter instead of having to steal it, but you left the man you married for a better man and your son buried you alive, invented a life for you that you would not have wanted to live, and obliterated his sibling because he went with you or because you took him with you. My father had ripped up this letter and stuck it back together, long ago, the Sellotape was yellow and peeling away from the paper, as though at fourteen he had already decided how to live his life, how to fall in love, how to see the people, the world, everything, maybe that’s why he didn’t go with you, but he grew up to be more than a man, he grew up to be a magician, a wizard, a snake-charmer, the most irresistible man in the world. He was lucky, Grandma, he got to be rich, important, powerful, but we were not lucky, this country was not lucky, reason and justice and liberty did not prevail. Could you have come to find him, Grandma, did you wind up in prison, in a mass grave, in a ditch by the roadside? You can’t begin to know what your love means to me, you can’t know how proud I am to be your grandson, your son’s son, I loved you long before I knew you, Teresa, I have always admired people like you. And I know it has come too late, I know it is a pyrrhic victory, that it cannot make up for that defeat, but you have won the war now, Grandma, a victory that is of no value to you, but it is important to me.