The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Eugenio Sánchez Delgado was unique, or at least Julio had never met another Falangist as pure, stupid, honourable, idealistic or as innocent as he was. At Orléans station, his friend was on the verge of tears at the sight of a small gang of rabid, republican Spanish exiles who, when they ran out of stones to throw, slashed their thumbs symbolically across their throats.

  ‘It looks as if they’re . . .’ organised was what Julio had been about to say, but he changed his mind ‘. . . worse in Orléans than anywhere else.’

  ‘It’s a shame . . .’ Eugenio shook his head, not really listening, as the whistle sounded and the train pulled away.

  ‘There was this guy, Casimiro, from Seville.’ Romualdo, Eugenio’s brother, came to let them know what had happened. ‘He told the captain that some communist told him to go fuck his mother, but that’s a lie. I was there and what happened was that the communist does this . . .’ Romualdo drew his thumb across his throat ‘. . . and shouted, “Go on! Run away! Cousin Pepe will slit your throats for you, hijos de puta!” ’

  ‘Cousin Pepe?’ Eugenio looked at them both, surprised. ‘Who’s Cousin Pepe?’

  ‘Stalin.’ Julio, who had been careful to think about every word he spoke since leaving Madrid, didn’t stop to think before he said this.

  ‘And how do you know that?’ Romualdo shot him a malicious smile.

  ‘I just worked it out.’ Julio looked at the brothers, and adopted a cheery, offhand tone. ‘It’s common sense, isn’t it?

  ‘Really?’ The elder of the Sánchez Delgado brothers laughed. ‘And what would you know about common sense, Julito?’

  Romualdo was like a broader, taller, more muscular version of his brother. Dark haired, pale skinned, with a hooked nose and thin lips, they looked like two loaves from the same oven, one with too much yeast, one with too little. This was why, when Julio saw Romualdo in the sea of blue shirts he had been trying to escape from until fate had turned up in the form of a weak, wounded Falangist, he recognised the perfect image of danger.

  ‘Where have you been, you little fool?’ Romualdo greeted his brother, not bothering to look at the boy’s ankle. ‘And who’s this?’ he asked, pointing to Julio.

  ‘He helped me get here. I sprained my ankle - I’m limping, in case you didn’t notice . . .’

  ‘Honestly! You’re the cross I have to bear . . .’

  Then, without saying another word, he turned his back on them and looked up at the balcony where Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, was due to appear.

  ‘Right, well, I should go,’ Julio said, his voice tremulous and shy. ‘I’m working in a garage on the Calle Montero, and I only came out to get some change. I can’t hang around, my boss . . .’

  ‘Of course . . .’ Eugenio smiled and clapped him on the back. ‘Thanks for everything, Julio. See you around.’

  ‘Sure,’ mumbled Julio, ‘see you around.’ And off he dashed.

  Julio didn’t take another breath until he was safely away from the crowd, and then he broke into a run, he ran up the Calle de Alcalá, crossed the street and went into the bank, where he found he was the only customer. The stone-faced tellers were all seated at their windows, not even pretending to be busy, and Señor Gutiérrez, usually so talkative and happy to waste time, served him so quickly that he barely opened his mouth to say hello and goodbye. Julio realised that he still didn’t know what this demonstration was about. It was 24 June 1941 and in Madrid the only thing that was certain was that it was better not to know, not to know anything or anyone.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Señor Turégano didn’t reprimand him when he got back. ‘You look very pale, Julio. Are you sick or something?

  ‘No, it’s not that . . . It’s just . . . there was a Falangist march at Alcalá and Gran Vía, there were thousands of them, and a lot of them were carrying guns, so a lot of the shops closed for a while, and so did the bank, I had to wait until they opened again.’ As he spoke he took the deposit slip and the change out of his pocket, then he remembered something else. ‘With all that going on, I forgot to buy the beers. If you like I can go for them now.’

  ‘No, no . . . don’t worry about it, I think the best thing to do today is stay inside.’

  Julio had always assumed that his boss had celebrated Franco’s victory two years earlier but his assumption was based on nothing more than Señor Turégano’s current circumstances. In Madrid at that time republicans owned nothing. Not even their own future. But although the period between spring 1936 and spring 1939 never came up in the conversations at the garage, it was likely that some of his co-workers had just as dangerous a past as he had. This was why no one ever dared to ask, and that day, everyone in the garage worked harder and more diligently than ever, as though being shut off from the outside world in this cool, foul-smelling basement was a blessing, a privilege worth working hard for. There were no visitors that day, no one came by to drop off or pick up a car, no one came in to ask for a quote, until finally, at nightfall, as they were closing up, Eugenio Sánchez Delgado appeared and asked for Julio.

  ‘I came by to say thanks for this morning.’ He had changed his blue shirt for a white one, wore a bandage round his ankle, had showered and was looking a lot better. ‘I wanted to buy you a beer, if you’re free . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ Julio smiled, ‘hang on a minute, I’ll just change.’

  Eugenio insisted on walking to his favourite bar on the Plaza Santa Ana; his foot was fine, he explained, it was nothing serious, just a sprain. His mother, who had been a nurse during the war, had given him an injection, put on a tensile bandage and told him not to walk on it too much, but he wasn’t paying much attention, because, well, you know how mothers are.

  ‘It was a stroke of luck,’ he said when they were finally sitting at a table with a beer in front of each of them, ‘because I’ve decided to enlist. Tomorrow or the day after. My brother Romualdo says that the Falange has decided, they’re just waiting for Franco to give the nod, and he’ll have to, won’t he, I mean, after all the Germans did for us . . . My brother says it’s best to sign up as soon as possible because the Russians won’t hold out more than a month and if you don’t sign up now, you probably won’t get to fight at all . . .’

  Eugenio was the same age as Julio and had been born in Madrid, but he had spent the war in the rebel zone - the nationalist zone, Julio corrected himself silently as he listened - because his mother’s family was from Salamanca and they had been spending the summer with his grandmother when the rebellion broke out. His oldest brother Fernando, who was a cadet at the Military Academy in Zaragoza, had decided not to go with them even though he was on holiday, and had died in Cuartel de la Montaña. Arturo, the second oldest, had also been a Falangist since before the war, and had lost both legs at Brunete. Romualdo, who was two years younger, had enlisted in the Youth Movement, but he had not been allowed to join the ranks until the autumn of 1938 and had marched into Madrid without sustaining any serious injuries. Eugenio had another brother, Manolo, who was alive and living in exile in Mexico, but he did not mention him that evening.

  ‘And what do your parents think?’ Eugenio raised his eyebrows as though he didn’t know what to make of the question. ‘Because, I don’t know, one of their sons is dead, one is in a wheelchair and now the two of you are heading off to war . . .’

  ‘They don’t like the idea, obviously, but they understand. It’s like Serrano said, history and the future of Europe demand the extermination of Russia. Russia is to blame for Fernando’s death, and for Arturo being crippled, and our parents know that. My family has a score to settle with Stalin, and Romualdo and I are the only ones who can do it . . .’

  That night, after they had gone their separate ways, Julio walked back to his boarding house. He was still trying to understand Eugenio. In his situation, to have a friend like this was both an asset and a ticking bomb, an advantage and a risk, a promise and a threat. Julio did not know Eugenio well, but he had sensed something he could easily expl
oit, the same unconscious, smiling submissiveness he got from Manuel, from Isidro, from Señor Turégano, from the girls who had hung around the door of the Casa del Pueblo when he did his magic routine. Today, he had not even needed to resort to tricks or jokes to discover Eugenio’s weakness, that inexplicable tendency to confide in him, to seek out his company. Some are born handsome, rich, are born princes. Julio had been born charming and he knew it, but he had good reason to distrust casual meetings.

  Some years ago, the prettiest legs he had ever seen had played the same role that Eugenio’s sprained ankle had today. But Mari Carmen Ortega, Peluca’s daughter, who had just turned seventeen in June 1937, had been too much of a woman for him at the time. So much so that when he had decided to accept the challenge of her smouldering glances, her mocking smiles, he chose a circuitous route.

  ‘Watch carefully . . .’ he said, standing in the centre of a group. ‘The hand is quicker than the eye.’ And as he said it, he unfolded the sheet of newspaper he had torn to shreds as soon as he had seen her step from beneath the arches. She laughed and clapped three or four times, less enthusiastically than the others, but she looked him in the eye, and for him, that was enough.

  ‘All right . . .’ he said then, considering the show over. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Wait a minute . . .’ Vida, a slim, graceful girl with small, bright eyes, put up her hand. ‘You said you were going to show us a coin trick, Julio.’

  ‘I can do it on the way,’ he said, ‘it’s easy.’

  ‘What!’ Mari Carmen made no attempt to hide her surprise. ‘You mean, he’s coming?’

  ‘Yes he is. Come on.’ Isidro put a hand on his shoulder as his beautiful comrade in her home-made military jacket shrugged her shoulders.

  That very afternoon, Julio had worked out that Isidro and Mari Carmen were vying to be leader of the group using the same techniques. Isidro was theoretically the leader, as he was head of the local youth cell. He was physically unimpressive, serious, bookish, he looked much younger than he was, spoke little and never danced. She was the eldest daughter of one of the heroes of 7 November 1936, the glorious day on which the people of Madrid had driven the fascists out of Madrid, but more importantly, she was a grown woman, determined, brave and stubborn with a magnificent body and an attractive face. She had a big nose and a broad mouth - too broad for the fashion of the time, but the moment they saw her, men forgot that she wasn’t their type.

  That very afternoon, Julio also found out that his sudden infatuation was contagious. There were few men on the streets of Madrid in the summer of 1937, and most of them were in uniforms, but three out of four of them would stop and brazenly look Mari Carmen up and down. And Mari Carmen always looked back at them and smiled. It was another string to her bow and one that Isidro could not possibly match. When Julio met her, she was semi-engaged to one of the Russian pilots who performed aerial acrobatics above the city now that they had driven off the German planes, as if they had become infected with the audacity of the people of Madrid, who paid no attention to the air-raid sirens, but stood in the middle of the street so they could watch the bombs drop and applaud when it was over.

  ‘What about your boyfriend?’ Isidro would ask her from time to time. ‘Did he write to you today?’

  ‘Of course he did!’ she said. ‘An M and a C, clear as day up there ... You can ask her ...’

  Then she would elbow whoever’s turn it was to back her up and the girl would nod as though her life depended on it while Isidro choked back his frustration that there was nothing explicitly or implicitly heroic about his life.

  ‘You can’t understand a word he says, you can’t even communicate with him.’

  ‘Who says I can’t?’ Now it was her turn to laugh. ‘Some day I’ll show you how well I communicate with him, idiot.’

  At such moments, Julio realised that there were other means by which Mari Carmen and the Russian pilot could understand each other and he felt a terrible spasm of jealousy, not so much for the fictitious pilot, but because it made him pity himself and he could not bear to be pitied. This sudden, unaccustomed feeling of inferiority, of weakness, pained him more than the fact that he had no right to be jealous of someone else’s fiancé. But he never gave up hope, not even when Mari Carmen showed up one day at the headquarters of the Socialist Youth Movement, the JSU, with her pilot. He was very young, barely more than a boy, with a shock of white-blond hair and impossibly pale velvety skin.

  Julio never gave up hope, because he had discovered that Mari Carmen was like him, she had the same innate ability to seduce, to persuade, to get along with people. It was easy for him to be popular in the JSU. He was clever, he learned fast and most of all he quickly mastered the language, the ideology, the repertoire of myths and expressions adopted by the left. He was his mother’s son, whether he liked it or not. Otherwise, he liked this new life better than the old one. He liked the city, liked to wander the streets, meeting new people every day, moving from one meeting to the next, one bar to the next, one cinema to the next. Julio Carrión’s life had never been so intense, so full of dates, plans, things to do. Little by little, he frittered away his father’s savings while the old man, constantly drunk, stayed shut up in his room at the boarding house, praying and weeping and cleaning his shotgun. Benigno Carrión never found out that his son was an enemy activist, because in truth Julio was no activist. He was content simply to be led, to feel wanted, to hang out with those who gave orders, all the while discovering in himself a talent for imposture.

  Mari Carmen Ortega never did fall into the arms of Julio Carrión. She had ditched her Russian boyfriend long before he went home, trading him for a sergeant in the Fifth Regiment who, though not as tall, was twice as heavy. His name was Antonio and he was from Vicálvaro. She had no trouble communicating with Antonio and they were married in July 1938, at which point Julio, who had never stopped loving her from a distance, did not dare to carry on.

  ‘I don’t believe it . . .’ Isidro would joke. ‘I don’t know which is scarier, Vicálvaro or the Soviet Union.’

  Vida, who had been in love with him since that first day and with whom he had an informal, erratic relationship, was the only one who did well out of the situation, until the war ended and Julio abandoned her as quickly as he did the others. Julio Carrión was thinking about all this on 24 June 1941 as he slowly walked back towards the boarding house. Vida was in jail, but she had not informed on him. Mari Carmen was still free and might denounce him at any moment. Fortune favours those who know when to back a winner, and he had not known. Meanwhile, his life had changed. It was dreary now, squalid and monotonous, but it could be worse. Much worse.

  That night, as he went to bed, Julio Carrión did not know what to do. When he woke the following morning, not only did he see things more clearly, he felt a cold shudder run through him when he remembered the foolish ideas he had been toying with the night before. I’ve done enough stupid things in my life, he thought, and yet he walked out of the building, not bothering to stop in the doorway to make sure he did not run into Mari Carmen, as though he knew that two days later he would enlist.

  The newspapers were to blame, the bulletins he heard on the radio, the comments on the streets. The Germans had destroyed two thousand Russian planes, he heard one of Señor Turégano’s customers say that morning, bombed them right there on the landing strip, I tell you, they’ll be in Moscow before you know it ... His boss smiled and repeated the story to later customers. In the street, in the queues in front of the newsstands, on the corners, everyone was saying it. Stalin isn’t likely to hold out as long as the fucking Maginot line. No way. I’m telling you. No one can stop them, look at France, Belgium, Poland . . .

  The following day, things had moved on, the newspapers were talking about a German victory, announcing the imminent fall of Minsk, Kiev and Odessa. Julio remembered the four-and-a-half-peseta taxi ride that had separated Franco from Puerta del Sol in 1936. The Germans were stronger, richer and more power
ful, they were better armed than Franco, a weak general whose troops had mostly been foreign mercenaries, and who had had the majority of his own country against him, yet Franco had won the war. And Julio Carrión González, who had promised himself that never again would he be on the losing side, had lost. This time, it was easier to be certain.

  Eugenio had given him his telephone number, but Julio did not dare to call him. When he left work on 26 June, however, he went straight to the Cervecería Alemana in Plaza Santa Ana and found Eugenio there with a group of uniformed Falangists. They were gathered around Arturo, who sat in his wheelchair, two medals pinned to his shirt, a blanket thrown over the empty space where his legs had been, and a burning envy in his eyes.

  ‘Hey!’ Eugenio was happy to see him. ‘Have you decided to come with us?’

  ‘Well . . . Yes . . . I think so.’

  Afterwards, Julio Carrión González would often remember the night of 26 June 1941 as though it had happened to someone else, as though he had been a spectator watching this passionate impromptu display of camaraderie, as half a dozen strangers gave him a brief, bone-crushing hug.

  The other men were older, friends of Arturo and Romualdo. They knew what war was, or at least they knew how to drink and to pretend. Later, when he came to learn for himself, rejected everything he knew, and began giving new names to everything in this world of black and white, this world in which the only men who survived were those who could renounce logic in favour of animal instincts, he no longer recognised himself in his memory of that night of drunken revelry. And yet it was him, he had done these things, when he did not yet know that the engines of friendly planes sound just like those of enemy planes, when he did not yet know that the cold can drive you mad, that snow can blind you, when he did not know that fear is a form of caution, sleep the promise of death, and he got drunk with Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, who was just as ignorant as he was, who knew nothing about Julio and yet that night invited him home for dinner, introduced him to his father, his mother, treated him like an old friend, an accomplice.