The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘What about my grandmother ?’

  ‘Your grandmother . . . Yes . . .’ She looked me in the eye. ‘Your grandmother died in prison somewhere, but I don’t remember where. There were a lot more prisons back then, but it was one of the famous ones . . . All I know is that, like all the other teachers, she was given a long sentence. But she died soon afterwards, two or three years later, I think. It might have been tuberculosis, but I don’t remember now . . . The only thing I remember is that your grandfather mentioned it to my father, and that’s how I know.’

  I felt a great wave of relief and a surge of grief at the cruel way things had turned out. It was a relief to know that she had not been executed, that she had not left home alone, but it was terrible to know that like so many others she had not survived. It was a comfort to know she hadn’t been tossed into a well, that she hadn’t been dragged from her bed at dawn and shot dead by the side of a road, but it was horrifying to think of where and how she might have died. It was better that she had not lived to see what her enemies had done to this country and terrible that she had not lived despite what her enemies had done to this country.

  Encarnita stared at me as I chided myself for my naivety, for my weakness in thinking that somehow Teresa might have survived. Many people had survived, but in my heart I had always known that she was not one of them, because had she still been alive, her son would not have been able to erase her so completely.

  ‘She was a strong-willed woman, Julio.’

  ‘Álvaro . . .’ I reminded her gently.

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’ she was deep in thought, ‘a strong-willed woman. Too strong-willed, perhaps.’

  She was a strong-willed woman, I thought, Teresa González Puerto, a good woman, a very good woman, a fact worth mentioning since to be a good mother is not a given when a woman is strong, intelligent and brave in a land where the laws of gravity do not apply. Teresa González Puerto had married the wrong man, had tried to be a meek middle-class wife but could not bear it. She had believed in the dream of her own freedom, had risked everything only to lose everything, even her life. And so, although it grieved me to see my grandmother’s smile, the memory of her urged me on to another strong woman.

  ‘What about this photograph?’ I handed it to Encarnita and she brought it close to her face. ‘Do you know who this woman is?’

  ‘She’s extraordinarily beautiful,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Extraordinarily beautiful,’ I agreed.

  ‘But I’m afraid I don’t know who she is. If I’d seen her, I would remember.’ She paused for a moment then peered at the photo again. ‘The man is your father, of course, it would have been around the time he came back.’

  ‘The photo was taken in 1947,’ I said, ‘there’s an inscription on the back.’

  She turned it over and thought for a moment: ‘Paloma, Paloma . . . I don’t know. There are so many girls called Paloma. But he didn’t bring her back here, that much I can tell you. Nineteen forty-seven, that’s right . . . He’d been gone for years by then, I never thought he’d come back, there were three of them from Torrelodones who shipped out to Russia, one of them was killed, and the other one came home three or four years before your father.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked, suspicious now of everything I thought I knew. ‘Did he go back to live with my grandfather ?’

  ‘Certainly not! Your father never liked the village . . .’ She laughed, before going on to confirm what we as his family had always known. ‘Or to be precise, he liked to come here to be seen, to strut around and boast, and that he did, because he came back a gentleman, with money and fine clothes, not at all like your grandfather, who was always a country bumpkin . . . Your father was a real ladykiller, he had a way with women. I never saw it myself, but there was many a girl in the village who made cow-eyes at him, and then of course there was Señorita María.’ ‘Señorita María?’ The name meant nothing to me.

  ‘Mariana, her name was, she was the niece of Don Mateo Fernández, who owned the Casa Rosa,’ she said, taking it for granted that I knew what she was talking about.

  ‘It’s a big mansion up on the hill,’ her daughter interrupted. ‘You can get there from a path at the end of the street. You can’t really see it from here, but it’s a beautiful old house, with ivy on the walls. You should take a look at it before you leave . . . Nowadays, there are several modern houses around it, three of them, I think, but back then it was all part of the Casa Rosa gardens.’

  ‘So what did my father have to do with the house?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Encarnita frowned. ‘To be honest, no one ever quite knew. Your father would come back, and obviously everyone in the village knew him, but apart from visiting your grandfather, he would go up to see Señorita Mariana. I can still see him walking up that hill . . . People used to say they were having an affair, but who knows? People like to talk and more often than not, they haven’t the first idea. And besides, aside from the fact that Señorita Mariana was quite a bit older than your father, she always struck me as a cold, serious, rather bitter woman, maybe because her husband died early on, leaving her with a little girl - a pretty little thing, with blue eyes and blonde hair . . . I have to say, blonde hair did run in the family - most of the Fernándezes were blonde and blue eyed. I don’t remember the little girl’s name. Her mother didn’t allow her to come down to the village, they never had any dealings with us, you know the kind . . . thought they were better than us. They’d turn up every June in a taxi, and we wouldn’t see hide nor hair of them, except at mass on Sundays, until a taxi came to collect them in September. Fermina, who used to be Don Mateo’s housekeeper, would do their shopping for them, but apart from her and her husband and kids, your father was the only one Señorita Mariana ever talked to. But she wasn’t the kind of woman to have an affair with a man like him.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘If he was such a ladykiller . . .’

  ‘Ladykiller he might have been, but back then things weren’t the same as they are now. People were very correct, Señorita Mariana was a lady and he was . . . well, he was no one, even if . . . I don’t know, you can never tell. But there was some link between them, that much I do know, because every time he came to Torrelodones, he’d go up to see her. And later, when the house was sold, she wrote to the mayor, to her lawyer, she even wrote to the Guardia Civil saying he was the one who had put her out on the street, that he’d stolen the place from her even though that house had never really belonged to her. To Señorita Mariana, I mean . . . It belonged to her Uncle Mateo, though I’ll grant you that before that it had belonged to her grandfather, her father’s father. But it was Don Mateo who inherited it when the estate was divided up. Don Mateo got the house, and Señorita Mariana’s father, Mateo’s older brother, must have got something else. The family had a lot of money.’

  ‘But then . . .’ I was completely lost by now. ‘Why was she living in the house if it wasn’t hers and she had money of her own? And how could my father have been responsible for putting her out on the street?’

  ‘Ah, hijo, that I don’t know . . . Nobody knows, or at least nobody in the village does, it was always a curious business. Señorita Mariana spent the summers at the house because the people who owned it weren’t here, in Spain, I mean. I think they moved to France after the war.’

  ‘So they were republicans?’

  ‘Pah!’ She smiled, waving her hands emphatically. ‘Atheists, that’s what they were, wouldn’t let me near the house, wouldn’t even let me up the hill . . . The children - though they weren’t really children, you understand, the youngest of them would have been ten years older than me - well, the children never made their communion, they weren’t even baptised. Their parents wouldn’t give my parents the time of day by then, whereas before the war, they had all got on well together. But that wasn’t unusual in those days . . . After the war, they left and went to France and they left the keys to the house and to their place in Madrid with their niece Señorita Mariana
, she was the only one who stayed behind.’

  ‘And she got to keep everything?’ I guessed, and Encarnita nodded vehemently. ‘Because if she stayed here in Spain, she must have been in with the new regime.’

  ‘That’s what everyone round here thought . . . No one was surprised and it wasn’t a time to grumble or ask awkward questions . . . Don Mateo didn’t come here for three summers during the war, it wouldn’t have been possible, not with the front at Moncloa. And then one day his niece shows up as lady of the manor - she liked to put on airs, and was prickly with it, because she was flat broke. I don’t know what her father had done with all his money, but it was gone. After that, well, I expect it’s as you say . . .’ She shook her head sadly. ‘When her family left, she must have thought she’d won the lottery and was set up for life. Then one day your father shows up in the village and he’s a Falangist. About a year later, the house was sold and we never saw Señorita Mariana or the little girl again, it was as if the ground had opened up and swallowed them. It was almost the same with your father, it was a long, long time before he came back to the village - ten years, I think. Well, he’d come to see your grandfather, but he’d park the car right outside the front door, and he’d leave without saying a word to anyone. By the time I next talked to him, he’d married a foreign girl and they had two or three children - you’re a big family, aren’t you?’

  ‘There are five of us. But my mother isn’t foreign.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she smiled, ‘but we always called her that because she looked a bit foreign, and because your father had been all over the world . . . she turned up here one day, slim and elegant and wearing sunglasses that covered half her face, and she was always so quiet, it was as if she didn’t understand what was being said. Someone said, “She must be foreign,” and that’s what we all thought. Later on . . . well, I never did talk to her much, but when she stopped and said hello I realised she wasn’t foreign.’

  The whole story sounded so bizarre that I was convinced there had to be a simple explanation. ‘But maybe my father was working for an estate agent who wanted to buy the property, and maybe they did the deal directly with the owners. As far as I know, he always worked in the property business, and he started out buying places that were falling down, doing them up and selling them on.’

  ‘That would make sense,’ Encarnita’s daughter said.

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know . . .’ Encarnita was clearly not convinced. ‘As I said, it was all very mysterious.’

  She handed me back the photograph and I slipped it into my wallet, checked my watch and realised it was half past two. I took Encarnita’s hands in mine, and apologised for taking up so much of her time.

  ‘You can’t imagine how grateful I am for everything you’ve told me about my grandmother. Honestly, I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘Are you leaving already?’ she said, clearly surprised.

  ‘Mamá,’ her daughter said gently, ‘I’m sure he wants to have his lunch, and we should be having ours.’

  ‘All right, but first . . . Can someone bring me the photo from the dressing table in my room?’ Her granddaughter got to her feet. ‘I want you to see this before you go.’

  It was an ordinary class photograph, fifty pupils - boys and girls - lined up by age and height on the steps of a large building. There were four adults in the picture - three men and a woman - two on the bottom step, flanking the children in the front row, the other two standing together one step higher than the back row. The woman looked like a younger, sultry, stylised version of my grandmother, her hair loose, her eyes shining. Next to her was a thin, dark-haired man, his long face seen in profile, and he was gazing at her, smiling, as though they were alone.

  ‘That’s my grandmother, isn’t it?’ Encarnita nodded at my redundant question. ‘And that must be Manuel.’

  ‘Yes. See the way he’s looking at her ? That’s why there was such a scandal when it all came out . . . That little girl there, that’s Teresita. And there, that’s me, and that girl there is Amada . . .’

  Teresa Carrión González looked like her mother and her brother. She was dark haired with dark eyes, her hair parted in the middle and braided into two pigtails, each tied with a ribbon. Her nose was smaller than my father’s had been, but her mouth, with its thick lips, could have been my own. Posing stiffly but happily, wearing a clean smock, her hands tucked into the pockets, her chin tilted upwards just like her mother. I gazed at her for a long time.

  ‘Would you mind lending it to me? I’d like to have a copy made . . .’

  ‘No!’ She snatched the photograph away with a strength I would not have suspected. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘But Mamá . . .’ By the time her daughter intervened, she was clutching the frame to her chest. ‘He’s not going to keep it, he just wants to have a copy made and then he’ll bring it back. Surely you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘Well, I do mind ! I mind very much.’

  ‘But it’s his grandmother, Mamá! How can it hurt . . .’

  ‘It can hurt! It hurts me . . .’ Now Encarnita had lost her composure, she was wailing like a little girl; and I suddenly felt sorry that I had upset her. Then she said something which was even more surprising. ‘To me, it’s a photograph of your mother, and I don’t want him having it, I don’t want him borrowing it. It’s mine and I want to keep it.’

  ‘All right, Mamá . . .’ Encarna put her arms around the old woman. ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to give him the photo. He doesn’t mind, do you?’ She glanced at me, signalling that we would talk about it later.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said quickly, ‘I’m terribly sorry I upset you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Encarna reassured me, ‘it’s all right. Cecilia, take Grandma back to her room. Go on, she can put the photo back in its place and then we’ll have lunch.’

  She transferred her mother into the arms of her daughter and waited for them to leave.

  ‘She’s eighty years old, you know.’ She smiled. ‘She’s in good health, as you can see, but she gets these little turns from time to time. I’ll have a copy made for you. I’ll take the photo down to the village some afternoon and tell her I want one to hang in the chemist where I work. I’ve already got one, but I’m sure she won’t remember. Give me your address, that way I can send it to you . . .’

  Encarna showed me to the door and pointed up the hill to the house we had talked about earlier, then waited at the door, but I was only halfway down the steps when she called me back.

  ‘Álvaro!’ As I turned back, she came down the steps to where I was standing. ‘I was thinking . . . There’s something I want to tell you. I’m not really Encarnita’s daughter . . . Well, I am, she is my mother, but not my biological mother.’

  She looked at me for a moment as though giving me permission to ask the question.

  ‘My mother’s name was Amada,’ she continued, ‘the other little girl you saw in the photo. She died three years ago. She and Encarnita lived together for more than fifty years, they were only ever apart for two years. Amada was younger than Encarnita, and she was never strong. When she was twenty-one she panicked and confessed, she was so terrified she ran away to Madrid to work as a maid. She had a boyfriend while she was there, he was doing his military service, he got her pregnant and then he disappeared. So she came back to the village, alone, and more frightened than ever. Her father was in the Guardia Civil and her parents didn’t welcome her back with open arms. But Encarnita forgave her for leaving. Her father, who owned the village chemist’s shop - it’s mine now - had just died. Encarnita was an only child, and she was well off so she took my mother in. I was born and grew up in this house . . . And I live here now with my husband and my children. Encarnita’s mother, the only grandmother I ever had, set up a room for herself on the ground floor, and as to what went on in the rest of the house, she preferred not to know. My mothers slept in the master bedroom upstairs. They always swore they weren’t lesbia
ns. They were friends. They slept together, they were jealous, they were unfaithful, they’d have knock-down fights in the kitchen, but they weren’t lesbians.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t know . . .’ I suggested, trying to be pleasant, though I didn’t quite know why she was telling me this story.

  ‘Of course they knew! How could they not know? They knew perfectly well, they just refused to admit it . . . The only time I ever dared talk to them about it, they were furious, wanted to know how I could say such things.’ She smiled and I smiled with her. ‘And they went on going to mass arm in arm every Sunday, they even went to confession, but they didn’t mention what they got up to in bed. Encarnita managed to convince my mother that this was something friends did, and that it’s only a sin if you do it with a man. And they went right on gossiping about other people, telling me not to trust boys because they’re only after one thing. They were very much in love with each other and I think they were happy together, but it was never mentioned. I just wanted to tell you because you came here to ask about your grandmother, nobody had told you anything and I just thought . . . well, it’s not so rare - in this country at least.’

  ‘Thank you, Encarna.’ She shook her head, smiling still. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

  I kissed her on both cheeks and said goodbye. As I got into the car, I felt the gentle, benevolent presence of my grandmother Teresa still hovering over me, protecting me. I was glad to have learned so much, although I felt incapable of evaluating all the new information swirling round my mind - the image of my grandmother, so pretty, so young, so proud, this little miracle of history which had brought her to life, then killed her. There was something heroic and yet familiar, something small yet exemplary, something larger than life yet real, something Spanish yet universal about Teresa González Puerto, and all of those qualities converged on a single point. Me.

  I would have fallen in love with you, Grandmother. Had I been your age, had I known you in 1936, had I not been your grandson. And this thought made me happy, because it was a wonderful thought and because it freed me of the suspicion of being unfair to this love, which at any other time would have been enough to give meaning to my name, and which had come to me only now that I was no longer free, when I no longer wanted to be free.