The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  So, at 4 p.m., I closed my eyes and pressed the button on Raquel’s entryphone.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hi, it’s me.’

  ‘Álvaro.’ It was not a question but a statement.

  ‘Yes, it’s just . . . I went down to Torrelodones to sort out some of my father’s papers and . . .’

  ‘. . . and you just happened to be in the area.’

  ‘No, I came specially.’

  ‘Come up.’

  When I got a taste for jumping off the huge mound of damp, compacted sand which had appeared overnight in the corner of the school playground, I still thought the first time had been the best, but it lacked the excitement of the second, the third, of the fourth, because something new was added to the experience every time. Slipping into Raquel’s bed for the second time, I was more moved than I had been the first time; it was a good thing, because the amazement of the first time settled into something more certain and more amazing, and the only worthwhile miracles are those which can be repeated. Therefore, as I looked at her, as I watched the regular rhythm of her breathing, I found I was able to speak, to do more than just babble.

  ‘I’m going to tell you a story.’ I turned towards her, kissed her and took her in my arms. ‘I hope you’ll like it . . .’

  I didn’t tell her about my grandmother, I couldn’t bring myself to, I hadn’t even told Fernando Cisneros yet. It was not simply that I liked to think that Teresa belonged to me, nor was it a sense of propriety. There was something else, something hazy and romantic, about my reticence. It was all happening at once, too fast. I needed time to grow accustomed to the memory of my grandmother, to allow this sudden, intense, innocent passion to settle until they became familiar images, old stories. Only then would I be able to tell the truth, this secret, suppressed truth, without seeing myself as an interloper, an opportunist, a second-hand grandson. Teresa González Puerto deserved better than that. So I told Raquel the story of Amada and Encarnita without even mentioning my grandmother, as if I’d run into an old friend of the family in Torrelodones, the local chemist, who had insisted I come back to her house because her mother wanted to offer her condolences over my father’s death, not realising that the glass of wine she’d drunk on an empty stomach would loosen her tongue.

  ‘So, did you like the story?’

  ‘I loved it,’ Raquel said, laughing. ‘It’s unbelievable, don’t you think? Two women living together for fifty years, doggedly oblivious. But didn’t you realise? Surely you suspected something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I kissed her again. ‘You know I don’t know anything about what you women get up to. Like you, for instance . . . What do you and your friends get up to?’ ‘God, you men can be so boring,’ she said, still laughing. ‘You’re only after one thing.’

  And at that moment, as I was looking at her, everything clicked into place.

  ‘Fuck!’ I pushed her away gently, sat on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Raquel sat next to me. ‘Álvaro?’

  It had been my fault too, I thought as I looked at her. Because if I hadn’t been wandering around like an idiot for two days dreaming of this bed and wondering how to get back here, I might have been quicker, more intelligent. But Encarnita’s story only vaguely tied in with something I remembered from family stories: something about a little house near a train station, a little girl of seven or eight who had never spoken to the schoolmistress’s son but who met him, years later, walking down the Gran Vía, now a grown man. It was mostly Raquel’s fault, I said to myself. But neither of us was to blame and I had no intention of letting my father spoil this afternoon for me. Not entirely sure what this connection might mean, I let myself fall back slowly on to the bed, drew Raquel to me, and made up an excuse.

  ‘It’s nothing. I just remembered I was supposed to be at the university, I had an important meeting, but then I remembered I arranged to vote by proxy, so . . . It’s nothing.’ I drew her closer, until my nose was touching hers. ‘I don’t know where my head is these days.’

  She drew back slightly and smiled, and everything resumed its course, running gently like water, as though Señorita Mariana’s pretty, blonde, blue-eyed daughter, whom many years later Encarnita would not recognise, having seen her only once or twice, was not called Angélica.

  As though that same little girl would not grow up to be my mother.

  The first time Ignacio Fernández Muñoz saw Anita Salgado Pérez, he thought she was beautiful. He also thought she was Spanish. Not simply because she was slight, or because of her dark hair and her huge, dark, melancholic eyes. The stranger who was walking along the footpath towards him had pale skin, her body was slight but curvaceous; proportioned and graceful as a doll, she might easily have been French, but she was Spanish, he was certain of it. It was something about the way she walked, about the way she did her hair, but most of all it was her face - her expression, cautious, somehow fearful and yet defiant. It was an expression Ignacio Fernández had seen often in the past three years, on the faces of men and woman, the old and the young, even on the faces of Spanish children. So, when he saw her slacken her pace as she came to the doorway he had been fruitlessly watching for half an hour, hiding awkwardly behind his newspaper, he almost spoke to her, to explain his predicament and to ask her to let him in, but he did not.

  ‘¡Perdone!’ she said in Spanish, and looked up at him.

  ‘No ha sido nada,’ he replied, and she smiled before slipping the key into the lock.

  At that moment, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised that he could dispense with explanations, which in this case was extremely convenient. He went back to his newspaper, stared at the headline he had been staring at without reading, heard the creak of the hinges, watched from the corner of his eye as she stepped inside and simply shifted his foot to stop the door from closing completely. Then, his heart pounding in his chest, he glanced to his left. An elderly couple, shuffling slowly, had just rounded the corner of a distant street. He could see no one else, so he turned and looked in the other direction. A teenager on the pavement opposite was oblivious to his presence. Ignacio slipped inside. The hallway was damp and cold. He waited a moment before climbing the stairs, listening for the least sound, but none of the residents chose that moment to pop their heads round the door. Ignacio had deliberately chosen a time when they would be having lunch.

  When he got to the second floor, he glanced around and found the door he was looking for, rang the bell and promptly heard the familiar clattering of heels. He was touched to hear the sound of his mother’s footsteps, he recognised them still. But when the door opened, she did not recognise him. Shrouded in the half-light, Ignacio saw a look of fear steal across her face, her eyes wide. He stepped forward, pushed her back into the apartment, then stood behind her, his arm around her waist, his right hand covering her mouth as he kicked the door closed behind him. He moved quickly, cleanly, as though this woman were an enemy soldier.

  ‘Don’t shout, Mamá, please, don’t shout.’ Slowly, he let her go. ‘It’s me, Ignacio. I’ve escaped.’

  María Muñoz slowly turned and stared at him. She could not believe that this filthy, emaciated, bearded man was her son Ignacio. Three years of incarceration and forced labour had transformed the only son she had now into an ageless man so gaunt she could see his ribs through the dark fabric of his shirt. He seemed shorn of his humanity, of physical and spiritual dignity, like the desolate souls left to die alone in the filthy sheets of the charity hospitals. This was what María saw when she looked at Ignacio. He saw it and he felt so alone, so lost without her, that he broke down and slumped against the wall. Seeing his pain, her detachment unravelled.

  ‘Ignacio!’

  Mother embraced son. She did not put her arms around him, did not hold him up, but she stroked his face until she could no longer see him through her tears, then she closed her eyes and pressed her face against his chest, seeking su
ccour, just as she had done in Madrid on the last night they had dinner together.

  In Ignacio Fernández Muñoz’s memory, the hot, silent tears with which she mourned his life and Mateo’s death, grieved for the inevitable devastation and the improbable salvation of her family, fused with other tears that were different, remote yet familiar. It seemed to him that his mother’s eyes and those of thousands of men and women with very different stories formed a vicious, unbreakable circle that would last until the end of the world.

  This was how he remembered the scene years later; as though nothing had happened since that day when his brother’s eyes met his as Mateo stood in the truck that would take him away. That day when he had brought his one free hand to his lips to let his brother know that his heart was breaking. And yet things happened, many things had happened since that day, the most important of which was that he was still alive. He would not have cared if he had died, but he was fated to live and so he did. He had gone on seeing, hearing, sleeping and breathing ever since that day in the camp at Albatera when he had collapsed only to feel a friendly, complicit kick which made him open his eyes just in time to see the guard’s boots marching towards him.

  He heard an urgent whisper in an Aragonese accent. ‘Come on, man, get up, don’t be a fool . . .’

  When he turned his head he saw a short, swarthy miliciano looking at him anxiously.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ The guard gave him a less friendly kick.

  ‘Nothing,’ the miliciano answered for him, ‘he just twisted his ankle.’

  ‘And that’s got you rolling on the ground ?’ The officer greeted the news with a vicious grin. ‘You call yourselves “men of steel”, but you’re just a bunch of sissies.’

  ‘I know . . . but it really hurt.’ The miliciano yanked his left arm and got him back on his feet. ‘You’re all right now?’

  Ignacio simply nodded, eyes fixed on the ground, and went back to marching alongside the man who had saved his life.

  ‘Who was it? Your brother ?’ the man asked after a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ Ignacio answered eventually, ‘my older brother.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ He nodded his head as though pleased with his intuition. ‘That’s what I thought, you don’t look much like queers.’

  Ignacio Fernández Muñoz smiled, because to survive meant to keep smiling, and he looked at this skinny, nervous little man walking alongside him, with his big, knotty hands, his cropped hair balding in patches, a typical farmer’s son raised in the great outdoors.

  ‘Thanks for what you did earlier,’ Ignacio said, holding out his hand as he introduced himself.

  ‘Jesus, you’re lucky!’ The man shook his hand.

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘Of course . . .’ He looked as surprised as Ignacio. ‘D’you know how many people in Spain are called Ignacio Fernández Muñoz? Hundreds - thousands probably - which means you won’t get into trouble if they decide to shoot your brother. Where are you from?’

  ‘Madrid.’

  ‘Some people have all the luck!’ And in a curious, morose tone that Ignacio would quickly grow accustomed to, the man told his story. ‘My name is Roque Ansó Ansó. There’s only about three hundred of us in our village and we’re all related, the fascists and the rest of us, so neither peace nor justice is going to get me out of here, as my grandmother would say . . . My older brother was killed too. He was posted to the front over in Castellón. I think it’s better to die that way, with a bullet to the head, but maybe my mother’s luck will hold . . .’

  They became good friends. The sort of friend a man might make in a concentration camp, on a working party, in a prison, in war. Roque was twenty-five years old and the two men had nothing in common, but they could sit side by side in silence for hours at a time. This facility, so rare in a place where there was nothing to do but walk and talk, would have been enough to bring them together even if Ignacio had not been taken with Roque’s deadpan humour in the face of adversity, the indolent yet somehow elegant fatalism common to those who are destined from birth to a life of poverty and struggle. Roque’s stoicism compensated for the brutal, black rage that overwhelmed Ignacio every time he looked around him and his mind went over all the things he had once had, the things that had been snatched from him, above all his faith. At such times the blood would drain from his cheeks and he would clench his fists, beat the air, then suddenly he would feel Roque’s hand on his shoulder, hear his gravelly voice saying ‘Keep it up - just as long as you don’t take it out on me’, and they would both burst out laughing.

  They became good friends, and this elemental yet complex friendship saved them both, for if Roque had not told him he was lucky, had not reminded him how many Spanish communists shared the same name, Ignacio would not have been able to interpret the look of disappointment on the face of the lieutenant in the office to which he found himself summoned to make a statement in mid-June.

  ‘How nice - someone else with an unusual name!’ the man muttered, licking his finger and leafing through one of the box files that had spilled on to the floor.

  That alone might not have been enough, because when Ignacio Fernández Muñoz looked into the colonel’s eyes, he had only one thought: pity I wasted that bullet on the poor bastard in Vistillas when I could have put it between your eyes, you little cunt. But, in spite of his homicidal fantasies, he realised that Roque was right, and he could take advantage of this man and hide himself among the thousands of Spaniards who shared his name, so that he might live to put a bullet between the eyes of men like him. This prospect seemed more felicitous, more heroic, than the arrogant posturing republican officers resorted to, which perhaps his brother Mateo had resorted to. If they shoot me, they win and I lose, he thought. If they don’t shoot me, I win and my side wins. Prison extended the time and lessened the intensity, but it did not alter the outcome of that future. And so he stepped into the office, his arms held limply by his sides, shoulders hunched with a respectful air of fear he did not drop in the presence of the enemy.

  ‘Fernández Muñoz, that’s your name, isn’t it?’ the chief officer asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Ignacio. I don’t have any papers, they were stolen.’

  ‘O K . . . Seems to happen to all of you.’ This remark, rather than irritating him, seemed to amuse him, for this, after all, was why they had won the war. ‘Ignacio Fernández Muñoz. Peláez, you heard him . . .?’

  ‘Yes, but with a name like that . . .’ The lieutenant confirmed what the prisoner already knew. ‘I’ve got volumes of them here, Colonel.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Madrid, sir !’ The colonel smiled at his subordinate.

  ‘No exactly helpful . . .’ he allowed himself a little laugh ‘. . . is it, Peláez?’

  The latter did not respond and the colonel turned back to the prisoner.

  ‘You’re very young, aren’t you, lad ? How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-one, sir.’ He ventured some information he had not been asked for. ‘I didn’t do anything, I’m just a conscript, I was drafted at eighteen. When I was called up . . . well, I had to go, what else could I do? But I didn’t volunteer or anything ...’

  A moment later he could heard the quiver of a doubt in Peláez’s voice. ‘So far I’ve found three soldiers named Ignacio Fernández Muñoz from Madrid who are twenty-one, but the only one who fits is a captain.’

  ‘A captain? At that age?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peláez, who was no longer surprised by anything. ‘The communists went round promoting people without rhyme or reason . . .’

  ‘Pff . . .’ Ignacio gave a sigh and murmured. ‘Me a captain? Heaven forbid!’

  ‘The aforementioned Captain Fernández Muñoz . . .’ The lieutenant glared at him as though he could read the truth in his eyes. ‘... was a communist. He was arrested in Casado and sent to Porlier, but he never arrived there, so I have no further information.’

  Ignacio looked at the lieutenant, then at the colonel,
and realised they were trying to decide whether the man before them could have been a communist captain. The Albatera camp was so vast and so crowded that he had not even managed to find his own brother, and he realised that what everyone said was true: the fascists had too many prisoners to cope with, they didn’t know what to do with them. In his case, this could mean only one thing: if he stood his ground, they would end up sending him back to Madrid to be identified there.

  ‘I’m not a communist, sir,’ he said, whimpering like a frightened child, ‘I swear to you, I’ve never belonged to any party . . .’

  When the colonel informed him that the most likely outcome would be that he would be dispatched to Madrid on the next possible train, where he should present himself at the recruiting office where he had enlisted with witnesses or documents that could corroborate his identity, Ignacio smiled and thanked the man. You think I’m going to let them identify me? he thought as he walked out of the office.

  He had not gone a hundred yards before he remembered that he was tall and blond. His looks counterbalanced his good fortune in having a common name, making it easy to identify him in a crowd, while Roque would go unnoticed. For a moment, panic seized him, but then he realised that the socialist jailer, the man called Rogelio, had saved his life twice over, because if he had not escaped, if he had been arrested and released in 1939, as most of his communist brothers had been, there would have been a physical description - height, weight, colour of hair and eyes - in Peláez’s files. The republican jailers in Madrid had not destroyed the lists of communist prisoners arrested in 1939. It had been one of their gifts to Franco, and it had taken Franco’s men only two days to round them all up again. How many of them are still alive? wondered Ignacio, and he felt ashamed that he had been so weak, had almost panicked. What did it matter, he thought, he had nothing to lose. He had already lost everything, and yet he was planning to escape with Roque.