The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘The is The Lawyer, one of the prisoners’ spokesmen. He is highly respected by everyone here and has considerable authority, especially over the communists,’ he said by way of introduction.

  The plump, well-groomed, one-armed man stepped confidently towards him.

  ‘I used to be one of you. I fought with the Reds against the nationalists.’ He held out his remaining hand.

  ‘Fuck off, you bastard,’ said Ignacio, stuffing his hand into his pocket.

  Huguet never quite believed Ignacio’s interpretation of this encounter, and Ignacio could understand why, because the carelessness of Franco’s men, who did not even bother to learn the terminology of those they pretended to be, was unbelievable. What was more shocking still was that they succeeded in duping some of the prisoners.

  Some men decided to go home, although they realised it was a trap, that they would be doing forced labour, and every day the gendarmes brought in more undocumented men who had crossed the border without the least idea of what awaited them. The newcomers upset him most, because in their vulnerability they were a mirror image of Roque, of himself. ‘Have you got any money?’ the old hands would ask them with a mocking smile. ‘Of course,’ they would say, ‘we didn’t have time to spend it,’ and for an instant, hope would dance in their eyes. ‘Why? Can we change it here?’ ‘Of course, you can change anything here. We use republican pesetas to wipe our arses, and yours will come in handy because we haven’t a peseta left . . .’ And everyone would laugh, everyone except the newcomers, who would glance around them with a look of utter despair.

  Every day, new recruits joined this desolate army, and all the while Ignacio Fernández Muñoz went on studying. Things in the camp were going from bad to worse, even for the communists, the only prisoners who, from the moment they arrived, had set about organising things and had managed to create a stable, efficient infrastructure connected to their French comrades. Only this had made it possible for them to survive the humiliating blow Stalin had dealt them in his perverse alliance with Hitler.

  For those who were free, it was terrible; for those in prison, it was a catastrophe. For Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, newly arrived in Barcarès and still the butt of jokes by the camp veterans, it was a bitter starting point, one more sign of his infinite misfortune. Betrayal is the rule, he thought, betrayal is our fate, it is the norm in our lives. I live, I survive, I breathe only to be betrayed, in Spain and beyond, by friends and by enemies, to my face and behind my back. Betrayal is the one constant in my life, he thought.

  ‘This war is not our war, it is an imperial war between capitalist powers, it does not concern us.’ This was the opinion of their leaders, announced with the serenity of someone enjoying life in Paris with false identity papers, someone living in a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow with his wife and children, who slept in a warm bed every night, and ate well every day. This they proclaimed with a joy born of prosperity, and the French and the English - the supreme traitors to the Spanish cause - deserved nothing more. Ignacio agreed with them on this last point, though not on the rest, and he loudly said as much. He had just arrived in Barcarès and had not yet met Lieutenant Huguet, he had not yet been given his nom de guerre, but he dared to speak out because he had nothing to lose. This was why he spoke out, why he said that for him the Nazis were and would always be the real enemy.

  Had he been free, he might have been expelled from the party, but he was imprisoned and so were those he spoke to. These men did not sleep in warm beds at night, did not enjoy several meals a day, they were far from Paris, and this was what they wanted to hear. They needed to hear something like this from someone like him, someone who had been raised in a prosperous family, who had studied, who had been trained to lead, but who found himself here, just as fucked as everyone else. Outside, he might have been expelled from the party; in here he quickly rose through the ranks. He never asked questions, never asked to see any identification from those prisoners who came to him and asked whether he was the guy from Madrid, the one they called ‘The Lawyer’, and this helped to restore a tacit reconciliation between his comrades and the other republicans in the camp, although it did not make him feel any happier.

  In his eighteen months of clandestine politics, the only thing that comforted Ignacio Fernández Muñoz were the escapes. He had no personal ambition, and never thought about his future since he was utterly convinced that he did not have one. For him, the word future extended only to the next twenty-four hours, but if one day he were able to choose a life for himself, he knew he it would not be in politics. Only two or three years earlier, it had occurred to him that he might stay in the army, become a professional soldier after the republicans won the war. Now, although all was lost, he realised that this reflex had become more deeply rooted in him. This was why he revelled in the escapes, organising them, conceiving them. Given the responsibilities he had taken on, he could not escape himself, but he enthusiastically planned every one.

  ‘Where will I go without you?’ The night he left, Roque hugged him as hard as he had on the day they realised they had arrived in France. ‘How will I work out what they’re saying?’

  Ignacio looked at him and felt proud. Roque could have left the camp months earlier, he had papers, he would be running no risk, but he had not wanted to leave. At the beginning of 1940, with the prospect of a war with Germany, the French government had begun to consider the waste of resources represented by tens of thousands of idle Spanish prisoners. Their initial ideas foundered with men like Ignacio. Few republicans were prepared to join the French Foreign Legion, considering it an insult given the parallels with the Spanish Legion, and many more chose to stay in the camp rather than sign up for forced labour details which did not even guarantee them the right to visit their families. But this was one thing, escaping was very different. Ignacio laughed before responding to Roque’s question.

  ‘You’ll manage, take my word for it . . . and let’s face it, you’ll be better off away from here, Roque.’

  The Perpignan comrades arrived and began to dig on the other side of the fence. Ignacio saw them only in fits and starts, when a flash of light imprinted on his memory an image of this perfect digging machine, the French on one side, the Spanish on the other, arms working tirelessly, sinewy and powerful, two perfectly synchronised halves of a whole. They did not take this much trouble with individual escapes, but more than fifteen of them were planning to escape that night, so they had carefully studied the storm clouds. The Senegalese guards were afraid of electrical storms and hunched their shoulders at the first peal of thunder, making a dash for the barracks, and they did not reappear until the rain had stopped, by which time the escapees would be home and dry, perhaps even sleeping in a real bed in a house with a roof that did not leak, sheltered by some French citizen with a heart and a conscience. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz was moved at the thought. With every escape, he felt the same thing, but this was one time he would not forget. Not simply because he knew that it was probably the last time he would ever see Roque, but also because this night brought him closer to Aurelio Perea, alias The Bigmouth, who in time would become something more than a friend, almost a brother.

  ‘Which one of you is The Lawyer ?’

  A young Frenchman peered through the fence, a sheaf of papers in his right hand.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Ignacio, stepping towards the fence.

  It began to rain, but the boy, unperturbed, opened the umbrella he had hanging on his arm, and began to read:

  ‘Yesterday, 16 May 1940, the Antifascist Committee of the département of Roussillon, made up of the French Communist Party, the French Socialist Party and the General Confederation . . .’

  ‘Listen, why don’t we skip all that,’ Ignacio interrupted, both moved and bewildered that the boy had actually brought the minutes of a meeting and was fully intending to read them here, in the dark, in the rain, in the middle of an escape.

  ‘Comme vous voulez.’ The young man looked at him, then car
ried on reading. ‘The members of the committee salute their Spanish brothers - in the first draft it said “comrades” but I suggested changing it to “brothers”. Anyway - their Spanish brothers in the struggle against fascism, unlawfully incarcerated at the Barcarès camp as a result of inexcusable cowardice on the part of the current government . . .’

  ‘Perea!’

  Domingo, the lad from Seville, started yelling in Spanish, but this did not deter the adolescent spokesman.

  ‘. . . and offer them their unconditional support, just as they supported the cause of Spanish republicanism against the criminal weakness of the League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee in London . . .’

  Roque looked at Ignacio before slipping under the fence, and smiled at him from the other side. Domingo, who was leading the escape, started shouting again while the young man went on reading, as if this were an absurd dream.

  ‘. . . the victory of fascism, as embodied by the figure of General Franco.’

  ‘Perea! I’m going. If you don’t come now, you’ll be left behind.’

  ‘. . . aided and abetted by the Axis powers . . .’

  ‘Come on, lad,’ Ignacio realised he had to do something, ‘just give me the papers. Tell everyone involved in the meeting that we’re very grateful. I’ll read it to our comrades here later, but there’s too much going on at the moment.’ He turned and switched into Spanish. ‘And Domingo, could you shut up? You’ll have the Senegalese out here, storm or no storm . . .’ He turned back and saw a lone man heading towards him. ‘What’s the matter, Perea?’

  ‘It’s just . . .’ The Malagueño spoke in a whisper. ‘When I was little, my grandmother used to say to me, “Don’t get hit by lightning, lad, don’t get hit by lightning,” because where I lived, there was a man walking through the fields during a storm, and he was hit by a bolt of lighting and burned to ashes, and now every time I see that fence . . .’

  Perea seemed paler, his eyes darker than Ignacio remembered. He knew the man vaguely, had talked to him only once or twice, but Ignacio had not forgotten him: ‘How come your wife is in Nîmes? I thought there weren’t any refugees there . . .’ he had once asked. ‘Because her father is a bullfighter,’ Perea had answered, clearly thinking this explained matters. ‘What has that got to do with it?’ Ignacio asked. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Perea said condescendingly. ‘The Arena of Nîmes! The biggest bullring in the south of France. My father-in-law knows the owner, so . . .’ Ignacio thought of the conversation now as he saw the abject terror on the face of the bullfighter’s son-in-law.

  ‘You’re afraid of thunderstorms?’ said Ignacio in a whisper.

  ‘No,’ Perea protested, ‘I’m not afraid of thunderstorms, I’m afraid lightning will strike just as I’m crawling under the fence . . .’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do, macho, go or stay?’

  ‘I want to go to Nîmes, I want to see my wife.’

  ‘Well then, go, Perea!’ He took the man by the arm and dragged him to the fence. ‘Stop fucking around and go!’

  As he watched Perea slither under the fence, he heard the French boy’s voice from the other side.

  ‘The French people do not share the views of their government, we do not support this policy, this betrayal. We share a common fate, that is what we wanted to say.’

  ‘Thank you, comrade.’ He found the fervour of this young man so moving that he almost crawled under the fence to embrace him. ‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.’

  Perea was not struck by lightning and the escape went off without any problems. The Lawyer went back to work, filling in the hole, getting rid of every trace of the tunnel. Afterwards, he waited for a few minutes to make sure there were no problems, and then headed back to sleep, drenched, sneezing and happy. He felt happier still when, early in 1943, he met Perea again in the last place he would have expected: a remote sawmill in the mountains near Ariège that served as a cover for a brigade of Spanish guerrillas who had joined the French resistance.

  ‘Hey, Lawyer!’

  He looked around but could see no one he recognised among the men scattered on either side of the path.

  ‘Someone’s calling you,’ said Amadeo.

  ‘I know, I just don’t know who’s . . .’

  ‘Lawyer !’ the voice came again. He turned to his left and finally he saw him.

  ‘Perea!’ Aurelio ran up and they hugged each other. ‘Am I glad to see you! But what are you doing here? I thought you were in Nîmes?’

  ‘I spent four months there, living like a king . . . My wife is staying with a doctor, a friend of hers, he helped her get her a carte de séjour. I didn’t set foot outside, obviously, I just curled up in a warm bed next to her and had three hot meals a day, it was great . . . Until the local chemist turned up unannounced one night and caught us in the middle of dinner. The little bastard stood there staring at me. He asked the doctor who I was, but he obviously didn’t believe I was a deaf-mute . . . I couldn’t stay there any more, it was too dangerous for everyone, so I left. I hid out for a couple of weeks, stealing food, sleeping anywhere I could, until finally I thought, I have to decide. Either I go back to the camp, or I go back to Spain and they throw me in prison or send me off to build roads for a couple of years. I nearly did go back, but when I got to the border, I saw the Guardia Civil at the checkpoint in the distance and I thought: no, I’m not going there . . . So I turned back and this time the French sent me to St-Cyprien, just for a change, then they sent me out on a work detail, building roads, the same as if I had gone back to Spain. So the first I heard of an escape plan, I got out of there. So here I am, back at war, sleeping on the ground, eating sardines out of a tin, this is my world . . .’

  ‘Our world, Perea,’ Ignacio said, smiling at his old friend. He looked much better, Ignacio thought, he had put on weight and was tanned. Ignacio thought about the cruel fate they shared, a fate in which war was something to be desired, almost a blessing compared to the intolerable life of the camps. But the joy of seeing Perea again, the first connection he had made with his recent past after a series of goodbyes, was stronger than all that, and so he hugged Aurelio.

  ‘What about you?’ Perea asked. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had a rough time, although . . .’ Ignacio smiled. ‘Same as you, I suppose.’

  Same as everyone, he thought, although this was only true in part, the part that did not include having met Anita.

  As for the rest, he too had been sent out on work detail, and although he had been moved three times, he had managed to stay in the south. At first he had worked in a pot factory, then in a mine, then in a tyre factory which, under the Vichy regime, had been turned into a warehouse supplying parts to the German Army. He had arrived here in December 1941, but had been planning his escape for some time, ever since he heard that they were being sent to Toulouse. It had taken him three months to concoct the perfect escape, a plan so simple that it entailed ducking down a side street on one of the weekly trips to the public baths while his companions staged a protest about working conditions.

  That night, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz had bathed like a king, in the bathroom of his parents’ house, but the pleasure he felt could not allay his heart or calm his thoughts.

  On meeting his family again he had had similar feelings. His mother was worn out with tears and she went on stroking him, repeating his name, whispering the sort of things she had written to him during the war, the sort of things Ignacio had not heard since he was a child. María, curious at all the noise, had come out into the hallway and screamed. His sister’s hug was different, hearty, triumphant. She was still rocking him in her arms when his father appeared, and with him a lean, gaunt figure, her eyes larger than he had ever seen them, her face a mask of tragedy that transformed but did not destroy her beauty. It was Paloma, the new Paloma, melancholy and frail, as beautiful as ever, but no longer the lively, rosy-cheeked girl she had once been. This transformation shocked him more than the haggard
appearance of his father, an old man at fifty-four though he still managed to smile.

  ‘Thank you, hijo,’ he said afterwards, stepping back, but not quite letting go.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being here.’ Tears brimmed in his father’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve thought about you so much, Papá . . .’ Ignacio’s voice quavered. ‘After I was arrested in Madrid, when they put me in a cell, I thought about you all the time, I was so happy that you weren’t there to see it, to see how we were betrayed, Papá . . .’

  ‘We have nothing to be sorry for, Ignacio.’ His father’s lips quivered beneath the weight of his words. ‘I have no regrets, hijo.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what we’re all doing standing here with the dinner getting cold. Ignacio must be starving, aren’t you?’ said his mother after a moment.

  ‘Of course I’m starving,’ he said, laughing, ‘you can’t imagine . . .’

  He followed his family into a small, gloomy dining room with cheap furniture and mismatched chairs. But his parents’ obvious hardship troubled him less than the pair of large dark eyes, which grew deeper and more brilliant as he moved towards them, the eyes of a strange girl he had seen earlier in the doorway. Seeing him, she got to her feet, and in spite of his excitement, his exhaustion, the joy he felt at being with his family once more, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz noticed the perfect curves of her body, the gracefulness of the hand she extended to shake his.

  ‘Hello.’ The word tumbled from her generous lips.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, gently shaking her warm, soft hand.

  ‘Of course, you haven’t met . . .’ María Muñoz introduced them. ‘Anita, this is my youngest son . . .’ She hugged him again, unaccustomed to having him by her side. ‘Anita is a friend of your sister’s, she’s like another daughter to us . . .’