The Frozen Heart (26 page)

‘No!’ Julio stood up. Manuel stood up too, but Julio was not afraid, not yet. ‘You heat it up for me, that’s your responsibility, you’re the lady of the house, aren’t you? The least you can do is keep up appearances even if everyone knows you’re nothing but a tart.’

‘Don’t speak to your mother like that!’

By the time he heard the words, Julio was already sprawled on the floor, Manuel towering over him. His face stung with rage and pain as he got to his feet, ready to rush Manuel, who, though he was no stronger than the boy, was quicker and had been in many fights, so he managed to send the boy sprawling again before Julio had a chance to land a blow. He had no intention of giving the boy another chance. He threw himself on top of Julio, held him down with his left hand and slapped him with his right, a humiliating slap full of contempt.

‘Who do you think you are, you little fool?’ he said. ‘You’re nothing but a coward, Julio, a little shit, nothing more, nothing less . . . Your father’s son.’

‘Leave him alone,’ Teresa separated them, ‘he’s only fifteen, Manuel, please let him go.’

It was the last time he ever spoke to them. As soon as he could, he got to his feet and rushed out, running around the back of the house until he came to a narrow, filthy alleyway nobody ever used, and there he slumped to the ground and started to cry. You’ll see, he muttered, surprised to hear his own voice ragged with sobs, filled with the same bewildered, desperate helplessness he heard when his father cleaned his rifle. You’ll see who I am, you fucker, I’ll show you, take my word for it, I’ll kill you . . . He stayed there for a long time, calming himself, and only then did he go back to the house. He sat on the bench beside the front door, intending to wait up for his father, but he fell asleep and was wakened by the cold before Benigno came home. Nor did he see his father the next day, because he stayed in bed until he was sure everyone had gone. He spent the whole day out and when he came back after dark, he found a hunk of bread and some cheese and took it to his room. He did not speak to them, but they were not speaking to him either: this he realised the following day when he woke up to find an empty house, a cardboard suitcase filled with handkerchiefs, decks of marked cards, and boxes with secret compartments, and the last words his mother would ever address to him. ‘My darling Julio, please forgive me for all the pain I have caused you, I never meant to hurt you, because I have always loved you and I will go on loving you until the day I die. And maybe someday, when you grow up and you fall in love with a woman and you know what heartbreak is, you’ll understand . . .’

‘Mamá!’ Julio could not bear to read on. ‘Mamá!’

Without knowing what he was doing, he jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and searched for them all over the house, opened every door, every wardrobe, every drawer and found nothing but bare wood, some crumpled, dusty tissue paper and some old shoes thrown in a corner. Then he went out and looked for them at the school, on the square, in the Casa del Pueblo, asking people if they had seen them, but no one seemed to know anything. ‘They’ll be back this afternoon, or your mother will, at least,’ one of the teachers told him. ‘The Evacuee Support Committee is meeting at seven o’clock and she’s the president . . .’ At a quarter to eight, the committee was called to order without Teresa González, but her son Julio went on waiting until the last woman left, the teacher who had told him she would be there. ‘Go home,’ she said. ‘Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or something happened, and she had to go straight home.’ He already knew he would not find her there, but he took the woman’s advice, and went back and stared at the bare wood, the scrap of crumpled tissue paper, the shoes tossed into a corner.

He felt nothing. As he wandered through the empty house, he felt nothing. The day had slipped away in what seemed like an instant, but it was nearly nine o’clock and he was hungry. This was the first feeling that returned: hunger; then all the others came flooding back, anger, longing, cold, pain, guilt, rage, despair, until he realised that once again he had only one place to go, and again it was not a path he had chosen.

Never again
, he said to himself with every step as he walked to the rectory,
never again
, as he knocked on the door and nobody opened,
never again
, as he knocked again and heard footsteps, whispering, the rasp of the peephole opening,
never again
, as he greeted Sister Consuelo and told her he had come to fetch his father,
never again
, and there they were sitting in the basement around the radio, Father Pedro, the sacristan, the chemist, two men who had stopped greeting his mother when they met her in the street and his father, Benigno Carrión, miserable, old and bovine; never again would Julio Carrión González be on the losing side, he promised himself in that moment, never again.

It was a promise he would always keep, though he could not have known that then. Nor could he have known that he would make three mistakes before he would finally, permanently, get it right. On 24 June 1941, he ducked down the narrow backstreets to dodge the flood of blue shirts trooping down the Gran Vía only to happen on another wave on the Calle Alcalá. His purpose was as firm as ever but he could no longer doubt his stupidity. Nor was he the only one. ‘You disgust me, Julio Carrión,’ Peluca’s daughter Mari Carmen had said to him some two years earlier, carefully enunciating his name and surname like a warning.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Julio, where have you been?’ she had said that Sunday morning in May 1939, a morning when he had not thought to avoid her. When she had emerged from the church on her mother’s arm, wearing a veil, she had appeared so demure that he had had to look twice to make sure it was her. ‘I called for you at the boarding house a couple of times.’

It had been almost two months since Franco had marched into Madrid and he had been wrong in thinking that there was only one way to interpret so much interest. Not so insignificant now, am I, Mari Carmen? Just thinking this gave him a thrill of pleasure, but he was genuinely fond of her, and quickly decided not to give in to the temptation of hurting her. Instead, he gave a radiant smile and told her the truth.

‘It’s just . . . I’m out most of the day. I’ve been looking for work.’

‘Like everyone else.’ She smiled back at him before dashing his hopes with a cautious but firm whisper. ‘I wanted to talk to you because there’s a meeting on Thursday at the Casa de Virtudes. We can’t do much at the moment, we don’t know how many of us are left, a lot of others are in jail and there are others we haven’t been able to locate . . .’ She paused and, seeing that his expression had not changed, smiled again, mistaking his impassiveness for quiet courage. ‘You know where the Casa de Virtudes is, don’t you? The party will send someone to take charge. We don’t know who it will be yet, but I’m sure whoever it is will know what to do, it’s mostly a question of helping the people who’ve been arrested, that’s the main priority . . .’

‘What are you talking about, Mari Carmen?’ He cut her short, a fear growing inside him unlike anything he had ever felt. ‘Are you mad?’

It was a solid, physical sensation, and all he could see was a reflection of his own fear in this beautiful madwoman whose long, gorgeous legs had taught him that, even in Madrid, the memory of Teresa González still lived on in her son because he, who believed only in what suited him, was attracted only to women who were brave to the point of being foolhardy.

‘Well, don’t count on me,’ he said, in spite of the fact that Mari Carmen’s eyelashes were just as thick, just as long, behind her veil of black lace. ‘Don’t wait around for me, don’t call me, don’t ever come looking for me,’ he said, although beneath her blouse buttoned to the throat, he could still feel the power of the most immaculate décolleté he had ever seen. ‘Don’t even mention my name, is that clear ? Don’t go telling people I know you or that I’m one of you. I don’t want to get involved, all I want is a quiet life, but if you cause trouble for me, I can cause trouble for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

He said this in a frantic, hurried whisper, as Peluca’s daughter drew herself up to her full height, put her hands on her hips, and in five well-chosen words, spat her contempt:

‘You disgust me, Julio Carrión.’

This was what she said before she turned on her heel and walked away without looking back. She had carefully enunciated his name, his surname, and said nothing more. She did not need to. She knew he would understand. And he did, because he knew her. And there she was, the
hija de puta
, he had not seen her for two months and it would be only three weeks until he saw her again, for the last time.

In the meantime, everyone had been arrested - those at the Casa de Virtudes were the first to go, but many more followed. ‘Mari Carmen and I escaped by the skin of our teeth,
macho
,’ Isidro told him shortly afterwards, ‘she wasn’t there because the metro wasn’t working, so she had to walk. I got away because I’d never been there before and had written down the address wrong. By the time we arrived, they’d all been taken away . . .’ Someone - but not him - had informed the police, although the traitor, if he was still alive, could hardly have slept worse than Julio Carrión, who was torn between the fear that Mari Carmen might be arrested and the fear that he might go on running into her in the street. He could not decide which was worse - that she had been arrested and might at any moment choose to denounce him, might say his name, or that he might spend weeks, months, even years panicking over the thought that it would happen sooner or later. For the moment, they had not caught the loudest, bravest, wildest of them all and she was still free.

Many of the others had been killed, more than fifty had been executed at dawn on a single morning in August 1939, and if you were to calculate the ages of all those who died, they would not add up to a thousand years. He knew many of them, knew almost all of them by sight, the men and the women, because they were shooting women too, even those who were underage, everyone but her. It was unbelievable, impossible, but in the barrio everyone knew everything about everyone, and what they did not know he heard from Isidro, who never gave up hope of finding her. Isidro went on treating Julio as a friend until he too was arrested on the fourth or the fifth attempt - Julio could not remember any more - by those fools, those suicidal idiots to regroup and reorganise.

If it had been anyone else, Julio would have thought that she had sorted something out, found a Falangist lover who would protect her. Uglier women than she had done it, but not her. In the barrio everyone still knew everything about everyone, although it had been months since Isidro had shouted his last ‘
Viva la República’
in front of a firing squad. Everyone knew she still went to the prison every week to visit her husband, still lived in the same house with her mother and her sister and with a single sewing machine between them, lived with the heroic, useless memory of her dead father, and the uncertainty of not knowing how long Juan Ortega, a hairdresser who - no one knew how - had let off his gun on 6 November 1936 and the following day had held out in the Casa de Campo until he was shot just before sunset, would go on being the only useless hero in the family.

But for the moment, Mari Carmen was free, he had glimpsed her himself that morning, and he had thought about leaving Madrid, going back to Torrelodones, the sheep, to a life that was not for him, but was better than prison, better than facing the
tribunal de las Salesas
and the blood-spattered walls of the eastern cemetery. His father would intercede for him, would talk to Father Pedro, and they would save him - or perhaps not, it was impossible to know - but he would then be forever branded, exiled from the world he had dreamed of, the world of those who, when choosing sides, never got it wrong. Mari Carmen was free, and for as long as she was, he was in danger. This was why he did not like the Falangists, why he despised them for no reason other than an instinctive shudder which forced him to remember himself in this world, this city in which he seemed to have spent a lifetime rather than just four years, since the day he had unpacked his suitcase in that little boarding-house room he had once shared with his mother when Teresa had taken him to Madrid in a truck crammed with people to celebrate the triumph of the Popular Front.

‘Don’t touch the rifle.’ On that second occasion, it had been Benigno Carrión, not his wife, who had pointed to the bed where Julio was to sleep. ‘I’ll look after the rifle.’

And that afternoon, so as not to have to look at him, or listen to him, to suppress the contempt he felt for this old man who had spent three days in a drunken stupor, playing the role of the wronged husband, Julio had gone out for a walk.

As he had stepped out into the street, his cheeks still flushed with shame at the memory of the day before, when the young lieutenant, having heard why he was requesting a safe conduct to Madrid, had invited Julio’s father into his office. ‘Calm down and come with me,’ he had said. ‘There’s no need to talk like that in front of your son . . .’ Then he had turned to the duty officer. ‘Take the boy to the canteen and get him something.’ ‘What?’ ‘I don’t know, a hot chocolate, a glass of milk, anything . . .’ As he spoke, the lieutenant had given him a look of pity that he could not bear to remember. And so, when he had finished hanging his clothes in the wardrobe, he had left his father at the boarding house and had followed those endless, glorious, magnificent legs, beneath a tight skirt and a military-style jacket, until they reached the Plaza Mayor, where their soft, dark-skinned owner met up with a group of people her age, among them a friendly lad with a freckled face called Isidro, who told jokes. He was the first person in Madrid to befriend Julio Carrión, and more than that, he was the one who told Julio where they went every day, the one who took him to the Unified Socialist Youth headquarters, the JSU.