The Frozen Heart (35 page)

Mateo had already met a fiery, dark-skinned girl, who was very young, very passionate and dedicated her time to holding what the JSU called ‘flash rallies’ on the Paseo del Prado. Her name was Casilda García Guerrero, and she prowled the tram stops, the exits to the metro, anywhere she was likely to find groups of people. Then she would approach them, try to persuade them to join the resistance, tell them where they could go, what they could do, where their skills might be useful if they chose to fight in their own way, to bury fascism by digging trenches or sewing uniforms. She was pretty, funny, a little plump, and the military trousers she wore fitted her well.

‘You know, I think what you’re doing is really interesting.’ The second time he saw her, Mateo plucked up the courage to speak. ‘It’s important to know that there are people motivating the rearguard . . .’

Casilda smiled and thanked him.

‘Do you mind if I walk with you a bit?’ Mateo had ventured, and she nodded. ‘So what does your boyfriend think about all this . . .?’

‘What is he supposed to think?’ she answered him with a mocking laugh.

‘I don’t know. You’re too pretty to be out alone all day.’

‘I’m not alone. That guy over there, and that one there . . .’ she pointed to a pair of innocuous boys younger than herself, barely more than children, ‘they’re comrades. We come here together, but we split up so we can talk to more people.’

Mateo frowned, though he was still smiling. ‘That’s even worse . . . I’d be so worried, thinking about you out on the streets with your comrades, I’d probably forget to fire and the fascists would kill me.’

‘Would you?’ Casilda’s eyes met his in a proud, defiant look. ‘But I’m a free woman. Since my father enlisted, I’ve been getting on just as well living on my own. I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t need some man worrying about me.’

Mateo nodded, as though he found what she had said commendable, then kissed her on the mouth, which earned him a not very comradely slap on the face.

‘Who the hell do you think you are? Cheeky bastard!’

‘You’ve got a good right hook,’ he shouted after her as she stalked off.

But that had been some days before the Legión, the former monarchist forces, and before the bombs from Italian and German planes crashing down on Madrid. Some months later, when fear stalked the streets of the city almost as much as at the front, and staying alive was a miracle on both sides of the trenches, Mateo ran into her one morning in Cuatro Calles.

‘They still haven’t killed you?’ Casilda spoke first, smiling.

‘No,’ Mateo returned her smile, ‘because I wasn’t out there worrying about you . . .’

This time, she was the one to slip her arms around his neck and kiss him on the lips with the same devotion she brought to her impromptu meetings.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said, taking his hand, and he cursed his luck before refusing.

‘I can’t. Not right now, honestly. I have to get back to Usera, I have a dispatch for my commander - that car over there is waiting for me . . .’ Casilda looked at the car and nodded.

‘Five Calle de Espoz y Mina,’ she said simply, ‘third floor, lefthand side. And try not to get yourself killed.

That day, Mateo Fernández Muñoz did everything in his power to get a furlough, a pass, a new assignment, a new posting as an intelligence officer, but in vain. The next day and the day after that he tried again with the same results until finally he went to see the major, the only career officer fighting for the republic, who found himself leading a ragbag of strays from the unions, locals, teachers, volunteers of all stripes, and, among them, Mateo Fernández Muñoz, who had joined the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in 1935 for purely ideological reasons and who was the only person under his command who actually knew what Marxism entailed. The major had grown fond of this intelligent young man, so towards midnight, when he saw Mateo, the commander smiled. For three days, while the bewildered Mateo had been trying to get a furlough at any cost, the major had been waiting for him, and so he did not even let the lad finish the speech he had rehearsed.

‘So you’re telling me your mother is ill,’ he summed up, and Mateo nodded.

‘Yes, Major, I’m sorry.’

‘Tell me something, Fernández . . .’ The wily authoritarian, who smoked continually, and could not speak without bellowing even when he was in a good mood, raised his finger and pointed at himself. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’

‘No, sir.’ Fernández smiled, against his better judgement.

‘Ah, good ! You had me worried . . .’ He took a pad from the table, filled out a permission slip, and held it in the air, brandishing it like a toffee in front of a child. ‘O K . You go wherever you have to go and get laid - just once, got it? Twice if you’re quick about it - and then get your arse back here pronto, by five a.m. If you show up at one minute past five I’ll have you court-martialled and shot as a deserter. Are we clear ?’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘And if we send these bastards packing and they ship us off to the godforsaken plains of Burgos, you’ll see what war is really like, when the nearest town is fifty kilometres away, and I’ll tell you something else . . .’

But Mateo had already taken to his heels and did not hear the end of the sentence. He did not know how he would manage to be back in time, but someone offered him a lift and, after that, his luck held.

‘At your service, Major.’

At 4.45 a.m., Mateo Fernández Muñoz stood to attention in front of his commanding officer, who looked at him carefully, then slapped him on the back.

‘Mother all better, Fernández?’

‘Right as rain, sir.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Just make sure she doesn’t have a relapse.’

After that, Mateo never again slept in the bedroom he had always shared with his brother, and Ignacio himself would move out a year and a half later. ‘So you’re leaving me too.’ His mother never resigned herself to her children leaving. ‘But where will you sleep? Now I’ll never get to see you or Mateo. I have no idea where you are or who you’re with - well, it’s a figure of speech, but listen to me,
hijo
, one of these days, the worry will kill me . . .’ As he listened to her, Ignacio laughed. ‘You’ll kill us first, Mamá,’ he said, and kissed her forehead. ‘And as long as it’s only worry, everything is all right.’ But by then nothing was all right. Things were going so badly that sometimes, in their separate beds, with different women, the brothers missed the whispered bedtime conversations, like this last one in which they told each other things they dared not say in the light of day.

‘Are you awake?’

‘No, Mateo, I’m asleep, you can tell by the fact that I’m talking to you.’

‘It’s just, I wanted to ask you . . . Aren’t you afraid ?’

‘No.’ But what he had said sounded so strange that he had to stop a moment and think. ‘I mean yes. Yes, of course I’m afraid, but never when it matters, never when I’m fighting. I’m afraid before, and afterwards . . . when I think that I could be dead, but when the commotion starts, I see things differently, it’s as if I have eyes like a fly and can see everything at once. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’m completely detached, calm, and yet I have this rage burning inside me . . . Don’t you feel that?’

‘I feel the rage, but not the calm.’ Mateo smiled. ‘But I’m scared, all the time. I hold it together, so no one ever notices, and it’s true that sometimes, at the worst moment, the rage takes over. But I’m still afraid.’

‘Good for you,’ Ignacio lied, ‘you’ll live longer than me.’

While his brother Mateo was fighting the war from inside a trench, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz was involved in the battles to defend Madrid and a number of other fronts. In almost every one, he received two different types of decoration: mentions, promotions or medals, and wounds. He remembered every one, he could point them out and explain how he came by them in chronological order when he was seriously wounded for the first time, in Madrid, shortly before the end of the war. His parents went to visit him at San Carlos hospital and tears welled in María Muñoz’s eyes when she saw him lying there naked, his skin a web of scars and stitches.

‘In war, cowards die before the brave, Mamá,’ he told her, as though that might console her.

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Ignacio.’

But his father smiled. He understood his wife’s anxiety all too well and yet he was proud of this son he had once feared for. Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva had always been a pacifist. To him, war had always seemed a terrible catastrophe and this war the worst calamity of his life, and yet every time he saw Ignacio’s name in the newspapers, he felt a pride he could not hide.

‘If your son were fighting with the rebels, the enemies would be falling over themselves to serve under his command.’ Even the commander of the armed forces, for whom Mateo senior worked as an adviser, talked to him about Ignacio. ‘They’re very superstitious, they believe that some soldiers are destined to survive, they even have a name for them . . . We’re just as superstitious, but we explain things differently. We say war is unpredictable. How many times has your son been wounded ? Quite a few. But always flesh wounds, nothing serious enough to put him in hospital, a few stitches and he’s off again . . . Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about him. I’ve seen it many times, trust me. Ignacio has luck on his side.’

And yet, although he would walk with his son down the Calle Fuencarral, watching as people threw their arms round him, listening to the whispers of admiration, Mateo Fernández had never trusted luck, nor had he ever forgotten that war is a terrible calamity. And he was thinking of Ignacio, as were his wife, his daughters and his son-in-law, when his firstborn stepped into the living room on that autumn evening in 1938. But war is also unpredictable, and Mateo went straight over to María, pressed his forehead against hers, and asked her to forgive him.

 

Esteban Durán was not even twenty years old when a single, stray bullet pierced his skull. He was too young, and he was bored in this trench, which seemed as deep as the moat of a derelict castle, bored with the stillness of these last days, when it seemed as though the enemy had surrendered and forgotten to tell them, as though the fascists had deserted en masse out of sheer boredom. In the beginning, it had all been different. The trenches at Usera had been hell, then there had come glory, and finally exhaustion. The enemy had not passed, nor had they retreated, they had simply stopped, and now they waited just across the rise, like a flock of vultures. Some days, there was sporadic gunfire to prove that the enemy was still there, other days there was nothing.

‘Look at the head on that.’

The corporals screamed like playground bullies, the sergeants scolded them like irritable aunts and the officers tried not to forget how young and hotheaded their charges were, though they no longer cursed their luck at having to leading a battalion of students who had never expected to be called up. After two years of war, the survivors had developed a maturity, except in their adolescent inability to cope with the inaction of a battle that had been fought to a standstill.

‘Get your head down, you fool, or they’ll blow it off!’

Behind him was Madrid, the streets, the buildings, the trams that no longer ran quite as often. Some afternoons, when she knew that all was quiet at the front because her brother Mateo was home on leave, María Fernández Muñoz would wash her hair, put on her high high-heels and take the tram to war. ‘I’m the sister of Corporal (later Sergeant, finally Sergeant First-Class) Fernández and I have an urgent communiqué for Ernesto Durán . . .’ The duty officer would smile and she would giggle when she heard him shout, ‘Hey! Someone tell Esteban his girlfriend’s here!’ Towards the end, when the enemy seemed to have given up firing, Esteban would take María to one of the deserted buildings near the trenches and there, for half an hour, everything stopped: the fighting, the fear, the boredom, the bad news from other fronts, the screams that split the silent days.

‘Get your head down, you fucking idiot!’

Esteban Durán, who had been in love with his sister’s best friend ever since he went with his mother to pick up his sister at the school gates, enjoyed María’s visits more than his furloughs, he remembered them as luminous drops of intense, unadulterated happiness floating in the vast and desolate sea of days. He was not the only soldier to wake up every morning feeling as though his life depended on the tram, but many were unfortunate enough to be loved by cautious or reckless women, and every one of María’s kisses seemed to hold him, bind him to the land of the living.

‘I can still see heads!’

War was interminable, ugly, hard. María’s visits were life, beauty, happiness; everything that war was not. And that afternoon, although Mateo Fernández Muñoz was on duty, he was lookout, Esteban sensed her presence. It was a sensation he had had on other afternoons; sometimes he was right, sometimes not. In the beginning, when the fear, the bombs, the hunger were new, María, who was mad but far from stupid, never came to see him if there was a chance she might encounter her brother. But in the autumn of 1938, the only reality was the war, and now María did not come to see him whenever she wanted to, but whenever she could, and every day he saved half of his rations in case he was lucky. ‘Esteban, you’ve got a visitor.’ In this topsy-turvy world, the soldiers had more to eat than the civilians.

‘For Christ’s sake get your head down!’

Now the baby of the family no longer tried to conceal her visits from her big brother, and he no longer felt it necessary to watch out for her, to ask, to worry. Not that they loved each other less, if anything they loved each other more, but it was different, because the only thing that existed now was the war, and they were losing the war. This was not the first afternoon on which he heard the rumble and raised himself up to look for the tram, the truck, the car that might be bringing María. It was not the first time he had popped his head out of the trench, and he had never suffered anything more serious than the ache of not being able to hold her in his arms. In the silence of this stagnant war, even the faint rumble of a vehicle in the distance brought the thrill of good news he had been waiting to hear.