The Frozen Heart (39 page)

‘They’re transferring you all to the jail in Polier tomorrow,’ he said one night.

‘Don’t do this to me, Rogelio.’ Ignacio clutched the bars and looked into the man’s eyes. ‘You kill me. I’d rather be killed by you than Franco. Shoot me or get one of your comrades to do it, but not Franco, Rogelio. Don’t hand us over to them, don’t let them take us alive. You do it, or give me your gun and I’ll shoot myself right now.’

He would happily have killed himself, he didn’t care, but Rogelio was staring at him in silence, his eyes filled with tears. He walked away and came back almost immediately, quietly opened the door to the cell, then closed it, making it look as though it was still locked.

‘Wait twenty minutes,’ he said, ‘then make a run for it. There are guns in the cabinet in the hall, I’ve left it unlocked. Get rid of your badges, and don’t let anyone know you’re communists.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper, his face close to Ignacio’s. ‘There are usually trucks in Las Vistillas about this time . . .’

Ignacio didn’t thank him. It was something he would never forgive himself for, but it was all so fast, so sad, so sombre, and he was no longer himself, no longer capable of feeling anything, caring about anything, believing in anything. But he was capable of stealing a truck, capable of creeping up on the driver like some furtive, vicious predator, some animal with no scruples. ‘Hands up.’ It was his turn to say the words, and he remembered Facundo and his captain. The truck driver made a sudden movement and Ignacio killed him, but he did not care, because he was not a man any more, he did not think, did not believe, did not feel.

Three years later, in the pantry in a house in Toulouse, there was a bed and in it, by his side, a slight woman with black hair and large black eyes as beautiful as her hands, as her body, as the face she now lifted from his chest.

‘What’s the matter, Ignacio? Why are you crying?’

He gazed at her with a love he had never felt before, a love that had budded inside that stone that rolled among other stones, a stone that did not think, did not feel, did not believe in anything, until it found a love that made it possible for him to be reborn, to be a man again.

‘I killed a man, Anita.’

‘Just one?’ She smiled. ‘You killed a lot of men, didn’t you?’

‘No. The war killed the rest of them, but I was the one who killed that anarchist . . . I killed him because I wanted to. My life had been saved twice, first by Carlos, my brother-in-law, then by a socialist named Rogelio. They saved my life and I never thanked them, and I couldn’t bring myself to forgive that man . . . Maybe that’s the only reason I’m here. Maybe he would have killed me, he did something with his hands, I didn’t know if he was armed - he had a pistol inside his jacket, I saw it when he fell. Maybe he would have killed me, but I’ll never know because I shot him. They had betrayed us, they were murdering us, so I hated him, even though I didn’t know him. I aimed at his head and I killed him, I couldn’t bring myself to spare his life . . .’

‘Don’t cry, Ignacio.’ Anita pressed herself against him, comforted him, using the same words his granddaughter Raquel would use many years later before promising never to tell her grandmother. ‘Don’t cry, please, don’t cry.’

It was warm in that field in Albatera in mid-May, but Ignacio’s blood froze in his veins as he watched his brother Mateo climb into a truck, turn and look for him, then seeing him, bring the hand that was not handcuffed to his lips, kiss the palm gently and turn it towards him to say goodbye.

At that moment, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised that his heart was broken.

And that it was no longer a human heart.

T
he first thing I found out that morning was that María Victoria Suárez Mena, a girl from Zaragoza and a member of the women’s branch of the Falange, had offered to be my father’s ‘war godmother’ after seeing his picture in the paper. A thin, lanky thing with a nose like a hawk’s beak and a shock of red hair, she had enclosed a photo with the first letter she sent to him at the Grafenwöhr camp in Bavaria. It was a stupendous, deeply patriotic picture, framed by a wide clear sky, with a handful of decorative clouds, and a thin strip of bare, arid earth at the bottom. In the foreground stood a flagpole and, next to it, there she was in a blue shirt, a shapeless skirt and bare legs. Although her nose was a little too big, she wasn’t ugly, though she had no breasts to speak of. In any case her looks were much less inspiring than her prose, a heady mix of inane bloodthirsty rhetoric which - in the name of the mothers of Spain, those kindly old women who sit around an open fire sewing with never a word about the terrible worry they feel for the sons they have given up for their country - encouraged him to crush, exterminate, eradicate, destroy, thrash and kill the culpable rabble of Russia.

Jesus, what a country! I thought, bored by the endless repetition, how can they be so fascist and so pompous - the loving arms, the puffed-out chests, the smell of home-made bread, the tots clinging to the apron strings of Mamá as she bids her son farewell with a heroic smile that is sensitive yet strong, not to mention the Virgin Mary, I thought, remembering Father Aizpuru, our mother in Heaven, who might not wear an apron, but is determined to drape her protective mantle over the German tanks, all hail Europe, hail to the Führer, to his iron fist, to the defenders of civilisation, death to Marxism, to the tyrannical beast . . .

My father’s ‘godmother’, like most of them, was barely seventeen years old, her spelling was shaky and utterly at odds with the limpid, extravagant passages she carefully copied out in handwriting as naive as her parting advice: don’t forget to wrap up warm, from what I hear it’s cold out there in Russia. Until she got annoyed and her letters became more entertaining: Dear Julio, I haven’t had a reply from you in some time, Dear Julio, I’m scared because I haven’t heard from you for so long, Dear Julio, I know you are fine, but I haven’t heard anything for months now, Dear Julio, if you didn’t want me to write to you, you could have told me, this is the last time I’m going to write, Julio, and it was.

That peaceful morning, I had no classes so I began my day with María Victoria Suárez Mena’s letters. I was alone in the house and sunlight streamed into the room my son called ‘the room with Daddy’s books’, a study lined with bookshelves that was bigger than the living room, but so oddly shaped that Mai could not think what to do with it. I liked it, because it was a corner room with two windows opening on to a quiet terrace from which I could see the sky, and it was at the end of a long hallway, far from the living room, Miguelito’s bedroom and the kitchen. I also liked it because it had two desks, something that intrigued the cleaner, though she never dared come in if I was there. Ignoring the desk with the computer on it, I cleared the books and papers from the other one and set down the blue cardboard folder and the small brown leather folder whose lock I had been trying to pick the previous afternoon.

The cardboard folder contained papers relating to Julio Carrión González: his military record bearing the date that he enlisted, noting that he was a minor but had his parents’ approval, a physical description, height, weight, colour of eyes, vaccinations, date and place of birth, and his profession, listed as mechanic - all in duplicate - a German document corresponding to each document in Spanish, medicals, pay slips, a form detailing his admission to the Spanish hospital in Riga and a form discharging him when he left. There were photos too, lots of photos: my father wearing a Spanish Army uniform, a German uniform, at attention, at ease, my father with snow up to his knees, mud up to his knees, fooling around next to a signpost with arrows pointing in opposite directions - Berlin 1485 km, St Petersburg 70 km - partying in a bar somewhere, flanked by two beautiful blonde women who seemed to be doing a lot more for his patriotism than poor Señorita Suárez ever could, and later, when the fun was over, wrapped in a greatcoat, blankets, the only thing visible a pair of eyes that might have been his, might have been anybody’s, standing guard beside a trench as the snow fell. His friend Eugenio was in many of the photos, the skinny lad who wore glasses and looked like an intellectual; my father told me that he had failed his physical but his family - all Falangists apart from his father - had pulled strings so that Eugenio could enlist.

I hadn’t seen Eugenio at the burial, but he had been at the funeral, as skinny as ever, formal, elegant and exquisitely polite as he offered his condolences, first to my mother, then to his god-daughter Angélica, and then to the rest of us, whispering precisely the right words to each of us. I’d always liked him, and I couldn’t imagine him bellowing out the advice my father’s war godmother had appended to her letters, but he did, he must have done, because he wore the Falangist Yoke and Arrows on his lapel, until one winter night in the year that I was born. It was a night like any other until the phone rang and he heard his brother Romualdo’s voice. It was his brother who, in less than five minutes, told him that his daughter was a communist, that she had been arrested in a dawn raid at Moncloa and taken for questioning, that an officer whose name he would never discover had ruptured her spleen with a kick and dragged her out of there naked, that she was currently undergoing surgery at El Clínico and that the prognosis was bad. She ran away, so did he.

‘Poor bastard,’ was all my father would say, ‘his children destroyed him. If ever this country produced an honourable man it was Eugenio Sánchez Delgado. If ever there was a man who could have exploited people but never did, could have robbed but never did, a man who genuinely believed in what he did, it was Eugenio, and for what? So that a couple of ungrateful brats could ruin his life . . .’

Anyone listening to him might have thought that his children’s clandestine militancy had ruined him financially, but he was the one who walked away, he was the one who could not bear the fact that the regime in which he had invested such faith could arrest a defenceless eighteen-year-old girl, strip her naked and rupture her spleen.

The Sunday after the Communist Party was legalised, he and his wife came to lunch at our house. We all lived on the Calle Argensola, I was twelve, but I still remember the look on his face, the patience with which he handled the protestations of my father to whom the recent events in Spain seemed acceptable, even desirable - everything except this.

‘Democracy?’ He voiced the question only to answer it himself. ‘OK. Elections? Fine, I’m all in favour. Unions? If we have to. Socialists? Well, I suppose there has to be a left wing . . . But this? No, damn it! No Communist Party. Anything but that . . . Fucking hell. They’ve got democracy in the United States, haven’t they? And what about England, that’s a democracy, isn’t it?’ His tone grew louder, more passionate, more dramatic, as he stared into his friend’s eyes, looking for an approval he did not find. ‘But do they have a Communist Party? No, of course they don’t! I can’t believe it . . .’ he eventually gave up, tired of asking questions that only he seemed to want to answer, ‘it’s as if you don’t care.’

‘That’s because I don’t care, Julio,’ his old comrade answered, his voice unruffled. ‘I don’t like communism, but two of my children are communists, and I love them. They’re young, they’re passionate, and they fervently believe in what they say. Maybe they’re making a mistake, but I made mistakes too when I was their age. So while I’m not happy about it, I’m not worried about it. I don’t owe anyone anything, as you well know.’

My father fell silent and my mother changed the subject, and there was no mention of politics again until after they left, when Father said how much he pitied them. ‘Poor Eugenio,’ he told us, ‘his children have ruined his life.’ He concluded with his usual threat: ‘If one of you gets involved in politics, I’ll put you out on the street.’

My two eldest siblings had experienced the last rounds of resistance against the dictatorship since Rafa went to university a few months before Franco died and Angélica one year later, but Rafa talked as if nothing had happened there, and in the years before she left her first husband, the only thing Angélica remembered was the fact that until the day she finished her studies, she was paralysed with fear every time she saw a poster or an advertisement for the Youth Movement run by a young militant named Adolfo Cerezo. My brother Julio, who was born in 1961, was much more interested in politics, but he was drawn to the other side. He was the one who was the most eager to find out more about Papá’s adventures in Russia.

‘Were you in Possad, Papá? Did you cross the Voljov? Did you swim across Lake Ilmen?’

‘I was there, yes, I crossed the River Voljov more than once, but I wasn’t at Ilmen, thankfully . . .’

Julio, who had learned German military vocabulary by heart, would take any opportunity to toss out battalions of words - Kommandaturs, Oberkommandos, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, Sturmbannführers and Stablieters, his extravagant pronunciation mangling the words so they were incomprehensible.

‘Did you get frostbite, Papá? Did they give you a medal ?’

‘Will you shut up, for God’s sake! You’re such a pest . . .’

Being four years younger than Julio, I sat in silence and observed their bickering, and every time Julio would come away convinced that our father had been a hero, but one Saturday night, after watching a film about the war in the Pacific on television, I dared to ask a question of my own.

‘Why were you fighting for the bad guys, Papá?’

He glanced at me with a look of fear that resolved itself into a smile when he remembered I was only ten years old.

‘And who told you they were the bad guys?’

‘In the films, they’re always the bad guys, aren’t they? Besides, they lost the war. The good guys always win in the end, don’t they?’

‘No,’ he answered, ‘in the end, the strongest always win, but they’re not always good. And after they win, they have lots of money and they spend it making films, and in the films the bad guys are always the ones who lose.’