The Frozen Heart (62 page)

Anita, who had been so jealous of the words of love sent to another woman by a man she would never know, would not have settled for less, still less would she have settled for Paul, her fiancé, who worked in a butcher’s shop and was older than Captain Fernández Muñoz, though he seemed younger than this man who, from time to time, would draw back and gaze at her as though he had never seen a woman. A fugitive’s love is passionate and precarious, intense and fleeting. This is what Anita thought, and she tried to commit to memory each instant of this miracle, to understand every nuance, the troubled logic of its beauty. ‘What are you waiting for?’ she whispered in his ear, and he, who had been moving slowly to allow his mind time to adjust to the reality that quivered beneath his fingertips, paused for a moment. Then he looked at her, her wet silken lips, the glimmer in her dark eyes, and the pillars of the temple began to shake.

In that moment, Ignacio felt every single day of those three long years. From this heaven, he looked down on hell, remembered the constant dull ache of his life as it had been, the humiliation, the cold and the exhaustion. And he had faith in Anita, as though her body could make the world right again, as though he knew that the happiness he felt at that moment could change everything and keep him from tumbling back into the pit of despair. And in that moment, he fell in love with her, loved her as he would never love anyone else. For the rest of his life, long after she had shown him that he had the right to live a life as normal, as mundane as the lives of those who have never known any other, he still felt that she had saved him, that in this cramped pantry, Anita had saved him from a death worse than death itself.

The interlude would not even last three months, but every moment of this extraordinary time expanded such that every incident, every minute, was imprinted on their memories. Ignacio would never forget Anita’s tears on the night she dared to confess something she had never told anyone, how she had stolen the petticoats of a dying woman when she was fifteen, because that day she had just arrived in the refugee camp with nothing other than the dress she was wearing, because she was having her first period and there was no one to help her, she did not know what to do. Anita would never forget the wordless grace with which Ignacio had taken one of the big books he was constantly reading out of her hands - she had picked it up out of curiosity and was holding it upside down.

‘Tomorrow, I want you to buy me four exercise books. Two ruled, and two with little squares, the ones the French children use at school. Ask one of my sisters to go with you, they’ll know.’ He waited a moment for a question that did not come. ‘I’m going to teach you to read and write.’

‘No.’ She looked away as she spoke, as though offended by his words.

‘Yes,’ he insisted gently.

‘No. What for ? I can read a bit already. Your mother is teaching me, and anyway, I can get by . . .’

‘You can’t get by, Anita.’ Ignacio did not let her go on. ‘Nobody can. You have to learn and I can teach you, I taught so many soldiers that I know the lessons by heart. Mamá is very busy but I don’t have anything to do in the mornings. It’s much easier than you think, and besides . . .’ he put his arms around her and hugged her to his chest as though he did not want to look at her ‘. . . I don’t know how much longer I can stay around here. Sooner or later, someone is bound to see me, to ask questions . . . That’s how it goes. We’re in an occupied country in the middle of a war, everyone has their own problems, something they need in exchange for informing on a fugitive. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Anita. If you don’t want to learn for your own sake, do it for mine. That way, when I have to leave, at least I’ll know I’ve done something for you.’

‘You’ve done so much already!’ she protested, breaking free of his embrace.

The next day, she came back with four exercise books.

‘What about your homework?’ Ignacio would ask her the same question every night and Anita would shrug and smile. ‘I didn’t have time to do it.’ ‘Really? And why not?’ He would feign surprise. ‘It’s just that I have this boyfriend who takes up all my time,’ she would say, and they would both laugh. Then they would sit together at the kitchen table, the pupil tracing lines and curves, the teacher watching her, a smile playing on his lips.

She learned quickly, because she was learning from Ignacio, for Ignacio. She did her best to please him, especially now that he had marked out their future with the terrible words ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stay around here’, words that exploded in her mind like gunshots. So began the countdown, and as it slipped away time became something precious, the most valuable thing that Anita Salgado Pérez had ever possessed. Never, not even on the day she had robbed the dying woman, had Anita felt anything like the terrible dread that choked her every evening as she slipped her key into the lock. Never, not even when she was a child living in a village surrounded by mountains, had Anita felt anything like the joy that melted her heart when she saw him leaning against the stove and he said: ‘What about your homework?’

She no longer spoke to him in words. If they were alone in the kitchen, she would throw herself into his arms, and if they were not alone, she would find some excuse to push him into the pantry so that she could hug him until her arms were tired. Then she would sit next to him at the kitchen table, reading the words aloud as he ran his finger underneath: ‘A-ni-ta is a lit-tle ap-ple’. She had never been so happy, and it hurt her, because her happiness no longer had anything to do with love letters, fine words or romantic notions about renegade soldiers. It was something bigger, something deeper than that, so powerful, so painful that it would wake her in the night with a jolt like a premonition of death. And when she saw him sleeping next to her, she would think: ‘Tomorrow, he might not be here, tomorrow I might be all alone in this bed . . .’

Until one fine evening in June, she did not find him waiting in the kitchen. No one asked about her homework, no one was waiting for her, only the exercise books lying open on the kitchen table with the words ‘
Before
p
and
b
there is always an
m
. . .
’ and beneath it, in the space where in awkward, hesitant pencil she was to write an example, was an unexpected phrase in an elegant, cursive script, ‘I love you, Anita’, and his signature, just his first name, Ignacio. Then, before she had managed to decipher the phrase, the fugitive’s mother came in from the dining room and told what had happened:

‘He’s gone. He had to go . . . The downstairs neighbour, Madame Larronde, well, she came to see me this morning to warn me that her brother-in-law was planning to turn him in. With these windows on to the courtyard, everyone sees everything that goes on . . .

‘Oh God.’ Anita’s eyes widened and she brought her hand to her mouth.

‘I told him not to go, I said we would go and see this man together, offer him money, but he wouldn’t stay, he said he wasn’t prepared to put us at risk . . .’

María Muñoz said no more, preferring to spare Anita her son’s actual words, the dread that she would carry alone until the war was over. ‘It’s too dangerous, Mamá, for you but for me too,’ was what Ignacio had said. ‘If I go now, I can turn myself in voluntarily. I’ll be arrested, they’ll put me in solitary for a while, and then they’ll send me back to work. But if I’m caught by the Vichy regime, they’ll deport me to Germany and the Nazis will put me in a concentration camp. Don’t worry, Mamá, I knew this would happen some day and I know what I have to do . . .’

María Muñoz did not tell Anita this part of the story because she had stayed with him until the last, had seen him go into the pantry and reappear with the exercise book, seen him write something in it and place it on the table before leaving. He had barely reached the stairs when he came back to ask her one last favour: ‘Look after Anita for me, Mamá,’ he said, taking her in his arms and kissing her. This was why María Muñoz said no more but simply watched Anita silently, helplessly, realising she could do nothing to help her. Only Paloma knew what to do; something of her old compassion came back to her that night. Everyone was asleep except Anita. She had refused to leave the kitchen table, and was still sitting there, the exercise book in front of her, staring lifelessly ahead, when Paloma came and, over Ignacio’s words, placed a photograph that Anita had never seen.

‘Look,’ she nodded to the golden image, ‘it’s a picture of the family on my wedding day. In those days - eight years ago now - there were three young men, see them? This one . . .’ she stroked her husband’s face with her finger ‘. . . they took from me, they murdered him. This one . . .’ she pointed to her brother Mateo, almost as elegant as the groom in a tailcoat, a white gardenia in his buttonhole ‘. . . they murdered him too. This one . . .’ her finger stopped over Ignacio, a gangling boy, his legs disproportionately long for his height ‘. . . this one is not going to die. This one is going to live. Because they can’t kill all three of them. It’s what in mathematics they call the balance of probabilities.’ At last, Anita raised her head and looked at Paloma. ‘When you’ve finished this book, ask my brother to teach you maths.’

Anita smiled at Paloma, then gazed at the faces of the Fernández Muñoz family, happy and flourishing, a side of the family she had never seen - the parents much younger than she could ever imagine, Mateo with his long hair and his moustache, María, elegant, wearing rings on her fingers, bracelets and necklaces. She smiled at the bride and groom, Paloma, startlingly beautiful, and her husband, happy, as though no one knew better than he how lucky he was.

‘Can I keep the photo?’ she asked Paloma.

‘OK, but just for tonight, you can give it back tomorrow,’ Paloma said, kissing the top of Anita’s head.

Anita waited until she was alone again before looking down once more at this boy of sixteen who looked so young that it felt as though she remembered him at that age. ‘I wonder where you are now?’ She felt a spasm of loneliness. ‘Where are you, Ignacio, where are you?’

Ignacio was in the basement of a barracks, in a makeshift cell, and he was reasonably happy, for everything had gone according to plan. He had made his way back to the tyre factory without incident, checked that his work detail was still there, he even had time to hug Amadeo, the Asturian labourer he had entrusted his political responsibilities to, before turning himself in to the manager.

‘Where the hell have you been,
macho
?’ Amadeo asked in his sing-song voice. ‘You look like you’ve spent two years in a spa . . .’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Ignacio smiled. ‘How are things here?’

‘Obviously not as good as wherever you’ve been, but they’re much the same as ever.’ Amadeo laughed.

This meant that the boss was still the same commandant who was prepared to do anything for a quiet life and who, although he was part of the regime, felt no undue affinity with the policies of the Vichy government. This, perhaps, was why he had never sent a prisoner in his charge to almost certain death in the German concentration camps, and Ignacio proved no exception. ‘Ah, the Spanish!’ he marvelled, having heard Ignacio out. ‘What did the French ever do to deserve such neighbours?’ Ignacio could have answered the question, but did not, and was rewarded for his silence by being sent to the makeshift cell in the basement. And here, where once he had felt helpless, he realised that Anita was still with him, and never again would he feel as lonely as before.

He had an advantage over her in that he knew her daily routine, could picture her in specific places surrounded by faces he knew. He knew the cup she always used at breakfast, the order in which she took off her clothes, the foods she liked, the way she washed her hair in the kitchen sink. Each day in the cell was the same for him, but he would wake up and think of Anita waking up, before he fell asleep he imagined Anita sleeping, and this image gave his time purpose and meaning.

Had he been able to see Anita, Ignacio would have been happier still, and intensely proud of her. She flushed the toxin of self-pity from her system so quickly that the day after Ignacio’s departure, she got out her exercise books, sat at the kitchen table and announced: ‘I’m doing my homework.’ Then she drew a box around the last sentence he had written, and in the space remaining she copied out five times ‘
Before
p
and
b
there is always an
m . . .’, then, on the facing page, she copied out the words: ‘empire’, ‘combat’, ‘embolism’, ‘compass’, ‘camp’, ‘tombs’, ‘sombre’. ‘
Before
p
and
b
there is always an
m
. .
. I love you, Anita.’ This was the first sentence that she wrote when she finally reached the blank pages at the back of the exercise book, before copying out the simple sentences he had written to help her learn to read: ‘Anita is a little apple, Anita is as stubborn as a mule, I am mad about Anita, I am going to eat you up with kisses. Time to stop reading and come to bed’. By the time she had copied out all the sentences, she realised she was getting fat.