The Frozen Heart (80 page)

‘Come on, I don’t want you getting cold.’ Miguelito was bizarrely compliant, he didn’t complain as I put on his yellow fisherman’s raincoat and buttoned it all the way up. ‘Maybe it’ll be fine tomorrow . . .’

He stood silently for a moment, staring at me with an almost adult intentness, then he asked me the last question I wanted to answer that morning.

‘Why is Mamá crying?’

‘Mamá’s not crying.’ I put on his hat, not thinking what I was saying.

‘She is too, I’ve seen her,’ he insisted. ‘Why is she crying, Papá?’

‘I don’t know.’ I crouched down beside him. ‘She’s probably sad. People get sad sometimes . . .’

‘I know.’ He frowned and looked at me. ‘Are you going to cry too?’

‘No, I’m not going to cry . . .’

Two minutes later, he was laughing like a lunatic, running ahead of me in a race that, as always, he was going to win. At the harbour, we fed the fish stale bread we’d brought from the house, and some more we scrounged from nearby restaurants that knew us, and I thought maybe this is my life, and it was good, peaceful, happy, as my son giggled, watching the fish stuff themselves, following him along the harbour. Then I thought about Mai, I pictured her the way she had looked when we had first met, before I had ever seen her cry, when I loved her the way I might have gone on loving her my whole life if my father hadn’t died, if Raquel hadn’t gone to his funeral, if my mother hadn’t insisted that I should be the one to meet with the investment manager. But all these things had happened, and now everything was lost. Then, as though I thought there was still one more step to go, one false move I had to make before I tumbled into the void, I turned on my phone and called Raquel.

I expected the message ‘The telephone you are calling has been switched off ’, but I dialled the wrong number. So I did not redial the number, I looked for her name in my contacts list, made sure that her name was highlighted, pressed the green ‘dial’ button, and for the second, third, fourth time I heard the message:

‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’

I dialled other numbers, the landline at home, but the answering machine was turned off, my number at the office, but nobody answered, the bank where she worked, where, after half a dozen attempts, I was informed that it was not company policy to give information about the status of employees to strangers.

Directory enquiries was worse. Yes, the subscriber had closed that account, no, they could not tell me if she had opened another account, yes, the information was confidential, no, the operator didn’t care who I was, yes, she understood that I was desperate to get in touch with this woman but if I continued to pester her she would have no option but to contact the police. ‘Believe me, I’ve come across husbands like you before,’ she concluded. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ I concluded, and she hung up on me.

‘You told me you weren’t going to cry . . .’

Miguelito was looking up at me, his mouth quivering.

‘And I’m not going to cry. I hardly ever cry, you know that.’

‘But you’re crying now, Papá.’

‘No,’ I said, smiling to prove he was wrong. ‘It’s just the wind making my eyes smart. Are you out of bread?’

‘Yes. And I’m cold.’

‘Let’s go.’

As we headed back to the apartment, I listened to the message again. ‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’ I promised myself this would be the last time, although I didn’t know whether I would keep my promise.

Raquel needed time to escape, to run away. She wanted to disappear, and all that was left on the other side of her pauses was a man abandoned.

I felt physically ill, a flash of hot and cold, a deep stabbing pain like fever. The future had ripped itself in two; all that was left on this side was me and my son, the four-year-old boy walking beside me, holding my hand, trying to avoid the cracks in the pavement. At first, that was all I could think. Then I realised that there was only one possible solution for a ruined, lovesick, abandoned man; his only possible salvation was to rip off all these adjectives in a single blow.

Beyond the sea of loneliness, I could see contempt looming like a familiar horizon. When I knew I had this, I realised it would not be difficult. All I needed to do was hang on to the repulsive images: a Jacuzzi as big as a swimming pool, a vaulted bedroom, two dozen candles and as many films carefully arranged on a metal stand and that purple rubber dildo I’d found in a drawer. The solution consisted of replaying over and over in my mind the very images that for months I had forced myself to forget. These were the elements of the equation, it was simple: I merely needed to subtract where previously I had added, divide by the same amount I had multiplied. It was a costly solution, but it was worth it, because if I could feel contempt for Raquel, perhaps I might come to hate her, perhaps even hate her as much as I had loved her. It would not give me back my life, but it would give me peace.

I was convinced that the only thing that could save me was to throw my passion into reverse, and so I tried. I used every ounce of energy I still possessed, I abjured my body, cursed happiness, renounced madness. I tried to despise Raquel Fernández Perea with everything that I had left, with the little she had not taken with her, but I did not succeed. Don’t do this to me, Raquel, why are you doing this to me? I was convinced that I had to despise her so that I could come to hate her, but her eyes had never shone as they did now, her skin was never so soft, so flawless, her body so large and I so small, a tiny insignificant man, with no map, no compass, lost in the vastness of a world that had suddenly stopped and would never turn again.

W
hen Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised that Julio Carrión González had robbed his parents of everything they possessed, he broke down. It was not the first time he had experienced defeat, but it was the cruellest, for in none of the defeats he had known had he been responsible. He could not have fought more than he had fought, could not have been more committed that he was; and he would do it again, he would give his all for a second chance that would never come. Others might have been able to do more, or to do it better, but not he, he had done his best, and it was this knowledge which kept him going, which kindled his sense of pride. This - the conviction that he had no regrets - was what Julio Carrión González stole from Ignacio when he robbed his parents of everything they owned.

By the spring of 1964, when his youngest child would be the first person in the family to go back to Spain since 1939, this wound had not completely healed. It would never completely heal. This was why, when his son Ignacio, who could not know the impact of his words, casually mentioned over the dinner table that Spain had beaten Greece as the choice for his school trip, it plunged Ignacio senior into a silence that even he did not understand.

‘You don’t like the idea, do you?’ Anita asked him that night when they were in bed.

‘I don’t know . . .’ he replied truthfully. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s just . . .’ His wife pressed closer to him, nestled her face into his neck. ‘I don’t know either, but I don’t like it one bit.’

That night, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz did not sleep. As he tossed and turned, his whole life flashed through his mind - the images, the colours, the sounds and smells, precise or intangible sensations shot through with shafts of light and pools of shadow. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz envied his son and feared for him in equal measure.

That night, as he tossed and turned, he would have given anything to slip beneath his son’s skin on the day he set off, so that, without sacrificing his own memories, he might see with his son’s eyes, hear with his ears, experience this land, this country that he longed to go back to with the same passion that prevented him from going back. He could not go back, perhaps he would never go back, but no one could stop him from returning to Spain in his mind, through the sensations of a young man setting foot there for the first time. It was exhilarating and sad, bitter and joyful, but most of all it was strange. And so when he told his wife that he envied and feared for his son, he was telling the truth.

It was not merely a physical fear, though he could not completely rid himself of that. His son had been born in France and would cross the border with a French passport, a genuine passport, not like the meticulously crafted forgeries he had so often marvelled at when bidding farewell to comrades. But the validity of the passport would not change the fact that the border guards would see the name: Ignacio Fernández Salgado, son of Ignacio and Anita, born 17 January 1943 in Toulouse, and draw their own conclusions.

In 1964, France was teeming with Spanish exiles who had children the same age as his. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz knew that the passport was sacrosanct, that Franco’s police would not touch the person carrying it, but that would not stop the harassment, the comments, the needling questions, ‘son of a communist, are we?’ I should tell him to say nothing, keep your mouth shut, don’t give them the satisfaction, thought Ignacio, as he watched his life flash through his mind. I should tell him to stay calm, but I won’t need to, his mother will take care of that. This thought reassured him, freed him from the responsibility of offering what might have sounded like simple fatherly advice but which, to him, represented something more - for to say these things would be another defeat, belated perhaps, but an unconditional defeat all the same.

Ignacio Fernández Muñoz tossed and turned in his bed, attempting to choose between the lesser of two evils. Maybe his son would not like Spain, that would be bad. Maybe he would like it too much, that would be worse. He might come back thinking that the butchers who had laid waste to his country, his family, his future, were good people, well meaning, that the Spanish people were happy with their lot, content to live and prosper beneath the fascist boot. Ignacio knew this was not true, not everywhere. The communists in Paris had close ties with people back in Spain, they had many contacts there, and information was passed back and forth. Until very recently, the
guerrilla
could count on vast, efficient support networks in certain areas, even during the worst of the crackdowns; there were the miners who were constantly waging their own war, the students who had brought Madrid to its knees in 1956, and the tram drivers striking in Barcelona. Eight years later, with the official unions infiltrated at every level, the major universities had become strongholds of the underground movement, but such progress, which looked so attractive from Paris, might not have been as popular on the ground. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz tossed and turned, he could not sleep wondering how he would react if his son came back from Spain and said the unthinkable: ‘It was great, really beautiful, the monuments, the wine and the flamenco, I loved it, and the people are really nice, they’re so happy, the standard of living is pretty much the same as here, it’s obvious that the economic development is really working, they have a good life, and they don’t seem to be missing out on anything ...’

Ignacio looked at the alarm clock and saw it was 4.20 a.m. He got up, went into the living room and sat in an armchair.
Cuanto peor, mejor
- ‘The worse, the better!’ A phrase attributed to Nikolai Chernyshevsky indicating that the worse social conditions become for the poor, the more inclined they are to launch a revolution. He had repeated this phrase so often, heard it said so often, but he had never really thought about what it meant. What an unfair, unjust fate, he thought, it’s absurd. But this was his fate, the life he had chosen; he had fought and lost, and had rebuilt his life from the ground up to fight again for the very people on whom he now wished not simply poverty but misery, the bitter, profound misery capable of stirring them to revolution.

It’s appalling. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz felt terribly alone. Exile was a terrible fate, one that took its toll not only on the surface, but deep within, distorting love, swelling hatred until good and evil became a single thing. The horror of this stagnant life, this river flowing nowhere, with no sea, no lake to meet it. And at this, the darkest moment of the night, Ignacio saw Julio Carrión exactly as he was that last evening, standing in the hallway of their family apartment in Paris, the evening when Paloma had stopped him with a question.

She had suffered the most, she who had already suffered so much. In 1949, when the inevitable came to pass, like a slick of black oil fouling a crystal sea, his parents had put on a brave face. Anita was more worried about comforting him than she was about having lost a fortune she had never had, but Paloma tried to commit suicide in the bathroom of that same apartment, a home he had since left to live with his wife and children.

Ignacio would never forget Anita’s cries, his mother sobbing on the telephone, the fear he could feel in his legs as he ran to the apartment, his sister, sitting on the edge of the bath, her eyes vacant, her wrists wrapped in white bandages, stained with blood. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he said to his mother. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he whispered again, this time to Paloma. He crouched down next to her, but she did not speak. ‘Forgive me, Paloma, forgive me,’ he begged her, ‘this is all my fault.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘But it is, it’s my fault, the whole thing was my idea, that’s why I need you to forgive me, Paloma, please . . .’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Ignacio.’ This was the first thing Paloma said when she came home from the hospital, then she said that she was very tired and wanted to be left alone. She did not attempt suicide again, but followed an insensate pattern of eating, drinking, sleeping, getting up in the morning, kissing her parents, hugging her nephews. ‘Leave me in peace, please, just leave me in peace,’ she would say. They watched her closely, on the alert, but Ignacio did not simply watch her, he saw her, saw in her dry, emaciated body a woman who had lost the capacity to desire, watched as despair turned the beautiful Paloma into an ugly, disagreeable woman.