The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  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.

  ‘What about Mari Carmen?’ Julio dared to ask the day he got his membership card and finally felt secure, like one of them.

  ‘Mari Carmen . . .’ Isidro smiled at him. ‘What about her?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ He did not like his friend’s smile, but there was no going back now. ‘Does she have a boyfriend ?’

  ‘Listen, I’m going to give you a bit of advice.’ Isidro was still smiling. ‘Forget about her, find someone else, seriously . . . Either that, or enlist and get yourself trained to fly anti-tank aircraft or fighter planes.’

  ‘Why?’ Julio, who had always been lucky with girls, masked his disappointment. ‘Does she only go for soldiers?’

  ‘And not just any soldier. You should have seen her last November, when she used to go to La Moncloa with her mother, looking for deserters . . . “You cowards! You bastards! You should be ashamed of yourselves. Is this what my father died for? Go back to the front and fight like men!” Fuck! You should have seen her, and that was before she made herself the uniform she wears now.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘The uniform? Nothing . . . well, it’s just something she designed. Didn’t you know she was a dressmaker ? Of course, last November, she didn’t need it. She’d howl like an animal, or grab the deserters by the lapels, and whisper insults, “Coward, maricón, go back to the front right now or give me your rifle and I’ll go myself”. And then, if they were young and good looking, she’d kiss them on the mouth.’

  ‘And did they go back to the front?’

  ‘Fucking right they went back,’ Isidro burst out laughing, ‘they were more scared of her than the Falangists.’

  It had been only four years since that afternoon, and Isidro and the JSU no longer existed, but the streets were just as dangerous as they had always been, because Mari Carmen’s legs still walked abroad. This was why he hated the Falangists, why he could not stand the sight of them, but that morning he had no choice.

  They streamed down the Calle Alcalá, down the Gran Vía, stamping their boots, impervious to the heat, impervious to anxiety or fear because they had won the war, they were the lords of life and death, law and order, prison and the firing squads. They had picked the winning side, thought Julio, as all around him people ran alongside them, saluting, or disappeared into the dark alleys, looking for a few moments of precarious peace. Everyone was running in one direction or another, but there was nothing for him to do but stand still, because he was simply someone who worked for a garage on the Calle de la Montera, a customer at the bank that was just the other side of the Calle Alcalá, because he had two cheques to deposit, because he was nothing, no one, a fool incapable of working out what he believed in. This was why he stood waiting for the tide to ebb, for the stragglers to be absorbed into the heaving blue torrent that spilled down the major axes of Madrid. Where did they all come from? he wondered, realising that the people he had known for as long as he had lived in Madrid asked the opposite question - Where did they all go? At that moment, as the shops began to open again and a few courageous pedestrians attempted to cross the street, he spotted a lone Falangist, his face a rictus of pain, hobbling along the kerb.

  He was very young and skinny, and seemed delicate, less because of the thick glasses whose black frame emphasised the pallor of his skin than because of the protruding breastbone which the arrogant brutishness of his uniform simply made even more pathetic. His face was slick with sweat, his mouth hung open, and his right leg was drawn up in pain. Julio stared at him. The man stared back for a moment before slumping to the ground.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Señor Turégano’s right-hand man approached him with the respect due to the colour of his shirt. ‘Do you need help?’

  ‘I walked into a fire hydrant,’ said the Falangist, who was clearly no older than Julio. ‘I was marching with my brothers, but they didn’t wait for me, I don’t know if
they even noticed.’

  ‘Is your ankle swollen?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s have a look.’ The victim took off his shoe, pushed down his sock and stared at his red, raw ankle. ‘Fuck! It is swollen . . . And today of all days . . .’

  ‘You need to bandage it,’ advised Julio. ‘If you like I’ll get you a taxi, you should go home.’

  ‘No, I can’t! Listen . . .?’ The boy raised an eyebrow questioningly.

  ‘. . . Julio,’ he held out his hand, ‘Julio Carrión.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ The boy shook his hand. ‘My name is Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, I’m the youngest son of Sánchez Delgado, you know,’ Julio did not know, but did not dare say as much, ‘so I can’t go home, not today . . . I have to support the others. You don’t understand - this is our opportunity, our duty. Our fathers and older brothers won this war, and now it’s down to us. Spain is just the beginning, we’ve got the whole world in front of us. Civilisation needs our youth, our strength. The Western world is in danger and we must heed the call . . .’

  This pallid, misshapen youth, who knew how to talk, who knew what he believed in, who was driven by a force Julio would never know, stared at him through his thick glasses and Julio recognised the glimmer in the boy’s eyes. Mamá, he thought, Manuel, Mari Carmen, Isidro. He had seen this light before, the colour of conviction, the steely words that were worth dying for, and he hesitated, only for a moment, but just long enough to remember Peluca’s daughter. In the end, Julio thought, they’re all the same. Julio Carrión González, who had made a promise to himself that never again would he choose the losing side, had already been mistaken once. When Eugenio Sánchez Delgado got to his feet, wincing at the pain, gripping his shoulder then leaning against him for support, Julio did not realise that he was about to make a second mistake, one which would lead him to the third before he finally got it right.

  ‘Come on, Julio. If you help me, we can make it. We’ll defend Europe against the East. Don’t you doubt it. Let’s go . . .’

  It mattered to me to know what kind of man my father was.

  I didn’t believe that Julio didn’t care, but I did believe what he told me. His story had the same immediate, apparent improbability, the same fundamental truth, as his claim that I had been my father’s favourite, something I had never even noticed. The whole is only equal to the sums of its parts when those parts are unaware of each other. For too long, the parts had been unaware of each other, I thought, and the whole was becoming too unwieldy, too contradictory, to escape the law of complex systems. My father was a complex system, one that comprised many components, and I remembered that disasters occur when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

  I can’t recall the exact date, I remember it was very hot, and that Miguelito was still a baby, so it must have been some night in June, or maybe July 2001, when we both woke up at the same time, my son tossing and turning in his cot, eyes closed, whimpering softly. Mai was still asleep, lying sprawled across me. Carefully I pushed her off, but it was so hot I felt no relief. Miguel was sweating too; when I picked him up I felt that his smooth, white, velvety skin was damp. As I laid his head against my shoulder, he suddenly became calm, knowing that he was safe in my arms. It was 5.40 a.m. and he sucked furiously on his dummy as I heated a bottle for him in the kitchen. I didn’t turn on the overhead light because I did not want to disturb him, but also because I wanted to savour the unexpected joy of this easy, boundless intimacy between father and son, his skin against mine, this new, strange, heartbreaking contact he would not remember and which I was still unused to, since it was barely three months since he had been born. Miguelito, so hungry, so tired, so helpless, utterly dependent on me, it was a terrifying responsibility, and yet the solution was simple: take the bottle out of the microwave, attach the teat, sprinkle a couple of drops on to the inside of my wrist and bring the bottle to his mouth.

  Having a son made a deep impression on me. I had never thought about having children as a purpose, a goal, or even a stage in my life. It was not that I didn’t want children, but if Mai hadn’t insisted, it would never have occurred to me to suggest it. For me, my wife’s pregnancy was something strange, mysterious, almost frightening, and yet I experienced no surge of emotion when I felt him kick, or listened to his heartbeat, not even as I watched him grow with every scan, those grey smudges flecked with light and shadow the gynaecologist confidently identified as lungs, kidneys, arms, legs, because I couldn’t see anything. Through it all, I felt disconnected, as though I were on the outside, but that all changed when Miguel was born.

  I thought about that when he and I were alone. I carried him out on to the porch. Having a son made a deep impression on me, all the more so when I remembered how in a split second the very word ‘son’ had gone from meaning nothing to meaning everything, the split second when he took his first breath, and was suddenly himself, and I was suddenly his father. From that moment, in some sense, Mai ceased to matter. A second earlier the child we already knew was going to be called Miguel was her business. Not any more. She was still in the same place, but I was somewhere different, and I liked it.

  When I took my son in my arms for the first time I suddenly experienced all the emotions I hadn’t felt before. In time, the shock of these intense feelings, the surprises, the fears, the responsibilities, the indescribable joys, would become less intense, mutating into a constant, everyday love as Miguelito ceased to be like other children and began to be himself, with his own face, his own body, his own way of annoying me, the peculiar way in which he could be unbearable one minute and adorable the next, without ever ceasing to be Miguel Carrión, my son. But that night in 2001, when I took him out on to the porch, I found my father there, since he could not sleep.

  I sat down next to him and, still busy with the baby and the bottle, I remarked that it was impossible to escape the sweltering heat even at six in the morning. But he didn’t want to talk about the weather. ‘So where’s Mai?’ he asked point blank, making no attempt to conceal his surprise. ‘Asleep,’ I said. He shook his head. ‘You must really love your wife, hijo,’ he continued after a moment. ‘Of course I love her,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t get up for her sake, I did it for myself.’ ‘For yourself?’ he insisted. ‘For myself,’ I insisted, ‘I like looking after the baby.’ He stared at me, incredulous, and then finally agreed that it really was too hot.

  When my brother Julio left that evening - ‘If we’re not going whoring, I’d like to get home and see the kids while they’re still up’ - I decided to stay in the bar and take my time over the last drink. I still did not feel like going home, but the reason behind my hesitation was not at home, it was in the boot of my car. Before heading back to my quiet life, I had to go back to the apartment that did not belong to me on Calle Jorge Juan and undo the dirty work I had done only that afternoon. Although I had decided just to leave the two bin bags in the hallway, I still felt irritated, tired of taking responsibility for my father. Then, of course, there was Raquel. I would have to phone her, call round, give her the key, see her, listen to her. I would have to curb the fierce excitement of the hunter she had awakened in me, ignore the alarm signals that went off the moment she touched me, withstand the silences, the flawless performance of this role she had rehearsed; I would wonder what sort of game she was playing, ignore the fact that she was extremely clever, overlook that singular beauty that required you to look twice before seeing it, ignore the fact that she had been my father’s last lover.

  My father. Two words that had never been a problem for me, not even when things were difficult between us, when all the decisions I took were at odds with his plans, with the son he wanted me to be. My father. Words so easy to think, to say, to take for granted, that maybe the innate kudos of the concept blinded me to the man behind the words. A poor man, I reminded myself, a complete bastard, remembering what Julio had said. A father and his sons, new information to be fed into the experiment; Julio, who had chosen to be a fathe
r though it meant giving up being a son; Miguelito, who was barely three months old, a hungry, sleepy baby, on that night when his grandfather had stared at us in sheer disbelief, or perhaps not, perhaps it was disbelief mingled with contempt that I saw in his wide eyes.

  ‘You’re reading too much into it, Álvaro,’ Mai would have said, taking his side as she always did. ‘He’s an old man, there are some things he doesn’t understand, I’m sure it would never even have occurred to him to get up in the middle of the night to feed any of you, but that doesn’t mean that he loved you any less.’ Mai never said these words to me, but I can hear them now, I can even refute them: ‘Maybe you’re right, but lending money to your son so that he can sort things out with the mother of his children is not the same as getting up in the middle of the night to feed a baby, Mai.’ In the quiet of this half-empty bar it was no longer a matter of remembering every date, every action, every image of the man I could not bring back from the dead, but of finding new, hidden, meanings in the dates, the actions, the images of this man I thought I knew. Yet doing so made me a traitor, I thought, the scheming, treacherous son who listens to idle gossip, unsubstantiated rumours, put about by his enemies. But in this case the enemy was my brother and he was right. There was more at stake than memories of Julio Carrión González. What was at stake were my own memories. This is what I thought, and it did not make me feel any better, but it made me feel fair.

  At that moment, it occurred to me that I could choose to do nothing. There was no solution; my father was dead. If he was not the man I’d loved and admired, then he would never be another. Nor would he have a chance to defend himself, to tell me what Mai had told me in his own words, persuade me I was reading too much into things. Yet if I was reading too much into things, I wouldn’t have been able to understand Julio’s anger. If I was reading too much into things I wouldn’t instantly, involuntarily, have remembered that sweltering summer night when my son, my father and I had not been able to sleep. If I was reading too much into things, surely at some point I would have noticed some hint of the favouritism that had so riled Rafa.