‘The stuff about your father isn’t so surprising, Álvaro. I know you don’t think so,’ he said as he was driving me home after dinner, ‘but every family has a closet stuffed full of skeletons.’
His words reminded me of Raquel’s - ‘human beings are boring and predictable, our lives are pretty much the same’ - two different ways of saying the same thing. But that night I had to accept that what I felt had opened up a new chapter, maybe a completely different story to the one that had been played out in that apartment on the Calle Jorge Juan.
Clara’s labour went so smoothly that by Saturday afternoon, when we visited her, we found her sitting, smiling serenely, with the baby asleep in her arms. Íñigo and Fran, her other children, who had coped much better than Mai and I had expected, hurled themselves at her the moment they saw her, which gave my mother, a little annoyed that she had no great tales of woe to relate, the opportunity to make herself useful. But before she took the children to get something to eat, she beckoned me over.
‘Listen, your brother Julio is completely tied up sorting out the death duties on the estate,’ she explained, ‘so he won’t have time to check on the house at La Moraleja next week, and since your blasted exhibition has opened now, I told him that you wouldn’t mind swapping.’
‘No problem.’ I smiled at my mother’s display of authority.
‘OK. Here, I’ve brought you the money and so on . . .’ She slipped a hand into her handbag and fished out the usual sealed envelopes tied with an elastic band. ‘Call Lisette and tell her when you’ll be over - any time except Wednesday afternoon, because she’s started ballroom dancing lessons. She asked me if she could, obviously, and I told her of course, since she’s out there on her own, the poor thing is bound to get bored . . . I’m thinking of going back there at the end of May, but I can’t leave Clara at the moment.’
As she went on to tell me how happy she was to have a granddaughter named Angélica after her, I decided to go to La Moraleja on Wednesday afternoon. I’d intended to go through my father’s study the next time I was there anyway, and with Lisette out of the house I would have free range. So I phoned Lisette and told her I would come over on Tuesday, then phoned her on Tuesday afternoon to say I had an important meeting. I asked her not to mention it to Mamá since she would be furious, and said I would have to come over on Wednesday. ‘I’m up to my eyes on Thursday and Friday, Lisette, but don’t worry, just put the post in my father’s office and I’ll pick it up and leave the money there for you, OK?’ ‘But I get out of class at seven,’ she said, ‘I can be home by half past.’ ‘Fine,’ I agreed, ‘let’s say half seven, it’s a bit late for me, but never mind . . . What time does your class start?’ ‘At five,’ she said, ‘but if you want, I don’t have to go to class . . . It’s just, leaving all that money in the office with me not there . . .’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her, ‘you go to your class and I’ll see you at half seven.’
It was unlikely that she would be late leaving or back early, but even so I didn’t open the door to my parents’ house until a quarter to five. I was no longer surprised by the cold premeditation, that was increasingly becoming a part of me; I was learning to lie, to tell half-truths, to hide what I knew, which was simply a more rarefied form of lying, but as I stepped into my father’s office, I remembered how I had felt the last time I had stood there, still whole, still shaking with unconditional grief over the memory of this man who was more extraordinary than we, his children, would ever be.
That afternoon, I did not doubt that my father had been an extraordinary man, I was simply no longer sure what the adjective meant. And I knew that I was doing what I had to do, but I didn’t know whether I was looking for evidence that would acquit him or convict him. For a moment, I felt like a traitor, the scheming, treacherous son who had listened to rumours put about by his enemies, and this feeling hurt so much that I stopped in the study doorway for a moment. And yet I knew that I could not simply do nothing. I was already involved.
I went to the living room, poured myself a drink and then headed back to the study, trying to remain detached, to stand back in order to focus on the problem. It was a technique I had used before, and that afternoon it did not let me down. OK, I thought, there is the desk, four drawers on either side and a middle drawer. The middle one is probably locked, but the others will be open, they usually are. Two of the walls are lined with shelves - six in total - with cabinets beneath. The cabinets are probably locked, but the keys to the cabinets and to the middle desk drawer are usually kept with various other keys in a long silver box in front of the Enciclopedia Espasa.
There was nothing of interest in the desk drawers, but that did not surprise me. Some were empty, others were full of envelopes, writing paper, a box of recently printed business cards, pens, paper clips, a stapler, a few photos of his grandchildren, and cheque stubs, each marked in his neat microscopic handwriting with the payee, the amount and the date. I went through it all carefully, systematically, putting everything back the way I had found it. I took down the silver box and I worked out which key opened the middle drawer, but there was nothing interesting or unexpected in there either. Current chequebooks for the business accounts, savings books for the accounts Papá had opened for my son and my nephews and nieces, my parents’ passports and official letters from various places, from the Customs Office to the Department of Transport, mostly reminders of payments due. I didn’t feel disappointed, I had expected as much.
I didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything concrete, but if my father had kept any trace of another life, I knew it wouldn’t be found in the desk drawers he had casually opened and closed in front of his children. Nor would it be in the bedroom safe, since my mother always left it open whenever she took out her jewellery. But I had never seen the cupboards under the bookshelves open.
I decided to work from left to right. The first cupboard was empty, the second, which opened with the same key, was full of the many presents Julio Carrión González had received from his children when they were teenagers: dolls and certificates and miniature trophies emblazoned with the words ‘To the Best Dad in the World’. I recognised some of these monstrosities as my own and smiled. That was why he never opened these cupboards in front of us, I thought, as I sorted through other gifts - fountain pens, desk clocks, commemorative plaques from his staff and the sort of odds and ends that only showed up at Christmas. Much of the third cupboard and all of the fourth were taken up with business gifts, since the two dozen or so coffee-table books could hardly have come from anywhere else. There was a little of everything, from the flora and fauna of Spain to the treasures of cathedrals, reflecting the personal tastes of the person who had chosen them - probably some secretary doing a favour for her boss, who could hardly be expected to know the tastes of the beneficiary. But between Treasures of the Prado and The Glories of Aigüestortes National Park, I noticed something thick and blue with no spine.
I had to take out several of the books before I could get at the ordinary blue cardboard folder. It looked old and inside were a dozen letters sent from Zaragoza to Russia between 1941 and 1943 to a María Victoria Suárez Mena, a pile of old photos, what looked like a military record and some other documents. I closed the folder without studying the contents further, and put it on the floor next to me before returning the books to their original position. It’s something, I thought, though it didn’t look like much. The fifth cupboard was empty, as was the bottom half of the sixth, but in the top half were five ring binders which my father had labelled with the past five years. I opened them one by one and found nothing more than tax returns with receipts attached, each in a transparent plastic folder. Behind the ring binders was a curiously shaped grey metal box. It was long and rectangular with bevelled edges and in the middle was a lock that none of the keys my father kept in the silver box would open.
I stopped for a moment and thought, then went back to the middle drawer of the desk. I’d noticed a small key ring there with thr
ee little keys on it. Two were identical, and both opened the metal box, but none of them opened the tiny gold padlock on the small leather case I found inside. It was long and thick and looked as though it had originally been designed to hold chequebooks, but I had never seen my father use anything like it. There was nothing else in the box so I closed it and put it back where I had found it, making sure that nothing was out of place.
I was tinkering with the padlock, which was flimsy enough to be smashed using a screwdriver and a couple of blows of a hammer, when I heard a door opening. It was only twenty-five past six, but all of my brothers and sisters had keys to the house. I put the case into the blue cardboard folder and quickly stuffed it between the books and notepads in my briefcase before calling out. When Lisette came into the study, my heart was still hammering, but I made a show of flicking through the post with the slow, deliberate movements of someone resigned to wasting his time.
‘Álvaro!’ she groaned in her sweet, singsong voice. ‘But your mother’s right, you’re completely impossible. I thought we said seven thirty?’
‘We did,’ I got up from the desk and went over to greet her, ‘but by five o’clock I’d done everything I had to do. I was hardly going to hang around twiddling my thumbs in the university bar for two hours.’
‘It’s just as well I didn’t stay for the second hour, I knew it would be a bit late for you . . . Do you want a drink?’
‘I’ve just had one,’ I said, indicating the empty glass.
‘Well, another drink, then? Go on.’
‘No, Lisette, thanks anyway. It’s not that I don’t want one, it’s just that I have to drive.’ I started gathering the post together and nodded towards the corner of the desk. ‘The money’s there.’
She attempted a reproachful look, then smiled at me as she picked up the envelopes my mother had given me. ‘Well, I have to say, you’re very sensible.’
I followed her compact body, sweeter and svelter than ever in her tight-fitting black leotard and matching skirt, which fluttered as she walked. As I said goodbye, I stared at the slit in her skirt, which came up to her thigh. And suddenly the words were on the tip of my tongue.
‘Hey, Lisette, I just wanted to know . . .’ But then I came to my senses. ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter.’
‘What?’ She gave me an eloquent smile, as though she could guess what kind of question it was that I dared not ask.
‘Nothing, honestly,’ I kissed her on both cheeks and opened the door, ‘I was just being stupid.’
I just wanted to know whether my father ever came on to you, Lisette, whether he looked at you, desired you, gave you presents for no apparent reason, whether he ever thought of inviting you to dinner, whether he actually did invite you to dinner. That’s what I wanted to know, but I didn’t dare ask you because I was Álvaro Carrión Otero, a good son, a good citizen, an ordinary guy with no idiosyncrasies aside from a morbid fear of funerals, a physics professor who avoided problems, who could not even imagine doing something spontaneous, who would never ask his mother’s maid an inappropriate question.
This was the man I used to be. I wasn’t that man any more, I thought, as I drove back into Madrid, but at least I still seemed like him, and I found that similarity comforting.
When he saw his brother Mateo for the last time, it had been several days since Ignacio Fernández Muñoz had seen himself in a mirror. In concentration camps there are no mirrors. Had he been able to see his reflection that morning he might not have faltered when he recognised his brother’s eyes amidst a mask of taut, dry, ashen skin seemingly held in place by jutting cheekbones sharp as razor blades. Mateo had always had a round, doughy face - at home he had been called ‘pancake face’ - and he was very clever. Ignacio had never seen him with a beard either, which was why he hesitated when he saw those piercing blue eyes in an unfamiliar face, the face of an old man shuffling along, swinging his shoulders painfully with every step.
When he saw his brother Mateo for the last time, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz had renounced the human condition for a different, primal existence which was not life. He was no longer the man who, a month and a half earlier, had stolen a truck to escape from Madrid, but a skeletal, primal version of that man, a body that existed only through and for what it needed, as though all other capacities - the ability to think, to believe, to feel - had melted into the brutal intensity of four elemental needs, the need to chew and swallow a hard crust of black bread whenever he could find one, to drink whenever he could without looking at what he was drinking, to clear the stones from a patch of ground so that he might sit or, if he was lucky, sleep when he was tired, and to carry his blanket with him wherever he went so that it would not be stolen. In mid-May, in the camp at Albatera, it was hot, but no one knew where or how they would spend the next winter. Indeed, no one knew if they would live to see another winter, but for as long as they clung to their blankets they did not have to think, did not have to feel. They talked a lot, there was nothing for them to do but talk, and sometimes, when several of them gathered together to remember or invent stories aloud, they almost enjoyed it.
Ignacio was not aware of this, and would not be until he was alive again, when he had recovered his reason, his responsiveness, his faith and his true nature, and then it was difficult for him to accept it. Human beings are creatures of desire and desperation rips them from their very being. In the port of Alicante, where hope had guttered out, shots rang out one after another, day after day, bodies fell, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes separated by hours that seemed like eternity, and he stared out to sea, at that great, still expanse of water, at the ships that would never arrive, towards the deliverance they no longer dared hope for, they who had not even had the opportunity to taste the bitterness of exile. They were the last of the faithful, betrayed by all, fodder for the firing squad, the victor’s spoils of war.
In the port of Alicante thousands upon thousands were gathered, but no one wanted to speak. No one dared to say again, no, they will not betray us, they will not leave us here, they cannot do this to us, they will send ships, Blum failed, the French failed, and at the moment of truth, the English failed, the democracies of Europe cannot do this to us . . . Now, nobody spoke, not even the desperate, those who said no goodbyes as with secretive fingers they fumbled for their pistol, pressed the barrel to their temple and fired. Bodies fell like sacks, like trees felled before their time, and he stared out to sea, at that great, still expanse of water, at the ships that would never arrive, listened to the shots, heard the bodies fall, but he did not turn, did not see, he did not want to know. From time to time he heard screams, the sobs of children or of adults weeping like children, but he stared out at the sea so he would not have to look, so he would not have to know that one more Spaniard would rather die than live in Spain, in this land where he was born, where he had fallen in love and seen his children born, in the country he had fought for for three years, where he had known fear and cold and hunger and the unbearable loneliness of a long war, in his native land for which he had risked everything, for which he was about to die. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz looked out at the treacherous sea and did not turn his head. He was twenty-one years old, and he did not care whether he died, nor did he care whether he lived. He chose desolation over death and so became something else, something dry, dusty and inert, alive but barely human, until the moment he recognised his brother Mateo’s eyes and in that moment he wanted, with all the might he no longer had, to be mistaken.
He pushed his way as best he could through the crowd of solitary men, silently watching the only thing that broke the monotony of life in the camp: a couple of soldiers with loaded guns leading the macabre procession of the condemned, the walking dead, who shuffled forward, hands shackled, linked to men as dead as themselves by a chain like some nightmarish umbilical cord. With all his might, Ignacio wanted to be mistaken, but he was not. It was Mateo, haggard, exhausted, so pale that it looked as though he did not have a single drop of blood l
eft in his body, but it was his brother, the blue of his eyes still alive in the face of a man dead before his time.
‘Where are they taking them?’ ‘To Madrid, to face the firing squad.’ ‘But have they been sentenced?’ ‘Have they been sentenced ? What country do you think you’re living in, lad ?’ Ignacio listened to the muttering voices, the whispering fear that leapt from mouth to mouth. ‘Why don’t they just shoot them here?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Franco is afraid to live in Madrid, he doesn’t feel safe there, he’s still in Burgos and apparently he wants to teach the Madrileños a lesson before he moves in.’ ‘So what’s he planning to do? Hang them from the lamp-posts along the Gran Vía?’ ‘They don’t care where it happens, the fuckers . . .’ The defeated looked away as they said these words, hid their mouths from dangerous, prying eyes; everything was dangerous to them, the fuckers, Ignacio did not want to be like them, yet he scarcely dared call out his brother’s name as he passed, although Mateo heard him, recognised his voice and, barely moving his head, his eyes flashed round, looking for him. When his eyes met Ignacio’s, he shook his head almost imperceptibly, an infinitesimal movement from one side to the other. He did it only once, but it was enough for Ignacio to know what he meant. Don’t look at me, don’t speak to me, don’t say goodbye, don’t tell anyone you know me, save yourself.
‘Wow, when did they promote you to captain?’
Barely three months earlier, on 19 February 1939, when the Fernández family gathered in their house in Madrid for the last time, Ignacio had been the last to arrive. He had come from El Pardo and he was worn out. This was how Mateo had greeted him as he arrived, Mateo who collapsed rather than sat down on one of the armchairs in the living room. Ignacio hugged Casilda and Carlos and his sisters before answering.
The Frozen Heart Page 25