The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  ‘Stop thinking about that nonsense.’ Mateo shook her gently as they arrived at the Puerto del Sol. ‘Look around you, look at what’s happening - can you see it? It’s amazing, and here you are worrying about your stupid cousin . . .’

  It was amazing, but it changed her life for ever, opening up an unexpected chink in her ordinary cares and pleasure; it forced her to choose a path she had never imagined and planted in her the seeds of a pride, a love, a pain that she had never known.

  ‘We are what we are, María - for better or worse - and our place is here, with our own people.’

  Her husband was right, so much so that she felt ashamed to have argued in front of her daughters. But that was after her downstairs neighbour had refused to open the door, when she had had time alone, to sit in her kitchen and think. They were hard, cruel days, more so than they appeared to be, more than she had thought when Mateo told her Paloma had arrived and had asked her to come into the dining room.

  ‘Now, girls . . .’

  In that last week of 1936, her elder daughter was twenty-one and had been married for more than two years, and her younger daughter was seventeen, but their father still treated them the way he had done when they used to climb up on his lap, and they loved him for it. Both girls smiled as Mateo chose his words carefully.

  ‘Your mother and I have been talking and . . . Well, you know that the government has set up an evacuation programme so that civilians who want to can go to Levante.’ As he was speaking, Paloma began to shake her head, and he began to nod as though agreeing with himself. ‘I won’t lie to you, your mother and I are not leaving. If I asked the ministry for a transfer, I’m sure they’d refuse and with good reason, but it’s also because I would rather work for the generals’ junta than for the government, because that’s what I know and they need me here, not in Valencia. I didn’t leave a month ago, I’m not leaving now, I don’t think I’ll ever leave, because this is my city, my sons are defending it and because I don’t want to leave,’ his wife laid a hand on his arm but he did not lose his composure, ‘and no fucking general is going to make me leave Madrid. Whatever is going to happen to me is going to happen here. But your mother has suggested that maybe the two of you . . .’

  ‘No way,’ Paloma did not let him finish, ‘I’m not going. That’s what I told my mother-in-law when she left for Almería and I told her I wanted to stay with my husband.’

  ‘Your husband is at the front, hija.’

  ‘But the front is in La Moncloa, Mamá. You can walk there from here. And the soldiers at the front get leave to come home. When Carlos is on furlough, I want to be at home to sleep with him.’

  ‘Paloma! Don’t talk like that in front of your sister.’

  ‘But Mamá, all she said was sleep . . .’

  Mateo Fernández laughed at his younger daughter’s quip - though not as beautiful as her sister, she was quick and clever, and she was his favourite.

  ‘Well, I’m telling you now, you’re going to Valencia,’ his wife said, leaning over the table and wagging her finger.

  ‘Me?’ The girl leaned forward too until her nose and her mother’s were almost touching.

  ‘Yes, you, María, running around, spending all day out in the streets, treating war like some kind of holiday - well, you’re wrong.’

  ‘I won’t go. Besides, I can’t . . .’ She sat back in her chair. ‘I have a fiancé at the front too.’

  ‘He’s not your fiancé, hija,’ her mother declared, ‘he’s a piece of foolishness.’

  ‘And you don’t even like him, you always treat him like dirt.’

  ‘What would you know about it, Paloma?’ María turned on her sister. ‘How do you know whether I like him or not?’

  ‘Of course I know!’ Paloma Fernández Muñoz - the most beautiful girl in the whole building, in the Glorieta de Bilbao, in the Barrio de Maravillas, in all of Madrid - laughed. ‘Everyone knows! Don’t you remember the day Papá told the maid you’d go down and fetch Esteban but the outside door was locked and the poor lad spent half an hour soaking wet and shivering, waiting for you? Remember what you said to us,’ she put on a whiny child’s voice, ‘ “You like him more than you like me, everyone in this house loves Esteban more than they love me . . . ” Until the day he showed up in his uniform, and then he suddenly became the love of your life. It’s true, isn’t it, Mamá? What did I say to you that afternoon?’

  ‘You said, it’s not Esteban she’s in love with, it’s his uniform.’ They both laughed.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ Seeing his wife and his eldest daughter join forces, Mateo, as always, sided with his María. ‘She should know whether or not she has a boyfriend.’

  She did know. Her mother and her sister had preferred not to acknowledge the fact until one night in the autumn of 1938 when Sergeant First-Class Fernández, who should have been at the front, in the trenches at Usera, showed up unexpectedly. Panicked, they stood up, each with a single thought, but for once Ignacio, who collected bullet wounds the way he had collected lead soldiers as a boy, was unhurt.

  ‘Ignacio is the one I worry about,’ Mateo Fernández said to his wife in the darkest hours of the darkest November of their lives. ‘I don’t worry so much about the other lad, he’s more sensible, but Ignacio has a reckless streak in him . . .’ And yet Ignacio turned out to be a fine soldier. No one understood why, not even the boy himself, but he found out that first morning, a dog-day of cold and leaden skies as his boots sank into the mud and the icy drizzle lashed his face. They had been ordered to advance to take a hill, but the sergeant commanding the detachment took a bullet early on. Looking behind him, Ignacio saw the enemy running towards them, howling like wild animals. And that was when it happened. As his comrades began to tremble, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, with extraordinary calm, remembered his father, the look of stoic concentration on his face, the little speech he repeated over and over as he taught ten-year-old Ignacio to play chess. ‘You have to see the big picture, Ignacio. I know it’s not easy, but you have to try, force yourself to see the whole picture - your pieces and mine - in that first glance before you even start to analyse it. If you can’t do that, you’ll never play well.’ His father was a fine chess player, and to prove that the other king - the real king - was just a man like everyone else, he always said the same thing, ‘if you prick him, he bleeds’. Ignacio remembered these things as suddenly, once more, he saw the big picture. These were not chessmen made of wood but men of flesh and blood, yet the thrill, the sense of revelation, was the same. There are more of them, but we hold the high ground, they know how to fight, but they have to get up here and they can’t run and shoot at the same time, because at the end of the day, they’re just men, if you prick them, they bleed. The thought flashed through his mind in less time than it would take to say the words, and he felt his blood run cold, because suddenly he saw everything.

  As he turned his rifle on his comrades, he looked at them one by one. Almost all of them were older than he was, but he did not need to raise his voice for them to realise that he was deadly serious.

  ‘The first of you who tries to run, I’ll take him down.’

  As he spoke, they stared at him as though he had gone mad, but their shock overtook their panic. With every second the enemy was closing in, but Ignacio continued speaking with a calmness he had never felt before.

  ‘We’re going to wait for them. We’re going to take cover - because we can and they can’t - and we’re going to wait for the fuckers, because although there are more of them, we hold the high ground, so we have the advantage. They have to climb the hill, and as they do, we’ll pick them off one by one, got it?’ He realised they were beginning to understand. ‘That’s how easy it will be, because they can’t run and fire at the same time, they’re only men, if you prick them, they will bleed. But we have to stand firm. No one is to fire before I give the signal, clear ?’

  The enemy howled and ran, with every second they were closing in, but at the top of the hill no one m
oved, until the sergeant, who had taken a bullet to the shoulder two minutes earlier, came to and, dragging himself up on to one elbow, said: ‘Listen to the kid, damn it! He knows what he’s talking about . . .’ before he passed out again.

  Ignacio smiled and then another idea occurred to him, an idea which, before the day was out, would make him famous.

  ‘One more thing . . . When you fire, you’re going to scream, you’re going to scream like someone is ripping your tooth out. If they can scream, so can we!’

  Two of the detachment escaped but the others did as they were told, they screamed until they were hoarse, they fired as though they were shooting ducks at a fair, and the enemy retreated in panic.

  That day, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz’s detachment stopped calling him ‘the kid’. In the afternoon, someone dressed his first bullet wound, a spectacular but superficial flesh wound on his left arm. His name was mentioned in dispatches the following day. He had not even been at war a week.

  ‘Ignacio?’

  ‘What . . .’

  The first time they were given leave, when the worst was over though it had barely begun, his brother whispered to him in the darkness from his bed, as he had when they were children. The enemy had not passed. In the previous months, the two of them had thought of nothing else, there was nothing else to think about in Madrid in November and December 1936. Both found it strange that night to find themselves back in their parents’ house, in the bedroom they had shared for so many years. Everything seemed strange, the beds, the pyjamas, the softness of the mattresses, the crispness of the sheets. Both felt vulnerable without the rifles which their mother had insisted they carefully place in the umbrella stand in the hall. Neither of them knew that this scene would never be played out again.

  Mateo had already met a fiery, dark-skinned girl, who was very young, very passionate and dedicated her time to holding what the JSU called ‘flash rallies’ on the Paseo del Prado. Her name was Casilda García Guerrero, and she prowled the tram stops, the exits to the metro, anywhere she was likely to find groups of people. Then she would approach them, try to persuade them to join the resistance, tell them where they could go, what they could do, where their skills might be useful if they chose to fight in their own way, to bury fascism by digging trenches or sewing uniforms. She was pretty, funny, a little plump, and the military trousers she wore fitted her well.

  ‘You know, I think what you’re doing is really interesting.’ The second time he saw her, Mateo plucked up the courage to speak. ‘It’s important to know that there are people motivating the rearguard . . .’

  Casilda smiled and thanked him.

  ‘Do you mind if I walk with you a bit?’ Mateo had ventured, and she nodded. ‘So what does your boyfriend think about all this . . .?’

  ‘What is he supposed to think?’ she answered him with a mocking laugh.

  ‘I don’t know. You’re too pretty to be out alone all day.’

  ‘I’m not alone. That guy over there, and that one there . . .’ she pointed to a pair of innocuous boys younger than herself, barely more than children, ‘they’re comrades. We come here together, but we split up so we can talk to more people.’

  Mateo frowned, though he was still smiling. ‘That’s even worse . . . I’d be so worried, thinking about you out on the streets with your comrades, I’d probably forget to fire and the fascists would kill me.’

  ‘Would you?’ Casilda’s eyes met his in a proud, defiant look. ‘But I’m a free woman. Since my father enlisted, I’ve been getting on just as well living on my own. I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t need some man worrying about me.’

  Mateo nodded, as though he found what she had said commendable, then kissed her on the mouth, which earned him a not very comradely slap on the face.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Cheeky bastard!’

  ‘You’ve got a good right hook,’ he shouted after her as she stalked off.

  But that had been some days before the Legión, the former monarchist forces, and before the bombs from Italian and German planes crashing down on Madrid. Some months later, when fear stalked the streets of the city almost as much as at the front, and staying alive was a miracle on both sides of the trenches, Mateo ran into her one morning in Cuatro Calles.

  ‘They still haven’t killed you?’ Casilda spoke first, smiling.

  ‘No,’ Mateo returned her smile, ‘because I wasn’t out there worrying about you . . .’

  This time, she was the one to slip her arms around his neck and kiss him on the lips with the same devotion she brought to her impromptu meetings.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said, taking his hand, and he cursed his luck before refusing.

  ‘I can’t. Not right now, honestly. I have to get back to Usera, I have a dispatch for my commander - that car over there is waiting for me . . .’ Casilda looked at the car and nodded.

  ‘Five Calle de Espoz y Mina,’ she said simply, ‘third floor, lefthand side. And try not to get yourself killed.

  That day, Mateo Fernández Muñoz did everything in his power to get a furlough, a pass, a new assignment, a new posting as an intelligence officer, but in vain. The next day and the day after that he tried again with the same results until finally he went to see the major, the only career officer fighting for the republic, who found himself leading a ragbag of strays from the unions, locals, teachers, volunteers of all stripes, and, among them, Mateo Fernández Muñoz, who had joined the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in 1935 for purely ideological reasons and who was the only person under his command who actually knew what Marxism entailed. The major had grown fond of this intelligent young man, so towards midnight, when he saw Mateo, the commander smiled. For three days, while the bewildered Mateo had been trying to get a furlough at any cost, the major had been waiting for him, and so he did not even let the lad finish the speech he had rehearsed.

  ‘So you’re telling me your mother is ill,’ he summed up, and Mateo nodded.

  ‘Yes, Major, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell me something, Fernández . . .’ The wily authoritarian, who smoked continually, and could not speak without bellowing even when he was in a good mood, raised his finger and pointed at himself. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Fernández smiled, against his better judgement.

  ‘Ah, good ! You had me worried . . .’ He took a pad from the table, filled out a permission slip, and held it in the air, brandishing it like a toffee in front of a child. ‘O K . You go wherever you have to go and get laid - just once, got it? Twice if you’re quick about it - and then get your arse back here pronto, by five a.m. If you show up at one minute past five I’ll have you court-martialled and shot as a deserter. Are we clear ?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And if we send these bastards packing and they ship us off to the godforsaken plains of Burgos, you’ll see what war is really like, when the nearest town is fifty kilometres away, and I’ll tell you something else . . .’

  But Mateo had already taken to his heels and did not hear the end of the sentence. He did not know how he would manage to be back in time, but someone offered him a lift and, after that, his luck held.

  ‘At your service, Major.’

  At 4.45 a.m., Mateo Fernández Muñoz stood to attention in front of his commanding officer, who looked at him carefully, then slapped him on the back.

  ‘Mother all better, Fernández?’

  ‘Right as rain, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Just make sure she doesn’t have a relapse.’

  After that, Mateo never again slept in the bedroom he had always shared with his brother, and Ignacio himself would move out a year and a half later. ‘So you’re leaving me too.’ His mother never resigned herself to her children leaving. ‘But where will you sleep? Now I’ll never get to see you or Mateo. I have no idea where you are or who you’re with - well, it’s a figure of speech, but listen to me, hijo, one of these days, the worry will kil
l me . . .’ As he listened to her, Ignacio laughed. ‘You’ll kill us first, Mamá,’ he said, and kissed her forehead. ‘And as long as it’s only worry, everything is all right.’ But by then nothing was all right. Things were going so badly that sometimes, in their separate beds, with different women, the brothers missed the whispered bedtime conversations, like this last one in which they told each other things they dared not say in the light of day.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘No, Mateo, I’m asleep, you can tell by the fact that I’m talking to you.’

  ‘It’s just, I wanted to ask you . . . Aren’t you afraid ?’

  ‘No.’ But what he had said sounded so strange that he had to stop a moment and think. ‘I mean yes. Yes, of course I’m afraid, but never when it matters, never when I’m fighting. I’m afraid before, and afterwards . . . when I think that I could be dead, but when the commotion starts, I see things differently, it’s as if I have eyes like a fly and can see everything at once. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’m completely detached, calm, and yet I have this rage burning inside me . . . Don’t you feel that?’

  ‘I feel the rage, but not the calm.’ Mateo smiled. ‘But I’m scared, all the time. I hold it together, so no one ever notices, and it’s true that sometimes, at the worst moment, the rage takes over. But I’m still afraid.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Ignacio lied, ‘you’ll live longer than me.’

  While his brother Mateo was fighting the war from inside a trench, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz was involved in the battles to defend Madrid and a number of other fronts. In almost every one, he received two different types of decoration: mentions, promotions or medals, and wounds. He remembered every one, he could point them out and explain how he came by them in chronological order when he was seriously wounded for the first time, in Madrid, shortly before the end of the war. His parents went to visit him at San Carlos hospital and tears welled in María Muñoz’s eyes when she saw him lying there naked, his skin a web of scars and stitches.