On that afternoon in August 1939, when Paloma Fernández Muñoz had found Anita crying on the kerb outside the boulangerie where they both worked, she barely knew her. And yet, that afternoon, she sat down beside her, put her arms around her, and comforted her like the little girl she still was. It seemed to Paloma that she had never seen anyone cry with such abandon, had never seen anyone so utterly vulnerable. Paloma had not yet received Carlos’s letter, she had had no news of him, and every evening, as she stepped into the building, she closed her eyes for a moment to calm herself, even as she savoured the thought of stepping into the apartment and finding him sitting on the sofa chatting to her parents, telling them all the details of his escape.
And so she comforted Anita, took her into the boulangerie and suggested that the girl tell her, slowly, what was the matter. Anita did as she was told, she told Paloma everything. She was fifteen years old and from a village near Teruel. The fascists had murdered her father before the republicans routed them. She and her older sister had fled with their mother to Barcelona as soon as the army retreated. They had been forced to leave her sister behind in a village near Gerona because she was suffering from tuberculosis and could not walk any more. Broken-hearted at having abandoned her daughter, her mother sickened. After they crossed the French border, they spent four months in a refugee camp, but by June her mother was so ill that permission was given for her to be transferred to the hospital here in Toulouse. Now the doctors said there was nothing more they could do and that her mother had to leave because they needed the bed, but she couldn’t bring her mother back to the hostel where she was staying, because they slept eight to a room and Anita didn’t make enough money to pay for a room somewhere else and now she didn’t know what to do, her mother was dying, she couldn’t leave her out on the street.
‘The only thing I can think of is to kill her. Kill her and then kill myself,’ she said with such determination that it was frightening.
Paloma sat in silence, looking at the girl, finding it hard to accept this story, which seemed too cruel, too strange, too pitiful to be true, especially for a girl of fifteen. Paloma did not doubt the girl for an instant, but simply thought: What have we done? What have we done to deserve tragedies such as this? What did she ever do to deserve a fate so cruel, so overwhelming? Back then, she still had the courage to ask herself such questions, but she never found an answer.
‘I have to go to the hospital,’ Anita said, ‘it’s visiting hours.’
‘OK, you go, but come back here and find me afterwards.’
Paloma already knew what she had to do. That night, she took Anita home with her and coaxed her into telling her story again. She saw her mother glance at her father. He nodded.
‘Listen,’ said María, ‘we don’t have much room here, there are four of us and only two small bedrooms, but there’s a long narrow room next to the kitchen, a pantry, with a window on to the courtyard. If you like, we can clear it out, and put a bed in there. There won’t be room for much more than that, but at least your mother will get a bit of peace, and we can help you take care of her. I give singing lessons here, so I don’t need to go out, that way if anything happens while you’re at work . . . What I don’t know is where you’re going to sleep, although . . .’
María Muñoz did not manage to finish the sentence. Before she could give the girl the choice between the small sofa in the tiny space they called the living room or a mattress on the kitchen floor next to the cooker, Anita Salgado grasped her hands and tried to kiss them.
‘No, hija, no, there’s no need . . . We’re all in the same boat. This time we’re helping you out, but maybe later you’ll be the one helping us.’
Long before the day Ignacio came home, Anita had become another daughter to Mateo Fernández and María Muñoz and she lived with them after her mother died. Two days after the funeral, as she was cleaning the kitchen, she heard a howl of pain and a dull thud as though something had fallen out of a cupboard. She dashed out and found Paloma kneeling in the hallway amid a crumpled mass of pages, beating the tiled floor with her fists.
Paloma’s parents were out that night and María was visiting a friend, so the two girls were alone in the apartment. Anita guessed what had happened, she had been expecting it, and she stood there, paralysed, not knowing what to do. She knew that the first thing was to help Paloma to her feet, and this she did. She dragged her to the nearest chair, then picked up the pages, which were still scattered on the floor, long paragraphs in small, elegant handwriting, a man’s handwriting, Anita thought, though she did not know how to read. María explained to her later that it was a letter from Paloma’s husband, and did not begin, Dear Paloma, as she had expected, but My Love, and then The Toad has turned me in. But this she discovered only after she had tended to Paloma, had comforted and supported her until the others came home. And that night, without asking permission, she took the mattress on which her mother had died from the pantry and put her own mattress in its place. It was her way of drawing a line under her own grief to make space for the grieving widow.
Anita Salgado Pérez may not have known how to read or write, but in September 1939, at almost sixteen, she was an intelligent girl. So when María read the letter aloud for the first time, she learned by heart many of the passages Carlos Rodríguez Arce had written from his prison cell. When they shoot me, I’ll shout ¡Viva la República! like everyone else, but that will not be what I am thinking, when they kill me I will be thinking ‘I love Paloma’ . . . It’s so beautiful, Anita thought, and she felt like crying. I have loved you with all my strength, I love you still with everything I am, that is how much I love you, remember that and forget me . . . Oh my God, she thought, what it must be like to have someone write such things, how terrible and sad but how wonderful . . . The condemned man begged his wife to live on without him, to meet someone else; if he can offer you only a tenth of the love I have for you, my darling, and half the happiness that I have known with you . . . and Anita would fall asleep, still thinking of the exquisite gentleness of his words and the appalling death that had put an end to such a passion.
Some three years later, in the first days of the summer of 1942, she would receive her own love letter, a provisional goodbye, less dramatic and much briefer, but one that she would be able to read for herself. Before p and b there is always an m . . . A Spanish refrain used to teach children spelling, it said at the top of the page, and underneath, hurriedly scrawled, ‘I love you, Anita’. Then she would be the one to cry, to despair, to learn for herself the true cost of beautiful things.
‘If you want, you can sleep in my bed,’ she said to him, that first night, when he was still a stranger. ‘Honestly. I’m only little, I can easily sleep on the sofa.’
‘No, that’s all right.’ Ignacio smiled. He had just washed and shaved and was wearing a pair of his old pyjamas. ‘I’m used to sleeping on the ground, so I’ll be happy with a mattress. Mamá told me you know where there might be one.’
‘Of course, I’ll get it for you. Where do you want me to put it?’
Ignacio Fernández Muñoz looked at Anita Salgado Pérez and was astonished to discover how much he enjoyed looking at her, as she stood there, barefoot, in a plain white nightgown and María’s old silk dressing gown embroidered with Chinese dragons. Trying to understand his gaze, she brought her hand up and took the last pin from her chignon so that her dark, wavy hair fell in elegant confusion about her shoulders.
‘Where would you put it?’ he asked, revelling in the sight, which warmed him.
‘I’d put it here, it’s warmer.’ She glanced towards the stove.
He simply nodded, and Anita made up his bed where she had once slept herself. Then she watched him get into bed and smiled to see him wriggle against the coarse wool mattress.
‘Are you comfortable?’
‘Yes,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘Actually, no. I’m not. It’s been years since I’ve slept on a mattress, or washed with hot water or worn pyjamas . . .
You can’t imagine how many times I’ve dreamed of sleeping in a real bed, with clean sheets and a pillow, but now I’m here, the bed feels too soft. That’s life, I suppose . . .’
The next morning, when Anita got up, Ignacio was sleeping with the placid abandon of a child while his younger sister, the other early riser in the family, watched him with a childlike smile. They ate breakfast quietly, standing up, so as not to wake him while María told Anita stories about her brother. Anita thought of them all day, could still hear them in her head that night when they were alone together in the kitchen and he told her he was not tired.
‘Oh, all right . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘Well, if you’re not tired, would it bother you if I washed my hair ? It’s just that it’s so long, I can’t do it in the washbasin, and the sink here is much bigger.’
He shook his head. It did not bother him, because he did not yet know how much it would bother him. He sat on one of the chairs, poured himself a glass of his father’s terrible wine, lit a cigarette and watched her.
‘Jesus, it’s been years since I’ve had a glass of wine . . .’ he said, as though to himself, but he saw her turn and noticed the flash of pity in her expression; he yielded to the playful urge to carry on. ‘It’s been years since I’ve had two cigarettes one after the other.’
Anita, for her part, slowly took out her hairpins, her arms stretched above her head, until her curls tumbled down on to her shoulders. Then, without saying anything, she poured the pan of hot water she had waiting into the sink, turned on the tap so it would not be too hot and tested the temperature with her hand. When she was happy with it, she tossed her hair forward and plunged her face into the water, leaving her neck bare.
Ignacio said nothing as he watched her; he would not have known what to say, other than it had been years since he had seen anything so beautiful. He could have stood watching this scene for the rest of his life, for it would have taken a lifetime to truly appreciate her grace, the harmony of her movements, the quiet beauty that belonged to a time of peace and joy, of serenity and pleasure, that spoke of a time when happiness and reason, faith and love were possible. It was an image that distilled everything he had lost, everything that he found again in that instant.
Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised the transformation. He felt a strange burning in his eyelids, the pale throbbing of his new skin, he relived the colours and the smells, the dizzying sounds of Madrid, which he thought he would never know again, and he suddenly felt alive once more, alive and aware. Then Anita wrung out her hair, piled it on top of her head, twisted the towel into a makeshift turban and turned to look at him. He gazed at her glistening skin, the white fabric like a translucent veil against her taut, firm breasts, the dark nipples, and for the first time in many years he felt capable of suffering.
‘All right, well . . . I’ll leave you in peace . . .’ She saw the deep, intense, almost fierce look in Ignacio’s eyes and suddenly she plucked her nightdress away from her skin as though only now aware how naked she seemed, or as though she regretted her innocent, but not entirely unconscious, flirtation.
‘Good night.’
He nodded, but as she passed him, he could not stop himself from reaching out and grasping her nightdress. His right hand clutched it for only an instant, and she simply stood, motionless beside him. She was trembling. When he noticed this, he let go.
‘Good night,’ he said at length.
Anita went into the pantry and closed the door without looking back, and when they saw each other the next day, they said good morning as though nothing had happened.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine. It’s been years since I’ve had a lie-in.’
She laughed, and after that it became a game between them. It’s been years since I read a book, it’s been years since I’ve eaten so well, used a fountain pen, played chess, done a crossword. Anita listened and smiled at him, she woke up and went to bed with these words in her head and no longer thought about Carlos Rodríguez Arce’s letter.
‘There’s one thing you never talk about, Ignacio . . .’
It was she who dared, hoping to draw the one confession which, calculatedly, he had withheld.
‘What’s that?’ Sitting on the mattress, his back pressed against the warm stove, he saw her cheeks flush.
‘How many years has it been since . . .? You know.’
‘No,’ he said, laughing, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well . . .’ Blushing furiously now, Anita lowered her eyes. ‘Your mother told me that you had an affair, back in Madrid, with an old married woman . . .’
‘My mother didn’t like her, but she was wonderful, she had red hair and she was very beautiful. And very generous, too.’ He glanced at her. ‘She taught me a lot of things. And she was thirty, she wasn’t old.’
‘Maybe, but she’s still older, I mean, you’re only twenty-four now, aren’t you?’ He nodded. ‘That’s the one thing you never talk about . . . It.’
‘It?’
‘For God’s sake, Ignacio.’ She pounded her fists against the mattress, then squeezed the words out in a rush of breath: ‘How many years has it been since you’ve been with a woman?’
He put a finger under her chin, lifted her head and looked into her eyes, and he found her so beautiful, so young, so genuine, so worthy of being loved and protected, that he realised he would not lie to her, even if he did not tell her the truth. Because if Anita was a lady, the prostitutes in the brothel at Barcarès were not. Twice, Ignacio had turned on his heel at the very sight of them, until on the third and last time he allowed himself to be dragged along, Roque had pushed him through the doorway. These scrawny creatures were paid with the coal they had managed to filch over the course of a month while working in the mines. Now that he was alive again, these creatures did not count, because the man who had been with them was not him, but a corpse. That man no longer existed, had never been more than an empty shell. And so he did not mention this, he wiped it from his memory and confidently gave her a genuine response, the only response that Anita Salgado Pérez wanted to hear.
‘Three years. Not since 27 February 1939. Three years, one month and two days . . .’ He glanced at the clock on the wall opposite. ‘. . . three days, now.’
‘That’s a long time,’ she whispered.
‘Yes.’ He pressed his index finger to her forehead, gently drew it along her face, as though to brush away a lock of hair, then stroked her earlobe. ‘A very long time.’
Anita lowered her face again, relaxed her shoulders, curled up as though she needed time to think. He withdrew his hand and watched her from a distance, but she straightened up, closing the distance between them.
‘I’ve never been with a man . . . But I have a fiancé here in France.’ Ignacio nodded wordlessly. ‘Well, he’s not my fiancé exactly, more of a boyfriend . . .’ They were now so close that Ignacio’s nose was almost touching hers. ‘I don’t know . . . French woman aren’t like us, they’re much more brazen, and I don’t want him to think . . .’
‘What?’
She did not answer, but when he kissed her, she parted her lips.
‘And that night, Samson fell and with him all the Philistines’ was how, years later, Anita summed it up. ‘Why do you say that?’ Her husband laughed. ‘I don’t know, it’s something my grandmother used to say . . .’ And yet that was what that magnificent night had been for her, Samson falling with all the Philistines, and Anita Salgado Pérez, as much a dreamer at eighteen as she had been at fifteen, would not have settled for less, a soldier, a fugitive who had been waiting three years for her, on a cramped, narrow bed in the pantry, in an alien city in an alien land.
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 dra
w 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.
The Frozen Heart Page 48