‘Tomorrow, I want you to buy me four exercise books. Two ruled, and two with little squares, the ones the French children use at school. Ask one of my sisters to go with you, they’ll know.’ He waited a moment for a question that did not come. ‘I’m going to teach you to read and write.’
‘No.’ She looked away as she spoke, as though offended by his words.
‘Yes,’ he insisted gently.
‘No. What for ? I can read a bit already. Your mother is teaching me, and anyway, I can get by . . .’
‘You can’t get by, Anita.’ Ignacio did not let her go on. ‘Nobody can. You have to learn and I can teach you, I taught so many soldiers that I know the lessons by heart. Mamá is very busy but I don’t have anything to do in the mornings. It’s much easier than you think, and besides . . .’ he put his arms around her and hugged her to his chest as though he did not want to look at her ‘. . . I don’t know how much longer I can stay around here. Sooner or later, someone is bound to see me, to ask questions . . . That’s how it goes. We’re in an occupied country in the middle of a war, everyone has their own problems, something they need in exchange for informing on a fugitive. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Anita. If you don’t want to learn for your own sake, do it for mine. That way, when I have to leave, at least I’ll know I’ve done something for you.’
‘You’ve done so much already!’ she protested, breaking free of his embrace.
The next day, she came back with four exercise books.
‘What about your homework?’ Ignacio would ask her the same question every night and Anita would shrug and smile. ‘I didn’t have time to do it.’ ‘Really? And why not?’ He would feign surprise. ‘It’s just that I have this boyfriend who takes up all my time,’ she would say, and they would both laugh. Then they would sit together at the kitchen table, the pupil tracing lines and curves, the teacher watching her, a smile playing on his lips.
She learned quickly, because she was learning from Ignacio, for Ignacio. She did her best to please him, especially now that he had marked out their future with the terrible words ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stay around here’, words that exploded in her mind like gunshots. So began the countdown, and as it slipped away time became something precious, the most valuable thing that Anita Salgado Pérez had ever possessed. Never, not even on the day she had robbed the dying woman, had Anita felt anything like the terrible dread that choked her every evening as she slipped her key into the lock. Never, not even when she was a child living in a village surrounded by mountains, had Anita felt anything like the joy that melted her heart when she saw him leaning against the stove and he said: ‘What about your homework?’
She no longer spoke to him in words. If they were alone in the kitchen, she would throw herself into his arms, and if they were not alone, she would find some excuse to push him into the pantry so that she could hug him until her arms were tired. Then she would sit next to him at the kitchen table, reading the words aloud as he ran his finger underneath: ‘A-ni-ta is a lit-tle ap-ple’. She had never been so happy, and it hurt her, because her happiness no longer had anything to do with love letters, fine words or romantic notions about renegade soldiers. It was something bigger, something deeper than that, so powerful, so painful that it would wake her in the night with a jolt like a premonition of death. And when she saw him sleeping next to her, she would think: ‘Tomorrow, he might not be here, tomorrow I might be all alone in this bed . . .’
Until one fine evening in June, she did not find him waiting in the kitchen. No one asked about her homework, no one was waiting for her, only the exercise books lying open on the kitchen table with the words ‘Before p and b there is always an m . . . ’ and beneath it, in the space where in awkward, hesitant pencil she was to write an example, was an unexpected phrase in an elegant, cursive script, ‘I love you, Anita’, and his signature, just his first name, Ignacio. Then, before she had managed to decipher the phrase, the fugitive’s mother came in from the dining room and told what had happened:
‘He’s gone. He had to go . . . The downstairs neighbour, Madame Larronde, well, she came to see me this morning to warn me that her brother-in-law was planning to turn him in. With these windows on to the courtyard, everyone sees everything that goes on . . .
‘Oh God.’ Anita’s eyes widened and she brought her hand to her mouth.
‘I told him not to go, I said we would go and see this man together, offer him money, but he wouldn’t stay, he said he wasn’t prepared to put us at risk . . .’
María Muñoz said no more, preferring to spare Anita her son’s actual words, the dread that she would carry alone until the war was over. ‘It’s too dangerous, Mamá, for you but for me too,’ was what Ignacio had said. ‘If I go now, I can turn myself in voluntarily. I’ll be arrested, they’ll put me in solitary for a while, and then they’ll send me back to work. But if I’m caught by the Vichy regime, they’ll deport me to Germany and the Nazis will put me in a concentration camp. Don’t worry, Mamá, I knew this would happen some day and I know what I have to do . . .’
María Muñoz did not tell Anita this part of the story because she had stayed with him until the last, had seen him go into the pantry and reappear with the exercise book, seen him write something in it and place it on the table before leaving. He had barely reached the stairs when he came back to ask her one last favour: ‘Look after Anita for me, Mamá,’ he said, taking her in his arms and kissing her. This was why María Muñoz said no more but simply watched Anita silently, helplessly, realising she could do nothing to help her. Only Paloma knew what to do; something of her old compassion came back to her that night. Everyone was asleep except Anita. She had refused to leave the kitchen table, and was still sitting there, the exercise book in front of her, staring lifelessly ahead, when Paloma came and, over Ignacio’s words, placed a photograph that Anita had never seen.
‘Look,’ she nodded to the golden image, ‘it’s a picture of the family on my wedding day. In those days - eight years ago now - there were three young men, see them? This one . . .’ she stroked her husband’s face with her finger ‘. . . they took from me, they murdered him. This one . . .’ she pointed to her brother Mateo, almost as elegant as the groom in a tailcoat, a white gardenia in his buttonhole ‘. . . they murdered him too. This one . . .’ her finger stopped over Ignacio, a gangling boy, his legs disproportionately long for his height ‘. . . this one is not going to die. This one is going to live. Because they can’t kill all three of them. It’s what in mathematics they call the balance of probabilities.’ At last, Anita raised her head and looked at Paloma. ‘When you’ve finished this book, ask my brother to teach you maths.’
Anita smiled at Paloma, then gazed at the faces of the Fernández Muñoz family, happy and flourishing, a side of the family she had never seen - the parents much younger than she could ever imagine, Mateo with his long hair and his moustache, María, elegant, wearing rings on her fingers, bracelets and necklaces. She smiled at the bride and groom, Paloma, startlingly beautiful, and her husband, happy, as though no one knew better than he how lucky he was.
‘Can I keep the photo?’ she asked Paloma.
‘OK, but just for tonight, you can give it back tomorrow,’ Paloma said, kissing the top of Anita’s head.
Anita waited until she was alone again before looking down once more at this boy of sixteen who looked so young that it felt as though she remembered him at that age. ‘I wonder where you are now?’ She felt a spasm of loneliness. ‘Where are you, Ignacio, where are you?’
Ignacio was in the basement of a barracks, in a makeshift cell, and he was reasonably happy, for everything had gone according to plan. He had made his way back to the tyre factory without incident, checked that his work detail was still there, he even had time to hug Amadeo, the Asturian labourer he had entrusted his political responsibilities to, before turning himself in to the manager.
‘Where the hell have you been, macho?’ Amadeo asked in his si
ng-song voice. ‘You look like you’ve spent two years in a spa . . .’
‘I’ll tell you later.’ Ignacio smiled. ‘How are things here?’
‘Obviously not as good as wherever you’ve been, but they’re much the same as ever.’ Amadeo laughed.
This meant that the boss was still the same commandant who was prepared to do anything for a quiet life and who, although he was part of the regime, felt no undue affinity with the policies of the Vichy government. This, perhaps, was why he had never sent a prisoner in his charge to almost certain death in the German concentration camps, and Ignacio proved no exception. ‘Ah, the Spanish!’ he marvelled, having heard Ignacio out. ‘What did the French ever do to deserve such neighbours?’ Ignacio could have answered the question, but did not, and was rewarded for his silence by being sent to the makeshift cell in the basement. And here, where once he had felt helpless, he realised that Anita was still with him, and never again would he feel as lonely as before.
He had an advantage over her in that he knew her daily routine, could picture her in specific places surrounded by faces he knew. He knew the cup she always used at breakfast, the order in which she took off her clothes, the foods she liked, the way she washed her hair in the kitchen sink. Each day in the cell was the same for him, but he would wake up and think of Anita waking up, before he fell asleep he imagined Anita sleeping, and this image gave his time purpose and meaning.
Had he been able to see Anita, Ignacio would have been happier still, and intensely proud of her. She flushed the toxin of self-pity from her system so quickly that the day after Ignacio’s departure, she got out her exercise books, sat at the kitchen table and announced: ‘I’m doing my homework.’ Then she drew a box around the last sentence he had written, and in the space remaining she copied out five times ‘Before p and b there is always an m . . .’, then, on the facing page, she copied out the words: ‘empire’, ‘combat’, ‘embolism’, ‘compass’, ‘camp’, ‘tombs’, ‘sombre’. ‘Before p and b there is always an m . . . I love you, Anita.’ This was the first sentence that she wrote when she finally reached the blank pages at the back of the exercise book, before copying out the simple sentences he had written to help her learn to read: ‘Anita is a little apple, Anita is as stubborn as a mule, I am mad about Anita, I am going to eat you up with kisses. Time to stop reading and come to bed’. By the time she had copied out all the sentences, she realised she was getting fat.
She was getting fat, but she tried not to think about it. At first, she did not worry because she felt fine, she had a good appetite, she slept well, never felt like vomiting. Her older sister had always realised she was pregnant when her morning coffee made her feel nauseous. Anita could not remember the last time she had drunk coffee, but the repulsive cereal she had with milk every morning still tasted the same. As for her periods, everyone knows girls sometimes miss their periods when they’re worried or upset. But her waistline refused to accept this, it ballooned, and her breasts ballooned, and Anita found it increasingly difficult to button her shirt in the morning, until one day it would not close at all. That afternoon, Anita sat on the bed in the little pantry and cried.
‘What’s the matter, hija mía?’ María Muñoz asked, stepping into the little room, her voice tremulous with panic. ‘Have you had bad news, have you heard something?’
‘No, it’s not that.’
‘Thank God.’ María ran her hands over her face. ‘Thank God ... But, then, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’ Anita managed to go on talking, though she could not bring herself to look at María. ‘I was thinking . . . Well, you’ve always had bad luck with Ignacio, haven’t you?’
‘Bad luck? No, I wouldn’t say that . . . what do you mean?’
‘I don’t know . . . Back in Madrid, with that woman he was seeing, the one who was always so rude . . .’ Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at Ignacio’s mother, who still seemed puzzled. ‘And now, here, with me.’
‘With you?’ María Muñoz thought Anita was trying to tell her about a relationship which everyone in the house had known about since the beginning; ‘But I love you very much, Anita, truly I do. Don’t worry, I never thought you were anything like that woman.’
‘But I am like her, María . . . I am, because . . . But don’t worry, I’ll leave . . . I’ll take my things and go back to the boarding house . . .’ Seeing María’s worried expression, the same look she might have given her own daughters, Anita realised the woman still did not understand. ‘After the baby is born, I mean . . .’
María Muñoz stared at the girl, then buried her face in her hands and rocked back and forth on the bed.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said Anita, not quite sure what was happening. ‘Honestly, I’ll leave, I can’t stay here, I’d die of shame . . .’
‘Dear oh dear.’ Her future mother-in-law removed her hands from her face and Anita saw that she was smiling through her tears. She took Anita in her arms and said the only words that Anita had not expected to hear: ‘What do you mean, you’ll leave? Don’t be silly, you can’t leave, you have other things to think about - you need to eat properly, get lots of sleep, a little exercise ... Oh, Anita!’ María held the girl at arm’s length, then hugged her again. ‘I’m so happy, honestly, I’m so happy.’
When Ignacio’s mother emerged from the pantry, she wanted to believe that this news could mean only one thing. Things were beginning to change. They were finally beginning to improve. She was so sure, so happy, that when her husband put his head in his hands when she told him the wonderful news, it did not trouble her.
‘Have you gone mad, woman?’ He stared at her like a father scolding a child. ‘What’s done is done, I accept that, but for you to be happy about it . . . I mean, honestly, María, this is all we need!’
‘Yes, Mateo, you’re right,’ María said. ‘This is exactly what we need. You’re right, I’m mad. They murdered my twenty-three-year-old son, my daughter is a widow at the age of twenty-four, I have a grandson in Madrid I’ve never seen, a grandson I might die without seeing . . .’ At this thought, she paused, saddened, then went on: ‘Of course I’m mad, what woman would not be in my place? But if you want to know the truth, I don’t care . . . So what if they’re not married ? So what if Ignacio doesn’t know he’s going to be a father ? It’s hardly our fault, and besides . . . So what if Anita’s father is a forester and the girl is illiterate . . .’
‘No, I’m not saying that, but . . .’ her husband tried to interrupt her.
‘But what?’ She cut him off, before realising that it was not her husband she was arguing with. ‘I’m not the same woman I was, Mateo. I’m not wrong as often as I used to be. The only thing that matters to me right now is my grandson, your grandson, and his mother. Nothing else. I can’t go on losing my family, burying the people that I love, I can’t bear to think that I might have another grandson I might never know. Don’t you understand?’
Mateo Fernández was looking at his wife rather differently now; she noticed this and went on, her tone gentler.
‘This is madness, I’m not saying it isn’t, we’re living in a foreign country, we have no money, there’s a war on, I know all that. But it’s also an opportunity, Mateo. Think about it. It’s a new beginning.’
As he considered what he might say, Mateo took the last of the French francs he had brought with him to Toulouse from the back of a drawer, and he gave the money to his wife. During dinner, he gazed at the girl who was to be the mother of his grandchild and smiled.
‘Do something for me, Anita, give us a little boy,’ he said. ‘There are too many women in this house already.’
‘I’d rather have a girl,’ she said, ‘on account of the balance of probabilities . . .’
‘Don’t be silly, woman.’ Paloma laughed, and the family realised that they had not seen her laugh for a long time. ‘Probability has nothing to do with it.’
It was a boy and he was born in January 1943, two weeks before his father m
anaged to escape for the second time, the last time, from the tyre factory where, every night while Anita was pregnant, he dreamed that she was by his side. As his son began to distend the soft, pale, adolescent belly that he could still see when he closed his eyes, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz discovered a new channel for his daring: all the energy he had previously put into escapes, he now devoted to sabotage. The Nazi occupation of Vichy France heralded a change, something which affected even the commandant in charge of the factory, who was relieved of his duties when he proved incapable of putting a stop to the constant disruptions to production at a difficult time for the German Army. This was not his fault, though it was true that screwdrivers began to slip mysteriously from the hands of the foreign workers and an equally mysterious hearing problem began to afflict the men.
‘I’ve dropped my screwdriver,’ Ignacio would hear someone shout in Spanish, the time prearranged in advance.
‘What?’ Ignacio would bring his hand up to his ear.
‘I’ve dropped my screwdriver,’ the man would say, not raising his voice while the others chuckled silently.
‘Turn the machine off before it fucks up!’
‘What?’ The man would point to his ears. ‘I can’t hear you . . .’
The machine would seize up, the commandant would be livid, whoever was responsible would be sent to the cells, Ignacio and Amadeo with them, even if they had not been directly involved, and the supply of tyres for the German Army would dry up again. They did not care about the punishment. They all remembered the story of the German bomb that fell behind republican lines in Guadalajara and failed to explode. The terrified artillery man sent to deactivate it found a message in rudimentary but intelligible Spanish inside: ‘Comrades, my bombs they do not explode’. Some unknown German workman had felt that the civil war was also his war, just as this war was also theirs. They did not care about the punishment, until the new commandant arrived. He increased the severity of the punishments, put supervisors on the factory floor, and when he realised that even this was not enough, he declared that any saboteur would immediately be turned over to the occupying forces. The threat did not make them stop, but they had to be more careful. Luckily, a comrade from the Pas Valley was about to discover a foolproof way to disable the factory permanently.
The Frozen Heart Page 49