‘All we have to do,’ he proudly told them, ‘is gradually, very gradually, loosen two of the screws on the machine over a period of a week or so. That way the friction will grind away the axle. A few days later, when the axle snaps, a couple of us can quickly retighten the screws and that’s that.’
Ignacio and Amadeo looked at each other, astounded.
‘Don’t you get it?’ said the man, a mechanic whom two wars had converted into an expert saboteur. ‘You said we have to be careful not to get caught, OK? This way, they’ll never work out why the machine broke and the factory won’t be able to operate.’
As predicted, the axle snapped and production came to a standstill, but the mechanic could not retighten both screws at the same time and when the commandant started shouting, the lad he had told to tighten the other one froze, ashen faced. It was now Amadeo’s turn to come up with a brilliant plan.
‘We’re getting out of here tonight,’ he said to Ignacio, as they stood around the factory waiting for the repair detail to arrive, ‘tonight or the first chance we get, you, me and the guy from Pas, because that little fool is going to talk or my mother’s name is not Eusebia ...’
Years later they discovered that, while Amadeo’s mother was indeed called Eusebia, the boy had not informed. Instead, he had spent a year and a half in a German concentration camp. That day, when Amadeo pronounced his prophecy, Ignacio did not know that Eusebia’s son had already found a blind spot - a fifty-centimetre stretch of the fence hidden from view - and that for the past two months he had been planning his escape. When the engineer decided that the wear on the axle indicated that the part was defective, the men were sent to their barracks while the management decided what to do with them. But Ignacio and his co-workers had no intention of waiting for their decision. At 4 a.m., following Amadeo, they crawled through the hole he had cut in the fence with a pair of wire cutters he had slipped into his boot that afternoon, ‘just in case’.
The party said that two of them could to go to Foix using false papers that stated they were employed by a party member there and he would put them on a truck to join the resistance in the mountains; the other man would have to stay behind in Toulouse and wait for the party to devise some mission for him. Ignacio was about to say that he would stay, but the man from Pas got in before him: he was over forty and too old to be tramping through the woods with a rifle; besides, he was of no use to the resistance, his speciality was sabotage: ‘. . . and they don’t have any power stations in the mountains.’ Ignacio could think of nothing to say. Nor, as they were leaving two nights later, could he bring himself to ask the truck driver to go through the city so he could say goodbye to his parents. Had he done so, he might have seen a light on in his sisters’ room, as Anita got up to feed his son.
When she saw the child suckling at his mother’s breast, a wave of peace surged through María Muñoz. ‘Please let him be healthy,’ all day the same thought lingered in her mind, ‘please let him be healthy.’ She looked at Anita, at the girl’s slight, willowy body, and she regretted the deceitful God, the ruthless supporter of their enemies, whose name she called on so often, but to whom she no longer prayed. ‘Let him take to the breast, because if he doesn’t . . .’ Hospitals, doctors, nurses, nannies, bottles, all these things had vanished with the world she had left behind. All she could do now was trust to her grandson, believe in him. The weight he gained every day, the speed with which he outgrew his clothes, had been enough to keep María Muñoz going when she found the curious envelope from the Service for Spanish Refugees in the letterbox that morning. What could they want now? she wondered, before opening it to find a letter from Ignacio telling them that he was well, that he was living in the countryside, working in the open air and was enjoying his new job - a job just like the one he got in Madrid seven years ago, the year the autumn was so cold.
Inside the envelope was a smaller one containing a letter for Anita. She smiled when she read the greeting, the ordinary, prosaic greeting of someone who has every intention of staying alive: ‘Dear Anita . . .’ Ignacio was not as good a letter writer as his brother-in-law had been, but he could tell Anita that he loved her, that he missed her terribly, that he could not bear the thought of her looking at another man, that he loved her more than he had ever loved anyone, that he needed her to trust him, to wait for him and he would come for her as soon as he could.
‘What are you up to, Bigmouth?’ They were in Ariège now, but Ignacio still called Perea by his nom de guerre. One evening he found Perea sitting on the ground, leaning on his backpack, writing a letter.
‘What do you think? I’m writing . . .’ Perea looked up at him.
‘But how . . .?’
‘It’s like this . . .’ Aurelio held up his pencil in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other. ‘You take a pencil and a piece of paper, then you put the pencil on the paper and . . .’
‘Not that . . .’ Ignacio accepted his sarcasm with a smile. ‘I mean, how do you get the letters to your family? How do you post them?’
‘It’s hard work,’ Aurelio continued to mock him, ‘I give them the letter and they put it in an envelope, they stick a stamp on it, they give it to someone who’s going to Marseille or to Paris, and that person puts the letter in a box. I know it sounds complicated, but you’re an educated man, I’m sure you’d get the hang of it . . .’
‘What about the return address?’
‘It depends, some people make up a Spanish name or a French name . . . I pretend mine are from the Spanish Service for Refugees, it looks less suspicious, and I make up an address - rue du Pont, rue Dumas, rue de l’Opéra - whatever I can think of. We can’t write too often as the postman would get suspicious, but I write to my wife every six months or so, so that at least she knows I’m alive.’
Between February 1943 and September 1944, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz wrote to his parents three times, each time with two envelopes, one for his family, one for Anita. The first letter became shorter and shorter because, given that he could tell them nothing about what he was really doing, he only had recourse to little white lies. The second letter grew longer and longer as time passed and he was tormented by the very real possibility that Anita might meet another man, the sort of man who comes home every night. He could no longer imagine life without Anita, and tried to tell her this, but he could never find the precise words to tell her what she meant to him.
‘I think about you all the time,’ he wrote, ‘you are with me when I go to sleep every night, every morning when I wake, I think about you every minute of every day.’ And it was true. So true that he did not stop thinking about her for a single second, even on the blessed morning when he put a bullet into the head of an SS commandant - a commandant like that bastard at Albatera. The dark, violent emotion he felt as he watched the man fall was for Carlos, was for Mateo. Yet a split second later he realised that he might have been shot that night and Anita would never know. It was then that he realised that it did matter to him whether he lived or died, and he was happy that he had survived.
They had gone out to retrieve a consignment of weapons parachuted in by Allied forces, but before they got there, they had stumbled on a German patrol - who might have been bringing up the rear of a convoy, or simply have lost their way, when their truck got a puncture.
‘Maybe it’s one of our tyres,’ Amadeo whispered, but Ignacio, still unable to believe his eyes, said nothing.
‘They’re having dinner,’ said Moreno, the leader, who was from Madrid like Ignacio.
‘Jesus, you’re right,’ Ignacio said, ‘I can’t believe we’ve been so lucky.’
His compatriot shot him a look of surprise. ‘We do nothing!’ Moreno said unequivocally. ‘The orders were clear - if conditions aren’t right, there’s no drop, so we go back.’
‘Like fuck we’re going back.’
They argued in whispers, hidden by the rocks, close to the spot where the Germans had built a fire and were sitting around it. Ignacio felt the f
inger on the trigger of his rifle burning.
‘We’re going to take them,’ he said simply.
‘No,’ said Moreno.
‘Yes.’
‘Do I have to remind you I’m in charge?’
‘You’re in charge?’ Ignacio Fernández Muñoz shot Moreno such a withering look that no one dared to break the electric silence that followed. ‘I’m in charge, because I’m a captain and you, you’re a puny little sergeant who still pisses his pants.’
Then, without waiting for a response, he turned to ‘his men’: Aurelio, Amadeo, Nicolás ‘The Confectioner’ from Reus, and Salvador - ‘The Kid’ - who came from somewhere near Orihuela.
‘We’re going to take them because even though we’re outnumbered, we’ve got cover and they’re in the open, got it?’ He waited until they nodded. ‘It’s going to be like shooting ducks in a fairground, but we have to take it slowly, line up the shots, divvy up the targets, and no one is to fire until I give the order . . .’
‘What did you say you did ?’
When they got to the farm where the local leaders of the Maquis were waiting, they were met by a line of resolutely bewildered faces rather than with the praise they were expecting.
‘Eleven dead, two prisoners,’ Ignacio repeated, slowly, in French, ‘and we took the truck with the weapons and ammunition, two motorcycles and a tank. There was a jeep too, but we had to leave it behind because there were only six of us, so there was no one to drive it.’
‘A tank?’ one of the Frenchmen repeated, and Perea, who saw where this was heading, became nervous. ‘And how did you get it here?’
‘We took the road.’ Ignacio was growing tired of what seemed like pointless questions.
The Maquis explained that this was not how things were done here, they did not take prisoners, that a tank was useless to them and they would have to destroy it. Ignacio had been expecting this, but Amadeo had been so excited when he set eyes on the tank - ‘Look, Bigmouth, there’s a donkey for you to ride back to your village!’ - that Ignacio had quickly given in to him. ‘Aw, Lawyer, do we have to blow it up? It’s so pretty,’ Amadeo had said, stroking the tank, ‘And it’s brand new, look, it’s like it’s been waiting for me. Let’s take it, it’s three o’clock in the morning and it’s only a couple of kilometres from here to the track. Who’s going to see us?’
‘It was reckless, I admit that,’ Ignacio said, ‘but you don’t win a war without being reckless.’
Ignacio’s brashness did little to convince the French, but Bigmouth’s outburst, hurling himself at one of them when he realised they intended to take away his donkey, proved more effective: ‘What do you mean, destroy it? You’re not destroying my tank, got that?’ He lifted the man off the ground, and went on screaming, oblivious to the fact that his victim did not understood a word he was saying. ‘I’m crossing the border in this tank, got that?’
That morning, Aurelio Perea drove the tank down the track, back to the camp where their waiting comrades gave them the welcome that would be immortalised the following day with a photograph. Moreno, deeply offended, refused to pose for the photo but they quickly lost sight of him on the afternoon they were summoned back to the farm, where they were met by a man dressed as a farm labourer, a senior French officer they had never met before. ‘Are you the tank guys?’ he asked, addressing them in Spanish. When they told him they were, he smiled and suggested that they join the French troops. ‘I get the impression your talents are underused here.’ ‘About time,’ Aurelio exclaimed; he was as bored as the others with being a messenger boy. Ignacio laughed, delighted at this sudden reversal of fortune, but as he laughed he thought about the risk he would be taking, about Anita.
On a morning in September 1944, as Ignacio looked up and down the station platform and did not see her, he wondered why he had left behind the carousing and the marches, the celebrations of the Liberation, to come back to Toulouse. He had sent her a telegram, so that she would know he was coming home for her, so that she would not feel like an outsider, coming to meet him at the station with his family. The telegram had obviously arrived because his family were there - his father, his mother and María, pregnant with a man on her arm. Everyone except Paloma, who was probably working, he thought. Everyone except Anita.
‘Ignacio!’ his father called to him, waving his hat. But Ignacio did not budge: Papá, Mamá, María, María’s boyfriend, no Anita. No Anita.
‘Hijo mío!’ His mother rushed over and threw her arms around him, but all she got was a perfunctory hug, a cold stare and a barrage of questions.
‘What about Anita? Where is she? Has something happened?’
‘No, she’s fine, she’s at home.’ María Muñoz smiled.
‘Why? Why didn’t she come to meet me?’ he persisted.
‘There have been a few changes, hijo, you’ll see . . .’
‘Is she married?’ His sister threw her arms around him, and tried to introduce the man with her. ‘Tell me, Mamá! Did she marry someone else?’
‘Of course not, what are you talking about? She’s waiting for you at home . . .’
‘I’m the one who got married,’ his sister interrupted. ‘This is my husband. Francisco, this is my brother Ignacio. Francisco is from Sonseca, near Toledo, you know, the village where they make the marzipan.’
‘Really?’ Ignacio shook the man’s hand, so confused that it took him a moment to remember what marzipan was. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
The newlyweds said goodbye as they left the station, leaving Ignacio with his parents: ‘What did you think of Francisco? María worships him, we’ve know him for about a year and a half. He was besotted with Paloma, but then he fell in love with María. He’s a nice lad, well brought up, a good worker. She got pregnant straight away, she’s five months gone. We’re hoping for a little girl.’ They bombarded him with facts and questions, but they were nearing home now, and a few minutes later the taxi dropped them outside the door.
‘Listen, Ignacio, before we go in . . .’ María Muñoz took her son’s hands in hers and looked into his eyes as her husband fumbled with his keys. ‘Only one good thing has happened to us since we left Spain, try to remember that, one good thing . . .’
‘María!’ From the hall, Mateo Fernández shot his wife an outraged look.
‘What?’ she protested. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to my son?’
‘No, you’re not. Because your son is a grown man, and more than capable of making his own decisions. He doesn’t need your advice, let alone your blackmail.’
‘Mamá, what the hell is going on?’ the grown man exploded. ‘For fuck sake, will someone tell me what this is about?’
‘Ignacio, I won’t have you talk like that!’
Arriving on the landing, Ignacio noticed that the door was open. Paloma, who had heard the raised voices, was standing in the doorway, smiling, and in her arms she cradled a baby, almost a toddler, with dark hair and protruding ears, and huge, dark, mournful eyes, just like Anita’s, he thought, still not putting two and two together.
‘This is your son, Ignacio,’ Mateo pronounced, his tone neutral.
‘He looks just like you, don’t you think?’ The baby’s grandmother reached out and her grandson clambered into her arms, gurgling and laughing, revealing a gap between his front teeth just like the one Ignacio Fernández Muñoz saw every time he looked in the mirror. ‘His hair is dark like his mother’s, but otherwise he’s the spitting image of you . . .’
Ignacio said nothing; he looked from the child to his mother, then to his father, to his sister Paloma and then back to the baby. But we were careful, we were always careful . . . except maybe once or twice at the end, he thought.
‘Here!’ Ignacio’s mother handed him his son, but the boy struggled out of her arms and ran to Paloma.
‘But this is Papá!’ Paloma explained. ‘You know. You can even say Papá, can’t you? Go on, let him hear you say it: Papá . . . papá. ’ The child had no intention of saying anything and
his aunt laughed. ‘He’s completely spoiled, of course . . .’
It took some time for Ignacio to react, and in that hiatus, his son’s curiosity overcame his surprise; he struggled until Paloma set him down, warily came closer, and clung to Ignacio’s trousers.
‘Soldier,’ he said. This was the first word Ignacio Fernández Muñoz heard his son say.
‘Where’s Mamá?’ Ignacio asked the boy.
‘Mamá,’ the child repeated confidently. He dashed off down the hall and his father went after him, only to come back when he realised he was missing a vital piece of information.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Ignacio!’ they chorused. And his mother added, ‘After you.’
As he followed his son down the short hallway to the kitchen, all the emotions he had been suppressing since he stepped into the apartment suddenly thrilled through him. In his astonishment, he felt Anita’s shock, the distress and worry she must have felt at discovering she was pregnant, also her fear, her determination and her strength. He almost laughed to think of all the nights he had spent reimagining her slender figure - she probably looked nothing like that now. And yet, as he stepped into the kitchen, the woman waiting for him seemed to have been frozen in time; she sat calmly with her back to the stove as though waiting for her son to tug at her skirt before moving. In a clear voice, the child announced:
‘Papá.’ Only then did Anita Salgado Pérez pick up a dishcloth and take the casserole from the oven; she wiped her hands, then turned and looked at him. He saw that she was much more beautiful, more real, more desirable, than he remembered. And he felt at once utterly naked and utterly safe, felt that he was finally home.
The Frozen Heart Page 50