The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  Whereas in 1941 there had been rage and hostility in the voices now there was only fear. Where in 1941 there had been fear, there was now something else. The people of Madrid might not notice it, but he had been away for six years and he had returned to a city that had been beaten into submission, a city inhabited by stiff bodies and silence, where a wide corridor opened up before any uniform even on the most crowded pavements, because the moment they saw a policeman or a soldier, civilians - of whom there were more women than men - stepped back as though they had received an electric shock. Here in the centre of the city, he could see no sign of poverty, but, like the fear, he could smell it in the distance. This was his country, and yet it reminded him of a different, far-off country. Here, mingled with the smells of his childhood and his heady, passionate youth, Julio Carrión González could smell Riga, and he realised that his country was not calm, it was caged, it was an occupied territory where there were no victors, only masters. Others might have pondered this, but Julio did not need to - he realised that he found himself in a paradise for impostors, usurers and opportunists. A place where he might thrive.

  Jesus, Madrid is expensive, he thought as he paid for his coffee. He did not have much money left, the trip to the tailor’s had eaten up almost half his final pay packet, but it did not matter. Tomorrow, he would go to Torrelodones and he wanted everyone to notice him, to see that he was back. He felt a sudden urge to head for the Calle de la Montera and say hello to Señor Turégano, but he resisted.

  At dinner time, he headed back to the hotel, went into the bar on the ground floor, and ordered a Martini. Almost immediately, a woman with bleached-blonde hair and too much make-up came over and asked him for a light, but Julio was not interested in her. She sat next to him, smoking, but realising that he had no desire to talk to her, she stubbed out the half-finished cigarette and slipped it back into her packet. Her place was quickly filled by a skinny young girl who also realised he was not interested and did not even bother asking him for a light. As she got up, Julio noticed another woman, about thirty - the age he preferred - with dark hair pulled up into a chignon, large eyes and a pretty mouth; she looked completely ordinary, married probably, but in a fix. At that moment, he saw Paloma Fernández Muñoz at the bottom of his glass, perched on the empty stool beside him, and he signalled to her.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman’s conversational skills were no better than his own, ‘a chocolate milkshake, please.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, after he had recovered from his astonishment at her nutritious request.

  ‘Julia,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Really? Mine’s Julio!’

  ‘Call me María if you like,’ she said, drinking down half the milkshake in a single gulp. ‘I don’t mind.’

  When he suggested that they might spend a little time together, she indicated a price, pressing the fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left, and he quickly asked for the bill. ‘Jesus, Madrid is cheap,’ he muttered to himself as he signed the bill. The woman turned to him: ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, it was nothing . . .’

  Stepping into his room, she took off her old, moth-eaten gloves and put them in her handbag, then laid out the ground rules:

  ‘I don’t kiss. I’ll do anything else, but not that.’

  ‘Even if I pay extra?’ Julio asked, out of curiosity.

  ‘Even if you pay extra.’ She picked up her bag, took out her gloves. She’s probably thinking at least she got something to eat, thought Julio.

  ‘No, it’s OK. We don’t have to kiss, I don’t mind.’ Watching her as she undressed in a diffident, emotionless manner that indicated she was no professional, Julio asked: ‘Are you married?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  She’s married, or she’s a widow - no, she’s married but on her own, he thought. She’s young, pretty, she has a good body, her husband must be off somewhere, in France maybe, I might even have met him. Maybe he’s in prison here, or in a labour camp, working off his sentence, thinking about his wife, waiting for her letters so he can write back by return post. So what? When he gets out, she’ll give up all this, and go back to being a polite housewife . . .

  After they had finished, the woman got up without saying anything, dressed quickly, and was gone. Then, Julio Carrión González, who two nights previously had been the chosen one, the most powerful man in Paris, found himself alone with his poverty, and he realised in spite of himself the true price of a kiss. Fine, he thought, better now than later. But he could think of nothing else, and suddenly the memory of Paloma’s kisses stung his eyes, parched his throat, sent pins and needles stabbing through his sides. ‘It’s all right, Paloma, I’m done with tears,’ he said aloud, as though she were lying next to him. And it was true. Julio Carrión González had a long life ahead of him, but never again would he succumb to the urge to weep.

  No tears troubled him when he came face to face with the ruin that was his father, the shambles that had been his home; in fact he felt a profound sense of relief, after having ordered the most expensive meal possible in the bar on the village square and bought a cognac - the good stuff - for those acquaintances who stopped by his table to say hello. Evangelina, who did not have the looks to tout herself around the hotels on the Gran Vía, had worked quickly and well. The room that took up most of the ground floor, what they had always called the dining room, was as immaculate as if Teresa González had never left. At one end, sitting at the table, his hair combed, wearing a jacket over the shirt he had always worn, Benigno stared vacantly in front of him.

  ‘Julio,’ Evangelina clattered down the stairs when she heard the sound of the door, ‘I’ve finished downstairs, though I only gave the kitchen a quick once-over. You can’t imagine the state it was in.’

  ‘Oh, I can imagine, Evangelina.’

  ‘I made your father a couple of fried eggs, there was nothing else in the cupboards. The bread was a bit stale, but he ate it anyway. There’s still a lot to do, so we’re going to need more time - two or three days if we’re going to launder everything, all his clothes and so on . . .’

  ‘That’s fine. Don’t worry about it . . .’ He looked at the woman and smiled again. ‘Take all the time you need. All I want is for the place to be clean. And I’d like you to come in regularly - to clean, do the laundry, the shopping and the cooking, because I can’t stay, I have to get back to Madrid. We’ll talk about it before I leave, all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Julio was far from sure that a woman like Evangelina would want to take care of a man like his father, but she looked at him as though he had saved her life, which, he realised, was probably the case. He had not wanted to agree a price with her because he was not yet sure how much money he had. This was the detail he had not thought about in Paris. Now, the state of his father cast a shadow over his carefully laid plans, so he forced himself to behave like a repentant prodigal son.

  ‘Father!’ He hugged Benigno, and sat down next to him.

  ‘Julio . . . So it is you . . . you’ve come back,’ his father said, staring at him as though he could not believe his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m here now.’

  ‘Your mother died in prison, the penitentiary in Ocaña, the little whore.’ His eyes flared, suddenly alive. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes, Father. You wrote and told me.’

  ‘She’s to blame for everything, it’s all your mother’s fault.’

  The old man made no attempt to explain himself. Julio closed his eyes because he did not want to remember, because he had promised himself he would never cry again. He refused to remember that odious letter he had ripped to shreds before he had finished reading it, his father’s words, ‘I’m not sorry for her, she had it coming. I don’t know where your sister is and I don’t want to know . . .’ Julio remembered the terrible loneliness that had kept him awake that night in Grafenwöhr, the feeling that he was an orp
han. But that was in the past, he quickly reminded himself.

  ‘Where is my money, Father ?’

  ‘What about my things?’ Benigno looked at him again, his eyes vacant. ‘Where are all my things? Can’t you see, they’ve stolen everything I had.’

  ‘There was nothing here, Father, only rubbish. I threw out everything that was broken. I’ll replace it all for you, but to do that, I’ll need my money. Where is it?’ Benigno frowned and grinned. ‘The money, Father. The money that was sent to you, my salary for the time I was in Russia - both salaries, the Spanish and the German. Where is the money, Father?’

  ‘What did you think?’ Benigno reacted at last, shooting Julio a lopsided smile and pointing to the chest of drawers. ‘You think I spent it?’

  That night, back in Madrid, the city seemed more beautiful to Julio, the lights brighter, the women more beautiful.

  He was rich. Only a fraction as rich as he planned to be, but he was rich. He had more than enough to live the life of a gentleman for several months, which was more than enough time for him to make contacts, finalise his plan and set to work. The money soothed him, it was enough to draw a line through time, rub out the past, rub out the fear and the fatigue of the garage on the Calle de la Montera, erase the cold and the mud and the lice in Russia, the grey routine of an expatriate labourer first in Toulouse, then in Paris, erase his mother and Paloma. In the morning, he took the train to Torrelodones, but for the return journey he hired the only taxi in the village. ‘I just want to say, Julio . . .’ Evangelina had been staring at him since he had accepted her conditions without argument, ‘I was very sorry to hear about your mother’s death, it broke my heart, really it did. Everyone loved her. She was a wonderful woman, intelligent, generous, brave, she was the best person I have ever known . . .’ Even this he forgot as soon as he stepped into the taxi to Madrid, which took him back to his fine hotel on the Gran Vía, with its vases filled with fresh roses and the burnished wood.

  His body was eager for pleasure, and for a day and a half he yielded to its demands. In this, at least, Madrid was unchanged, even if Franco, like his father, was holier-than-thou. The oldest bar in the city, La Villa Rosa, was still open for business, and lurking at the bottom of the narrow stairwell next to the kitchen of Los Gabrieles on the Calle Echegaray was the city’s finest brothel. It was a meticulous reproduction of a place where young bulls were tested out in Plaza de tientas, where once Primo de Rivera, the old dictator, had liked to play the bullfighter with his favourite whores. Romualdo, who liked to boast that he had been there many times, had told Julio about the place when they were in Russia, and Julio had been impressed by his tales.

  He needed little time to recuperate and so, after forty-eight hours of dissipation and twelve hours of sleep, he got up two days later, showered, shaved, dressed and went down to the dining room for breakfast. He picked up a newspaper and, leafing through it, asked for a telephone directory, hoping to find Eugenio’s number. He assumed that his old friend would be delighted to hear from him, and when he called, the two men arranged to meet at 2.30 p.m.

  Eugenio Sánchez Delgado lived at the Retiro end of the Calle Castelló, in a nice, bright apartment, with his wife Blanca, who was four months pregnant, though they had been married barely six months. As he made his way there, Julio’s senses, still fogged from an excess of subterranean pleasures, were met by a wholesomeness, a crispness, like the scent of freshly laundered sheets in this neighbourhood filled with the comfortable well-heeled middle class. He felt the same sensation as he stepped into Eugenio’s apartment, and as he kissed Eugenio’s wife. She smelled of eau de cologne and she was plain: an ordinary girl, too broad hipped for her age, she had a homely face, and her lips bore a permanent expression of calm.

  ‘You’re in fine form, Eugenio!’ Julio said honestly, hugging his friend. Eugenio slipped an arm around his wife’s shoulders before responding. ‘It’s true, I’ve never been better, but Blanca deserves all the credit.’

  Oh, so that’s how it is, thought Julio, giving his hostess a smile so charming that it made her nervous. Matrimonial bliss . . . It was true that Eugenio looked well, he seemed more confident, more mature, no longer a gangling youth, but a slender, well-built man. Yet, when his wife went back to the kitchen and left them alone together, Julio thought he detected a flicker of sadness in Eugenio’s eyes.

  ‘So, how are things?’ Eugenio took him by the arm and led him into the living room. ‘Tell me . . . where’ve you been all this time?’

  ‘Well, it’s a long story . . . I stayed in Riga, you remember Colonel Arenas asked me to?’

  His friend nodded. ‘Romualdo said something . . .’

  ‘Well, that’s where I’ve been . . . Arenas asked me to act as a liaison of sorts between the Blue Legion, the Wehrmacht and his head office back in Madrid, so I stayed on until the end. When the Germans had to retreat, I settled in Berlin. I had no official standing with the embassy, but in theory I had the support of the Spanish Army, although as you can imagine, given the way the war was going by then, that wasn’t worth much. I should have come back, but I ended up getting involved with a woman - Gertrude her name was, she was blonde and as tall as I am, with green eyes . . .’

  ‘Well, at least you got to learn German!’

  ‘You’d think. I learned about three words. She and I spoke French to each other, but I didn’t care because . . . what can I tell you, I fell for her. The night I met her, she looked right through me, I felt like a fool, you can’t imagine, by the next morning I barely knew my own name.’ Eugenio laughed. ‘I was head over heels and, well, by the time the Allies turned up, I couldn’t come back. Apart from the fact that most of them had already done a runner, it would have been more dangerous to go looking for a Spanish diplomat in Berlin than to sit tight, so I hid out with Gertrude, until eventually she went back to her village and starvation forced me out, and the American troops arrested me.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Eugenio was not laughing now, ‘because if the Russians had got you . . .’

  ‘I know . . . it took me more than a year to convince the Americans that I hadn’t done anything . . . In the end, they let me go with only the clothes I stood up in. I had no money and no way of making any. Things were tough for a while, I lived in a bombed-out hovel and depended on handouts for food, on the Red Cross, until they offered me a place on a refugee train to Paris. I got there last June. Things were easier in Paris because the place is full of Spaniards - republicans - they all help each other out. Of course, I had to pretend I was one of them, that way I could earn enough money to get by . . .’

  ‘What about the embassy?’ Eugenio looked at him, surprised. ‘They should have helped you. I mean . . .’

  Julio cut him off. ‘They don’t trust anyone at the embassy, nobody. I went and talked to them, I went again and again, I told them to call Madrid, to call Arenas. But it did me no good, it turned out he was dead, they said my safe conduct was a forgery, and there was no one else I could turn to - in Riga, I’d been undercover, in Berlin too. I suppose they didn’t want to take the risk . . . I was terrified that the French would just deport me, so I disappeared for a while . . . Shit, back then I was furious, but now I understand . . .’ Eugenio nodded, though Julio could not read the expression on his face. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what happened after that, but about a month ago they gave me a passport. I didn’t ask questions, I just went straight to Torrelodones so I could see my father, so I could eat well for once . . . And here I am.’

  It all came out in a single breath, his tone cheery, casual, just someone recounting an adventure that was over, a pirouette with no more grace than its inevitable whirling, and yet not one word of what he had said had been left to chance, not one was spontaneous.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ he had said to Huertas when the man had met him to give him his passport, ‘if, now that the hard part is done, everything went wrong and the deal fell through?’

  ‘Why should it go wrong? You said
you had contacts, didn’t you? I’ve told you where you can find Sánchez Delgado, I’ve done my part.’

  ‘Yes,’ Julio said, ‘and I’m grateful. But suppose I see Colonel Arenas strolling down the street. What do I do? He’s a soldier of the old school, an honourable man . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’ Huertas interrupted. ‘Maybe Colonel Arenas was all those things, but he’s not any more; he’s dead. Died of a heart attack eighteen months ago. You think I’m a fool, Carrión? Arenas was a good friend of my father’s, you think if he was still alive I would have anything to do with this scheme of yours? And in Madrid these days, the sort of people we’re interested in aren’t going to go asking a guy like you any questions. Take my word for it.’

  At that moment, Julio Carrión dared to meet Ernesto Huertas’s gaze, man to man, and the commander did not blink. This man who, for two years, had known everything there was to know about the Spanish communists living in exile in Paris must have known that Julio moved in the circles Huertas was investigating. When he went to meet him, Julio knew Huertas was from Córdoba, knew he came from a military family, and was married to a woman with a lineage as notable as it was decadent. Though she too was from Córdoba, she had not gone with him to Paris, preferring to stay in Madrid with the five children they had had in the space of seven years. Julio knew all this; he knew, too, that in spite of his unfailing allegiance to the cause, Huertas had a French mistress and considerable expenses. It was rumoured that he trafficked in passports - Julio held proof of that fact in his hands - and that he would intervene in judicial proceedings to have a prisoner released, a sentence quashed, even have the death penalty commuted. In Paris, Julio sensed, he was much too shrewd to take such risks, in Madrid he was not so sure, but as he looked Huertas in the eye, he was in no doubt as to the man’s greed.

  ‘I’m going to tell you a story, Commander, let’s see how believable you think it is . . .’ Huertas listened attentively, offered suggestions, genuine details; it was he who suggested the bombed-out building, suggested Julio mention the Red Cross. It was Huertas who told Julio to say he had arrived in Paris on a refugee train.