The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’

  I dialled other numbers, the landline at home, but the answering machine was turned off, my number at the office, but nobody answered, the bank where she worked, where, after half a dozen attempts, I was informed that it was not company policy to give information about the status of employees to strangers.

  Directory enquiries was worse. Yes, the subscriber had closed that account, no, they could not tell me if she had opened another account, yes, the information was confidential, no, the operator didn’t care who I was, yes, she understood that I was desperate to get in touch with this woman but if I continued to pester her she would have no option but to contact the police. ‘Believe me, I’ve come across husbands like you before,’ she concluded. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ I concluded, and she hung up on me.

  ‘You told me you weren’t going to cry . . .’

  Miguelito was looking up at me, his mouth quivering.

  ‘And I’m not going to cry. I hardly ever cry, you know that.’

  ‘But you’re crying now, Papá.’

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling to prove he was wrong. ‘It’s just the wind making my eyes smart. Are you out of bread?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m cold.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  As we headed back to the apartment, I listened to the message again. ‘The number you have dialled does not exist.’ I promised myself this would be the last time, although I didn’t know whether I would keep my promise.

  Raquel needed time to escape, to run away. She wanted to disappear, and all that was left on the other side of her pauses was a man abandoned.

  I felt physically ill, a flash of hot and cold, a deep stabbing pain like fever. The future had ripped itself in two; all that was left on this side was me and my son, the four-year-old boy walking beside me, holding my hand, trying to avoid the cracks in the pavement. At first, that was all I could think. Then I realised that there was only one possible solution for a ruined, lovesick, abandoned man; his only possible salvation was to rip off all these adjectives in a single blow.

  Beyond the sea of loneliness, I could see contempt looming like a familiar horizon. When I knew I had this, I realised it would not be difficult. All I needed to do was hang on to the repulsive images: a Jacuzzi as big as a swimming pool, a vaulted bedroom, two dozen candles and as many films carefully arranged on a metal stand and that purple rubber dildo I’d found in a drawer. The solution consisted of replaying over and over in my mind the very images that for months I had forced myself to forget. These were the elements of the equation, it was simple: I merely needed to subtract where previously I had added, divide by the same amount I had multiplied. It was a costly solution, but it was worth it, because if I could feel contempt for Raquel, perhaps I might come to hate her, perhaps even hate her as much as I had loved her. It would not give me back my life, but it would give me peace.

  I was convinced that the only thing that could save me was to throw my passion into reverse, and so I tried. I used every ounce of energy I still possessed, I abjured my body, cursed happiness, renounced madness. I tried to despise Raquel Fernández Perea with everything that I had left, with the little she had not taken with her, but I did not succeed. Don’t do this to me, Raquel, why are you doing this to me? I was convinced that I had to despise her so that I could come to hate her, but her eyes had never shone as they did now, her skin was never so soft, so flawless, her body so large and I so small, a tiny insignificant man, with no map, no compass, lost in the vastness of a world that had suddenly stopped and would never turn again.

  When Ignacio Fernández Muñoz realised that Julio Carrión González had robbed his parents of everything they possessed, he broke down. It was not the first time he had experienced defeat, but it was the cruellest, for in none of the defeats he had known had he been responsible. He could not have fought more than he had fought, could not have been more committed that he was; and he would do it again, he would give his all for a second chance that would never come. Others might have been able to do more, or to do it better, but not he, he had done his best, and it was this knowledge which kept him going, which kindled his sense of pride. This - the conviction that he had no regrets - was what Julio Carrión González stole from Ignacio when he robbed his parents of everything they owned.

  By the spring of 1964, when his youngest child would be the first person in the family to go back to Spain since 1939, this wound had not completely healed. It would never completely heal. This was why, when his son Ignacio, who could not know the impact of his words, casually mentioned over the dinner table that Spain had beaten Greece as the choice for his school trip, it plunged Ignacio senior into a silence that even he did not understand.

  ‘You don’t like the idea, do you?’ Anita asked him that night when they were in bed.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ he replied truthfully. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s just . . .’ His wife pressed closer to him, nestled her face into his neck. ‘I don’t know either, but I don’t like it one bit.’

  That night, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz did not sleep. As he tossed and turned, his whole life flashed through his mind - the images, the colours, the sounds and smells, precise or intangible sensations shot through with shafts of light and pools of shadow. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz envied his son and feared for him in equal measure.

  That night, as he tossed and turned, he would have given anything to slip beneath his son’s skin on the day he set off, so that, without sacrificing his own memories, he might see with his son’s eyes, hear with his ears, experience this land, this country that he longed to go back to with the same passion that prevented him from going back. He could not go back, perhaps he would never go back, but no one could stop him from returning to Spain in his mind, through the sensations of a young man setting foot there for the first time. It was exhilarating and sad, bitter and joyful, but most of all it was strange. And so when he told his wife that he envied and feared for his son, he was telling the truth.

  It was not merely a physical fear, though he could not completely rid himself of that. His son had been born in France and would cross the border with a French passport, a genuine passport, not like the meticulously crafted forgeries he had so often marvelled at when bidding farewell to comrades. But the validity of the passport would not change the fact that the border guards would see the name: Ignacio Fernández Salgado, son of Ignacio and Anita, born 17 January 1943 in Toulouse, and draw their own conclusions.

  In 1964, France was teeming with Spanish exiles who had children the same age as his. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz knew that the passport was sacrosanct, that Franco’s police would not touch the person carrying it, but that would not stop the harassment, the comments, the needling questions, ‘son of a communist, are we?’ I should tell him to say nothing, keep your mouth shut, don’t give them the satisfaction, thought Ignacio, as he watched his life flash through his mind. I should tell him to stay calm, but I won’t need to, his mother will take care of that. This thought reassured him, freed him from the responsibility of offering what might have sounded like simple fatherly advice but which, to him, represented something more - for to say these things would be another defeat, belated perhaps, but an unconditional defeat all the same.

  Ignacio Fernández Muñoz tossed and turned in his bed, attempting to choose between the lesser of two evils. Maybe his son would not like Spain, that would be bad. Maybe he would like it too much, that would be worse. He might come back thinking that the butchers who had laid waste to his country, his family, his future, were good people, well meaning, that the Spanish people were happy with their lot, content to live and prosper beneath the fascist boot. Ignacio knew this was not true, not everywhere. The communists in Paris had close ties with people back in Spain, they had many contacts there, and information was passed back and forth. Until very recently, the guerrilla could count on vast, efficient support networks in certain areas, even during the worst of the crackdowns; there were the
miners who were constantly waging their own war, the students who had brought Madrid to its knees in 1956, and the tram drivers striking in Barcelona. Eight years later, with the official unions infiltrated at every level, the major universities had become strongholds of the underground movement, but such progress, which looked so attractive from Paris, might not have been as popular on the ground. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz tossed and turned, he could not sleep wondering how he would react if his son came back from Spain and said the unthinkable: ‘It was great, really beautiful, the monuments, the wine and the flamenco, I loved it, and the people are really nice, they’re so happy, the standard of living is pretty much the same as here, it’s obvious that the economic development is really working, they have a good life, and they don’t seem to be missing out on anything ...’

  Ignacio looked at the alarm clock and saw it was 4.20 a.m. He got up, went into the living room and sat in an armchair. Cuanto peor, mejor - ‘The worse, the better!’ A phrase attributed to Nikolai Chernyshevsky indicating that the worse social conditions become for the poor, the more inclined they are to launch a revolution. He had repeated this phrase so often, heard it said so often, but he had never really thought about what it meant. What an unfair, unjust fate, he thought, it’s absurd. But this was his fate, the life he had chosen; he had fought and lost, and had rebuilt his life from the ground up to fight again for the very people on whom he now wished not simply poverty but misery, the bitter, profound misery capable of stirring them to revolution.

  It’s appalling. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz felt terribly alone. Exile was a terrible fate, one that took its toll not only on the surface, but deep within, distorting love, swelling hatred until good and evil became a single thing. The horror of this stagnant life, this river flowing nowhere, with no sea, no lake to meet it. And at this, the darkest moment of the night, Ignacio saw Julio Carrión exactly as he was that last evening, standing in the hallway of their family apartment in Paris, the evening when Paloma had stopped him with a question.

  She had suffered the most, she who had already suffered so much. In 1949, when the inevitable came to pass, like a slick of black oil fouling a crystal sea, his parents had put on a brave face. Anita was more worried about comforting him than she was about having lost a fortune she had never had, but Paloma tried to commit suicide in the bathroom of that same apartment, a home he had since left to live with his wife and children.

  Ignacio would never forget Anita’s cries, his mother sobbing on the telephone, the fear he could feel in his legs as he ran to the apartment, his sister, sitting on the edge of the bath, her eyes vacant, her wrists wrapped in white bandages, stained with blood. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he said to his mother. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he whispered again, this time to Paloma. He crouched down next to her, but she did not speak. ‘Forgive me, Paloma, forgive me,’ he begged her, ‘this is all my fault.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘But it is, it’s my fault, the whole thing was my idea, that’s why I need you to forgive me, Paloma, please . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Ignacio.’ This was the first thing Paloma said when she came home from the hospital, then she said that she was very tired and wanted to be left alone. She did not attempt suicide again, but followed an insensate pattern of eating, drinking, sleeping, getting up in the morning, kissing her parents, hugging her nephews. ‘Leave me in peace, please, just leave me in peace,’ she would say. They watched her closely, on the alert, but Ignacio did not simply watch her, he saw her, saw in her dry, emaciated body a woman who had lost the capacity to desire, watched as despair turned the beautiful Paloma into an ugly, disagreeable woman.

  Carrión had been clever, so clever that, by the time Ignacio began to realise something was wrong, it was too late. Initially, until the end of 1947, Julio wrote more often than necessary, talking about how slow the process was, the bureaucratic difficulties they could not have foreseen. The letters became more infrequent in 1948, but Ignacio remembered his own wedding, remembered Anita’s panic when the parish priest and the mayor of her village refused to respond, the simple birth certificate which even now had not arrived. Besides, in the spring, Julio had sent some money, a paltry sum in itself, but important because it was the proceeds of the sale of the first of the olive groves. But they received no more money, and by the beginning of 1949 Julio had stopped writing altogether.

  Ignacio had waited for two months, it was two months before he began to worry, and it took him some time to find a lawyer in Madrid he could trust; after that everything happened quickly. By the time his new agent had made enquiries, not one of the properties still belonged to the Fernández Muñoz family. Paloma was the one who suffered most, but her brother would have suffered as badly had his father not intervened.

  ‘Listen to me, Ignacio.’ It was a Sunday morning, the women were cooking lunch and the two men walked to a nearby café where Ignacio’s father chose a small table by the window in the sun. ‘Nothing has changed, understand ? We had nothing before, and we have nothing now. It’s no different than if they’d commandeered everything ten years ago, or if your cousin had robbed us of everything rather than this bastard. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘But it is, Papá.’ Ignacio would never be in any doubt about this fact.

  ‘No.’ His father raised his voice. ‘No. It doesn’t matter that you met him and brought him home, it doesn’t matter that it was your idea to sell the property. It was a good idea, it might have occurred to any of us. Yes, he swindled us, but what could we do about it? We were all taken in by him, not because we’re stupid, but because it’s easy to deceive honest people. That’s all there is to it.’ Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva paused, looked at his son with all the wisdom of his sixty-two years, and a flash of his former authority. ‘I need you, Ignacio, and in the state you’re in now, you’re no use to me. I need you to be strong, to look after the others. You’re the head of this family now, understand? You, not me, especially now that María has decided to stay in Toulouse. She’s a strong woman, but she’s not here, and I’m an old man, Ignacio. I’m old and I’m tired, and I can’t take much more. So let that be an end to it, I don’t want to hear the name Julio Carrión ever again, understood?’

  ‘Yes, Papá.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise, Papá.’

  You saved my life too, Ignacio thought that night, so many people saved my life so many times that I should have done something remarkable with it, something other than simply survive and finish my studies, fall in love, get married and have children. ‘But you’ve helped so many people,’ Anita would say to him when she found him in this mood, and perhaps it was true, but it was not remarkable or important, it was not enough to justify the effort that so many people had invested in him. And now, when the benevolence or the cruelty of the times made it possible for him to leave work at the same time as his colleagues, when there was not always one more confused old man sitting in his waiting room, no woman gazing vacantly at her brown dress, her hands clutching the hands of two children, now that he had all but forgotten their gestures, their problems, the words with which they told their very different stories, especially now, he wished them the worst, the cousins, brothers, parents of the Spanish exiles he had counselled, helped and defended for free. And all this because his son had decided to go back to Spain on a school trip.

  ‘Well, then, don’t let him go.’

  When the alarm clock rang a few hours after his mind finally allowed him to sleep, he found Anita sitting up in bed, her arms folded. This was how she was, quarrels made her tired, but she always woke to them again.

  ‘What?’ he muttered.

  ‘He doesn’t have to go back. We can exchange it for something else, he can go to Greece with a friend.’

  ‘No.’ He looked up at Anita; her expression was more worried than confused. ‘We can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Thanks . . .�
�� Anita got up and stood staring at him for a moment before storming off to the bathroom. ‘A lot of good you are to me, Ignacio, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know”. Sometimes I think you don’t know how to say anything else.’

  Neither of them could have imagined that their son also did not like the idea of the trip. Ignacio Fernández Salgado would have preferred to go to Greece, or Italy, or Holland, to any of the places they had voted on until there was only one option left.

  To him, Spain was not a country, it was an accident, an anomaly that mutated according to time and circumstance like a hereditary illness, capable of erupting and disappearing by itself. Ignacio Fernández Salgado, who had never been to Spain, was sick to death of tortilla de patatas and dancing sevillanas, of Spanish Christmas carols and Spanish proverbs, of Cervantes and Lorca, of Spanish shawls and guitars, of the siege of Madrid and the Fifth Regiment, of eating ‘The Twelve Grapes’ as midnight struck on 31 December and raising a glass of champagne only to hear the same words every year, ‘next year, we’ll be home’.

  It had nothing to do with the fact that his parents were foreign. Paris was full of foreigners, that was bearable. What was unbearable was to be the son of Spanish exiles, to have been born, grown up, to have become a man in this dense, impenetrable exile constantly tormented by a border which was so close and yet unreachable, like a plate of sweets a centimetre beyond the reach of a starving child. Exile was a terrible thing, this curious exile he had been forced to live out as his own, because he had been born, not into a country, but into a tribe, a clan, that fed on its own misery, a society of ingrates unable to appreciate what they had, for there was always something they did not have, who lived half-heartedly, constantly miserable, constantly shut away inside their portable country, a ghostly, posthumous presence they called Spain, which did not exist, it did not exist.

  It was probably different for those who had gone to South America, since they were separated from home by a vast ocean, by thousands of miles, different accents, the same language. Ignacio Fernández Salgado would have been happier had his parents met over there, in one of those hot countries, a country where Christmas came in summer. Over there, the refrain ‘Next year, we’ll be home’ would be an idle boast, made with a smile, shorn of the solemnity which hovered above the dining-room table each year. You’re such fools, thought Ignacio, what home do you have but this one? Then he would look at his mother, his father, his grandparents, the insubstantial phantom of his Aunt Paloma, and regret having thought it, but he knew that a year later, he would think the same thing again.