The Frozen Heart

by Almudena Grandes

  It would have been easy for her to attack Julio Carrión’s children since she knew what they looked like, where they worked. Sebastian would kick up a fuss, but in the end he would take her to their offices. It seemed a workable hypothesis, but she shelved the idea, not because it was unfair, but because she thought she might be wrong about them, because she had never forgotten the incident with the red-haired doll in the green dress. Clara Carrion was the same age as she was, and though her brothers were older, they were all of the same generation, the first generation of Spaniards not to live in fear. And fear was key, it was a necessary condition if her plan was to succeed. Were it not for the fact that Julio Carrion González had been afraid — that same fear which had paralysed Anita Salgado Pérez at the mere thought of her husband visiting Carrion thirty years previously — then the speech Raquel had learned by heart, rehearsed in front of a mirror, would barely have raised a worried smile. Everything she had said was true. The bookshops were full of books about the war and the post-war period, every month there was some new documentary about it, judges were constantly issuing exhumation orders for victims of Franco’s reign of terror, the state was paying reparations to republican organisations and unions whose assets had been seized after the civil war, but to take advantage of this upheaval would require more than a battered leather folder full of documents in the hands of an economist with no publishing contacts.

  What Raquel had, though important to her, would have seemed trivial to a journalist because there were so many stories like it — stories more shocking, more incredible, more spectacular — that the tragedy the Fernández Muñoz family had suffered would seem unremarkable in the face of the great national tragedy. It was brutal, it was hard, but that was how it was. She knew this, and she knew that even if she went out herself and staked out the offices of every publisher and newspaper in the country and finally found someone prepared to publish her story, the consequences, far from destroying the Carrion family, would be little more than a temporary hitch. The future of the Grupo Carrion would not be tainted by revelations about its founder’s past, Raquel Fernández Perea was certain of that, but she had played and she had won, or she would have had death not snatched victory from her.

  Raquel had bet everything on Julio Carrion González’s fear and he was afraid, he had always been afraid. That morning, in his office, Raquel realised that his reaction had nothing to do with her threats, it was the result of a deep-rooted fear. For years and years, Julio Carrion had been waiting for Ignacio Fernández Muñoz to carry out his threat, steeling himself to withstand the final blow. Her grandfather had been right after all. He had robbed Julio of his sleep and in doing so he had fostered the ideal circumstances in which his granddaughter could finish the task.

  But what had worked on the father would not work on his children. Raquel could picture herself giving her little speech and imagined their response: ‘Really? Fine, you go ahead, do what you like.’ They would not be afraid, and their equanimity would leave her defenceless. All that remained was the mother, the widow, the chief beneficiary of Julio Carrion Gonzalez’s fortune, the daughter of ‘The Toad’, the blonde, blue-eyed girl whom everyone in the house had been worried about because she was never scared when she heard the air-raid sirens, she would stay wherever she was and go on playing. For Angelica, born in 1935, the wail of the sirens was so routine there had seemed little point in being scared. This was all that Raquel knew about this woman, that and the fact that she had found fine food difficult to digest. Her constitution was so accustomed to eating black bread and lentils that the first time they gave her anything more nourishing, she went to bed with severe stomach cramps.

  Anita, her grandmother, had never told Raquel how Angelica had come to marry Carrion. She did not know that Mariana Fernandez Viu did not contact her uncle and aunt either before or after Julio Carrion came home, but in 1949, the night before she took the train back to her parents’ house in Galicia, Mariana had gone to see Casilda García Guerrero, her cousin Mateo’s widow. Casilda had kept in constant contact with the Fernández Muñoz family since the war ended, even after she remarried. During the hard times, when she lived alone with her son in a dingy attic flat on the Calle Ventura de la Vega, she had sometimes been forced to go cap in hand to Mariana when she had no work, or her son was ill. Whenever she did, The Toad gave her barely enough to survive on and she had never dared ask for more.

  It was through Casilda that the Fernández family found out what was happening in Madrid. It was Casilda who wrote to relay what Mariana - having tracked her down through one of her brothers who worked in a café — had told her. By then, Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva and his wife and children already knew, from the lawyer they had hired, that Julio Carrion González had robbed them of everything they owned except the house in Torrelodones. It was Casilda who informed them that Julio Carrion had just thrown their niece out on the street, that Mariana had suggested she might represent their legal interests in Spain to try to claw back what she could, and that Casilda had told her to go to hell. ‘Maybe I was wrong,’ she wrote, ‘but I’m sure that bastard Carrion has arranged things so that there’s no way of getting anything back. If you want me to write to The Toad, I have her address ...’ They all knew there was nothing to be done, and that even if there had been, it would have been to Mariana’s advantage, not theirs. They did not trust her any more than they trusted Carrion, and they somehow felt happier to think that things had ended like this, rather than the two of them dividing the spoils. And so, when the news came, they were caught unawares.

  By the time they opened a letter from Casilda to find a press cutting from the society pages of a Madrid newspaper, it was 1956 and the Fernández family had attained a standard of living that was comfortable enough for them not to think about Julio Carrion every moment of the day. This did not make it any easier for them to read the news: ‘On Saturday 5 May 1956, Don Julio Carrión González, thirty-four, was joined in holy matrimony to Señorita Angélica Otero Fernández, twenty-one, in the church of Santa Bárbara ...’ On the cutting, Casilda had scribbled in pencil, ‘What do you think of this? I was speechless ...’ The Fernández family was speechless, too, though they quickly forgot about it, all except Paloma, who sank even deeper into depression.

  These few stories that her grandmother Anita had told her had taught Raquel more about fear than she would otherwise have learned. A fear that was impossible for her, for any of her generation, to truly understand.

  ‘But I don’t get it, Grandma ...’ She said the same thing over and over. ‘If Casilda was still in Spain, if you and she were writing to each other all the time ... How is it that Mariana ended up with everything? Why didn’t she hire a lawyer, file a claim against her ..?’

  ‘Who, Casilda? Oh, hija mía! Casilda couldn’t have stood up in court ...’

  ‘Maybe not, but surely she could have found someone to represent her. Surely the courts would have had to do something ...’

  ‘Oh yes, they would have put her in prison.’

  ‘But why? She had already been in prison and they let her out at the end of the war. I don’t mean she should have gone to the police but ... I don’t know ... she had nothing, she was penniless, she was working every hour of the day and night, and there was Mariana with everything ... The war had been over for eight years by the time Carrion came back!’ The more she talked about it, the less she understood. ‘I mean, surely you must have thought about it before then? Your husband was a lawyer, and his father was an engineer who had worked for the ministry ... They must have known lots of people in Madrid, they weren’t helpless, surely there were people they could have turned to ... That’s why I don’t understand, how could this have happened, Grandma?’

  ‘Because we were afraid, Raquel.’ Anita looked at her granddaughter and smiled. ‘Everyone was afraid, whether they were rich or poor, educated or illiterate, we were all afraid. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Raquel, you can’t begin to imagine.’r />
  Maybe this was why Raquel said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ her grandmother came to her aid, ‘when the fascists marched into Madrid, Paloma’s husband Carlos went to see a close friend of his, a professor at the university who had become a communist during the war, and, from what he said, ended up being more radical than any of them. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember he was from a family of fascist army officers. That was the only reason he was still alive, and the reason Carlos thought he might be able to help him. He had to walk all the way to Aranjuez to see him, and his friend heard him out, promised to help him and asked him to wait. Then went inside and informed on him. It was his little sister who came and told Carlos to get out of there as fast as he could, she even gave him money for the train back to Madrid. She saved his life, even if it was only so that Mariana could turn him in the next day. Do you understand ?’

  ‘But the girl, she was a nationalist?’ said Raquel.

  ‘Of course. She may have been right-wing, but she was a good person, a better person than her brother. This was why we were afraid, because we couldn’t trust anyone. The only person we trusted was Julio, because he was like family to us, and look what happened...’

  Raquel had known Casilda all her life. Every year, on the way back from their holidays in Torre del Mar, they would stop off for lunch or dinner with her. Casilda was an elderly, affectionate woman who would always hug her then hold her at arm’s length and marvel over how much she had grown. After her parents went back, they saw her more often. Casilda invariably came with them if they were lunching out of town, and sometimes Raquel would stay over with Casilda and Mateo so that her parents could go out. This was why Raquel did not understand what happened the day her grandparents came back to live in Madrid, that day that had begun with vermouth on tap on a terrace in Vistillas. At six that afternoon, the doorbell rang. Raquel answered it and found Casilda in tears. ‘What’s the matter, Auntie? Are you hurt?’ Casilda shook her head and asked whether her grandfather had arrived yet. ‘He’s in the living room,’ Raquel said. He wasn’t in the living room any more, but standing behind her, and when she realised, she had to step aside quickly so as not to be crushed, because her grandfather and Casilda threw their arms around each other and stood there for a long, long time, Casilda crying and whispering, ‘Ignacio, Ignacio ...’

  When her grandmother told her everything she knew about Julio Carrion, Raquel remembered that scene and the many others that had made her childhood the most intense, the most exciting, the most emotionally charged period of her life. After the war, Casilda could not have left Spain, even years later, it would not have occurred to her to try, just as it would never have occurred to her in-laws, to Ignacio and his family, to take the simple but dangerous initiative of sending her a plane ticket. It was too late for Raquel to ask Mateo’s widow whether she had had a passport before 1976 since Casilda had died a few short weeks after her brother-in-law Ignacio, but Raquel was certain that she would not have run the risk of going to the consulate to apply for one, since she would have had to present her police record. It was absurd, but that was how it was.

  Time had passed for everyone, but the fear remained, as powerful, as formidable, as insuperable as a range of snow-capped mountains. To these people, fear had been a landscape, a country, an unvarying condition not to be questioned. And that, thought Raquel Fernández Perea, was what fear must also be to Angelica Otero Fernández.

  ‘But does the widow know?’ Paco asked her on the day they settled down to plan her coup in earnest.

  ‘She must know,’ Raquel answered. ‘I know what you’re thinking. The minute I tell her my name she’ll know who I am and what I want, she’ll be as scared as he was, agree to meet me straight away without telling anyone. I know her sons don’t know who I am, Sebastián told me. He said the one thing Carrion insisted on was that they weren’t to be told anything, and even if my surname is Fernández, my mother’s name is Perea, so ...’

  Seeing Paco shake his head she let the sentence trail off.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not what I meant. How can you be sure that she knew what was going on?’

  Raquel couldn’t answer that question. All she had were her suspicions, the memory of that distant Saturday afternoon, her intuition as a girl of eight, the blonde woman wringing her hands and glancing around, feverishly looking for her cigarettes. Ignacio Fernández Muñoz’s visit had made her nervous, sick with fear, that was the only thing Raquel knew for certain.

  ‘When my grandfather took me to the Carrións’ house in 1977,’ she continued in a more circumspect tone, as though trying to convince herself, ‘she was the one who came to the door. She smiled and asked what she could do for us, and when my grandfather told her his name she fell apart, I thought she was going to faint.’

  ‘OK ...’ Paco smiled. ‘That means she knew something, Raquel, I mean, she must have known something, mustn’t she? When Carrion came back to Spain she was a little girl, living with her mother, she must have known him, at least by sight. But we still don’t know how they met seven years later. Maybe she only knows part of it, and you can’t know which part.’

  ‘Does it really matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters,’ he said seriously, ‘it’s the one weak point in your plan.’

  Julio Carrion González had been buried for eight days when Raquel sent Paco Molinero an email inviting him round to her new flat for dinner. ‘So, what is it?’ He appeared in her office a few minutes later. ‘What’s happened? You couldn’t walk twenty yards to my office to tell me?’ Raquel smiled. ‘I could have, but I think the occasion calls for something more formal.’

  When Raquel finally explained the story to Paco, it was easy because, not being Julio Carrion González’s son, he did not interrupt her with questions. Even so, he was amazed by what she told him.

  ‘Wow, that’s serious ... I’ll need to think about it.’

  She nodded, but masked her disappointment with a smile.

  ‘Hey,’ he came over and shook her gently by the shoulder, ‘I just mean I need time to work out how to get the widow to hand over a million, not whether you should sell her the documents.’

  ‘So you still think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘Me?’ He pointed to himself and burst out laughing. ‘I think it’s brilliant.’

  For the next week, Paco called her or sent emails every day, sometimes several times a day, looking for details, names, dates, amounts that Raquel did not yet know. She had told him that neither of them would get a penny of the money, they had to treat it like a game, like a mini-version of the great swindle they had been planning all these years, and he had agreed without a second thought. He already had a notebook full of charts and figures, names and dates, and only when he was ready did he suggest they have lunch together after work.

  ‘That’s your one weak point, Raquel, you need to think about it. With the information we’ve got, you can’t just show up to meet the widow and say you’re her long-lost niece and that her husband had agreed to pay you a million euros for some documents that prove he’s a crook. What if she knows nothing about it?’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Raquel said, though she was not completely convinced.

  ‘Of course it’s possible. Suppose her mother kept everything about her relationship with Carrion from her? Suppose they met up later, by which time he was already rich ... There’s no reason for her to know where he got his money from. Even if she suspected, she might never have had the guts to ask him straight out...’

  ‘That’s impossible ...’

  ‘You think so? Back then? In this country?’ Raquel looked at him and she hesitated. ‘Listen, Raquel, all most people want is a quiet life, you know that. So your grandfather shows up at her house one day ... of course she was scared, he was like a ghost from the past, because it was all over now, Franco was dead, the exiles were coming home, political prisoners were being released ... Your grandfather would have been the last person she expec
ted to see when she opened the door. But the fact that she was scared just means she was unnerved, it doesn’t mean she knew her husband’s role in the whole thing. I’m not saying she didn’t know, all I’m saying is we can’t be sure.’

  ‘What about him? He must have been hysterical, he must have been beside himself, and his wife would have noticed something, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Maybe, but that night when they were in bed, all Carrion had to do was take her in his arms, and tell her he wasn’t going to let anyone harm his family. That’s what the men of his generation thought masculinity was. And the women thought femininity meant saying nothing and blindly trusting your husband. Think about it, Raquel ... Maybe the widow thought the real villain was her mother, that Carrión’s only mistake was helping her. It’s possible. Or, if she knew everything when she married Carrion, that means your Aunt Angelica betrayed her own mother. That’s possible too, and if it’s true, it works in your favour. But what if Carrion had a heart attack at the mere thought of his wife finding out what he had done to her mother after all these years? Or maybe Angelica knew everything that happened between 1940 and 1970, but doesn’t know about you going to visit her husband a month ago. You said yourself he didn’t want anyone to know. That’s why I’m saying we can’t be sure. If you go and see her, it’s quite possible she’ll throw you out, or send for her sons, or call the police ... None of which would be good.’

  Raquel Fernández Perea listened carefully to his reasoning, cursing herself for her own carelessness, for the weakness which had suddenly, treacherously, taken over her mind.