The Frozen Heart (23 page)

There she is, he thought when he saw her, fucking hell, and he’d hidden in a doorway like a street whore so she would walk by without seeing him, her face still half asleep, her long, glorious legs magnificently awake. Mari Carmen Ortega’s legs had been the first monument Julio Carrión González had admired on arriving in Madrid one June afternoon in 1937 when his father had coaxed him through the labyrinthine streets of this vast, unfamiliar city as if he were a sheepdog on the farm.

‘Julio, come on, not that way, are you stupid ? Over there, hurry up, follow me . . .’

The truck that had brought them from Torrelodones had dropped them on the Calle Mayor, but he had travelled in the back, surrounded by sacks and crates of ammunition and had seen almost nothing, only fleeting glimpses of buildings, some in ruins, others intact, wooden beams propping up façades, holes in the ground and people, lots of people, rushing around as though they were late for something, the women with baskets, the men in half a dozen different styles of military uniform, children shooting at each other with bits of wood, as though they knew nothing about the real war.

‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’ When he got out of the truck, his father was saying goodbye to the man who was still sitting next to the driver.

‘Don’t mention it, Benigno.’ He gave Julio a sad look, the same look he had given him the previous day before he had tousled his hair and said, ‘See you tomorrow, lad.’

‘Have you got somewhere to go?’

‘Yes, I’m going to try to stay at a boarding house on the Calle de la Sal run by a woman from the village. Her sister tells me she’s still there, and it’s still open, so we’ll see . . .’

The lieutenant, a young man, said goodbye to them both. Julio stood there, a suitcase in each hand, a bundle of clothes wrapped in a quilt slung over his shoulder and the birdcage containing his father’s bloody parakeet hooked over his little finger. His father was just as loaded down, but he knew his way around and set off with an energy his son had never witnessed before, an energy that was nothing more than useless fury.

‘Here we are,’ he said finally, stopping in front of a door, glancing in every direction except ahead of him as though with a single glance he might recognise the face of every man and woman in the city. You’re mad, Father, thought his son, but he kept the thought to himself.

‘Now we’ve got to get to the third floor.’

The proprietor of the boarding house greeted them as though she had been expecting them. Julio remembered her as soon as he saw her, but this memory of a more pleasant trip was quickly subsumed by the look of pity the old woman gave him, the same look he had seen on the face of the lieutenant ten minutes earlier. At fifteen, Julio Carrión González did not tolerate pity from anyone.

‘My sister told me everything, Benigno . . . but what are you planning to do?’

‘I’ll do whatever I have to,’ Julio’s father replied as his former neighbour busied herself helping the boy with the bundle of clothes and the birdcage.

‘This is madness,’ she said, ‘Madrid has gone completely mad, we don’t have anything, no food, no peace, we don’t even know if we’ll be alive tomorrow morning. Look, there . . .’ she waved towards her living room ‘ . . . opposite. They’ve all gone away. And now you show up. What for ? Hunger, ruins and bombs, that’s all you’ll find here. Go back to the village, Benigno, listen to me. Do it for the lad.’

‘Look, Pilar, do you have a room for us or not?’ She nodded, intimidated by the tone of his voice. ‘Well then, shut up, give me the key and leave me in peace.’

She knows, thought Julio as he listened to her, she said her sister told her, she found out the same day I did . . .

The boarding house was a large, ramshackle apartment. It was clean but there was little furniture, though dark outlines on the walls indicated the place where the furniture they had had to burn the previous winter to keep warm had once stood. Doña Pilar was telling the truth. In Madrid, there was no coal, no wood, although this was something Julio did not discover until winter returned, by which time he and his father were the only guests in the boarding house and Doña Pilar was so consumed with grief for her son, who had been shot in the head, and her other son, who was imprisoned in Huelva, that she had not a shred of pity left for them. But on that warm June afternoon in 1937, Madrid’s citizens were still ready to brave hunger, ruins and bombings and whatever else might come, still prepared to take pity on a poor villager who had chosen precisely the worst moment to go mad. And they all knew it, thought Julio as he followed his father down the corridor, watched him open the door, put down the suitcases and sit on the bed, watched him take off his cap and rub his trembling fingers over his forehead, then glare at him in furious despair, this was all Julio could think of, they knew it, everyone knew it, the lieutenant, Doña Pilar, the people they had left behind in the village, everyone knew that his mother had run away, that she’d left them, that she had abandoned them to go off to Madrid with the teacher from Las Rozas.

‘What will we do now, Father ?’

‘Just unpack the suitcases,’ he answered. ‘After that . . . I’ll have to think.’

Julio had never really loved his father. He feared rather than respected him, and his father seemed to revel in the distance created by that fear. When his son was born, Benigno Carrión was already an old man, more than old enough to have been the father of Teresa, his second wife, whom he had met shortly after his first wife died. It worried Julio to know that his father had had a wife before marrying his mother. He would secretly pore over pictures of her, particularly the photograph of her on their wedding day, a lady with black hair, black eyes, dressed in black lace, a black mantilla; she looked like a raven about to gobble up the young man Julio had difficulty recognising as his own father. Benigno never knew about the strange attraction these photos held for his son, but his mother had once caught the boy looking at them.

‘Julio! Leave those alone!’ She snatched the photographs from him and gently put them back into the manila envelope that usually lay hidden in the drawer under some clothes. ‘Your father will be furious . . .’

But nothing happened. With his mother, it was always the same. It was not that she did not scold him or punish him, because she did. Sometimes she would send him to bed without dinner, or not talk to him for a whole day, but she never shouted at him, never humiliated him and never hit him. And yet she always depended on him to do his homework, not play truant, learn his lessons, teach her French. Teresa González’s parents had been teachers, and she had studied to be a teacher herself. She would have become one, if her mother had not died suddenly and her father had not fallen ill shortly afterwards - with grief, she said - before moving to Torrelodones to take up what would be his last position. She was the youngest daughter, and the only one still unmarried, so she went with him to take care of him and help him with his students, and that was how she had met Benigno Carrión, who stood at the school gates every afternoon, though he had no children of his own, not even a nephew. He simply went there to see her, something her father realised before she did.

‘Don’t say that, Papá! Please!’ she had said when he told her, waving her hands in front of her face. ‘He’s an old man, a prude. He spends his whole day playing dominoes with the priest and the sacristan . . .’

‘But he’s a good man,’ objected her father, Don Julio, who took for granted his republican leanings, considering himself to be a modest freethinker. ‘Oh, really? And how do you know?’ asked his daughter, surprised. ‘Because whenever I go into the café, he leaves his dominoes, comes over and sits with me, and sooner or later we get round to talking about you, how pretty you are, how good, and all the things that might make a man love you.’ ‘Well,’ said Teresa, ‘I had no idea . . .’

The following day, when she left the school and found him standing there, cap in hand, she looked at him more attentively that she had ever done before. The first thing she noticed was that he seemed much older, but was strong for his age. He was a large, stout man, quite unlike the graceful leading men she fell for at the cinema, the kind that would keep a person warm on frosty nights. No more than that, thought Teresa. He was not ugly, nor was he handsome, though as a young man, before he went grey, he must have been attractive, with his rugged face and glittering black eyes, his slender nose and his surprisingly full, fleshy lips. She did not find him attractive, but she began to look at him differently.

One afternoon, he dared to speak to her and walked with her back to her house. This act of daring became a custom, and customarily he was invited in. As he sat drinking hot chocolate with her and her father, Teresa could feel the love emanating from this silent, almost awkward man, who found in himself a vein of unexpected eloquence, and spoke to her gently, affectionately, whenever Don Julio left them alone together, which he did more and more often. ‘I adore you, Teresa, I love you more than anything on earth, more than God, more than myself.’ And Teresa, an avid reader of poetry and novels who wept every time she read of beautiful, doomed Anna hurling herself beneath the train, of Heathcliff’s agony as he listens to the ghost of Cathy at his window, who sang sad songs about unequal loves, who played Schubert and Chopin badly on a cheap out-of-tune piano until some men came to take it away because her father could not afford the rental and did not dare tell her, trembled as she heard the words she longed to hear from lips that were younger, freer, more like her own. And yet she married him, not wanting to think that she would never have done so if her father had not died suddenly, leaving her with nothing but two dozen books, his fountain pen and two silver brushes that had belonged to her mother.

The everlasting adoration barely outlasted the wedding, but the bride’s disappointment did not extend into being unhappy. For many years - she was not yet twenty-one when she became Benigno Carrión’s wife - Teresa was resigned to her life. Her husband was a good man, hard working, strict, but respectful in his way, and he loved and trusted her. They lived well, not luxuriously, but in greater comfort than the schoolmaster’s daughter had ever known, and after the birth of their son, whom they named Julio in memory of his grandfather, they even employed a maid to deal with the heavy chores. Teresa felt a little guilty about this, because although she also worked hard, tending the vegetable garden and the chickens, her husband had no one to help him with the sheep. He would get up before dawn and come home after dark and that, she thought, explained why he was tired, and in part compensated for his lack of affection, his indifference to his children and the silent undemonstrative routine of their tame, conventional lovemaking on occasional Saturday nights when it did not even occur to them to undress before they began.

For many years, Teresa was resigned to her life, but she had been born with the century, was not yet twenty-one when she had married Benigno and no one, not even he, was to blame for what she felt was her true awakening. No one could stop the passing of the years, nor the fact that these were heroic, passionate, decisive years in which a few scant days might be worth a whole life. It was no one’s fault that in November 1933, having laid the table for the family’s breakfast, Teresa González had gone up to her bedroom and reappeared a little later dressed in the Sunday best she had always worn when she used to go to mass to please her husband, before the election campaign.

‘Where are you off to so early, Teresa?’ asked Benigno, although he already knew.

‘To vote,’ she replied, and kissed her son, then her daughter, before walking past her husband.

‘To vote?’ He clenched his fists, but could not contain his indignation. ‘You’ll go if I say you can go.’

‘I don’t need your permission.’ Teresa adjusted her hat, put her hand on the door handle, then turned back towards them. ‘I have the right to vote and I intend to exercise that right.’

‘And who are you going to vote for, might I ask?’

‘Whoever I like. I don’t have to tell you, as you very well know.’

The sound of the door slamming coincided with the shattering of crockery as Benigno dashed the cups and plates to the floor, oblivious to his daughter’s sobs and the silence of his son, who was holding his breath as he had learned to do in the two months since that October afternoon when things had begun to fall apart.

 

‘Don’t be so proud, Julio.’ His mother was sitting beside him at the kitchen table, helping him with his maths homework. ‘There’s nothing worse than a proud ignoramus. You’re a clever boy, but you’re only eleven and that means you don’t know everything, so let me show you . . .’

‘But I
do
know . . .’ the boy protested, more out of pride than conviction.

‘No, you don’t, because you’re not getting the right answers, or hadn’t you noticed ? And if you don’t learn now, you’ll never know how to do it.’

Just then, his father popped his head round the kitchen door as he did every afternoon, but instead of closing it again, as he usually did, he came and sat with them.

‘Listen, Teresa,’ his father said, ‘I’ve just been talking to Don Pedro, and it occurred to him . . . You know that the elections next month are very important . . .’

‘Very important,’ but somehow his mother’s agreement sounded more like defiance.

‘Good, well, we thought . . . since women will get to vote this time . . . It occurred to him, the priest, I mean, I didn’t make any promises, but I would like it if . . .’ Julio thought he had never seen his father look so nervous, so small, faced with his mother’s aloofness, sitting majestically serene in her chair. ‘It’s not that we want you to campaign, but you get on with everyone, Teresa, the women in the village all look up to you, they like you, and you know how pious they are, and that’s not the priest’s fault . . . Well, anyway, if you would talk to them, tell them who has their best interests at heart . . . I know you’re not religious, but you’re in favour of women’s rights, aren’t you? And I . . .’