The Frozen Heart (25 page)

It was the evening of 13 November and the revolutionaries of the nationalist army were about to enter Madrid at any moment. There had already been too many delays. In fact two weeks earlier, Don Pedro, the priest, had laughingly told his friend Benigno that a Seville newspaper had announced that Franco was ‘a four-and-a-half-peseta taxi ride from the Puerta del Sol’. Julio knew this because his father had told him, ‘Everything will be all right, you’ll see, after we win the war, I’ll sort your mother out . . .’

Julio had not liked his father’s words, or his tone of voice; there was something sinister about his father’s sudden resurrection, something cruel in the way he bared his teeth as he smiled. You needed Franco to show up to save your bacon, Father, he thought, and despised him all the more, but he also believed him, and he feared for his mother, not for her cause, nor for her friends, her comrades, the people who had filled her head with rubbish and had ripped him from his life. But it would not be long before he discovered his fears were unfounded, because his father was a weakling to the last.

‘It’s only a matter of hours, days, weeks,’ his father said, and the hours and the days and the weeks passed and nothing happened. ‘Whenever they like,’ he said, ‘they can march into Madrid whenever they like.’ Bullshit, thought Julio. ‘They’re purifying the city, they have to raze it to the ground, bring it to its knees, so that it can rise again, pure and clean.’ Bullshit, thought Julio. ‘They haven’t given up on Madrid, oh no! But first they want to take El Escorial, it makes sense, El Escorial is the spiritual heart of the empire.’ Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. ‘Whenever they like,’ said Benigno. ‘I don’t know what they’re waiting for, but they know, that’s for sure, and there’s more to Spain than Madrid.’

‘Look, Father,’ Julio finally interrupted him when he could stand it no longer, ‘have they taken El Escorial ?’

‘No, but . . .’

‘Well then, shut up! They haven’t taken it because they can’t. End of story.’

‘You’re wrong,
hijo
, you don’t know how wrong you are.’

In January 1937, Julio’s life began to change once more, not in the way he had hoped, but branching off in a direction he could not possibly have foreseen. As the days, the hours, the weeks pushed back his retribution to distant horizons his faith could not curtail, Benigno Carrión disappeared from the day-to-day existence of his wife and his children, becoming a sort of ghost, a flesh-and-blood apparition that vanished in the early morning and did not return until they were asleep, drunk on anisette and slogans heard on Radio Castilla de Burgos, which he listened to secretly in the rectory. And so he did not realise that at home no one missed him. Not even Julio.

 

‘Watch carefully . . . the hand is quicker than the eye.’

Manuel carefully tore a sheet of newspaper in half and then tore each half into little pieces. His fingers tracing arabesques in the air, he stuffed the pieces into his fist and blew on it, then with slow, mysterious gestures he unfolded the paper crumpled in his fist to reveal, whole, untouched, magical, the very page he had started with. Teresa and her children, his only audience, clapped until their hands hurt.

‘How did you do it?’ asked Julio.

‘I can’t tell you that.’ He smiled. ‘A magician never reveals his secrets. Here, pick a card, but don’t show it to me - show it to your mother and your sister. OK? Good, now put it back into the pack, anywhere you like.’

The two Teresas, mother and daughter, saw the jack of diamonds before Julio hid it carefully in the pack. Manuel’s face was turned away, although even if he had been facing them he could not have seen the card because his victim held it carefully in the palm of one hand, covering it with the other, as he slipped it back into the deck.

‘Let’s see . . .’ said Manuel, studying the cards and frowning as he deliberately misled them. ‘This is difficult, very tricky, I’m not sure . . . Could it be the ace of spades - no, no, it’s not that. The seven of clubs maybe, but no, it’s not that either . . . And it’s not the three of diamonds . . . So it has to be the jack of diamonds, doesn’t it?’

Manuel Castro was Leonese, from La Bañeza, but he had left his village at the age of six when his father, who worked on the railways, was posted as stationmaster to Las Matas. When he arrived in Torrelodones, he had just turned thirty-nine and had been a socialist for almost twenty years. When he was being serious, he looked older, because he had a long, grave, angular face, but when he smiled his face lit up like that of a greedy child watching someone unwrap a toffee. Being scrawny rather than thin, though not remotely frail, he was convalescing from a bout of osseous tuberculosis that had all but killed him - ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he would explain, ‘they wouldn’t let me enlist.’ He had many reasons to worry, but Julio saw him smile every day. His wife and daughters had gone to Valencia and wrote long, detailed letters to him, but each of his replies was shorter than the last. So as not to be too sad, thought Julio, so that he could preserve his energy, not lose the smile that had made their home habitable again. Julio liked Manuel, admired his strength because it was an inner strength, with none of the bragging or the pathetic theatrics his father used, and he also liked his serenity, his slow way of thinking that managed to calm, and even prevail over, his mother’s vehemence. Above all, he liked the man’s composure, his ability to control his own reactions without having to raise his voice or resort to any tricks other than those in which the hand was quicker than the eye.

‘Where did you learn to do magic?’

‘My father-in-law taught me. He is a real magician, you know. He used to work for one of the finest Italian circuses and he travelled half the world, even went to America. But then he came home and he met my mother-in-law, they got married and went to live in Madrid. I met him before I met his daughter. I saw him perform one night, in a theatre, and was really impressed, so afterwards I waited around outside to say hello to him. I never thought about giving up my job and taking up magic, but it was something I’d always loved ever since I was a boy. I started learning tricks myself, but I wouldn’t have got far without him.’

‘So why don’t you teach me?’

‘Do you really want to learn?’ Julio looked into his eyes and nodded solemnly. ‘OK, then, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. This is what my father-in-law did to me. I’ll let you come up close, right in front of me, and I’ll do some tricks a little more slowly, but only a little. We’ll do that for . . . let’s say a week. If you can see what’s happening, if you can guess the trick, I’ll teach you. If you can’t - no deal. OK?’

‘You’re on!’

That night, Julio concentrated until his eyes hurt, but he didn’t see anything. But the next day, he concentrated on the position of one of Manuel’s thumbs, which was not always visible, although he was waving his fingers about so you thought you could see ten when actually there were only nine. It took a couple more sessions before Julio understood what he was seeing, and he did not quite guess everything, but it was enough.

‘That’s exactly what I noticed,’ said Manuel, smiling broadly.

The hand is quicker than the eye, especially when it deceives the eye, makes it focus on some irrelevant detail. A perfect illusion is nothing more than skill, cunning and misdirection, Julio discovered that afternoon; in fact, the eye is always quicker than the hands. Never forget that, and take your time. ‘You’re better than I am,’ Manuel began to say, ‘and you’ll learn to be even better still.’ He suggested Julio might perform with him, assisting him at the events held in the Casa del Pueblo every Saturday night, at schools when they held parties to take the children’s minds off the horrors they saw every day, and in the barracks when he performed for the soldiers of the Popular Front.

Julio accepted eagerly, making sure he knew exactly what to do, and for a few months he was happy, happier and less happy than he had been before. Happier, because he liked Manuel and it was fun travelling with him, along with his mother and sister, to the outlying villages where the girls did nothing to hide the fact that they fancied him, and would come up after the show and ask him his name, how he did the tricks and when he was coming back. Less happy because he discovered the truth, the shallow foundations on which his happiness was built.

Teresa gazed at her house guest with an utterly covetous devotion, a look Julio had never seen before in his mother’s eyes. Manuel was always attentive to her, eager to have her around, to protect her, not to lose sight of her as they moved through the crowded streets, and every morning, at breakfast, he would make a little paper bird and give it to her and she would smile gratefully, too gratefully, as though she had much more to be grateful for. Julio could see them, hear them, comrade this, comrade that, innocent, almost insignificant words, but which, on their lips, seemed loaded with a meaning he could understand. And he could have given in, could have believed the simple version, the polite version in keeping with the war, with the terrible, raging atmosphere of the world around them, but he did not want to; he was too proud to give up on what was his, to play a minor role in a dream that was not his. Several times Manuel gave him the opportunity, but he did not want to take it.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, and Julio was aware that Manuel was treating him as an adult, a man, but he could not bring himself to feel grateful.

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you want to talk?’

‘No.’

If he had talked to him, everything would have been different. If he had talked to him, they would not have left him behind. But in the lawless country where Julio Carrión lived the hand was still quicker than the eye, quicker than war, quicker than fear, uncertainty, shame, and all the rest was skill, cunning and misdirection, in reality the eye is much quicker than the hand, Julio, never forget that, and he would never forget it after that May afternoon when he came face to face with the truth he had been attempting to ignore.

He was on the main square, flirting with some girls, when he realised he had lost the green handkerchief. He looked for it everywhere, asked his sister Teresa, who was playing with her friends nearby, to help him look, but they didn’t find it. In fact, he didn’t need it, he could do the trick with four handkerchiefs, but there had been five and he had lost the green one. I’ll go and borrow Manuel’s, he thought. The house was close by and he ran all the way. As he went in he called out, ‘Hi, it’s me! Anyone home?’ but he was not expecting an answer. At that time of day, his mother was usually busy with one of the innumerable committees that included Manuel and almost everyone in the street, and his father would be out, as usual. Afraid of getting back and finding his audience gone, he dashed up the stairs to the attic, so excited that at first he thought that the noise he could hear was his own breathing. But it was not him. For a moment, he thought about turning around and leaving, he had four handkerchiefs, one red, one white, one blue, one yellow, the trick would be just as good with four, but he did not turn back. There was a small window between the stairwell and the attic; it was very high, but sunlight streamed through it as there was no curtain. The hand is quicker than the eye and Julio found a stool he could stand on. The eye is quicker than the hand, and so it proved for him in the end as he watched his mother, naked, smiling, at the height of a beauty that constantly seemed to be gainsaying time itself, sitting astride Manuel, naked too, the fingers of his hands - ten this time, no tricks, no misdirection - caressing her waist, her hips, before seizing her and pulling her down on top of him. The hand is not quicker than the eye, it is nothing but illusion, cunning, misdirection. Nothing but shit, thought Julio Carrión González, nothing but shit.

‘Julio,
hijo
, are you still here?’ His mother, having looked all over the house for him, finally found him stretched out on his bed; they had a function to go to that night. ‘Hurry up, we’re going to be late.’

‘Leave me alone, Mother.’

‘Mother?’ Teresa sat on the edge of the bed and attempted to stroke his hair, but gave up when her son pushed her hand away.

‘You are my mother, aren’t you?’ he said with a harshness he had never felt before. ‘Among other things. So I’ll address you any way I like.’

He cut them off. Later, when he began to miss them, when he gave in to temptation, he tried to find some other explanation for things, felt that it was they who had abandoned him, but he knew that was not the truth. They hurt him. They hurt him so much that he preferred to lose them rather than face the misery of his own life, which had been trampled on, torn and ruined. He was the one they had betrayed, thought Julio, he had loved them, admired them, had been happy with them even if he did not side with them. It did not even occur to him to see things the other way round. He was too arrogant, too proud, too selfish, and he did not know everything.

There’s a man in this house, and I don’t mean my father, he thought. There’s a man in this house, and that man is me. Afterwards, when it was too late, he realised it had been a mistake, but only afterwards, when there was no way back, when his schemes, his tactics, his furious tyrannical plan were shattered by a cardboard suitcase and an envelope containing his mother’s letter, ‘For Julio’, at the foot of his bed. It was 2 June and the house was deathly silent. There was no one left to make a sound.

‘This soup is cold, Mother,’ he had said to her a few nights earlier, tasting it and dropping his spoon into the bowl.

‘It’s not true, Mamá,’ said his sister Teresita, ‘tell him. It’s not cold, Julio, why are being horrible to Mamá?’

‘Shut up, you little brat.’ As Julio said this, Manuel sat back in his chair and glared at his disciple in warning; Julio, with all the pride he could muster, held his gaze. ‘If I say it’s cold, it’s cold. Heat it up for me, Mother.’

‘Heat it yourself,’ said Teresa, the firmness in her voice belied by the tears in her eyes.