The Frozen Heart (34 page)

‘Don’t you worry, María,’ her aunt laughed, ‘it’s nothing more than a childish whim, and in any case . . . Better a republican than a drinker or a gambler or a philanderer. I cannot tolerate fleshly vices, but childish caprices of the spirit, well, they will heal with time.’

‘And with his inheritance . . .’

This pronouncement by the head of the family settled the matter of Mateo Fernández’s political ideas. They were not even mentioned when, in September 1912, Gloria achieved a long-held dream and was invited to attend a royal shooting party and told she could bring a close friend. María declined to accompany her. ‘Well, really,’ her cousin said, ‘stupidity is clearly contagious.’ By that time, Mateo was her fiancé, and she had kissed parts of his body even the most insolent officer in the army had not seen. He had a good job at the Ministry of Public Works and was held in high regard by her family. Aside from this, María’s life was much like that of her cousins, nor did this similarity diminish after her wedding. They were married in March 1913, a glittering affair with the Count de la Riva and his many children in attendance, though the one eccentric thing about the wedding was the groom’s refusal to take communion. On 14 April 1931, the day the republic was proclaimed, when she and her cousin Gloria argued for the first time, they shared the same pleasures and preoccupations, they cared for their children, they went to the opera and the theatre, they accompanied their husbands to dinners and receptions though the hosts of these events were not merely different, they were enemies. Gloria did good works, supported soup kitchens, schools for the underprivileged and charities distributing clothes to the poor, while María sat on committees campaigning for women’s suffrage, compulsory education and public assistance for working mothers. Her children attended modern, secular, co-educational schools which were as exclusive as the religious, segregated, traditional schools their cousins attended, and so their lives were already radically different long before they found themselves fighting for opposing armies. But when she picked up the phone that day, María was not conscious that she had grown up to be so very different from her cousin.

‘I can’t believe it.’ Gloria was so incensed she did not even bother to say hello. ‘You’ve deposed the king. I hope you’re happy.’

‘Not just happy, we’re ecstatic.’ She felt so confident that she laughed as she said it. ‘Mateo says it’s the happiest day of his life.’

‘So, what are you planning to do now?’ Gloria enunciated each syllable carefully as though biting it off before spitting it out. ‘I mean, assuming the republicans have a plan for what they intend to do with this country - other than run it into the ground.’

‘Well, what we plan to do right now,’ María’s voice had suddenly become so hard she barely recognised it, ‘is take to the streets and celebrate. I’ve already got my hat on.’

‘Take to the streets, with the rabble . . . Go on, that’s all you’re good for.’

‘The rabble?’ At that moment, María Muñoz discovered that her indignation was both cold and hot, bitter on the palate. ‘No, Gloria, not with the rabble. With the people of Madrid. The rabble, as you call them, are the ones hightailing it across the border. If you like them so much better than us, you know the way.’

She hung up the phone and sat looking at it, unable to believe what she had just done. Meanwhile, her husband, who had overheard the conversation from where he stood in the doorway with the children, all dressed up ready to go out, came over and hugged her, laughing.

But she was not laughing, and had left the house anxious, worried by the uncontrollable rage that had flared in her, and her cousin’s reaction, every word, every pause like the sound of breaking glass, alarming, sinister, but most of all unjust. They have no right, thought María, no right to talk like that. And yet she wished she had not been at home, had not answered the phone. She loved Gloria, they had always been close, and although with the passing years they had seen less and less of each other and their husbands, who had once been inseparable, barely spoke, she still thought of Gloria as a friend. And it was true that her journey to political radicalism had been faster than Mateo’s, for when she married him the republic had simply been a romantic dream, and while her husband had worked and plotted and met with people at the ministry, in cafés, in homes, addresses he did not confide even to her, María had continued to enjoy the comfortable life of a happily married woman. She had had to intuit the change, touch it with her fingertips, to realise that the republic could be something more, a duty, a goal, an opportunity to live and raise her children in a different country. But she did not feel it as passionately as her husband, who needed no one on this, the happiest day of his life.

‘Stop thinking about that nonsense.’ Mateo shook her gently as they arrived at the Puerto del Sol. ‘Look around you, look at what’s happening - can you see it? It’s amazing, and here you are worrying about your stupid cousin . . .’

It was amazing, but it changed her life for ever, opening up an unexpected chink in her ordinary cares and pleasure; it forced her to choose a path she had never imagined and planted in her the seeds of a pride, a love, a pain that she had never known.

‘We are what we are, María - for better or worse - and our place is here, with our own people.’

Her husband was right, so much so that she felt ashamed to have argued in front of her daughters. But that was after her downstairs neighbour had refused to open the door, when she had had time alone, to sit in her kitchen and think. They were hard, cruel days, more so than they appeared to be, more than she had thought when Mateo told her Paloma had arrived and had asked her to come into the dining room.

‘Now, girls . . .’

In that last week of 1936, her elder daughter was twenty-one and had been married for more than two years, and her younger daughter was seventeen, but their father still treated them the way he had done when they used to climb up on his lap, and they loved him for it. Both girls smiled as Mateo chose his words carefully.

‘Your mother and I have been talking and . . . Well, you know that the government has set up an evacuation programme so that civilians who want to can go to Levante.’ As he was speaking, Paloma began to shake her head, and he began to nod as though agreeing with himself. ‘I won’t lie to you, your mother and I are not leaving. If I asked the ministry for a transfer, I’m sure they’d refuse and with good reason, but it’s also because I would rather work for the generals’ junta than for the government, because that’s what I know and they need me here, not in Valencia. I didn’t leave a month ago, I’m not leaving now, I don’t think I’ll ever leave, because this is my city, my sons are defending it and because I don’t want to leave,’ his wife laid a hand on his arm but he did not lose his composure, ‘and no fucking general is going to make me leave Madrid. Whatever is going to happen to me is going to happen here. But your mother has suggested that maybe the two of you . . .’

‘No way,’ Paloma did not let him finish, ‘I’m not going. That’s what I told my mother-in-law when she left for Almería and I told her I wanted to stay with my husband.’

‘Your husband is at the front,
hija
.’

‘But the front is in La Moncloa, Mamá. You can walk there from here. And the soldiers at the front get leave to come home. When Carlos is on furlough, I want to be at home to sleep with him.’

‘Paloma! Don’t talk like that in front of your sister.’

‘But Mamá, all she said was sleep . . .’

Mateo Fernández laughed at his younger daughter’s quip - though not as beautiful as her sister, she was quick and clever, and she was his favourite.

‘Well, I’m telling you now, you’re going to Valencia,’ his wife said, leaning over the table and wagging her finger.

‘Me?’ The girl leaned forward too until her nose and her mother’s were almost touching.

‘Yes, you, María, running around, spending all day out in the streets, treating war like some kind of holiday - well, you’re wrong.’

‘I won’t go. Besides, I can’t . . .’ She sat back in her chair. ‘I have a fiancé at the front too.’

‘He’s not your fiancé,
hija
,’ her mother declared, ‘he’s a piece of foolishness.’

‘And you don’t even like him, you always treat him like dirt.’

‘What would you know about it, Paloma?’ María turned on her sister. ‘How do you know whether I like him or not?’

‘Of course I know!’ Paloma Fernández Muñoz - the most beautiful girl in the whole building, in the Glorieta de Bilbao, in the Barrio de Maravillas, in all of Madrid - laughed. ‘Everyone knows! Don’t you remember the day Papá told the maid you’d go down and fetch Esteban but the outside door was locked and the poor lad spent half an hour soaking wet and shivering, waiting for you? Remember what you said to us,’ she put on a whiny child’s voice, ‘ “You like him more than you like me, everyone in this house loves Esteban more than they love me . . . ” Until the day he showed up in his uniform, and then he suddenly became the love of your life. It’s true, isn’t it, Mamá? What did I say to you that afternoon?’

‘You said, it’s not Esteban she’s in love with, it’s his uniform.’ They both laughed.

‘Leave her alone!’ Seeing his wife and his eldest daughter join forces, Mateo, as always, sided with his María. ‘She should know whether or not she has a boyfriend.’

She did know. Her mother and her sister had preferred not to acknowledge the fact until one night in the autumn of 1938 when Sergeant First-Class Fernández, who should have been at the front, in the trenches at Usera, showed up unexpectedly. Panicked, they stood up, each with a single thought, but for once Ignacio, who collected bullet wounds the way he had collected lead soldiers as a boy, was unhurt.

‘Ignacio is the one I worry about,’ Mateo Fernández said to his wife in the darkest hours of the darkest November of their lives. ‘I don’t worry so much about the other lad, he’s more sensible, but Ignacio has a reckless streak in him . . .’ And yet Ignacio turned out to be a fine soldier. No one understood why, not even the boy himself, but he found out that first morning, a dog-day of cold and leaden skies as his boots sank into the mud and the icy drizzle lashed his face. They had been ordered to advance to take a hill, but the sergeant commanding the detachment took a bullet early on. Looking behind him, Ignacio saw the enemy running towards them, howling like wild animals. And that was when it happened. As his comrades began to tremble, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, with extraordinary calm, remembered his father, the look of stoic concentration on his face, the little speech he repeated over and over as he taught ten-year-old Ignacio to play chess. ‘You have to see the big picture, Ignacio. I know it’s not easy, but you have to try, force yourself to see the whole picture - your pieces and mine - in that first glance before you even start to analyse it. If you can’t do that, you’ll never play well.’ His father was a fine chess player, and to prove that the other king - the real king - was just a man like everyone else, he always said the same thing, ‘if you prick him, he bleeds’. Ignacio remembered these things as suddenly, once more, he saw the big picture. These were not chessmen made of wood but men of flesh and blood, yet the thrill, the sense of revelation, was the same. There are more of them, but we hold the high ground, they know how to fight, but they have to get up here and they can’t run and shoot at the same time, because at the end of the day, they’re just men, if you prick them, they bleed. The thought flashed through his mind in less time than it would take to say the words, and he felt his blood run cold, because suddenly he saw everything.

As he turned his rifle on his comrades, he looked at them one by one. Almost all of them were older than he was, but he did not need to raise his voice for them to realise that he was deadly serious.

‘The first of you who tries to run, I’ll take him down.’

As he spoke, they stared at him as though he had gone mad, but their shock overtook their panic. With every second the enemy was closing in, but Ignacio continued speaking with a calmness he had never felt before.

‘We’re going to wait for them. We’re going to take cover - because we can and they can’t - and we’re going to wait for the fuckers, because although there are more of them, we hold the high ground, so we have the advantage. They have to climb the hill, and as they do, we’ll pick them off one by one, got it?’ He realised they were beginning to understand. ‘That’s how easy it will be, because they can’t run and fire at the same time, they’re only men, if you prick them, they will bleed. But we have to stand firm. No one is to fire before I give the signal, clear ?’

The enemy howled and ran, with every second they were closing in, but at the top of the hill no one moved, until the sergeant, who had taken a bullet to the shoulder two minutes earlier, came to and, dragging himself up on to one elbow, said: ‘Listen to the kid, damn it! He knows what he’s talking about . . .’ before he passed out again.

Ignacio smiled and then another idea occurred to him, an idea which, before the day was out, would make him famous.

‘One more thing . . . When you fire, you’re going to scream, you’re going to scream like someone is ripping your tooth out. If they can scream, so can we!’

Two of the detachment escaped but the others did as they were told, they screamed until they were hoarse, they fired as though they were shooting ducks at a fair, and the enemy retreated in panic.

That day, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz’s detachment stopped calling him ‘the kid’. In the afternoon, someone dressed his first bullet wound, a spectacular but superficial flesh wound on his left arm. His name was mentioned in dispatches the following day. He had not even been at war a week.

‘Ignacio?’

‘What . . .’

The first time they were given leave, when the worst was over though it had barely begun, his brother whispered to him in the darkness from his bed, as he had when they were children. The enemy had not passed. In the previous months, the two of them had thought of nothing else, there was nothing else to think about in Madrid in November and December 1936. Both found it strange that night to find themselves back in their parents’ house, in the bedroom they had shared for so many years. Everything seemed strange, the beds, the pyjamas, the softness of the mattresses, the crispness of the sheets. Both felt vulnerable without the rifles which their mother had insisted they carefully place in the umbrella stand in the hall. Neither of them knew that this scene would never be played out again.