The Frozen Heart (70 page)

‘She doesn’t live there any more.’ A woman he did not recognise peered at him suspiciously from the doorway of Evangelina’s, the grocers.

‘Did she leave the village?’

‘No, but she lives up by the train station, on the left, one of those big concrete houses.’

Julio nodded and thanked her. He knew the houses she meant, they were really storehouses that belonged to the railway that had been disused even before he left for Madrid. It did not surprise him. Evangelina had just married a friend of his mother’s when the war broke out and had been widowed long before the war was over. Her husband had died defending Bilbao, but her grief had not stopped her work, she had been second-in-command to Teresa González on every committee they set up. This was why he had thought of her. Because if she was not in prison, she would be in need of money.

‘There’ll be a lot of work involved . . .’

At thirty-four, Evangelina sometimes missed prison life. In prison she had not had to worry, had not had to look after anyone but herself. During her visits, her mother always told her that her little girl was fine, that the family was fine, that there was nothing for her to worry about. Everything was different when she was released. She came out of prison to a new war, a sordid, petty war, the daily battle against unemployment, paltry wages and astronomical prices, the constant harassment of the Guardia Civil, the doors slammed in her face, the neighbours who refused to give her the time of day, the struggle of seeing her own daughter treated like a leper, and the hours waiting at the gates of another prison with a parcel of fruit to visit her little brother, to whom she would lie: ‘Everything’s fine, we’re all fine, there’s nothing for you to worry about.’ He had headed into the mountains in 1939 and had held out until one of his comrades decided to surrender and turn him and a number of others in early in 1943. Evangelina sometimes missed prison life.

‘I haven’t been to your house for a long time,’ she said, trying to hide her excitement, the nervous flicker of greed as she looked at Julio, her eyes so sunken that it would have been impossible for anyone to guess her age. ‘But with things the way they are . . .’

‘I’ll do it.’ A young girl of about twelve who had been standing listening to the conversation from the doorway of the old storehouse, which had been divided into small rooms, by hanging matting from two cables to create a makeshift corridor, came forward, smiling. ‘I don’t mind if it’s a lot of work, I can do it . . .’

‘Juana!’ Evangelina interrupted the girl with an expression of mingled embarrassment and fury. ‘He came to see me. And I never said I didn’t want to do it.’

‘I’m sorry, I thought . . .’ The young girl gave her an imploring look.

Julio watched them as they eyed each other: outside was a muddy track, there were no pavements, no electricity, no water, no cars. There were no young men here, only old men and women of all ages, single women with children, young girls more than happy to take on an adult’s job, who would work harder for less money and never argue.

‘I know there’s a lot of work involved,’ said Julio reassuringly, ‘but I’ll pay well.’

‘Well then, why don’t we both do it, that way it’ll be faster. When do you want us to start?’ Evangelina yielded to the embrace of her forceful little friend with a weak smile.

‘Straight away.’

On the way back to his father’s house, Julio enquired about Benigno’s land, his sheep. Evangelina told him the land was all leased, confirming Julio’s suspicions. He left them to their work and set off to find the bastard, who greeted him with a salute: ‘
Arriba España!
’; Julio did not respond with the habitual ‘
arriba siempre
’ but simply said, ‘I’ll waive the outstanding money.’ The bastard swore that he had kept no receipts of the fair, scrupulously exact payments he had made to Julio’s father.

‘Well, from now on, I want everything in writing,’ Julio said, ‘and I want you to pay the leasehold money into the bank immediately because I’m betting you haven’t paid it yet this month, have you?’ Before leaving, Julio turned, happy, but surprised that his threats had been so effective. ‘And don’t let me have to tell you again.’

In the village bar, it was the same. The villagers clearly remembered the morning when he had strolled through the streets with a uniformed Falangist, and they remembered his previous visit, too, when he had been wearing a blue shirt and a red beret, ready to ship out to Russia. It had been three years since the only other inhabitant from Torrelodones to have survived had come back, but he told them that Julio had stayed behind, that he had enlisted in the rearguard, that he was friends with the senior officers and that was why he had stayed. Now, here he was, well turned out, with money in his pockets, looking like a man of the world, and although it was already April 1947, still nobody asked, it was better not to ask questions, better to be nothing, to be no one. So everyone was happy to see him, they clapped him on the back, smiled in the street, and they didn’t ask questions.

Had Ignacio not been mistaken for a third time, had he gauged the situation correctly, his expectations being for the first time in sympathy with those of Spaniards on either side of the French border, everything would have been easy. Nobody imagined that the Allies would leave Franco in power. Not even Franco. The exiles in Paris knew that. ‘They’re running scared, they won’t be there for long now,’ they chanted outside the Spanish embassy.

Tens of thousands of Spanish resistance fighters, the same republican soldiers Daladier’s government had treated like dirt in 1939, had since fought with the Allied forces and defeated the Germans. They had made an important contribution in several key battles, had been crucial in the south, where they had single-handedly liberated towns, villages and whole districts. But they were not fighting for France, they were fighting for Spain, so that they could come back and fight for Spain, and the Allies knew it. Your turn today, our turn tomorrow, they thought. But no. Today it was the Allies’ turn, tomorrow it was Franco’s. True, Spain was not accepted as a member of the United Nations, but the snub mattered little to Franco. True, the advocates of world democracy had a few words to say to him, a little gentle scolding of the sort an affectionate grandmother might give her mischievous grandson. ‘If you don’t behave yourself, then one of these days you’ll end up with no dessert.’ That was all. Not a word more.

‘Betrayal is the one constant in my life,’ Ignacio Fernández had said to him. ‘I live to be betrayed. I get up and I go to bed, I eat, I breathe, I struggle, I risk my life only to find myself betrayed, by my friends and my enemies, in my own country and abroad, because betrayal is the rule, the one constant . . .’

It was December 1946; ten years had passed since the first time they had been betrayed, and in the intervening years nothing had changed. When the radio announced that the United Nations would take no further action, the waiter in the bar where they were drinking started to cry like a child. Tomás, from La Rioja, who was tall and heavyset; Tomás, who had marched into Paris with the 9th Company, deaf in his right ear and with three toes missing on his left foot, started to bawl.

Had Ignacio not been mistaken, everything would have been easy. If the world had not betrayed these men, had not abandoned them, they would have stridden home to Spain. When Juan Manuel, a taxi driver from Madrid who now worked in Orléans as a metalworker, asked him how he’d got there, Julio lied a little, but just enough.

‘I enlisted with the Blue Division for the money, and so I could get across the border, but as soon as I tried, they caught me.’ And so, in the first person, he recounted Pancho Serrano’s story, though he made up the last chapter himself. ‘They had no evidence against me, they’d already shot three of us that week, and I denied that I’d been trying to desert. I told them I’d got lost out there, what with all the snow, because it all looked the same, and the fascists didn’t like admitting to deserters . . .’ He paused and gauged his audience, but saw no suspicion in the three pairs of eyes gazing back at him.

‘The Nazis were sick to death of Spanish deserters, there were ten times as many Spaniards as Germans deserting, so they had me up for insubordination. They put me in a prison detail, we weren’t armed, and they gave us all the shitty jobs, digging trenches, making timber pathways, that kind of thing. I was still there when the Blue Division was recalled, so they put me on a train to Spain and told me I’d be free when I got there, that I wouldn’t be court-martialled, but I jumped the train at Marseille. I’ve been wandering around for five or six months now, hiding from the French police, working whenever I get the chance . . .’

Neither Juan Manuel nor his two friends asked Julio anything else, because he was not in Spain, but in France, and the exiles of 1939 were accustomed to hearing stories like his. Martín had been a shepherd in Biscay but now worked in the same factory as the taxi driver. If he didn’t have as many children as Pablo, he still shared a small apartment with his sister, his brother-in-law and his two nephews. Pablo’s children were not in France. The eldest was in jail back in Spain, and the two youngest, a boy and a girl, were in the Soviet Union. ‘At least, we think so, that’s where they were sent, but it’s been ages since we’ve had any news . . .’ he said as they walked back to his place. His wife Maruja, who, like him, was from Murcia, was happy to have a young man in the house once more.

Some days later, the man who had been the most elegant and mysterious Spaniard in Riga was working for a Frenchman who helped his workers by supplying them with false papers in return for half their salaries. Julio did not care, it was exactly what he wanted. While he broke his back lifting boxes and lugging them from one place to another, he imagined Romualdo Sánchez Delgado back in Madrid, well dressed, with money in his pocket, prattling about the invisible tanks the Germans were still secretly working on. There are no invisible tanks, Romualdo, but there are prisons. And that’s where you’ll be when I’m rich and sitting on a terrace on the Calle Alcalá, Julio thought whenever he felt exhausted, or depressed.

This was what would happen, it was logical. Julio did not doubt it, nor did Juan Manuel or Pablo or Martín, still less the young people he met the following year when he decided to try his luck in Paris. Tomás, Aurelio, Amadeo, Ignacio, their fingers still stained with the gunpowder of victory, their ears still ringing with the Spanish republican anthem, ‘
el Himno de Riego
’, played after the Marseillaise in every village and town during the parades that followed the Liberation. Their weapons were different. He had two decks of cards, identity papers that seemed completely genuine, and something even more uncommon and more valuable. Some are born handsome, are born rich, are born princes. Julio Carrión González was born charming and he knew it, he knew that people liked him, that men instinctively trusted him, that women desired him, and he also knew that the most intelligent people could be fools when confronted with someone more intelligent than they are.

 

‘
Buenos días
, I’d like to speak to Don Ernesto Huertas,’ he said with his habitual smile. On that morning in February 1947, at the desk of the Spanish embassy in Paris, it was not a woman who greeted him, but a brusque, dark-skinned civil servant.

‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible.’ The man looked him up and down, making clear his distaste. ‘There is no one by that name working here.’

‘Oh, well, if he does come in some day, or if you suddenly remember someone by that name, would you be so good as to give him this envelope?’

The receptionist looked at him again before stretching out his hand, and Julio took his leave with great ceremony.

Ernesto Huertas kept him waiting for three days, but on the fourth, he came to meet him at the newsstand where Julio, in his note, had said he would be waiting every evening at 6 p.m.

‘Your name is not Eugenio Sánchez Delgado,’ he said as soon as he saw him, ‘your name is Julio Carrión and you’re one hell of a turncoat.’

Julio accepted the insult with a smile. ‘Maybe, but I didn’t arrange to meet you so we could talk about my faults.’

Huertas, who was head of Spanish military intelligence and responsible for keeping an eye on republican expatriates, knew everything. For his part, Julio knew quite a lot about Huertas, and he was counting on that fact, for he had no intention of going back and tending sheep with his father.

‘So why did you bring me here?’

‘I’d rather we talked in private.’

Huertas nodded, then followed Julio to a café with a small private space at the back, a few tables behind a partition out of sight of prying eyes. Carrión ordered two coffees, then leaned across the table and said in a whisper:

‘I want to go back to Spain.’ Huertas smiled. ‘To Madrid.’

‘I think that sounds wonderful. That’s what the consulate is there for, it’s open every day from nine a.m. until noon.’

‘I know,’ Julio took a deep breath and crossed his fingers under the table, ‘and after that, there’ll be a trial, to . . . apportion blame. Isn’t that how you put it?’

‘Precisely.’ Huertas gave a mocking grin.

‘Of course. But I want to be exonerated, I want to go back a free man.’

‘And what were you planning to go back with?’ Huertas took out a small, well-thumbed notebook and leafed through it for a moment before continuing. ‘Your membership card as a Falangist, or the one from the JSU, or maybe your military service record from the Blue Division or the file I have in my desk back at the office?’ He looked up and smiled sardonically at Julio. ‘What would you like to go back
as
, Carrión? Tell me, I’m genuinely interested.’

‘I want to do a deal,’ said Julio, who had meticulously anticipated every possible turn of this conversation.

‘Oh, really?’ Huertas raised an eyebrow, took his time. ‘And what exactly can you offer me?’