The Frozen Heart (36 page)

‘Esteban, get your hea . . . !’

Mateo Fernández Muñoz, who had promised his sister he would look after her boyfriend the moment he found out they were fighting on the same front, finished the sentence, but the man he was speaking to did not hear it.

By the last week of 1936, María was already in love with Esteban Durán. It had not been his uniform, but what it represented, the courage of a judge’s son, of this timid, well-mannered medical student who had all but asked her permission before he kissed her, but who had won her over with a determination and a passion greater than others who had much less to lose. She did not know that this was the romantic longing that had led her mother to fall in love with her father, nor did she know that she would have to pay a terrible price for yielding to it.

‘When they killed him, they killed my Esteban,’ she would say, and that possessive stuck in her mother’s memory, in her sister Paloma’s memory, like a thorn they would never be able to remove. Mateo, who grieved with her for Esteban, never told his sister that his death has been a foolish accident. The first thing you learn in war is that no death is foolish, all deaths are equally heroic, equally pointless, equally wretched. Seeing them cry, united in their grief, her mother remembered the respect she had felt for María on the afternoon she had seen her sitting on that same sofa, talking to Paloma as though she were the older sister, the afternoon she realised that her little girl was now a grown woman.

Carlos was still in hospital, though he was out of danger. At the beginning of 1937, he had been expected to die, but a month and a half later, Paloma was weeping as if she had forgotten that fact.

‘The doctors have told me his right arm will be paralysed, and he’ll be crippled, he’ll be in pain for the rest of his life . . .’

‘So . . .?’ María tried to cheer her, taking Paloma’s face in her hands and forcing her to look up. ‘He’s alive, Paloma, he’s going to live. So, he’ll have a limp but he’ll still be able to walk. He’ll have only one arm, but he’ll still have the other arm. And he doesn’t need two arms to teach. He’s twenty-six years old and the best thing is that next year he’ll be twenty-seven, and then twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Don’t you understand? Nothing can happen to him now.’ She went on stroking her sister’s hands, squeezing them to let Paloma know she believed she would be happy. ‘They didn’t kill him and now they won’t get the chance to kill him, because he won’t be sent back to the front. They’ll give him a job in an office like Papá’s, he’ll be here in Madrid, he’ll go to work in the morning and come home every night. Think about that, Paloma . . . Don’t you see? You won’t have to be afraid any more . . .’

As she listened, her mother realised how wrong she had been, and she felt sorry that she had doubted María, that she had doubted everything on that afternoon in that last week of 1936.

‘Well, with your boyfriend or without him,’ she had said that afternoon, ‘I think you should still go to Levante. Believe me, I’d miss you more than anyone, but I would sleep easier knowing you were safe.’

‘No, Mamá, I’m not leaving.’ María had spoken slowly, without raising her voice, but with a determination her mother had never heard before. ‘It’s not just Esteban. I’ve got a job in a government nursery. They need people, and I’m not just going to sit here twiddling my thumbs.’

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ Mateo Fernández had unexpectedly agreed.

‘But . . .’ his mother turned towards her husband, ‘can we stop all this foolishness, please?’ Then she turned to her daughter. ‘I won’t hear of it, María. How can you have a job? You’re still at school, you should be studying, you’re only sixteen,
hija
.’

‘I turned seventeen in October, Mamá. Ignacio is only fourteen months older than me and he’s out in La Coruña with a rifle. The caretaker’s niece, who’s the same age as Ignacio, is learning to be a tram driver. And you’re telling me I can’t go and tell stories to a few children who are all alone in the world because those bastards . . .’ she lifted her arm and pointed towards the balcony, as though German pilots were listening outside the window ‘. . . those bastards bombed their houses and murdered their mothers.’

‘María! I will not have you talking like that!’

‘How do you want me to talk, Mamá?’

‘All right,’ her father raised his palm, calmly interrupting her, ‘your mother wants you to be polite. For example, say “murderers” when you’re talking about those evil fucking bastards.’

‘Very funny, Mateo,’ but although she did not join in her daughters’ laughter, his wife smiled as she scolded him, ‘but that’s exactly what I do mean, María. Because it could be dangerous . . .’

‘Everything is dangerous, Mamá.’ María adopted a gentle, more persuasive tone, trying not to think of what would happen if her mother found out that she took the tram to the front to visit her boyfriend. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these days Madrid ends just down the street at the Glorieta de San Bernardo. They’ve already taken everything else. And since they’re moving in a straight line from the Sierra, we’ll be next. The nursery I’ll be working at is just past Cuatro Caminos, but I could just as easily be killed by a bomb on La Corredera when I go shopping. Those ... murderers,’ she glanced at her father, ‘will only spare El Viso and the Barrio de Salamanca. And anyway, I’m not going on my own. Charito will be working with me and Emilia is thinking about it. I was going to talk to Dorita about it too, even if she’s a fascist, because she’s good with children, but when I met her on the stairs we got into a terrible argument . . .’ She paused and then continued in a voice very like the one her sister had used when mimicking her. ‘I’m so happy to see you, María, I’ve got a little message for your brother Ignacio, and since I never see him now he’s so busy killing people . . . “Killing people?” I said. “Yes, in the war,” she said. She asked me to tell Ignacio that she was dumping him and that when she agreed to go out with him, she didn’t realise it meant being some commie’s girlfriend. You tell him, she said to me, that way he doesn’t have to bother . . . You’re right, I said, it’s better if I tell him, that way my brother doesn’t have to bother talking to a little bitch like you . . .’ Her mother gave a sharp scream but María did not stop. ‘ . . . because there are hundreds of women throwing themselves at his feet. And do you know why? Because my brother is a real man, a hero, not like your brothers, who are cowards. Do you really think we don’t know the bastards are hiding in a trunk in your house?!’

‘You said that?’ Paloma’s eyes shone as her sister nodded. ‘Good for you!’

‘Paloma! Really, what is going on in this house? Have you all gone mad?’ María Muñoz slapped her hands on the table, got to her feet and looked at her family. ‘How could you do such a thing, María, how could you?’

‘But I wasn’t thinking of turning them in, what do you take me for ?’ Her youngest daughter suddenly seemed as surprised as her mother. ‘I swear, I wouldn’t have denounced them. It never even occurred to me, I promise.’

‘It doesn’t matter! Don’t you realise, it doesn’t matter? They don’t know that . . . Poor Doña Adoración, she’ll be scared to death now, it’s too awful to think about . . .’

‘They’d do the same to us if they could, Mamá,’ Paloma said harshly.

‘But we’re not like them!’

‘No, we’re not!’ Paloma vehemently agreed. ‘They were the ones who started it, they’re the ones who wanted all this. We’re only defending ourselves.’

‘That’s not what I mean!’ Her mother suddenly felt terribly tired, and bitter tears welled in her eyes. ‘It’s not that,’ she repeated, sitting down again, sadder now and calmer. ‘We’ve never been like them, we’ve never done the sort of things they do, everything we stand for is the exact opposite of what they stand for. Your father will tell you . . .’

Mateo Fernández loved his wife. He came close to her, hugged her and held her in his arms with the tenderness of a father cradling his newborn daughter, because suddenly he felt more sure of himself, more sure of the woman who loved him and their love, which could thrive even when times were hard.

‘Your mother is right,’ he said, still holding her. ‘What is going on out there is shameful. And we cannot look the other way, because we are not like them. You know how I feel about this. I’ve said it often enough, but I’ll say it again - I’d rather see your brothers dead than shooting people . . .’ he looked gravely at his elder daughter, then his youngest ‘ . . . no matter how fascist, how dangerous or how guilty they are. That’s something for a judge to decide, not people running around with guns. But, María, your daughters have a point . . .’ He lifted his wife’s head from his chest, brushed her hair from her face. ‘This is a war, and we didn’t start it. They attacked us, we are defending ourselves, and you have sons at the front, María, and your eldest daughter’s husband and your youngest daughter’s fiancé, and you should be proud of them, because all they are doing is their duty. Your sons are fighting for everything you and I stand for, everything we have always stood for. Unfortunately this is not politics, this is war.’

She got to her feet and straightened her dress, then, without stopping to think, she kissed her husband and went out.

‘I’m just going to talk to Doña Adoración for a minute . . .’ When she reached the door, she turned back and looked at her daughters. ‘For the love of God . . .’

‘Leave God out of this, Mamá,’ Paloma’s voice echoed in the hallway, ‘he’s not on our side.’

Doña Adoración was reluctant to open the door to her. María heard the woman’s footsteps, or maybe her daughter’s, as she rapped on the door, and tried to explain. Then she heard the footsteps walking away again quickly. She went back upstairs and sat on her own in the kitchen, until her husband came and found her there. He took her hands in his and said something she would never forget: ‘We are what we are, María, for good or bad, and our place is here with our own people.’ On 19 February1939, when she saw her children gathered in the Madrid house for the last time, this was perhaps another reason why she believed that this would be the worst night of her life.

‘What’s all this?’ Ignacio, who was exhausted, and who genuinely loved his brother and did not want to fight with him, had followed her into the kitchen. ‘That’s some spread. If I’d known you had made all this, I wouldn’t have invited everyone to Lhardy ...’

María Muñoz smiled and looked at the feast she had prepared, a four-egg
tortilla de patatas
, fried sweet peppers, two quarters of a roast chicken torn into fine strips so that it would stretch a little farther, three onions cut into rings and seasoned with olive oil, salt and a little paprika and half a loaf of brown bread for the nine of them, ten if you counted her sister’s niece, though she had bought some milk to make a little white sauce for her, because although poor little Angélica ate everything, she was only four.

‘This is the last time we’ll eat together for a long while,’ she said. ‘I was hardly going to serve lentils, we’re all sick of eating lentils ... But every day it’s getting harder. This cost me a fortune, and even then, the onions are the last of the ones you sent us, the olive oil too . . .’ María Muñoz paused and looked at her son, then finally said, ‘Are you still seeing that woman?’ He nodded. ‘Be careful,
hijo
.’

‘Of course I’m careful, Mamá.’ Ignacio sighed and shook his head. ‘Careful not to get myself killed. That’s all you need to worry about, not poor Edu. She’s not going to hurt me.’

Mateo had married Casilda some months earlier, after her father had been killed on the Ebro. ‘I don’t want her to be all alone, and that way, if something happens to me too . . . It’s always better to be married than single, isn’t it, I think it will make things easier for her.’ It had been a brief, hurried wedding, there were no guests, and it lasted only as long as it took to fill out the form and sign their names. It had also been a sad wedding, but by then María Muñoz was accustomed to sadness, and Casilda, the eldest daughter of a typesetter and a seamstress whose father had set her to work in a printer’s before she was fourteen, was nothing like the sort of girl her firstborn would have chosen as a wife if things had been different. But Mateo loved his wife and Casilda deserved his love, and things were not the same as before. She knew this, and yet even now she could not get used to the idea that her younger son was living with a married woman ten years older than he was. In spite of that, she regretted having mentioned her that evening, because Ignacio was right, he was still alive, and nothing else mattered.

‘Do you know where tonight’s dinner came from?’ She went over to her son, hugged him and forced herself to smile. ‘Your father has been buying silver five-peseta coins, paying seven or even seven and a half pesetas for them . . . He’s convinced that they are the only coins that won’t lose value . . . We sold some things, and we converted everything we had into five-peseta pieces. He didn’t want to mention it to you, because he didn’t want you to think he was a defeatist . . . He’s not a defeatist, you know that, he’ll do whatever it takes . . . Anyway, I bought the ingredients for dinner tonight with all our loose change, piles and piles of
céntimos
- you should have seen me.’ She tried to smile again, but she could not. ‘I don’t know when we’ll all be together again, so don’t fight with him, Ignacio, please, for my sake, please don’t start arguing about the rights and wrongs of what’s been done, and what shouldn’t have been done, and whether it’s all President Azaña’s fault for not having that conspirator Sanjurjo shot. You need to cheer Papá up, build his confidence, tell him we can still win the war, promise me, because Papá is . . .’ María Muñoz’s voice faltered and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Your father’s not well, Ignacio, he’s ill, worse than ill, he’s going out of his mind, he’s going to die of a broken heart. You don’t know,
hijo
. The republic is everything to him, he has spent his whole life fighting for it. Sometimes I think he would rather die than . . . I have a bad feeling, María, he said to me last night when we were in bed, I’ve a feeling that I’ll never set foot in this shitty country again. That’s what he said, and we cried, the two of us, and I thought about what my cousin Gloria said to me on 14 April . . . It’s terrible, Ignacio, it’s so unfair . . .’ She looked up and her eyes met his. ‘You can’t know how much I hate them. I never hated anyone the way I hate them.’