The Frozen Heart (50 page)

‘Julito!’ Romualdo recognised the voice before he’d even got to his feet, ‘It’s good to see you,
macho
!’

‘What are you doing here?’ Romualdo had a spectacular bandage around his neck and a smaller one on his left hand, ‘When I heard, I couldn’t believe it. You do know that if you stop getting yourself wounded, they’ll discharge you and send you home. Or maybe you’ve fallen in love with Riga . . .?’

Romualdo laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying life here in the rearguard . . .’

Julio smiled. His friend was right, his life was better than it had ever been.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘in my case, the neurologist let me go home.’

‘Yeah, I know . . .’

Julio gestured to the stripes on Romualdo’s uniform. ‘They’ve promoted you again?’

‘Yeah, at this rate, by the time the
russkis
kill me, I’ll be a colonel ...’

They had been injured at much the same time, on a front even harder and crueller than the hell of Voljov. Romualdo had originally contracted frostbite in the last week of December 1942, Julio had been wounded on 1 January 1943. Their twin misfortunes had spared them certain death in the slaughterhouse of Krasny Bor, but now they found themselves once more in the very same hospital to which Romualdo, having been discharged six months earlier, had just returned.

‘La Luna?’ Julio suggested as they stepped outside

‘La Luna,’ Romualdo happily agreed.

‘Have you had any news of Eugenio?’

‘He’s got a girlfriend apparently. A student, pretty ugly too, from what Arturo said in his letter . . . Otherwise everything’s fine, he’s back at university and it looks like they’re going to appoint him head of the Spanish University Syndicate, because obviously he’s a hero these days, but I don’t know . . . My mother is the one who usually writes, and she makes everything sound wonderful because she wants me to come home too.’

The Luna bar, which was owned by a disabled Spanish veteran who had married a Latvian girl, was almost full, but the Spanish soldiers at the tables were in no mood to sing or call for a guitar. Almost all of them were drinking alone and in silence, neither talking to their comrades, nor paying attention to the few painted ladies who would get up from the bar and wander slowly round the room.

‘Well, this looks cheerful,’ grumbled Romualdo, thinking back to the cheering and excitement of the previous winter.

‘What do you expect?’ asked Julio.

‘I don’t know . . .’ His friend fell silent as they were served the drinks. ‘Apparently the Germans are developing some secret weapon, some kind of paint, well, not paint exactly but some kind of coating that makes tanks invisible.’

‘Invisible tanks?’

‘Well, something like that, I don’t know . . .’ Romualdo stared at his glass. ‘I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently the paint or whatever surrounds the tanks with a kind of mist that makes them invisible. One of the captains told me, and he’s on good terms with the Germans . . .’

Julio looked at him and lifted his glass; he knew what he was hearing. Secret weapons, miraculous bombs, magic aeroplanes, uniforms made from bullet-proof fabric. He had been away from the front line for a long time but even he had heard stories like this, the old wives’ tales that had proliferated since Stalingrad, the battle that was to have secured them victory but which had ended in disaster and defeat. But he simply smiled and sipped his drink. War reveals another side of a man, and Julio Carrión González had come to respect Romualdo Sánchez Delgado, a man he would never have trusted in peacetime.

‘Apparently we’re being shipped out,’ his colonel had whispered to him in that same bar less than twenty-four hours earlier. ‘It’s not official yet, but they’re about to give the order. We’ve known for a long time that Madrid doesn’t want us here any more, since things started turning ugly back there.’

Colonel Arenas glanced around to make sure no one was listening.

‘I think it’s disgraceful, but then they didn’t ask for my opinion.’

‘I think so too, Colonel, you know that.’ Julio leaned forward, placing both fists on the table, and his superior officer gave a satisfied smile.

‘Even the generals in Madrid realise that they can’t ship us all home at the same time, because obviously that wouldn’t look good. So they’re thinking about leaving a couple of battalions of volunteers who will work directly with the Wehrmacht . . . The Blue Legion, they want to call it, have you heard about it?’

‘No, sir.’ This was the truth.

‘The thing is, if they disband the division, that means disbanding General Headquarters, which is tantamount to leaving thousands of soldiers on their own in the arse-end of nowhere. Anyone who joins the Blue Legion will be considered a German solider, so officially Spain won’t be involved in the war. They’re intending to leave a detachment of the Guardia Civil in place, but they’re just here as Military Police - they never do anything that isn’t in the rule book . . .’ Arenas was studying Julio as though seeing him for the first time. ‘And the way things are going now, we might have to bend a few rules, know what I mean?’ Knowing what was at stake in this comment, Julio did not blink, but held the man’s gaze. ‘That’s why I thought I’d suggest to High Command that they create a new posting, and I thought you would be good, because it’s a job that would suit you down to the ground.’

Twenty-four hours later, sitting at a table in the same bar, Julio was replaying every word.

‘OK ...’ As Romualdo raised his glass, he decided what he would tell his colonel. ‘Let’s drink to invisible tanks.’

Julio Carrión González was not on board any of the three trains that repatriated the Blue Division in the last months of 1943. At the beginning of 1944, he was the most mysterious Spaniard in Riga. He had a small but comfortable apartment in a magnificent building in the most elegant part of the city, a sizeable income to judge from the way he squandered money, but no job, no responsibilities and no position that anyone knew of. He wore civilian clothes, though both his Spanish and his German uniforms still hung in his wardrobe, he enjoyed no particular diplomatic immunity or protection, but he was well known to the Guardia Civil responsible for order among the volunteers who had decided to stay, and was also familiar in a number of the offices at Wehrmacht headquarters.

‘What I’m offering is not a cushy job, believe me . . .’ Colonel Arenas had detailed the disadvantages of the post after Julio had accepted the position. ‘Or maybe it is, it certainly could be, but it’s also very dangerous. After I leave, the Spanish Army will officially have no presence in Riga. So you will cease to exist. I’ll give you a safe conduct before I leave, but I don’t know how long it will be valid if the war drags on. By the time I get back to Madrid, the pansies from the ministry may well have cancelled the operation, so I can’t give you any guarantees. At worst, you might find yourself completely isolated here a couple of months from now. If that happens, it’ll be up to you to make your own way back. And I don’t know if the Germans will be much help, if we double-cross them.’

‘At your service, Colonel, don’t worry about me.’

Julio Carrión González was one of the few Spanish soldiers in Russia who had no wish to go home, and the only man wounded in combat who was prepared to lend a hand at General Headquarters in Riga instead of making the most of his convalescence, getting drunk every night in La Luna. ‘I can’t just stand by and do nothing, Colonel, while my comrades at the front . . .’ Arenas had been so impressed by this display of gallantry when he first met Julio, that he had offered him a job as an aide-de-camp until the doctors pronounced him fit to go back to the front. Julio Carrión González knew that this would never happen, since the doctor had advised him that if he continued to suffer the savage migraines resistant to all painkillers, he would have to be sent home, and Julio had had every intention of continuing to pretend to suffer from them.

Working with Colonel Arenas, Julio discovered that life in the rearguard was tailor-made for someone like him. After a year and a half at the front, he was as dazzled by Riga as he had been by Madrid when he had first arrived there from Torrelodones. War seemed remote in the streets and the boulevards, the cafés and the restaurants of this picturesque city, which, though small, had cosmopolitan ambitions and which boasted a flourishing black market. In Riga there were ample opportunities to grow rich.

And so, when his convalescence was finally over and he was definitively refused permission to return to the front, Julio quickly auctioned off his seat on the train home. Colonel Arenas, who knew nothing of Julio’s financial motives for staying, interpreted his reluctance to return as proof of his devotion to the cause and authorised the change which his assistant had requested: ‘Don’t make me go back now, Colonel, let me stay here, let me do what I can to help my comrades . . .’

Arenas never regretted having acceded to his aide’s request. He liked Carrión, he was funny and immensely likeable, constantly telling jokes, making strings of coloured handkerchiefs appear from his pockets. Carrión knew all the best places, the liveliest bars, the finest restaurants, the most discreet brothels, he knew where to get cigarettes, brandy, perfume, even morphine. It was a pleasure to take him to the receptions and tourist excursions organised to entertain high-ranking officers, since all were charmed by the young man. But Colonel Arenas, an upright, generous, almost gentle man, was no fool. It was because of this, and because he suspected that his protégé might well be capable of doing anything to get ahead, that it occurred to the colonel to leave a man behind in Riga, a covert link between the volunteers of the Blue Legion and himself and in turn a link with the Spanish High Command. If Carrión had refused the position, he would have abandoned the whole idea. But he had known that Carrión would accept.

What Colonel Arenas would never know was that Julio Carrión González would step off a train at Orléans on 25 April 1944. The retreat of the German Army from the Eastern Front was so sudden that it put an end to Julio’s plans of getting rich, and robbed him of the almost limitless funds in the account maintained by the War Office in Madrid. But in the hotel where he found a room for the night, no one asked for explanations.

At the time, Europe was teeming with Spaniards - civilians and soldiers, exiles and volunteers, men and women fighting for one side or another. There were so many of them in Orléans that it did not take him long to find them. By the time he did, he had bought himself some cheap French clothes and in his pocket was the JSU card which he had hidden between the flyleaf and the cover of his father’s Bible three years earlier, on his last night in Madrid. At the time, he had thought it might prove useful if he was captured by the Russians. Now, he had other plans.

He did not like the look of the bitter, surly regulars he found in the first Spanish-speaking bar so decided to try his luck next door. There, at the back of the bar, he found three men some years his senior, hard-working family men who were chatting in low voices as they polished off half a bottle of wine. He moved closer so that he could hear snatches of their conversation. The tall, grey-haired man with the easy smile who was sitting in the middle gestured theatrically as he made fun of one of his friends. Julio recognised the Madrid accent as he said: ‘Come on, don’t fuck around . . .’ That was why Julio chose him.

‘
Perdone
. . .’ The men did not seemed surprised to be addressed in Spanish. ‘Could I have a light?’

‘Of course,
hijo
,’ said the man, ‘here.’

Julio lit his cigarette, looked at the men and decided they didn’t look much like anarchists. So, with a sly movement, hiding his arm with his body, he raised a clenched right fist in case they were communists, but did not call them comrades, in case they were socialists.

‘Cheers,
compañeros
,’ he finally ventured to say in a whisper.

‘Put down your fist, you little fool.’ The Madrileño who had given him a light was shaking his head with a benevolent, almost paternal smile. ‘Well, aren’t you just what we needed . . .’

T
he whole is equal to the sum of its parts only when the parts do not interact.

This is how it was, how it had always been before that night which altered the laws of physics, which refuted the eternal and sacred laws of the universe, leaving my tiny insignificant shoulders unprotected.

When I left Raquel’s, dawn was breaking, and on the dirty pavements between the badly parked cars, beneath the pale curtain of last laughs, I found not a shard, not a splinter, of that vital axiom which had been shattered, painlessly and without the least resistance on my part, into a million tiny subatomic particles.

This was not me, my life was not like this, and yet never had I felt more alive than I did at that moment when I found myself alone - not free, because my freedom no longer belonged to me. The hand is quicker than the eye, and even as I walked away, I felt Raquel’s hand holding me back though she did not touch me, her voice dictate my movements though she did not speak to me, and her beauty, all-powerful even in her absence, fetter my eyes completely. And I was happy, I missed nothing and no one. Not even my father, or my longing not to be his son.

I had resolved not to think about him any more, and I managed to unplug the cable, but he was still there, in some corner of my mind. I was alive, he was not. This was significant, yet it did not answer the one mystery I did not need answered, for the most mysterious thing about that night was that I did not feel the expected surprise, the awkwardness, while I lay in bed with my father’s mistress.

I was in bed with Julio Carrión González’s lover; this was the first time I had touched her, the first time I had caressed her, kissed her, slipped my tongue, my fingers and my cock inside her. The first time that my body felt the fingers, the tongue, the mouth of this woman who was no longer my father’s mistress, but mine, as though my freedom now resided in some obscure nook of her body. My freedom lay sleeping with her in a bed which felt like a new world, then like a newborn universe, impervious to the laws of physics, like a part of me that did not know how to and did not want to be reclaimed. I can’t say that I did not realise what was happening, I simply didn’t care, because this was the first time, and yet as I left her place, I felt as though I had done nothing, learned nothing, experienced nothing except the right to hope for the moment in which I touched, kissed, caressed Raquel Fernández Perea so that my hands, my tongue, my cock might recognise in her some unfamiliar part of myself.