The Frozen Heart (63 page)

She was getting fat, but she tried not to think about it. At first, she did not worry because she felt fine, she had a good appetite, she slept well, never felt like vomiting. Her older sister had always realised she was pregnant when her morning coffee made her feel nauseous. Anita could not remember the last time she had drunk coffee, but the repulsive cereal she had with milk every morning still tasted the same. As for her periods, everyone knows girls sometimes miss their periods when they’re worried or upset. But her waistline refused to accept this, it ballooned, and her breasts ballooned, and Anita found it increasingly difficult to button her shirt in the morning, until one day it would not close at all. That afternoon, Anita sat on the bed in the little pantry and cried.

‘What’s the matter,
hija mía
?’ María Muñoz asked, stepping into the little room, her voice tremulous with panic. ‘Have you had bad news, have you heard something?’

‘No, it’s not that.’

‘Thank God.’ María ran her hands over her face. ‘Thank God ... But, then, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ Anita managed to go on talking, though she could not bring herself to look at María. ‘I was thinking . . . Well, you’ve always had bad luck with Ignacio, haven’t you?’

‘Bad luck? No, I wouldn’t say that . . . what do you mean?’

‘I don’t know . . . Back in Madrid, with that woman he was seeing, the one who was always so rude . . .’ Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at Ignacio’s mother, who still seemed puzzled. ‘And now, here, with me.’

‘With you?’ María Muñoz thought Anita was trying to tell her about a relationship which everyone in the house had known about since the beginning; ‘But I love you very much, Anita, truly I do. Don’t worry, I never thought you were anything like that woman.’

‘But I am like her, María . . . I am, because . . . But don’t worry, I’ll leave . . . I’ll take my things and go back to the boarding house . . .’ Seeing María’s worried expression, the same look she might have given her own daughters, Anita realised the woman still did not understand. ‘After the baby is born, I mean . . .’

María Muñoz stared at the girl, then buried her face in her hands and rocked back and forth on the bed.

‘I’m really sorry,’ said Anita, not quite sure what was happening. ‘Honestly, I’ll leave, I can’t stay here, I’d die of shame . . .’

‘Dear oh dear.’ Her future mother-in-law removed her hands from her face and Anita saw that she was smiling through her tears. She took Anita in her arms and said the only words that Anita had not expected to hear: ‘What do you mean, you’ll leave? Don’t be silly, you can’t leave, you have other things to think about - you need to eat properly, get lots of sleep, a little exercise ... Oh, Anita!’ María held the girl at arm’s length, then hugged her again. ‘I’m so happy, honestly, I’m so happy.’

When Ignacio’s mother emerged from the pantry, she wanted to believe that this news could mean only one thing. Things were beginning to change. They were finally beginning to improve. She was so sure, so happy, that when her husband put his head in his hands when she told him the wonderful news, it did not trouble her.

‘Have you gone mad, woman?’ He stared at her like a father scolding a child. ‘What’s done is done, I accept that, but for you to be happy about it . . . I mean, honestly, María, this is all we need!’

‘Yes, Mateo, you’re right,’ María said. ‘This is exactly what we need. You’re right, I’m mad. They murdered my twenty-three-year-old son, my daughter is a widow at the age of twenty-four, I have a grandson in Madrid I’ve never seen, a grandson I might die without seeing . . .’ At this thought, she paused, saddened, then went on: ‘Of course I’m mad, what woman would not be in my place? But if you want to know the truth, I don’t care . . . So what if they’re not married ? So what if Ignacio doesn’t know he’s going to be a father ? It’s hardly our fault, and besides . . . So what if Anita’s father is a forester and the girl is illiterate . . .’

‘No, I’m not saying that, but . . .’ her husband tried to interrupt her.

‘But what?’ She cut him off, before realising that it was not her husband she was arguing with. ‘I’m not the same woman I was, Mateo. I’m not wrong as often as I used to be. The only thing that matters to me right now is my grandson, your grandson, and his mother. Nothing else. I can’t go on losing my family, burying the people that I love, I can’t bear to think that I might have another grandson I might never know. Don’t you understand?’

Mateo Fernández was looking at his wife rather differently now; she noticed this and went on, her tone gentler.

‘This is madness, I’m not saying it isn’t, we’re living in a foreign country, we have no money, there’s a war on, I know all that. But it’s also an opportunity, Mateo. Think about it. It’s a new beginning.’

As he considered what he might say, Mateo took the last of the French francs he had brought with him to Toulouse from the back of a drawer, and he gave the money to his wife. During dinner, he gazed at the girl who was to be the mother of his grandchild and smiled.

‘Do something for me, Anita, give us a little boy,’ he said. ‘There are too many women in this house already.’

‘I’d rather have a girl,’ she said, ‘on account of the balance of probabilities . . .’

‘Don’t be silly, woman.’ Paloma laughed, and the family realised that they had not seen her laugh for a long time. ‘Probability has nothing to do with it.’

It was a boy and he was born in January 1943, two weeks before his father managed to escape for the second time, the last time, from the tyre factory where, every night while Anita was pregnant, he dreamed that she was by his side. As his son began to distend the soft, pale, adolescent belly that he could still see when he closed his eyes, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz discovered a new channel for his daring: all the energy he had previously put into escapes, he now devoted to sabotage. The Nazi occupation of Vichy France heralded a change, something which affected even the commandant in charge of the factory, who was relieved of his duties when he proved incapable of putting a stop to the constant disruptions to production at a difficult time for the German Army. This was not his fault, though it was true that screwdrivers began to slip mysteriously from the hands of the foreign workers and an equally mysterious hearing problem began to afflict the men.

‘I’ve dropped my screwdriver,’ Ignacio would hear someone shout in Spanish, the time prearranged in advance.

‘What?’ Ignacio would bring his hand up to his ear.

‘I’ve dropped my screwdriver,’ the man would say, not raising his voice while the others chuckled silently.

‘Turn the machine off before it fucks up!’

‘What?’ The man would point to his ears. ‘I can’t hear you . . .’

The machine would seize up, the commandant would be livid, whoever was responsible would be sent to the cells, Ignacio and Amadeo with them, even if they had not been directly involved, and the supply of tyres for the German Army would dry up again. They did not care about the punishment. They all remembered the story of the German bomb that fell behind republican lines in Guadalajara and failed to explode. The terrified artillery man sent to deactivate it found a message in rudimentary but intelligible Spanish inside: ‘Comrades, my bombs they do not explode’. Some unknown German workman had felt that the civil war was also his war, just as this war was also theirs. They did not care about the punishment, until the new commandant arrived. He increased the severity of the punishments, put supervisors on the factory floor, and when he realised that even this was not enough, he declared that any saboteur would immediately be turned over to the occupying forces. The threat did not make them stop, but they had to be more careful. Luckily, a comrade from the Pas Valley was about to discover a foolproof way to disable the factory permanently.

‘All we have to do,’ he proudly told them, ‘is gradually, very gradually, loosen two of the screws on the machine over a period of a week or so. That way the friction will grind away the axle. A few days later, when the axle snaps, a couple of us can quickly retighten the screws and that’s that.’

Ignacio and Amadeo looked at each other, astounded.

‘Don’t you get it?’ said the man, a mechanic whom two wars had converted into an expert saboteur. ‘You said we have to be careful not to get caught, OK? This way, they’ll never work out why the machine broke and the factory won’t be able to operate.’

As predicted, the axle snapped and production came to a standstill, but the mechanic could not retighten both screws at the same time and when the commandant started shouting, the lad he had told to tighten the other one froze, ashen faced. It was now Amadeo’s turn to come up with a brilliant plan.

‘We’re getting out of here tonight,’ he said to Ignacio, as they stood around the factory waiting for the repair detail to arrive, ‘tonight or the first chance we get, you, me and the guy from Pas, because that little fool is going to talk or my mother’s name is not Eusebia ...’

Years later they discovered that, while Amadeo’s mother was indeed called Eusebia, the boy had not informed. Instead, he had spent a year and a half in a German concentration camp. That day, when Amadeo pronounced his prophecy, Ignacio did not know that Eusebia’s son had already found a blind spot - a fifty-centimetre stretch of the fence hidden from view - and that for the past two months he had been planning his escape. When the engineer decided that the wear on the axle indicated that the part was defective, the men were sent to their barracks while the management decided what to do with them. But Ignacio and his co-workers had no intention of waiting for their decision. At 4 a.m., following Amadeo, they crawled through the hole he had cut in the fence with a pair of wire cutters he had slipped into his boot that afternoon, ‘just in case’.

The party said that two of them could to go to Foix using false papers that stated they were employed by a party member there and he would put them on a truck to join the resistance in the mountains; the other man would have to stay behind in Toulouse and wait for the party to devise some mission for him. Ignacio was about to say that he would stay, but the man from Pas got in before him: he was over forty and too old to be tramping through the woods with a rifle; besides, he was of no use to the resistance, his speciality was sabotage: ‘. . . and they don’t have any power stations in the mountains.’ Ignacio could think of nothing to say. Nor, as they were leaving two nights later, could he bring himself to ask the truck driver to go through the city so he could say goodbye to his parents. Had he done so, he might have seen a light on in his sisters’ room, as Anita got up to feed his son.

When she saw the child suckling at his mother’s breast, a wave of peace surged through María Muñoz. ‘Please let him be healthy,’ all day the same thought lingered in her mind, ‘please let him be healthy.’ She looked at Anita, at the girl’s slight, willowy body, and she regretted the deceitful God, the ruthless supporter of their enemies, whose name she called on so often, but to whom she no longer prayed. ‘Let him take to the breast, because if he doesn’t . . .’ Hospitals, doctors, nurses, nannies, bottles, all these things had vanished with the world she had left behind. All she could do now was trust to her grandson, believe in him. The weight he gained every day, the speed with which he outgrew his clothes, had been enough to keep María Muñoz going when she found the curious envelope from the Service for Spanish Refugees in the letterbox that morning. What could they want now? she wondered, before opening it to find a letter from Ignacio telling them that he was well, that he was living in the countryside, working in the open air and was enjoying his new job - a job just like the one he got in Madrid seven years ago, the year the autumn was so cold.

Inside the envelope was a smaller one containing a letter for Anita. She smiled when she read the greeting, the ordinary, prosaic greeting of someone who has every intention of staying alive: ‘Dear Anita . . .’ Ignacio was not as good a letter writer as his brother-in-law had been, but he could tell Anita that he loved her, that he missed her terribly, that he could not bear the thought of her looking at another man, that he loved her more than he had ever loved anyone, that he needed her to trust him, to wait for him and he would come for her as soon as he could.

‘What are you up to, Bigmouth?’ They were in Ariège now, but Ignacio still called Perea by his
nom de guerre
. One evening he found Perea sitting on the ground, leaning on his backpack, writing a letter.

‘What do you think? I’m writing . . .’ Perea looked up at him.

‘But how . . .?’

‘It’s like this . . .’ Aurelio held up his pencil in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other. ‘You take a pencil and a piece of paper, then you put the pencil on the paper and . . .’

‘Not that . . .’ Ignacio accepted his sarcasm with a smile. ‘I mean, how do you get the letters to your family? How do you post them?’

‘It’s hard work,’ Aurelio continued to mock him, ‘I give them the letter and they put it in an envelope, they stick a stamp on it, they give it to someone who’s going to Marseille or to Paris, and that person puts the letter in a box. I know it sounds complicated, but you’re an educated man, I’m sure you’d get the hang of it . . .’

‘What about the return address?’

‘It depends, some people make up a Spanish name or a French name . . . I pretend mine are from the Spanish Service for Refugees, it looks less suspicious, and I make up an address - rue du Pont, rue Dumas, rue de l’Opéra - whatever I can think of. We can’t write too often as the postman would get suspicious, but I write to my wife every six months or so, so that at least she knows I’m alive.’

Between February 1943 and September 1944, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz wrote to his parents three times, each time with two envelopes, one for his family, one for Anita. The first letter became shorter and shorter because, given that he could tell them nothing about what he was really doing, he only had recourse to little white lies. The second letter grew longer and longer as time passed and he was tormented by the very real possibility that Anita might meet another man, the sort of man who comes home every night. He could no longer imagine life without Anita, and tried to tell her this, but he could never find the precise words to tell her what she meant to him.