The Frozen Heart (76 page)

‘Jesus, Mari Carmen, you’ve got some tongue in your mouth!’ He laughed again, as though her insults amused him. ‘My mother was not a bitch, I’ll have you know, she was a schoolteacher, a good republican and a communist, she died of pneumonia in 1941 in a detention centre in Ocaña.’

‘That’s true,’ she nodded, ‘and I apologise. To your mother, that is, not to you ...’

‘That’s OK, I accept your apology.’ He took her by the arm and for a moment she was so surprised she let him. ‘Now, let’s go and have a drink. I’m buying.’

‘What?’ She tried to resist, but he held her arm. ‘You and me go for a drink? Are you joking?’ Julio looked at her, nodded and walked on.

By the time he opened the door of the bar on the Calle Mayor, Peluca’s daughter had stopped protesting.

‘What would you like?’

She didn’t answer immediately. Standing at the bar in her simple white blouse and an off-white skirt which was clearly out of fashion, Mari Carmen Ortega felt awkward in this place which Julio had thought was neither too expensive nor too classy. He saw her glance around at the women with their jewellery, taking tea and gossiping.

‘I don’t know,’ she said after a moment, ‘what are you drinking?’

‘Brandy,’ said Julio, ‘I need to get over the shock of seeing you again.’

‘No, nothing alcoholic,’ she ignored the compliment, ‘I’ll have a white coffee and some toast.’

‘Aren’t you conventional!’ murmured Julio, signalling to the waiter.

‘Or maybe . . . hang on . . . I’ll have one of those new grilled sandwiches. I’m sure they must have them here, you know, with ham and cheese?’

‘I know.’

And he knew that he had won, knew it even before he saw her look at her cup, at the waiter, then say in a tone that came from a different age, ‘Would you be so kind as to bring me another sachet of sugar, please?’

When the waiter brought it, she put it with the other sachet in her handbag.

‘You’re not going to put any in your coffee?’

‘I don’t mind either way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I don’t usually have sugar in coffee. Anyway, that way you can really taste the coffee, and the children like sugar.’

Julio ordered another coffee with two sachets of sugar, which he gave to her. She smiled and thanked him before stuffing them into her bag.

Then, eating slowly, as though savouring every bite, he asked her a few questions to which he already knew the answers, careful not to reveal his intentions.

‘Me? I’ve only got one, but I’m looking after my sister’s daughter, my sister’s disappeared and no one knows where she is.’

‘It’s hard work.’

‘Yes, I have to admit that. I mean, I sort of know how she felt, I can understand why she might have had enough. We’ve never had things easy, it’s hard to find work and a day’s pay doesn’t go very far. And there’s no salary where I work, there’s just the three of us, making dresses . . . Pura was seeing some guy, I know that. She always denied it, because obviously she’s still married, and she thought it was seedy, having an affair, even if her husband hasn’t written to her in two years . . .’

‘Where is he?’

‘France,’ she shrugged, and made a face, ‘I mean, I think he’s in France. He’s probably got someone else, he might be dead for all I know, we haven’t heard a thing. That’s why I said I know how she must have felt, but walking out like that and leaving her daughter behind . . . It’s not fair on the girl and it’s not fair on us.’

‘What about your husband ? Is he in France?’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘Antonio’s a lot closer to home. He’s in prison, in Yeserías, just down the road.’

‘Still?’

‘He got out in 1944, got a job, got me pregnant, but before the baby was even weaned, they arrested him again.’

‘You say it like it’s funny.’

‘No, it’s not funny, but what can you do?’ Her face was serious, though her tone was still light. ‘That’s life.’

‘For the good guys.’

‘Yes,’ her eyes glinted, ‘for the good guys.’

Mari Carmen Ortega did not know and did not want to know what kind of city, what country, what reality she was living in, and Julio Carrión, an expert in cocktails, whores and private rooms, did not waste time attempting to explain it to her.

‘What about you, Mari Carmen? Wouldn’t you like to change your life?’

He took a wad of banknotes from his wallet, and put a hundred-peseta bill on the bar, and another, then another. He had expected her to be angry, and she was angry. What he had not expected was that she would misunderstand the nature of his offer.

‘What do you take me for ?’

Her tone was shocked, but she was not shouting. Then she got up, her back straight, her chest out, her head high, and began to scream at him:

‘You think I’d inform? I’m not some grass, some traitor like you, Julio. I’d rather starve, I’d rather beg in the streets, I’d rather die than betray my own, you’ll get nothing out of me, understand ? I won’t be bought . . .’

‘That’s not what I meant, Mari Carmen . . .’ Julio took her arm, and pulled her to him. ‘What do you take me for? I’m not with the police, I’ve nothing to do with the police, I don’t care what you know and what you don’t . . . I was talking about something completely different. And, forgive me for saying this, but you look like a complete fool.’

Mari Carmen took a moment to react. Slowly, she sat back down on the bar stool, sipped her coffee, and smiled to herself.

‘Oh, so it’s the other . . .’ she said, shaking her head as though she could hardly believe it, ‘you want to sleep with me, is that it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, thinking that he had nothing to lose.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she laughed, ‘after everything that’s happened you still want to sleep with me.’

‘What do you expect? I’m a one-woman man.’

‘Really . . .?’ Mari Carmen laughed again, she was nervous and she was flattered by the fact he still wanted her, but neither her nervousness nor her vanity stopped her from picking up the money on the bar so quickly he was taken aback. ‘Well, I’ll take this for the moment, and I’ll think about it.’

‘Take my phone number, that way you can call me.’ He scribbled his number on a business card. ‘I usually go home for a siesta and I never go out before seven p.m.’

‘All right. But I don’t think it’s likely.’ She took the card and put it in her purse.

And then the prettiest pair of legs in Madrid walked away, taking her astonishing body with them. As he watched her go, Julio replayed the scene as though it had happened to someone else and found himself with a quaint moral dilemma. Though the integrity that had prompted Mari Carmen’s fury was strange, Julio Carrión knew that it was not feigned: she would genuinely prefer to starve than to betray one of her own. But her integrity had not stopped her from taking three hundred pesetas from under his nose as an advance against possible favours she might just as easily have granted him for considerably less. But even if she did, Mari Carmen had never been fickle. Julio had seen her with more than one man, but he knew that she had been faithful to each of them until she slept with the next. And since her marriage there had been no one else, as far as Doña Pilar knew, and in such matters she was as all-knowing as the Almighty. Strange woman, thought Julio, and then he thought of Eugenio and laughed. It would not have occurred to him to introduce Mari Carmen Ortega to his old friend, but he realised that were he to do so, Eugenio would probably think her decent, even admirable, a real hero. It was a foolish idea, obviously, but he might introduce her to Romualdo . . .

Mari Carmen Ortega had told him she would not call him, and she did not call, but ten days later she showed up at his place at 6 p.m.

‘No kissing,’ she said, standing in the doorway.

‘Like the whores?’

‘Exactly.’ She stepped inside, put her bag on the sofa and looked at him. ‘That’s what I am, isn’t it? A whore. But I’m a better person than you and I don’t want either of us to forget it.’

‘You are . . .’ Julio caught her around the waist, then ran his hand slowly over her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, ‘You are the better person, Mari Carmen, but you’re totally screwed.’

That afternoon, Julio Carrión González settled his scores and put the finishing touches to his plan.

The remaining stages of the plan proceeded slowly and without incident until the last storm of the summer of 1949, when Mariana Fernández Viu reluctantly climbed into the taxi, along with her daughter. Angélica, who was only fourteen, was the only character able to play a role other than the one Julio Carrión had assigned to her.

‘Where are you going?’ her mother called, as her daughter clambered out of the moving taxi, the rain dashing against the windscreen. ‘Angélica! Come back here!’

‘I forgot something, Mamá,’ the girl did not turn, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

Still leaning against one of the stone columns, smoking, Julio Carrión watched her rush back, but he thought nothing of it. Angélica was an only child, she had always been spoiled, impulsive, disobedient, she always did as she pleased. She knew nothing of Julio’s last conversation with Mariana, had not heard her mother’s vicious insults and Julio’s cold indifference. And yet, this young girl knew something that he could not have guessed.

‘Angélica!’ Mariana opened the car door, stuck out her leg, but did not dare get out. ‘I said come back here at once!’ But her daughter had already reached the top of the steps.

‘Come with me,’ she grabbed Julio’s hand and dragged him inside, ‘I forgot something.’

In the hallway, she pushed him against the wall. What happened next did not seem like much, and it was over very quickly, but before her mother had time to call to her again, Angélica closed her eyes, kissed Julio hard on the lips and ran out.

I
n mid-July the countdown began.

‘What’s the matter?’ I’d ask Raquel from time to time.

‘Nothing,’ she’d say, and I didn’t believe her, but I hugged her and saw her smile.

Her smiles were not different from those I had seen before, but now there was something new, a kind of insistence that made them linger just a second longer than necessary. The same was true of her kisses and of the sudden urge that compelled her to hug me as we were walking down the street. I know it should have worried me, but at the time I barely noticed, because aside from these subtle changes, Raquel expressed no doubts, showed no sign of tiring of me. On the contrary, what I most noticed about her was an absorption, an intensity in her most serious and her most frivolous gestures, the way she stroked my face as though attempting to leave some indelible trace, the sentences left unfinished, her wide eyes studying me as though trying to memorise ever line, every detail, every wrinkle of my face.

I noticed and interpreted these clues, but I was wrong about every one. I would probably never have guessed their real significance, but other factors conspired to mislead me. The most important was my particular interpretation of the relative speed of time. If the Whole had been merciless to me, Time was more cruel still, stripping me of everything I had once known, of every scrap of knowledge, all my suspicions, my intuitions, my certainties. The calendar was no use. I knew how to read it, I knew that if sex counts as the beginning, then my affair with Raquel began on 22 April, but even the date - ‘22 April’ - was just words, meaningless words in some altered reality.

‘What’s wrong, Raquel ?’

‘Nothing.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Honestly, there’s nothing wrong.’

I matched her smile, her silence, with my own, never saying what I never found the right moment to say - ‘Of course there’s something wrong, and I know what it is’. Looking at the pages of a calendar, not only did our situation not seem tragic, it looked as though it might still aspire to the breezy foolishness that is the first flush of love. But our lives were not lived in the pages of a calendar but on a tightrope which every day grew more taut, which had begun to flay our feet. This is what I felt, what Raquel must have felt: we had exhausted our resources, cut every corner, and time was running out.

On one of the many surreal mornings when I arrived back at my own house, feeling strangely as though overseeing the team of builders was my sole occupation, I discovered a package from the register office in Madrid in the letterbox, containing the death certificate of my grandmother, Teresa González Puerto, deceased on 14 June 1941, in the famous Ocaña penitentiary, just as Encarnita had said. The certificate specified the immediate cause of death - cardiac arrest - and the secondary cause - pneumonia, the result of tuberculosis. It also indicated her date of birth, her marital status, the fact that she was a prisoner, and her age - she was forty. She would have been forty-one on 3 August, but she did not live to see it.

Two days later, in the same letterbox, I found a class photograph, some fifty pupils posing with their teachers, and two good-quality enlargements; one of Teresita Carrión González, with her hair in pigtails, wearing a spotless school smock, and a second one of my grandmother, her hair loose, standing next to Manuel Castro. Inside the envelope was a short, affectionate note from Encarnita’s daughter in which she apologised for the delay, explaining that it was because her mother had been upset after my visit. ‘It was two weeks before I could get the photo away from her.’

For my part, I had not stopped thinking about my grandmother. Every time I was surprised by the peculiar lack of feeling, the guilt of the cheating husband that should have kept me from sleeping at night, I wondered whether she had felt something similar, whether, when she looked at her husband, my grandfather, she felt the slight uneasiness, almost annoyance together with a vague feeling of pity, that I felt when I looked at my wife. It was possible that, when this photograph was taken, this freedom fighter was no longer free. Maybe she had already sacrificed her freedom to this man, who stood gazing at her as though she were the only woman in the world. Going into the house, I placed the photo Encarnita had sent me next to the bland portrait which stared back at me from its silver frame.