The Frozen Heart (40 page)

‘Maybe, but what about the Jews?’ I persisted.

‘You’re right,’ he nodded, ‘but we had nothing to do with that. And a lot of the Germans we fought with had nothing to do with it either.’

‘So the Nazis weren’t bad guys?’

‘Of course there were bad guys. But the other side had bad guys too. And there were good guys on both sides, and sometimes it was hard to know who the bad guys were and which ones were less bad. Do you see what I mean?’

‘No,’ I said honestly, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’re only little, Álvaro, you’ll understand when you grow up.’

Time passed. One day Julio took down all the swastikas from the walls of the bedroom we shared and never mentioned them again. For several years, I had to study German and I learned to pronounce words that I had never felt tempted to say out loud, so I felt a shudder when I read - first in German, then in Spanish - the oath I found in the blue cardboard folder. ‘Do you, before God and upon your honour as Spanish citizens, swear obedience to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German armed forces, in his fight against communism, and do you swear to fight as valiant soldiers, prepared at any moment to give your lives to fulfil this oath?’ Underneath, first in Spanish, then in German, was the reply that my father, along with thousands upon thousands of Spanish men, bellowed in 1941 at the moment they became German soldiers: ‘I swear!’ On that sunny, peaceful morning in April 2005, I still did not understand.

‘You know Álvaro’s father was in the Blue Division?’

Fernando Cisneros understood better than I did. When I first went to university and met this tall, bearded bear of a man, talking about the civil war in the first person plural, I began to understand some things, although there were others I would never understand, and I made the mistake of admitting to him that my father had been in the Blue Division.

‘Álvaro’s father fought alongside the Nazis in Russia ...’

This was at the beginning of the 1980s, while the dust of the dictatorship still clung to our shoes, and whichever girl he was talking to would stop talking and shoot me a look of amazement mingled with compassion, if I was lucky, or disgust if I wasn’t. Then he would invariably seize the opportunity to tell the story of his own fearless grandfather.

‘OK, Fernando, that’s enough now,’ I grumbled from time to time.

‘Enough of what?’ he would counter. ‘What are you saying? That it’s a lie?’

‘No, it’s not a lie, but I don’t want every girl on campus finding out. I’d like to get laid too, you know, and you’re not making it easy ...’

‘I don’t see why.’ He shot me a look of smiling wonderment. ‘You’ve still got the Falangists. They’re pretty hot, or so I’m told.’

‘Maybe, but aside from the fact that we don’t know any Falangists, they’re not my type. I get enough of that shit from my sister Angélica.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ he said, laughing, ‘you shouldn’t have had a Nazi for a father.’

On the day his grandson presented his doctoral thesis, I met the fearless Máximo Cisneros and his equally admirable wife Paula. I had presented my own thesis some months earlier, though it did not even occur to my family to attend, although my father paid for dinner afterwards at a restaurant so overpriced it was beyond the means of anyone other than him. The whole Cisneros family came to the presentation of Fernando’s thesis. His grandparents on his father’s side were almost eighty, his mother’s father was older still, but all three climbed the stairs to the hall and sat through the ceremony, although it was unlikely they understood a word of what their grandson said during his presentation. When Fernando finally introduced me to Máximo, whose courageous story I knew by heart, I realised it had been worth postponing my return trip to Boston by five days. Changing my flight had cost me a fortune, but it had cost him much more to come here to see his grandson graduate
cum laude
, something that clearly made him happier than it made Fernando himself. I was excited to meet him, and I told him so, so much so that I didn’t mention how many times his grandson had used the story of his suffering to get laid.

The last time he told the story we were both already over thirty. I’d just come back from the States, Fernando had got married, and his grandfather had died. We had gone for dinner, José Ignacio Carmona hadn’t been able to come with us, and Elena Galván was complaining about having to shell out a third of her salary renting a place in Tres Cantos because her parents lived in Getafe on the other side of Madrid. She had casually added that she was from a military family. I had long since realised that Fernando was a law unto himself, but this time he caught me completely off guard.

‘Really? You have something in common with Álvaro, then . . . His father was in the Blue Division. I suppose your grandparents were too?’

‘No,’ said Professor Galván, completely unaware of where he was heading, ‘my grandparents stayed here in Spain. They’d had enough of war.’

‘Yes,’ Fernando smiled back at her, ‘I suppose that’s why they started it. Because if your father made it to colonel, that must mean both your parents were part of the revolution.’ She nodded, still smiling. ‘Where?’

‘My father’s father fought in Morocco, my mother’s in Santander. ’

‘Did we shoot him?’

Elena laughed. ‘No, you didn’t shoot him. But he spent nearly a year in prison.’

Fernando paused for dramatic effect, looked down at the table, then looked up into Elena’s eyes and shook his head, his smiling fading until it was just a memory. I’d seen him do it so many times that I knew every gesture, every sigh. ‘Mine spent sixteen.’

‘Sixteen . . .’ Elena looked serious all of a sudden, while Fernando was laying it on thick. ‘You mean your grandfather spent sixteen years in prison?’

‘Fifteen, actually. Fifteen years, nine months and three days.’ He paused again, then took a deep breath before making his final play, like a centre forward eyeing the wide expanse of the goal. ‘He could have got out any time, you know. All he had to do was apologise. He was a journalist, self-taught, his father worked in the printworks for a newspaper and got him a job as a runner, but he learned fast and was good with words. He was editor in chief of
Abc
, the republican newspaper in Madrid, during the war. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison, and he was moved from one prison to another until finally he ended up back here in Madrid. Then it occurred to him to set up his own paper in prison - a magazine, really. He did it pretty much all by himself and managed to publish an issue every month. It wasn’t much - you can imagine - but he was happy. And the magazine had a good reputation among other journalists. So the governor of the prison offered him a deal. If he apologised - meaning, if he was prepared to write a series of editorials in which he admitted he was wrong, and flattered Franco - the governor guaranteed he’d be out within the year. My grandfather had been banged up for nine years by then. He said he needed time to think about it. He wrote to his wife and told her everything and my grandmother, who was on her own with two children, wrote back just sixteen words: “Dear Máximo, don’t do anything for me you wouldn’t do for yourself, I love you, Paula.” He served seven more years in prison because he wouldn’t apologise.’

‘Fuck ...’

Elena Galván, a genuinely liberal girl from a genuinely fascist family - an ideal subject, in other words, for what we called the ‘Cisneros experiment’ - was so shocked that she began to call us by our first names.

‘After that, they took his newspaper away from him and gave it to another prisoner, someone who was prepared to write the sort of editorials they wanted, but they left his name on the byline.’ Elena closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they seemed bigger. ‘They did it to humiliate him, obviously, but he didn’t give in, they couldn’t break him. Nobody could, until he finally got out of jail and had a breakdown. “I can’t do anything else, Paula,” he said to my grandmother, “the only thing I know how to do is write.” ’ Fernando spoke as though it was something that had happened to him, every syllable causing him pain. ‘He was blacklisted everywhere and was never able to publish in a newspaper again. Of course, he wrote articles for the underground press but under a pseudonym. He took a job in a hardware shop, and that’s where he worked for the rest of his life, selling screws and nails . . .’

Elena gazed at him as though there was nothing else, no one else, but Fernando’s eyes, his hands, his voice, and I - because I was there - I could think only of one thing: he’s going to fuck her, the bastard’s going to fuck her . . .

‘Why don’t you tell her the story of your other grandfather?’ I suggested, kicking him under the table. ‘He was in prison too.’

‘Don’t interrupt me, Álvarito.’ He stamped down hard on my foot.

A couple of years earlier, in a moment of weakness that he would always regret, Fernando had let slip that his other grandfather, Pepe, wasn’t his mother’s real father. ‘Unfortunately, my real grandfather’s name was Florencio Jiménez,’ he admitted, ‘and he wasn’t a fascist, he wasn’t anything, he was a shit . . . He had a grocery shop in Legazpi and made a fortune on the black market during the war. His brothers were unimpeachable socialists,’ Fernando added, trying to salvage the family’s reputation, ‘and they never suspected a thing, because he was always careful to do his black market business outside the neighbourhood, but everyone in Legazpi knew him so, instead of keeping his head down, on the first of April 1939 he stepped out on the balcony of his house wearing a blue shirt and singing the anthem of the Falangists, “
Cara al sol
”. When the Falangists arrested him, he bought his freedom by giving them the names of every communist he knew, and a few that he made up. The day he was released, he went back to his shop and waited for it to get dark. This was where he had stashed the jewellery, the silver, the watches he had accepted as payment for food and medicine. He didn’t even go home to say goodbye, he just took off and no one ever heard from him again, until his wife, who had been living in sin for thirty years with her brother-in-law Pepe, applied for a divorce. That’s when they found out that Florencio was in Majorca, that he owned two hotels and a villa with a swimming pool and was living with a girl half his age. He said she could have a divorce as long as it didn’t cost him a penny.’

The story of Florencio Jiménez was much worse than my father’s, but maybe even that would not have put off Professor Galván, who, by the time the coffees arrived, looked as though she were about to fall to the floor and cling to Fernando Cisneros’s knees, offering herself in reparation for the sins of her ancestors. Which is what she did, more or less. ‘Do you fancy coming back to my place for a drink?’ she said as we got up to leave. Fernando got in before I had time to make up an excuse. ‘Álvaro can’t . . .’ he said simply, ‘but I’d love to.’

I thought about that story and the other stories I had heard about Fernando’s grandparents as I read the letters that my own grandfather, Benigno Carrión, had sent his son Julio from Torrelodones. There were only five of them, and they were dreary, full of spelling mistakes and clumsy syntax, ‘Dear son, I hope that this letter finds you well, I am fine, thank God’ but these did not surprise me as much as the fact that there was no mention of politics, no reference to murderous Marxism, or the bestial tyranny of Russia. Instead, every line was steeped in the profound faith of a man more worried about his son’s soul than his survival. ‘Remember to go to mass every day, do not lust after women, don’t be ashamed to pray because to pray is to talk to God, remember that death lies in wait and you can never know when it will come, so prepare your soul so that you may die in a state of grace.’ That’s cheerful, I thought; poor Papá, you go off to war and your father sends you stuff like this . . .

I hadn’t realised that my grandfather had been quite so religious, although it was always the first thing my father mentioned about him. It was not a trait his son had inherited, just as - at least in my presence - he had never paid lip-service to the ideals that had had him posted to Russia. My father was not a fascist, because his politics had more to do with fighting the things he despised than with trying to mould the world. He was anti-communist, yes, but more than anything he despised politics and politicians - the women more than the men. ‘Look at her!’ he’d say when some election candidate appeared on television. ‘She should be at home cooking the dinner and looking after her children instead of mouthing off on television.’ Still, he managed to get on famously with them.

Although things had been going well for him for a long time, my father only truly grew rich during the last years of Franco’s regime, especially after he rode out the storm of the energy crisis in the first years of democracy. For a man as charming as he was, the teams of military and the technocrats of the Opus Dei, who were unimpressed by magic tricks and silly jokes, had been difficult customers. The young, inexperienced democrats who had just come to power were much easier. He told them what they wanted to hear, presented himself as anti-Franco to a greater or lesser extent, hand-picked anecdotes from his repertoire that he thought they would like and effortlessly turned himself into the star of whatever event he was attending. Every morning when I came down to breakfast I’d find him in the kitchen with a glass and a couple of Alka-Seltzers. ‘Jesus, I’ve never gone out so much in my life. From what I can tell democracy means staying up all night . . .’ My mother, who would go back to bed after Clara and I had taken the bus to school, was thrilled. And yet when Antonio Tejero Molino stormed the Congress with all guns blazing in 1981, she seemed much less worried than he was - he paced up and down the living room with his hands on his head repeating, ‘This can’t be happening, those bastards are going to fuck me over now, fuck, fuck . . .’ He was so devastated and so furious that Mamá didn’t dare tell him not to swear in front of us. That was how we found out, during the six long hours it took the king to prepare his speech for the television cameras, that the reason he was so upset was on account of some fantastic contract he’d been offered that hadn’t yet been signed.