The Frozen Heart (58 page)

Faced with this burning chasm, the son of Mateo Fernández Gómez de la Riva learned also that his righteous anger could grow and change, could become tinged with tenderness and pride, the basic ingredients of a nebulous yet universal love for humankind. If only for that love, it was worth trying. This is what Ignacio was thinking when he got up from the chair to interrupt the tableau. He went over, put his arm around Roque’s shoulder, and acted as his interpreter until the interview was over.

‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, patting Roque on the back as he watched the official finish his report with a single, damning word:
indésirable
. ‘I think they’re sending us all to the same place.’

‘Excuse me . . .’ The next person in line, the short bald man with the glasses, still clutching his briefcase, said to Ignacio in his thick Majorcan accent, ‘Would you mind interpreting for me too?’

‘You’re the one from Madrid, the one who speaks French, the one they call The Lawyer?’ At the Barcarès camp, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz quickly became famous, although most people did not know his real name, only his nickname. ‘Wait a minute, we need to talk about your case . . .’ the official had said to him that morning when he had finished interpreting for those being interrogated that day. ‘I don’t think so. I have nothing to say to you. I’m a Spanish communist just like them and just as
indésirable
. The man looked at him, irritated to lose a backhander, but simply scribbled the word on Ignacio’s form and stamped it. ‘Fine, have it your way . . .’ Then they were all boarded on to a truck and driven to a forbidding stretch of beach enclosed by barbed-wire fences.

‘Fuck,’ Roque said when they arrived, ‘we’ve gone halfway round the world to wind up somewhere just like Albatera . . .’

‘True, but the ground is softer here, and there’s no shooting,’ Ignacio comforted him.

‘You’re the one from Madrid, the one who speaks French, the one they call The Lawyer?’ His clients from the commissariat, some twenty of them, though the women had been taken to a different camp, had spread the word, and now everyone called him The Lawyer. He liked it, it made him sound like a bullfighter. ‘That’s me.’ ‘Could you tell them my wife is here, I don’t know where she is, but she’s got my two with her, I have to find her’, ‘Tell them I didn’t do anything, tell them I’m from a village near Sevilla and that I fought in Santander, but we didn’t kill anyone’, ‘My brother’s in France and I want to find out where he is, that’s all, can you tell them that? And my fiancée, she’s all alone, I don’t know where she is, but I’ve got to find her, but they don’t understand’, ‘I think my wife is dead, and my children are only young, they won’t listen to me, I don’t know what to do’, ‘I have two daughters, one seven, the other one’s eleven, they’re supposed to be with their older sister and their mother is worrying herself to death because she can’t find them, go on, tell them, tell them . . .’

They came from all walks of life, young and old, tall and short, educated and illiterate, they came from the city and from the country, from the coast and the interior, from the mainland and the islands. ‘You’re the one from Madrid, the one who speaks French, the one they call The Lawyer ?’ He heard the same question in every imaginable accent, and his answer was always the same: ‘That’s me’. ‘The thing is, I have got this problem and these people don’t give a fuck . . .’ They came from all walks of life, and each of them had a problem, and the problems were all the same - a wife, a fiancée, a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, children. He listened to them and did what he could for them even though he knew that it was pointless.

‘Hey, Lawyer. I did burn down the church in my village . . .’ a boy from Zamora told him one day. ‘No one died, but only because the priest had already done a runner. If he hadn’t, who knows, I mean, there’s no point lying to you . . . So anyway, we took all the statues out and put the boy saints on top of the girl saints, and it was a laugh.’ Ignacio smiled but the boy went on, his voice serious, ‘I just wanted to tell you in case someone said something, but don’t go telling the French, OK?’

‘They don’t care,’ Ignacio said to the boy, ‘it’s just an excuse, a way to justify what they’re doing to us, it’s completely cynical.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Cynical ?’

He went over, put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘It means they don’t give a fuck if you burned down the church. If you were a republican, you’re fucked. That’s what it means.’

Then he went to the commanding officer, ignoring the bored expression on the man’s face and pleaded the case of a Spanish lad, recently married, whose friend had said he’d seen his wife sitting in a ditch just across the border. He got the same answer he always did: ‘No.’

‘Why do you do it?’ the French officer asked him later in a genial, almost friendly tone. ‘Why do you come and see me over and over, when you know I’m going to say no.’

‘Because they have the right to be heard,’ Ignacio replied. ‘Because they’re not criminals or murderers. All they did was fight for their country, they did nothing to deserve being locked up like this.’ He thought about turning on his heel, but realised that the time had come to say something more. ‘I didn’t do anything either, but I’ll tell you now, I wish I had burned down a church. If I’d known that things were going to turn out like this, I would have done, believe me.’

‘You’re the one from Madrid, the one who speaks French, the one they call The Lawyer ?’ ‘That’s me.’ And the next time he saw him, the officer in charge of the camp took his hand, shook it and said goodbye.

In Bacarès, everyone knew Ignacio Fernández Muñoz, but the only people who addressed him by name were Roque and Lieutenant Huguet, with whom he had a glass of wine every night. And, one Sunday in October, when he heard a woman’s voice say his name, he realised that his efforts had been rewarded. It had taken three months for his family to find him through Donato, a prisoner who was working in Perpignan and came back to the camp every night, and who put out the word to the network of republican exiles in the south of France for anyone who asked. Finding a familiar face among the sea of French people in their Sunday best who came every week to gawp at the communists in their cages was not easy, especially because on that particular Sunday there were a number of foreign photographers, Americans mostly, perched on ladders trying to get an aerial shot of the prisoners - an image that was clearly popular in the Western newspapers since they kept coming, week after week.

This was the one thing the West had done for them: take photos. Thousands of photos, portraits and group shots of Spanish people locked in cages like monkeys in a zoo. The men in Barcarès despised the photographers and yet they continued to indulge them. When one of them spotted a camera, he would yell ‘Photo!’ and everyone would get to their feet, raise their fists, tilt their chins in salute. From outside, it might have seemed a vain, futile gesture, but for the men it was a fervent affirmation of their identity, of their determination, it told the world that they were still alive, they were still the same men they had been. So, although they despised the photographers, they all got to their feet that Sunday, stared into the lenses, and among those on the far side of the fence saluting with them he saw his little sister and called out her name.

‘Ignacio, Ignacio . . . You don’t know . . .’ María babbled, starting sentences she could not finish, as they reached through the fence to touch each other. ‘You can’t possibly know . . . When we found out . . . Paloma wasn’t there that day, but one of my friends was with me . . . I was in a café and then . . . Ignacio . . .’

‘María . . .’ He cupped his sister’s face as best he could. ‘Slow down, María. I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

‘It’s true.’ She withdrew a fraction and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I’m just nervous. We thought you were dead too, I . . . I thought I’d never see you again. That’s what I was trying to say, and then this man came into the boulangerie where Paloma and I work. They put Paloma out front serving. I work at the back at the ovens. I don’t mind, but . . .’

At that moment, a Senegalese soldier stepped up and reminded Ignacio that communicating with the outside world was forbidden. Ignacio nodded and, in French, told the man that he was just saying goodbye.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he whispered in Spanish. ‘Move down the fence to where all those people are standing, find a space and wait for me.’ It was a respite which they both needed, an interlude in which they had time to take in the fact that they had found each other, that they could once more talk and touch, even if it was through the barbed wire.

‘Anyway . . .’ She picked up where she had left off. ‘This man came into the boulangerie and Paloma had finished her shift, but there was another girl there, her name is Anita, she lives with us now, and she took the message - it was a note to arrange a meeting, it said it was about you - so she gave it to me, she knows how things have been at home, ever since Mateo and then what happened to Carlos . . .’

‘What happened to Carlos?’ His voice sounded alien and hoarse in his ears.

‘Yes,’ María looked down at the ground, then back at Ignacio, ‘Carlos is in prison. He’s been sentenced to death, for military insurrection. It’s so ridiculous it would be laughable, if it wasn’t so tragic. But the worst of it is, it was The Toad who turned him in.’

‘The Toad?’ Ignacio remembered the hard, cold glow, patient and pitiless, in Mariana’s eyes as they followed him.

‘The Toad,’ his sister confirmed, ‘that bitch. It was different for Mateo, there was nothing we could do, someone in the camp at Alicante recognised him. He never found out who, but it was someone who knew him well, who knew the whole family. Mateo was killed not just for being who he was, but for being Papá’s son, Mamá’s son, for being your brother, Ignacio, for being Carlos’s brother-in-law. Just imagine it: a little rich boy, a philosophy student and a socialist, the son of a republican engineer, the grandson of a count and an Andalusian landowner, his brother a communist promoted to captain and his brother-in-law an officer. He was the perfect scapegoat, he represented everything they despised: philosophy, law, university. They must have been thrilled, those murdering bastards . . . Anyway, Mateo got angry, called them every name under the sun, and they didn’t dare beat him up. They were too worried that he might die ahead of time.’

‘Of course . . . they wanted him executed in Madrid . . .’ Ignacio remembered the rumours he had heard in Albatera, the whispered stories that at the time had seemed outlandish in their cruelty rather than real and tragic.

‘And that’s what happened. He was shot by firing squad on 29 May. They published his name and our names in the papers the following day.’

‘Nice of them.’ Ignacio thought about Casilda, his sister-in-law.

‘Charming.’ María tried to smile and failed. ‘Of course, now we’re the cancer of Spain . . . you know, the people who destroyed our country, the soulless liberal mob, the traitors who sold the country to Stalin . . .’ She paused, then shook her head. ‘They’re bastards but I still can’t believe that they could be so brutish, so stupid. And they’re the ones who are ruling Spain now. It breaks my heart . . . Anyway, before they shot him, on the journey to Madrid, Mateo was able to tell one of the other prisoners everything. He’s still in prison, but he told his wife, who found Casilda when she went back.’

‘How is she?’ For a second, he felt his throat close. ‘Is she in prison?’

‘No, she’s free . . .’ Her smile reassured him. ‘Though she went through hell, too. She was locked up in a convent in Cartagena after the war, so she never got the chance to go and see Mateo. By the time they let her go, he was dead. At least now she’s at home, and she has her baby. She named him after Mateo, but he has his mother’s surname, because after the war civil marriages were declared null and void. But you know, although the baby was premature, they’re both fine, they’re thin, but they’re healthy. So you’re an uncle.’

Ignacio remembered his brother’s wedding, a quick, impersonal ceremony so brief that he did not even arrive in time to be a witness, or to see the civil servant who had taken his place. He had been so surprised that Mateo had decided to get married, it seemed so absurd, so unseemly in the icy autumn of 1938, that he had paid scant attention to his brother’s reasons. At the time, he had thought it was some whim of his sister-in-law, and now that it was too late to regret it, he shuddered to think that, far from protecting Casilda, the marriage had made her life more difficult.

‘It was Casilda who told us that Mateo had seen you in the camp in Alicante, that you were alive.’ María looked at him, tried to smile and this time she succeeded. ‘But we didn’t hold out much hope. We found out that ordinary soldiers had been released as long as they had never belonged to a political party, but officers . . . Papá was devastated, he kept saying that the one thing he regretted was telling Mamá that at least you and Mateo and Carlos had finished your studies, so you’d move up the ranks quickly, that you were destined to be officers not cannon fodder. Now he thinks it’s a miracle that they didn’t make the connection between you and Mateo.’

‘And he’s right.’ Ignacio smiled at her.

‘When I went home and told him you were here . . . it was like he came back to life, honestly, and Mamá, well . . . you can imagine.’ Then tears welled in the eyes of María Fernández Muñoz, the youngest, the most resilient, the strongest of them all. ‘They wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let them, it’s a long way, and they need to look after Paloma . . . We all need to look after Paloma, she’s beside herself . . . She keeps saying she should never have come, that she always knew she should have stayed behind in Madrid, that it’s our fault, we forced her to leave Carlos behind, that she could have hidden him, helped him escape . . . It’s stupid. We’ve told her that the minute he was arrested she would have been put in prison too, but she won’t listen . . .’