The Frozen Heart (64 page)

‘I think about you all the time,’ he wrote, ‘you are with me when I go to sleep every night, every morning when I wake, I think about you every minute of every day.’ And it was true. So true that he did not stop thinking about her for a single second, even on the blessed morning when he put a bullet into the head of an SS commandant - a commandant like that bastard at Albatera. The dark, violent emotion he felt as he watched the man fall was for Carlos, was for Mateo. Yet a split second later he realised that he might have been shot that night and Anita would never know. It was then that he realised that it did matter to him whether he lived or died, and he was happy that he had survived.

They had gone out to retrieve a consignment of weapons parachuted in by Allied forces, but before they got there, they had stumbled on a German patrol - who might have been bringing up the rear of a convoy, or simply have lost their way, when their truck got a puncture.

‘Maybe it’s one of our tyres,’ Amadeo whispered, but Ignacio, still unable to believe his eyes, said nothing.

‘They’re having dinner,’ said Moreno, the leader, who was from Madrid like Ignacio.

‘Jesus, you’re right,’ Ignacio said, ‘I can’t believe we’ve been so lucky.’

His compatriot shot him a look of surprise. ‘We do nothing!’ Moreno said unequivocally. ‘The orders were clear - if conditions aren’t right, there’s no drop, so we go back.’

‘Like fuck we’re going back.’

They argued in whispers, hidden by the rocks, close to the spot where the Germans had built a fire and were sitting around it. Ignacio felt the finger on the trigger of his rifle burning.

‘We’re going to take them,’ he said simply.

‘No,’ said Moreno.

‘Yes.’

‘Do I have to remind you I’m in charge?’

‘You’re in charge?’ Ignacio Fernández Muñoz shot Moreno such a withering look that no one dared to break the electric silence that followed. ‘I’m in charge, because I’m a captain and you, you’re a puny little sergeant who still pisses his pants.’

Then, without waiting for a response, he turned to ‘his men’: Aurelio, Amadeo, Nicolás ‘The Confectioner’ from Reus, and Salvador - ‘The Kid’ - who came from somewhere near Orihuela.

‘We’re going to take them because even though we’re outnumbered, we’ve got cover and they’re in the open, got it?’ He waited until they nodded. ‘It’s going to be like shooting ducks in a fairground, but we have to take it slowly, line up the shots, divvy up the targets, and no one is to fire until I give the order . . .’

‘What did you say you did ?’

When they got to the farm where the local leaders of the Maquis were waiting, they were met by a line of resolutely bewildered faces rather than with the praise they were expecting.

‘Eleven dead, two prisoners,’ Ignacio repeated, slowly, in French, ‘and we took the truck with the weapons and ammunition, two motorcycles and a tank. There was a jeep too, but we had to leave it behind because there were only six of us, so there was no one to drive it.’

‘A tank?’ one of the Frenchmen repeated, and Perea, who saw where this was heading, became nervous. ‘And how did you get it here?’

‘We took the road.’ Ignacio was growing tired of what seemed like pointless questions.

The Maquis explained that this was not how things were done here, they did not take prisoners, that a tank was useless to them and they would have to destroy it. Ignacio had been expecting this, but Amadeo had been so excited when he set eyes on the tank - ‘Look, Bigmouth, there’s a donkey for you to ride back to your village!’ - that Ignacio had quickly given in to him. ‘Aw, Lawyer, do we have to blow it up? It’s so pretty,’ Amadeo had said, stroking the tank, ‘And it’s brand new, look, it’s like it’s been waiting for me. Let’s take it, it’s three o’clock in the morning and it’s only a couple of kilometres from here to the track. Who’s going to see us?’

‘It was reckless, I admit that,’ Ignacio said, ‘but you don’t win a war without being reckless.’

Ignacio’s brashness did little to convince the French, but Bigmouth’s outburst, hurling himself at one of them when he realised they intended to take away his donkey, proved more effective: ‘What do you mean, destroy it? You’re not destroying my tank, got that?’ He lifted the man off the ground, and went on screaming, oblivious to the fact that his victim did not understood a word he was saying. ‘I’m crossing the border in this tank, got that?’

That morning, Aurelio Perea drove the tank down the track, back to the camp where their waiting comrades gave them the welcome that would be immortalised the following day with a photograph. Moreno, deeply offended, refused to pose for the photo but they quickly lost sight of him on the afternoon they were summoned back to the farm, where they were met by a man dressed as a farm labourer, a senior French officer they had never met before. ‘Are you the tank guys?’ he asked, addressing them in Spanish. When they told him they were, he smiled and suggested that they join the French troops. ‘I get the impression your talents are underused here.’ ‘About time,’ Aurelio exclaimed; he was as bored as the others with being a messenger boy. Ignacio laughed, delighted at this sudden reversal of fortune, but as he laughed he thought about the risk he would be taking, about Anita.

 

On a morning in September 1944, as Ignacio looked up and down the station platform and did not see her, he wondered why he had left behind the carousing and the marches, the celebrations of the Liberation, to come back to Toulouse. He had sent her a telegram, so that she would know he was coming home for her, so that she would not feel like an outsider, coming to meet him at the station with his family. The telegram had obviously arrived because his family were there - his father, his mother and María, pregnant with a man on her arm. Everyone except Paloma, who was probably working, he thought. Everyone except Anita.

‘Ignacio!’ his father called to him, waving his hat. But Ignacio did not budge: Papá, Mamá, María, María’s boyfriend, no Anita. No Anita.

‘
Hijo mío!
’ His mother rushed over and threw her arms around him, but all she got was a perfunctory hug, a cold stare and a barrage of questions.

‘What about Anita? Where is she? Has something happened?’

‘No, she’s fine, she’s at home.’ María Muñoz smiled.

‘Why? Why didn’t she come to meet me?’ he persisted.

‘There have been a few changes,
hijo
, you’ll see . . .’

‘Is she married?’ His sister threw her arms around him, and tried to introduce the man with her. ‘Tell me, Mamá! Did she marry someone else?’

‘Of course not, what are you talking about? She’s waiting for you at home . . .’

‘I’m the one who got married,’ his sister interrupted. ‘This is my husband. Francisco, this is my brother Ignacio. Francisco is from Sonseca, near Toledo, you know, the village where they make the marzipan.’

‘Really?’ Ignacio shook the man’s hand, so confused that it took him a moment to remember what marzipan was. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

The newlyweds said goodbye as they left the station, leaving Ignacio with his parents: ‘What did you think of Francisco? María worships him, we’ve know him for about a year and a half. He was besotted with Paloma, but then he fell in love with María. He’s a nice lad, well brought up, a good worker. She got pregnant straight away, she’s five months gone. We’re hoping for a little girl.’ They bombarded him with facts and questions, but they were nearing home now, and a few minutes later the taxi dropped them outside the door.

‘Listen, Ignacio, before we go in . . .’ María Muñoz took her son’s hands in hers and looked into his eyes as her husband fumbled with his keys. ‘Only one good thing has happened to us since we left Spain, try to remember that, one good thing . . .’

‘María!’ From the hall, Mateo Fernández shot his wife an outraged look.

‘What?’ she protested. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to my son?’

‘No, you’re not. Because your son is a grown man, and more than capable of making his own decisions. He doesn’t need your advice, let alone your blackmail.’

‘Mamá, what the hell is going on?’ the grown man exploded. ‘For fuck sake, will someone tell me what this is about?’

‘Ignacio, I won’t have you talk like that!’

Arriving on the landing, Ignacio noticed that the door was open. Paloma, who had heard the raised voices, was standing in the doorway, smiling, and in her arms she cradled a baby, almost a toddler, with dark hair and protruding ears, and huge, dark, mournful eyes, just like Anita’s, he thought, still not putting two and two together.

‘This is your son, Ignacio,’ Mateo pronounced, his tone neutral.

‘He looks just like you, don’t you think?’ The baby’s grandmother reached out and her grandson clambered into her arms, gurgling and laughing, revealing a gap between his front teeth just like the one Ignacio Fernández Muñoz saw every time he looked in the mirror. ‘His hair is dark like his mother’s, but otherwise he’s the spitting image of you . . .’

Ignacio said nothing; he looked from the child to his mother, then to his father, to his sister Paloma and then back to the baby. But we were careful, we were always careful . . . except maybe once or twice at the end, he thought.

‘Here!’ Ignacio’s mother handed him his son, but the boy struggled out of her arms and ran to Paloma.

‘But this is Papá!’ Paloma explained. ‘You know. You can even say Papá, can’t you? Go on, let him hear you say it: Papá . . . papá. ’ The child had no intention of saying anything and his aunt laughed. ‘He’s completely spoiled, of course . . .’

It took some time for Ignacio to react, and in that hiatus, his son’s curiosity overcame his surprise; he struggled until Paloma set him down, warily came closer, and clung to Ignacio’s trousers.

‘Soldier,’ he said. This was the first word Ignacio Fernández Muñoz heard his son say.

‘Where’s Mamá?’ Ignacio asked the boy.

‘Mamá,’ the child repeated confidently. He dashed off down the hall and his father went after him, only to come back when he realised he was missing a vital piece of information.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Ignacio!’ they chorused. And his mother added, ‘After you.’

As he followed his son down the short hallway to the kitchen, all the emotions he had been suppressing since he stepped into the apartment suddenly thrilled through him. In his astonishment, he felt Anita’s shock, the distress and worry she must have felt at discovering she was pregnant, also her fear, her determination and her strength. He almost laughed to think of all the nights he had spent reimagining her slender figure - she probably looked nothing like that now. And yet, as he stepped into the kitchen, the woman waiting for him seemed to have been frozen in time; she sat calmly with her back to the stove as though waiting for her son to tug at her skirt before moving. In a clear voice, the child announced:

‘Papá.’ Only then did Anita Salgado Pérez pick up a dishcloth and take the casserole from the oven; she wiped her hands, then turned and looked at him. He saw that she was much more beautiful, more real, more desirable, than he remembered. And he felt at once utterly naked and utterly safe, felt that he was finally home.

There was a pile of well-thumbed exercise books on the table, the covers worn and creased.

‘I did my homework,’ she said, and seeing him smile, she smiled too.

‘So I see.’

She put the child down, took Ignacio in her arms and kissed him; her kisses kept coming, her feet lifted off the ground long before he wrapped his hands around her waist and sat her on the table, still kissing her, finally accepting the reality of her flesh. He felt so overcome that he did not recognise the cause of the sharp pain in his calf until they finally broke their embrace and, glancing down, he saw the son whose very existence he had forgotten.

‘He’s biting me . . .’ Ignacio said, laughing, as he removed the hairpins that imprisoned her lush confusion of curls in a severe chignon.

‘I know,’ she said, helping him. ‘He’s very attached to his mother.’

After lunch, the rest of the family went for a walk, taking the boy with them, and they found themselves alone in a bed different from the one Ignacio remembered, in a large, comfortable room that looked out on to the street. At that moment, Ignacio Fernández Muñoz said what he believed he had to say, but it felt not like a duty but a privilege. She did not agree to his request so easily.

‘Listen, Ignacio, I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s not as simple as that.’ Anita leaned back against the pillow and became serious. ‘Everything is about to change, it’s obvious, your father goes on about it all the time: “It might not be our war, but at least we’ve won this one.” And when the Nazis surrender, or maybe even before then, the Allies will deal with Franco, they’ll have no choice - I mean Franco sided with the Germans and the Italians from the very beginning, he even sent troops to Russia . . . So some day soon the Allies are going to invade Spain, you’ll go back to war, you’ll kick the bastard out, everything will be fine, and then what? Because everything’s different here in France - here everything is a mess, all of us are penniless. Back home, things will go back to being the way they were, with everyone back in their rightful place. And it doesn’t matter how communist you are, Ignacio, you’ll always be rich, a gentleman, and you might say it doesn’t matter, but it does. And me . . . there’s no point lying about it, in Madrid before the war, the best I could have hoped for was to be your mother’s maid.’

Anita had carefully prepared this speech, and rattled it off without pausing for breath, like a schoolgirl reciting a lesson. Then she looked at him and he was smiling.

‘Well, well,’ he was laughing now, ‘honestly, you’re as stubborn as a mule . . . I’ve never seen the like of it . . .’

‘What? I’m right, aren’t I?’ she protested.

He did not want to answer her. He gazed at her, pushed a lock of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.