The Frozen Heart (85 page)

As Mateo prattled on, and Raquel listened with an inscrutable smile, Ignacio compared the boy’s words to the things on the sideboard facing him: six glasses, each a different colour, a school sports trophy, a small teddy bear, two small earthenware jugs painted yellow, a white china pot embossed with flowers, a perfume bottle and a box made of painted seashells. Nothing more. And not a single book.

The poverty of the furnishings shocked him more than the rug hanging above his head. Ever since they had stopped thinking of him as a child - some six or seven years ago - his parents had stopped forcing him to accompany them to dinner with their Spanish friends, but he still remembered their houses, and his uncle’s house in Toulouse, his grandparents’ house, his own home. He had been born and raised in a home of exiles who had arrived in France with nothing but the clothes on their backs, who for years had worked like dogs so as to be able to live in a foreign country as they might have done in their own, or at least that was what he had believed. Until this afternoon, when he discovered the unexpected, grotesque reality, this ugly, ramshackle sofa, this house where even a perfume bottle might be considered an ornament. This was how they lived, those who had stayed behind, those whom the exiles envied, the men who had never had to sleep on a beach, the women who had never had to steal a petticoat from a dying woman. And still they wanted to go back, he thought, still they raised a glass every New Year’s Eve to toast the possibility that they might go back to this country. Before he had time to come to any conclusion, the lady of the house reappeared with some green cups and a sponge cake.

‘... and the women? Spanish women are stunning, of course, you’d know that being Spanish yourself. You should come back, honestly, there’s no place in the world where you can live like you can ...’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Mateo.’

Casilda did not look at her son as she poured the coffee.

‘It’s not rubbish, Mamá, it’s the truth. And . . .’

‘No,’ his mother interrupted, looking at her nephew and the girl who had come with him, ‘it’s not the truth. We’re not happy here. You can see that for yourselves.’

‘You might not be happy, Mamá,’ Mateo raised his voice, ‘you’re never happy with anything!’

‘Maybe that’s it . . .’ she conceded, her voice calm. ‘I’m not happy here. Andrés, would you like some coffee?’

‘I’d like you all to shut up.’

‘. . . and some coffee?’ his wife asked sardonically.

Her husband merely nodded as a girl of uncertain age commented from the doorway: ‘Mamá’s right,’ then crossed the room towards the guests.

‘Shut up, you brat.’ From his suddenly harsh, authoritative tone, Ignacio and Raquel realised that the man was clearly her father.

‘I’m not a brat.’ She, however, took after her mother. ‘I’m sixteen. ’ Then with a sincerity her older brother lacked, she went over to Ignacio and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Hi, I’m Conchita.’

‘There’s still one missing.’ Casilda smiled. ‘Andrésito, my youngest, he’s twelve, but he went out with his football a while ago and God knows where he is now . . .’

The football fan did not appear, and coffee and cakes proceeded without further interruptions, the women asking questions, the little girl eager to know everything about the guests - what they were studying, where they lived, what their parents did, what the French thought about Spain. Ignacio and Raquel answered her questions, choosing their words carefully, because they guessed that this was not the first time the family had had this argument, and they did not want to make things worse, but from time to time, Ignacio glanced at his cousin, who greeted his mother’s words - ‘So you’re studying engineering? That’s good. You’re just like your grandfather’ - with a contemptuous toss of his head, and he did not understand him, did not understand how Mateo could be so happy at the success of his father’s murderers.

Again Ignacio thought that Spain was an impossible place, but he did not have time to think any further, because Raquel glanced at her watch and nudged him gently.

‘It’s already eight o’clock, we should be going,’ she said.

‘We only have half an hour to get back to the city for dinner,’ he added.

Mateo looked at them wide-eyed. ‘You’re having dinner at half eight?’

‘No, well, at home we have dinner at half nine, sometimes as late as ten,’ Raquel said.

‘OK, but just wait a minute,’ Casilda said, ‘I’ve got something I want to give you. I’ll see you out.’

As she went to fetch it, Mateo said his goodbyes to Ignacio and Raquel. He gave his mother a withering look when she reappeared with a plastic bag.

‘Don’t mind them inside,’ she said as she walked down the steps with them, ‘it’s the fear talking. They terrified, and they don’t know what to say.’ She stopped and turned to look at them. ‘We’ve had a hard time, and there’s more to come. That’s why people don’t want to know, they don’t want to acknowledge the problems. They end up believing what they’ve heard and forgetting what they’ve gone through.’

‘But not you,’ Ignacio ventured.

‘No, not me . . .’ Casilda smiled and carried on down the steps. ‘But they don’t understand. That’s why I wanted to walk you out ... and besides, Andrés has always been jealous of my first husband, Mateo. In the beginning, I could understand it, because, before he asked me to marry him, he asked me straight out and I told him the truth, I told him I didn’t love him as much as I loved Mateo. And he said, “It’s because he was executed, isn’t it?” and I said no, I didn’t think that was the reason, but he’s always said it was . . . He took it very badly, but he still insisted on marrying me.’

She looked at them again. Ignacio looked at Raquel and saw that she was looking at him. Neither Ignacio nor Raquel knew what to say, and they carried on down the stairs in silence, concentrating on her words, because Casilda, for her part, had a lot to say: ‘He’d only just got out of prison. He spent five years inside. After he got out, he gave up on politics. He was all alone, he didn’t have any family, and he was living in a boarding house. Things were even harder for me. I used to work as a cleaner and I didn’t even make enough money to pay the rent. I’d had to give up my parents’ apartment, and all I could afford was an attic room with a leaky roof on the Calle Venture del Vega . . . It was no kind of life for me or for my son, that’s why I married Andrés. I’m not sure I did the right thing, that’s the honest truth, because although we got married, and had two children, he still hasn’t forgotten. He’s alive and Mateo is dead, he’s been dead for more than twenty years, the “twenty years of peace” those bastards are celebrating . . . I’ve been a good wife to him, but it’s not enough, and I can’t do any more. Things are going from bad to worse because he’s still jealous of a dead man, he gets furious if I so much as mention his name, and my son . . . Well, Andrés is the only father he’s ever known and that’s why he hates it when I talk about my first husband, that’s what he calls him, “my first husband”. It makes me angry, but what can I do?’

They had arrived at the front door of the building, but she did not go outside, she leaned against the wall, as though afraid someone might see her, and slipped her hand into the plastic bag. She glanced back up the stairs to make sure they were alone, and only then did she open her hand: laid across her pale palm was a gold bracelet encrusted with diamonds and sapphires and an enormous pearl in the centre.

She took Ignacio’s hand and placed the bracelet in it. ‘Here. Look after it, don’t lose it, it’s worth a lot of money. That bracelet was your grandmother’s dowry, she gave it to me the last time I saw her, when she found out I was pregnant. I was very fond of her, she was always good to me. That’s why I want you to give it back to her.’

‘But why?’ If she gave it to you, then it’s yours.’

‘I know, but I want her to have it, or one of your aunts, or your mother . . . “Take it,” she said to me, “if things get worse you can always sell it, you might need the money.” And she was right, the money would have come in useful, but I never could bring myself to sell it. In any case, it would never have worked, they’d probably have locked me up for theft.’

‘Why would they?’ said Raquel. ‘I mean, you’re her daughter-in-law ...’

‘Not to them. They said my marriage - all marriages performed during the republic - were invalid. I was a communist, and a communist couldn’t possibly have a bracelet like this unless she’d stolen it.’ She smiled. ‘No one would have dared buy it from me, they’d have called the police . . . For people like me, everything was dangerous ...’

‘What about now?’ Raquel said. ‘Surely now you could . . .?’

‘. . . sell it? Of course I could sell it now, but I don’t want to any more. If Mateo had been a girl, then maybe I might have kept it until he was a bit older, in case he came to his senses and I could have given it to him, but . . .’ She turned to her nephew. ‘I’d rather you took it back to your grandmother, tell her how much I love her, and thank her for me. And, oh, there’s something else I want you to have . . .’ Her lips suddenly began to tremble as her hand slipped once more into the plastic bag and took out a photograph with a scalloped border, the whites yellowed and the blacks mottled with grey. ‘I’m sure you’ve never seen this, have you? Take it. I have another one taken on the same day.’

‘It’s very beautiful,’ said Ignacio, who had never seen the portrait, but he immediately recognised the smiling soldier as his Uncle Mateo, his arm around a slim, graceful girl.

‘Yes,’ Casilda smiled, ‘Mateo is very handsome in that photo, and I look pretty too, I was pretty back then. That’s why I want you to take it to your grandparents and tell them . . . Tell them I think about Mateo every day, every day without fail . . .’ For a moment, her face contorted in a paroxysm of grief and she could not go on, but then she composed herself. ‘Fifty-six days of my life we spent together. Fifty-six days, not even two months, over a period of two years, and often I didn’t even get to spend the whole day with him, a couple of hours, maybe three . . . But still . . . I remember that first night he showed up at my house in the early hours, dripping wet, I remember him leaving in a hurry because his commander had said that if he was late back, he would be court-martialled and shot for desertion.’ Though there were still tears in her eyes, she laughed. ‘Every morning, I think about that night, I remember every detail so as not to forget, and I can still see him, still hear his voice, I still remember the things he said to me right up to the fifty-sixth time, the morning when he picked me up and took me to the truck that was taking me to Cartagena. I was inconsolable and there he was smiling and waving, and even after the truck pulled away I heard him shout, “See you soon, gorgeous!” That was the last thing he said, “gorgeous”, and I never saw him again . . .’

She wrapped her arms around herself and began to cry, to sob with such grief that it was as though it had been yesterday, as though twenty-four years had not passed. She had been a widow for almost twenty-five years according to the clocks, the calendars, but not to her. Not to her.

Ignacio Fernández Salgado knew how badly Mateo’s death had affected his father, his grandparents. They had often spoken about it, too often for his liking, and yet he felt an instinctive shudder of pain run through him, because he could not doubt the grief this woman still felt, this woman who had a second husband, three children, and a life that did not matter to her. If someone had described this scene to him, he would have found it laughable, just one more pitiful example of Spanish foolishness, but he was here, he could see it and hear it, there was a taste of apricots in his mouth, and he felt an overwhelming need to hug this woman, to hide himself within her so that he could weep for all the dead, all those people for whom, until now, he had not shed a single tear.

‘I remember it every morning.’ Casilda’s voice was firm now. ‘I wake up every morning before the alarm clock goes off, and I remember those fifty-six days, because no one can forbid me, no one can stop me, not my husband, not Franco, not his fucking mother . . . Tell your grandmother that, and tell her . . .’ She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and carried on. ‘Tell her that on the twenty-ninth of every month, I buy a bunch of flowers, I put on a black dress and I go and stand by the cemetery gates because I don’t know where he’s buried . . . They won’t tell me where he’s buried ...’

She fell silent, as though she could not bear to go on, and Ignacio took her hand and squeezed it.

‘I wasn’t allowed to wear mourning when I went back to Madrid. Everyone in my area knew me . . . I was a coward, I didn’t dare. The second day I went out wearing black, a policeman who lived next door took me to the station and they asked me how I could possibly know who I was mourning for, they said I was a whore, that I slept with anyone and everyone. That was just the start . . .’ She paused, looked at Ignacio and Raquel, then gestured with her hand as though waving away temptation. ‘Pff, why would I bother telling you what they said all those years ago . . .? The fact is I couldn’t mourn, and I was a coward, I didn’t dare . . .’

‘It doesn’t matter, Casilda.’ Raquel spoke the words Ignacio had been thinking. ‘Wearing mourning doesn’t mean a thing, it’s just clothes, it’s just a colour.’

‘It does matter,’ Casilda was insistent, ‘it mattered to me. But I was scared, and I had a baby . . . That’s why I wear mourning now - in secret, obviously - but only so that I don’t have to fight with my husband. I take the clothes to work, and I change again before I come home. My son knows, he says I’m crazy, but I don’t care. On the twenty-ninth of every month I buy the biggest bunch of flowers I can afford, and at lunchtime I go to the cemetery and I leave the flowers by the wall and I stay there for a while, until they throw me out, because sooner or later a guard always shows up and moves me on . . . I know the flowers don’t last. I know the guards give them to their wives or their girlfriends, but I don’t care. I go on buying flowers just to piss them off, I leave them by the wall where they shot him just to piss them off . . .’ For a second, her eyes flared with the fire of the young girl in the photograph. ‘One day, about ten years ago, I saw a name written on the wall in chalk: Victoriano López Aguilera. I don’t know who he was, but I’ll never forget his name. I asked around - because I go to the cemetery so often, I’ve got to know the other women who go - but nobody knew who had written it. One of them said, “It must have been written on one of the other days, I come on the twenty-ninth.” Since then, every month I write his name on that wall: Mateo Fernández Muñoz, and I write 1915-1939. I know they rub it out as soon as I’m gone, but before they can erase it they have to read it. Fuck the lot of them! Because what they want is for Mateo never to have existed. Do you understand, Ignacio?’