The Frozen Heart (53 page)

At 12.40 p.m., the register office in Torrelodones was deserted. I thought my luck had finally failed me, but I cleared my throat, banged on the reception desk, and a skinny young man in glasses appeared, looking at me nervously with the terrified air of a trainee. He could have been one of my students, and that thought reassured me.

‘OK. Can you fill out these forms, please . . .’ he said when I explained the purpose of my visit.

‘Listen,’ I cut him off, ‘I can’t hang around. This is really important to me. I’m a professor, I teach at UAM, and I don’t have much time ...’

‘You don’t have to come back,’ he replied. ‘We can post the information to you in Madrid.’

‘I know, but I’m guessing everything is on computer, isn’t it?’ He nodded warily. ‘So even if you’re going to send me the information later, couldn’t you look it up quickly right now and just tell me? It’ll only take five minutes.’

‘That’s not procedure. Standard practice is to send the information by post. My boss isn’t here right now, and I’m just a student, I’m only here for ten days, and . . .’ He looked at me, clicked his tongue then nodded. ‘What was your grandmother’s name?’

‘Teresa González.’

‘Teresa González what?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked at me, his eyes wide. ‘Honestly, I don’t know, as I said before. No one ever talked about her at home, I didn’t even know she had had another child, and I’ve only just found out that she didn’t die of tuberculosis in 1937. I think she might have been a victim of the reprisals after the war, but I don’t know. Maybe she left the country, I’ve no idea. All I know is that my father was born here in Torrelodones on 17 January 1922.’

‘That should be enough . . .’ he mumbled, more to himself than to me, before disappearing through a glass door.

It took longer than five minutes, but he was back within ten.

‘Puerto,’ he said, handing me three sheets of paper. ‘Teresa González Puerto, daughter of Julio and María Luisa, born on 3 August 1900 in Villanueva de los Infantes, a village in Ciudad Real. I’ve found only three documents relating to her. A marriage certificate dating from 1920 when she married Benigno Carrión Moreno, a birth certificate dated 1922 for her first child, Julio Carrión González, and a second birth certificate dated 1925 for Teresa Carrión González. That’s all there is. She certainly didn’t die in this district. Are you registered as living in Madrid?’ I nodded. ‘In that case, you can go to the register office there and put in a request. It may take them a while, because they’ll have to circulate it to all the sub-offices in Spain, but they’ll track her down, unless her death was . . .’ He stopped, groping for a word. ‘Unless her death was, let’s say . . . unofficial. There were thousands of men and women whose deaths were never officially registered. Some of them were declared dead later on, when their families brought pressure to bear, but if you say that your father didn’t want anything to do with her, I’m not so sure . . .’

 

‘Because he was a Spanish communist, not a Polish Jew, my father wasn’t lucky enough to be sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis.’

Adolfo Cerezo, a man Angélica introduced us to that evening, said these words in my living room with a drink in his hand and a serene smile on his face.

Later, while Mai, who had been involved in organising the dinner party, disappeared to find a box of chocolates, get more ice from the kitchen, check on Miguel, open the French windows, and show my sister the new dress she’d just bought, I listened as he told me about his mother’s family, who were from a village on Gran Canaria named Arucas.

‘The war never got that far,’ he said in the same sociable, seemingly offhand tone. ‘The rebels dispatched the whole African army to the islands and there was no way anyone could resist, there was no revolution, the people had no guns, there were no priests shot, no nuns raped, no riots, no propaganda, nothing. Arucas held out longer than anywhere else, and that was only for a day and a half. I’m sure you’ve never heard about this before . . .’

‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but the name sounds familiar.’

‘Oh, it’s a big place. That’s probably why the Falangists thought it would cost them a fortune in bullets. So they caught my grandfather and about sixty other republicans, threw them down a well and tipped in quicklime - not too much, you understand, just enough so the ones at the top couldn’t get out, they were famously stingy . . .’ He paused before explaining, ‘Auschwitz was more compassionate, you know, because the men at Arucas took a long time to die. Nearly a week. And they cried and pleaded, and the quicklime glowed in the night, and the people in the village called it the well of wailing witches, because what happened was like witchcraft. But they went on sleeping the sleep of the just all the same. That’s why my grandmother moved out to the peninsula, because she couldn’t bear to hear that name, and she never set foot in Arucas again. My mother was seven years old when they left the village and she never went back either. But it’s a nice place - that’s almost the worst of it - Arucas is pretty . . .’

‘You’ve been there?’ I said. He nodded.

‘Many times. And I went to the well. I saw where it had happened, I even took flowers, there are always flowers there, some dried and withered, others fresh, piled on top of the well cover.’

‘That’s terrifying. What an appalling story,’ I said at length.

‘Yes, it is appalling,’ Adolfo agreed. ‘Because he was a Spanish communist, not a Polish Jew, my father wasn’t lucky enough to be sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis.’

‘I know it’s a terrible thing, and it must be terrible to have to live with such a story, but I have to say the whole thing gives me the creeps,’ said Mai after my sister and her boyfriend had left, ‘to still be dwelling on it all these years later . . .’

‘If we’d dealt with these things earlier, we wouldn’t need to do it now . . .’ I said, though at the time I didn’t really know what I was saying, I didn’t fully realise the significance until that morning at the hall of records in Torrelodones as I looked into the eyes of the strange boy who was trying to prepare me for the worst.

‘If we’d dealt with these things earlier, we wouldn’t need to do it now,’ this was what I had said, but at the time I didn’t know what it was to imagine the terror, the suffering, the desperation, the fear and the pain which might contort a face - the face of a man, a woman - that a child has seen every day of his life, smiling out of a photograph on the sideboard, hanging in the hallway of the house where he grew up. ‘Your grandfather, your grandmother, my mother’, just a name and a face and if you’re lucky a sentence or two, maybe some beautiful or valuable object that had once belonged to them, but nothing more, no living memory to connect you to the frozen smile of the past. Then the darkness comes, the ground opens up, a lock slides home, a firing squad assembles or the barrel of a gun is pressed to the nape of a neck, and then we sense what we have never seen: the terror, the suffering, the desperation, the fear and the pain; we feel this body we have never held, the hands we have never touched, the tears that the photograph can never shed, and the acrid taste of lead in our mouths.

I felt these things as I imagined Teresa González Puerto tumbling into a well, collapsing in a ditch, dying in a mass grave, her eyes slowly closing as she waited for death. ‘Your grandmother was a good woman, she loved her husband and she loved to play the piano . . .’ I felt all these things and my face distorted with rage. ‘I go to Arucas from time to time, I don’t know why, but I feel I need to go, it makes me feel better. I look at the well, I take flowers, that’s all, it sounds stupid, but I need to do it . . .’ Adolfo had told me that night. Yet there are others - the grandchildren of the rebels, of the fascists, of the Arucas butchers - whose version of the story would be different, whose rage and tears would be different from Adolfo’s, from Fernando’s or my own. I thought about this, but my grandmother’s name had been Teresa González Puerto, and she had lost the war but had never lost her reason, she deserved me to win on her behalf.

‘I’m really sorry.’ The boy had looked at me, his face concerned, almost afraid. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I’ve got no reason to think . . . I’m really sorry.’

‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for, just the opposite.’ I forced myself to remain calm, took his hand, and he shook it firmly. ‘I’m very grateful to you.’

I took the official version of my grandmother’s life, three meagre sheets of paper, and walked towards the main square. The café terraces were almost empty, it was early, it was Monday. I picked a table in the sunshine and ordered a beer from a short, engaging, dark-haired waitress who looked like she might be from Ecuador or maybe Peru. I drank the beer and ordered another as I read and reread the documents, the summary printed in ten-point Arial at the top of the photocopy. Then I paid the bill, left a generous tip and went into the bar.

‘Excuse me, I don’t know if you can help me, I’m looking for someone . . .’ It was the appearance of the woman behind the bar - fifty-something, sturdy, self-possessed - which persuaded me to talk to her. ‘Are you from here?’

‘No, but I’ve been living here for thirty years,’ she said, smiling.

‘I see . . .’ I smiled back. ‘It’s, well . . . I’m looking for some friends of my father, he was born here in Torrelodones but he left for Madrid when he was young. I thought maybe you might know them . . . One of them is called Anselmo, he’d be quite old, the same age as my father was when he died at eighty-three . . .’

‘No . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anyone called Anselmo.’

‘And a woman everybody always called Encarnita?’

‘A tall woman with short grey curly hair, very tall and old . . .’

It was her. Not only did the woman know Encarnita, she knew where she lived. I got lost more than once, taking the wrong turning at ridiculous roundabouts that looked as though they had been deliberately designed to disorient drivers who weren’t local, before finally finding the place, a stone cottage set in an overgrown garden with tall trees surrounded by a hedge of rose-laurel. Next to the gate there was an entryphone. I pushed the button and said I had come to see Encarnita. Someone buzzed me in. A blonde woman of about thirty with short hair and pale white skin stood at the door waiting for me.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning,’ she replied, and from her accent I realised that she was foreign.

‘My name is Álvaro Carrión, I’m the son of an old friend of Encarnita,’ I articulated slowly, ‘I’d like to talk to her for a minute, if that’s all right.’

‘
La señora
no here.’

‘What time will she be back?’ The woman didn’t answer. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

‘Señora Encarnita here, Señora Encarna no here.’

‘OK, but ...’ The coincidence of the names made me wonder. ‘I don’t know . . . I’m looking for the older lady.’

‘Ay!’

That was all she said, her nervous expression looking almost like grief. She disappeared, leaving the door open. Some minutes later she came back with a young girl wearing tight jeans, a cropped T-shirt and a blue stud in her belly button.

‘Hi,’ she stuffed her hands into her pockets and smiled, ‘Jovanka said something about my grandmother, but I didn’t really understand what she was saying. She’s from Croatia.’

‘That’s probably why she didn’t understand me. The thing is . . .’

I introduced myself, explained who my father was, told her I had seen her grandmother at the funeral and that I wanted to talk to her because I thought she might have known my grandmother.

‘Oh, O K ... I’m sure she’d love to, she loves talking to people, but she gets tired easily . . .’ Just then, we heard a car and she craned her neck to look. ‘Look, there’s my mother now.’

I repeated my story for the third time to a graceful, friendly woman a little older than me, who listened and nodded until she felt she didn’t need to hear any more.

‘Come with me.’ She stepped into the hall, then turned to her daughter. ‘Cecilia, go and tell Jolanka your father phoned to say he won’t have time to come back for lunch . . .’

‘OK, but after that I’m coming back to listen.’

Her mother smiled and walked down the hall to a glass door through which the sun streamed. There, in a semicircular living room that opened on to a back porch which revealed how old the house truly was, Encarnita was sitting in front of the television, ramrod straight in a wicker chair stuffed with cushions. She did not seem particularly interested in the programme because she turned and looked at us, then switched off the television.

‘Hello, Mamá . . .’ Her daughter bent down, kissed her forehead and stroked the woman’s cheek. ‘How are you feeling? Look, you’ve a visitor. This young man is . . .’

‘I know,’ Encarnita cut her daughter short, looking at me, ‘I recognise you.’

‘Yes, we met recently at my father’s funeral,’ I said, ‘my name is . . .’

‘Julio Carrión.’

‘No,’ I smiled, ‘that was my father’s name, and I have a brother named Julio, but my name is Álvaro. Álvaro Carrión.’

She was a little taken aback, and I realised she had mistaken me for my father. Her daughter asked whether we would like something to drink then headed towards the kitchen. The teenager with the pierced belly button showed up and sat next to her grandmother, who gazed at her for a moment, as though she didn’t recognise the girl.

‘Of course . . .’ she said after a moment, ‘you’re Julio’s son. So you’re Benigno’s grandson, then . . .’

‘That’s right.’ I nodded, smiling, trying hard to mask my disappointment, but it was as if she could tell what I was thinking.

‘I’ve still got all my marbles, you know, but sometimes I forget, I get lost in the past and it takes me a minute to get my bearings. Apparently it has something to do with my circulation, at least that’s what the doctor tells me, but once I get my bearings, I’m fine.’ She smiled and turned to her granddaughter. ‘Isn’t that right, Cecilia?’