The Frozen Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

very happy together, but always in Spanish, speaking Spanish, singing in Spanish, bringing up Spanish children, with Spanish friends, Spanish food, Spanish habits . . . I learned to cook just like my mother-in-law - cocido on Saturdays, paella on Sundays - I’ve gone on doing it all these years, and I loved her as if she were my own mother, because she was there for me when your father was born and we didn’t know where Ignacio was, didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and I wasn’t even married. We had a hard time, back then, but everything was logical, it made sense, and now . . . Now I don’t know what we’re doing here, especially when you’re going back. If it was up to me, we’d be in Madrid already.’
    ‘What about the town you grew up in?’
    ‘Where I grew up? I don’t ever want to set foot in that place . . .’
    That was how strange, how absurd, how incomprehensible things were. Because they were Spanish. Raquel’s father had been born in Toulouse, her mother had been born in Nîmes; at the age of fifteen her Grandmother Anita had left a village somewhere in Teruel, but her granddaughter never knew its name and never wanted to know, because Anita could not bring herself to say it. Near the Sierra de Albarracín, was all she would say, and that it was a miracle she was alive at all, because they had killed everyone, her father, her brothers, her brothers-in-law, everyone except her, on that one terrible day, when, barely fifteen years old but with the courage of a woman of thirty, she had set off down the road with a tubercular sister and a mother who, at fifty, was like an old woman, until eventually she reached Toulouse.
    There, alone, she had been taken in by a married couple from Madrid, Mateo Fernández and his wife Maria, who had two sons; one had been executed by firing squad in Spain, the other was a prisoner somewhere in France, forcibly conscripted into a military work detail simply because he was Spanish. They also had two daughters; the elder girl, barely twenty years old, was widowed, her husband executed before the same adobe wall where his brother-in-law had been gunned down. Anita married the only boy in the Fernández family to survive the two wars, ‘our war and the other one’, she would say, as though Spanish wars were better, different, more important, and it had made her very happy to see her eldest son paired off with Raquel Perea, daughter of a man from Malaga named Aurelio, who was scared of nothing except thunderstorms. Aurelio had been about to cross the border into Spain, having escaped from the internment camp where he had met Ignacio Fernández, alias ‘The Lawyer’, but at the last moment, when he was close enough to see Guardía Civil uniforms, he turned back, because we come from a country of bastards, that’s the truth, what more can you say.
    This was the same Aurelio who had now gone back because he wanted to die in the sun, and every year he seemed farther from death, living in the shade of his vine; these thoughts brought tears to the eyes of the woman who now cradled his granddaughter in the kitchen of her house in Paris, Grandma Anita, who in her whole life had never seen an Andalusian vine, had never been to Malaga, had never seen the Mediterranean except from the Côte d’Azur, who had lived in France for more than twice as many years as she had lived in the village in Aragón whose name she could not bring herself to utter, who was alive thanks to a miracle and who had probably saved her husband’s life when, in 1945, he told her he was thinking of crossing the border because they needed men there, experienced men capable of fighting for the cause. ‘Please, I’m begging you, Ignacio,’ she had said to him, ‘whatever you do, don’t go back, you’ve already given enough, and I have only you, I have no family now, no home, no village, no country, nothing, all I have is you and a son you did not meet until he was two years old, and another on the