María Dueñas - The Time in Between

She led me through to the main room and once again homesickness engulfed me. How many Feasts of the Magi had I, as a young girl, visited that room, holding my mother’s hand, how excited I’d become as I tried to guess what gift would be waiting for me there. I remembered Doña Manuela’s home on the Calle Santa Engracia as a large, opulent apartment; not as fancy as the one on Zurbano where she’d set up her workshop, but infinitely less humble than ours on the Calle de la Redondilla. On this visit, though, I discovered that my childhood recollections had infected my memory with a perception that distorted reality. The house that Doña Manuela had lived in for her whole life as a single woman was neither large nor opulent. It was just a mediocre home, poorly laid out, cold, dark, and full of somber furnishings with worn, heavy velvet curtains that barely allowed any light in; an apartment covered with water stains, in which all the pictures were faded engravings and yellowed crochet doilies filled every corner.

“Sit, child, sit. Would you like a drink? Can I make you a little coffee? It’s not really coffee, it’s roasted chicory, you know how hard it is to get hold of provisions these days, but a little bit of milk will hide the taste, though even that gets more watery every day, what can we do? I have no sugar as I’ve given my ration card to a neighbor for her children; at my age it hardly matters—”

I interrupted her, taking her hand.

“I don’t want anything, Doña Manuela, don’t worry about it. I’ve just come to see you to ask you something.”

“Tell me.”

“Are you still sewing?”

“No, child, no. Ever since we closed the workshop in thirty-five I’ve not gone back to it. I’ve done the odd little thing for a friend or out of a sense of duty, but no more than that. If my memory serves, your wedding dress was the last big thing I did, and, well, since after all…”

I preferred to dodge the subject she was referring to, so I didn’t let her finish.

“Would you like to come and sew with me?”

It took her a few seconds to reply, perplexed.

“Go back to work, you say? Go back to the old job, just like we used to do?”

I nodded, smiling, trying to inject a trace of optimism into her bewilderment. But she didn’t answer me right away; first she changed the direction of the conversation.

“And your mother? Why have you come to ask me instead of sewing with her?”

“I’ve told you, she’s still in Morocco. She went there during the war, I don’t know if you knew.”

“I knew, I knew,” she said softly, as though fearing that the walls would hear her and pass on the secret. “She showed up here one afternoon, just all of a sudden, unexpectedly, like you’ve done now. She told me everything was arranged for her to go to Africa, that you were there, and that somehow you’d managed to arrange for someone to get her out of Madrid. She didn’t know what to do; she was frightened. She came to ask my advice, to see what I thought of it all.”

My impeccable makeup didn’t allow her to see the distress that her words were causing: I’d never imagined that my mother would have had any hesitation between staying and going.

“I told her to go, to leave as soon as possible,” she went on. “Madrid was a hell. We all suffered so much, child, all of us. Those on the left, fighting day and night to stop the Nationalists getting in; those on the right, longing for just that, in hiding so as not to be found and taken in by the secret police. And those—like your mother and me—who weren’t of either faction, waiting for the horror to be over so that we could get on with our lives in peace. All this without a government in charge, without anyone imposing a bit of order in that chaos. So I advised her that yes, she should go, she should get out of this agony and not pass up the opportunity to be reunited with you.”

Despite feeling overwhelmed by emotion, I decided not to ask anything about that meeting, which was now so long ago. I’d gone to see my old boss with a plan for the immediate future, so I chose to steer the conversation in that direction.

“You were right to encourage her, you don’t know how grateful I am to you for that, Doña Manuela,” I said. “She’s doing terrifically well now, she’s happy and working again. I set up a workshop in Tetouan in thirty-six, just a few months after the war started. Things were calm there, and even though the Spanish women weren’t in the mood for parties and dresses, there were some foreigners for whom the war hardly mattered. So they became my clients. When my mother arrived, we went on sewing together. And now I’ve decided to come back to Madrid and start again with a new workshop.”

“And you’ve returned alone?”

“I’ve been alone a long time, Doña Manuela. If you’re asking me about Ramiro, that didn’t last long.”

“So Dolores has stayed behind there without you?” she asked, surprised. “But she left specifically to be with you…”

“She likes Morocco: the climate, the atmosphere, the quiet life. We had very good clients and she’s made friends, too. She preferred to stay. But I missed Madrid too much,” I lied. “So we decided that I’d come back, I’d start to work here, and once the second atelier was up and running then we’d decide what to do.”

She looked at me for a few endless seconds. Her eyelids were drooping, her face covered in wrinkles. She must have been sixty-something now, perhaps already approaching seventy. Her curved back and the calluses on her fingers showed traces of each and every one of those tough years she had spent slaving away with needles and scissors. First as a simple seamstress, then later as an employee in a workshop, then as the owner of a business, and finally as a sailor without a ship, inactive. But in no way was she done yet. Her eyes, full of life, small and dark like little black olives, reflected the sharpness of someone who still had a good head on her shoulders.

“You’re not telling me everything, child, right?” she said at last.

The sly fox, I thought admiringly. I’d forgotten how smart she was.

“No, Doña Manuela, I’m not telling you everything,” I acknowledged. “I’m not telling you everything because I can’t. But I can tell you a part of it. The thing is, in Tetouan I got to know some important people, people who are still very influential nowadays. They persuaded me to come to Madrid, to set up a studio and sew for certain high-class clients. Not for women close to the regime, but mainly for foreign ladies and for monarchist Spanish aristocrats, the ones who think Franco is usurping the king’s place.”

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do your friends want you to sew for these ladies?”

“I can’t tell you. But I need you to help me. I’ve brought some magnificent materials over from Morocco, and there’s a terrible shortage of fabrics here. The word has got around and my reputation has spread, but I have more clients than I’d expected and I can’t handle them all on my own.”

“But why, Sira?” she repeated slowly. “Why are you sewing for these women, what do you and your friends want from them?”

I pursed my lips resolutely shut, determined not to say a word. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. But an alien force seemed to be dragging the words up from the pit of my stomach. As though Doña Manuela were back in charge and I was no more than an adolescent apprentice, when she had every right to demand explanations from me because I’d skipped a whole morning’s work going to buy three dozen mother-of-pearl buttons in the Plaza de Pontejos. The words were spoken by my entrails, and by yesterday, not by me myself.

“I’m sewing for them in order to get information about what the Germans in Spain are doing. Then I pass the information on to the English.”