María Dueñas - The Time in Between

I bit my bottom lip the moment I’d spoken the final syllable, aware of how careless I’d been. I regretted having broken my promise to Hillgarth not to reveal my mission to anyone, but it had already been said and there was no going back. I thought about clarifying the situation—adding that it was the best thing for Spain to remain neutral, that we were in no state to face another war, all those things they’d been so insistent about to me. But there was no need, because before I had the chance to add anything I could see a strange gleam in Doña Manuela’s eyes and the trace of a smile on one side of her mouth.

“With the compatriots of the queen Doña Victoria Eugenie, child, whatever you need me to do. Just tell me when you want me to start.”

We went on talking all afternoon, planning out how we’d divide up the work, and at nine o’clock the next morning she was at my house. She was all too happy to take on a secondary role in the workshop. Not having to deal with the clients was almost a relief to her. We complemented each other perfectly: just as she and my mother had done for all those years, but the other way around. She took to her new position with total humility, accommodating herself to my life and rhythm, getting along with Dora and Martina, bringing to us her experience and an energy that would have been the envy of many women thirty years younger. She adapted easily to my being the one in charge, to my less conventional lines and ideas, and to taking on a thousand little tasks that so often before she would delegate to the simple sewing girls. Returning to the breach after long years of inactivity was a gift to her, and like a patch of poppies in the April rains she emerged from her dark days and was revived.

With Doña Manuela in charge of the back room, my working days became calmer. We both toiled long hours, but I was finally able to move without too much rush and enjoy a few spells of free time. I began to have more of a social life: my clients encouraged me to attend a thousand events, keen to show me off as their great discovery of the season. I accepted an invitation to a concert of German military bands at El Retiro park, a cocktail party at the Turkish embassy, a dinner at the Italian embassy, and the occasional lunch in fashionable places. Pests began to buzz around me: passing bachelors, potbellied married men with the means to keep a handful of sweethearts, attractive diplomats from the most exotic places. After a couple of drinks and a dance I was fighting them off. The last thing I needed at that moment was a man in my life.

But it wasn’t all parties and recreation, far from it. Although Doña Manuela made my day-to-day life less harried, absolute peace and quiet didn’t follow. Not long after I’d unloaded the heavy burden of working alone, a new storm cloud appeared on the horizon. The simple fact that I was walking the streets with less haste, being able to pause at a shop window and slacken the rhythm of my comings and goings, made me notice something that I hadn’t seen till then, something that Hillgarth had warned me about during that long dessert in Tangiers. I realized I was being followed. Perhaps they’d been doing it for a while and my constant rush had stopped me from taking any notice. Or maybe it was something new, which happened by chance to coincide with Doña Manuela’s entry into Chez Arish. But the fact was, a new shadow seemed to have settled over my life. A shadow that was not even constant, not even total; perhaps this was why it wasn’t easy for me to become fully aware of its proximity. I thought at first that the things I was seeing were just my imagination playing tricks on me. In autumn, Madrid was full of men with hats and raincoats with the collars up; that look was actually very common in those postwar times, and thousands of replicas filled the streets, offices, and cafés. The figure who had stopped, turning away from me, as soon as I’d stopped to cross Castellana wasn’t necessarily the same one who a couple of days later pretended to stop to give alms to a ragged blind man while I was looking at some shoes in a store. Nor was there any good reason why his raincoat should be the same one that followed me that Saturday to the entrance of the Prado Museum. Or for it to be the same as the back that I saw hiding discreetly behind a column at the Ritz grill while I was having my lunch with my client Agatha Ratinborg, a supposed European princess with highly dubious roots. It was true, there was no definitive way of confirming that all those raincoats scattered along streets and days converged in a single individual, and yet somehow my gut told me that the owner of them all was one and the same man.

The tube of patterns that I prepared that evening to leave in the hairdresser’s salon contained seven conventional messages of average length and a personal one with just two words: “Being followed.” I finished them late—it had been a long day of fittings and sewing. Doña Manuela hadn’t gone home till after eight; following her departure I’d finished up a couple of invoices that needed to be ready first thing in the morning, I’d taken a bath, and then, still wrapped in my crimson velvet dressing gown, I had a couple of apples and a glass of milk for my dinner, standing up, leaning against the kitchen sink. I was so tired that I was barely hungry; no sooner had I finished than I sat down to encode the messages, and once these were done and the day’s notes sensibly burned I began turning out the lights to go to bed. Halfway down the corridor I stopped dead. I thought at first that I’d heard a single isolated knock, then it was two, three, four. Then silence. Till they started up again. It was clear where they were coming from—someone was at the door. He or she was knocking, knuckles against the wood, rather than ringing the bell. Dry knocks, getting less and less far apart, till they’d become a nonstop pounding. I stood stock still, gripped by fear, unable to go forward or back.

But the knocking didn’t stop, and its insistence forced me to react: whoever it was had no intention of going away without seeing me. I pulled the belt of my dressing gown tight, swallowed, and made my way slowly toward the door. Very slowly, without making the slightest sound, and still terrified, I lifted the cover of the peephole.

“Come in, for God’s sake, come in, come in,” was all I was able to whisper after opening the door.

He came in quickly, nervous. Unsettled.

“That’s it, that’s it, I’m out, it’s all over.”

He didn’t even look at me; he talked like a madman, as though speaking to himself, to the air, or to nothing. I led him quickly to the living room, almost pushing him, made fearful by the idea that someone in the building might have seen him. The apartment was dark, but before I’d even turned on a light I tried to get him to sit down, to relax a little. He refused. He kept walking from one end of the room to the other, looking around wildly and repeating the same thing over and over again.

“That’s it, that’s it, everything’s finished, it’s all over.”

I turned on a small corner lamp, and without asking I poured him a generous glass of cognac.

“Here,” I said, forcing him to take the glass in his right hand. “Drink,” I commanded. He obeyed, shaking. “And now sit down, relax, and tell me what’s going on.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea why he should have shown up at my house after midnight, and even though I was sure he would have been discreet in his movements his attitude was so changed that he might no longer have cared about such things. It had been more than a year and a half since I’d seen him, since the day of his official farewell from Tetouan. I preferred not to ask him anything, not to pressure him. Quite clearly this visit wasn’t a mere courtesy, but I decided it would be best to wait for him to calm down: perhaps then he’d tell me himself what it was he wanted from me. He sat down with the glass held in his fingers; he took another drink. He was dressed in civilian clothes, in a dark suit with a white shirt and striped tie; without his peaked cap, his stripes, and the sash across his chest that I’d seen him wear on so many formal occasions and that he wouldn’t remove until the event was over. He seemed to calm down a bit and lit a cigarette. He puffed on it, staring out into the void, surrounded by the smoke and his own thoughts. I didn’t say a word; I just sat down on a nearby chair, crossed my legs, and waited. When the cigarette came to an end he leaned forward slightly to put it out in the ashtray. And from that position he raised his eyes at last and spoke.