María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“I can’t,” he said forcefully.

I didn’t ask why. I was afraid he’d ask me to explain myself, that he’d reproach me for leaving him and throw back in my face all the pain I’d caused him. Or even worse: I was afraid that he’d tell me he still loved me and beg me to come back to him.

“You’ve got to leave, Ignacio, you’ve got to get me out of your head.”

“I can’t, sweetheart,” he repeated, this time with a note of bitter irony. “I’d like nothing more than never to remember the woman who destroyed me, but I can’t. I work for the General Directorate of Security of the Governance Ministry; I’m charged with watching and following foreigners who cross our borders, especially those who settle in Madrid with a suggestion that they mean to remain permanently. And you’re one of them. At the top of the list.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“And what do you want from me?” I asked, when I was again able to summon words to my mouth.

“Papers,” he insisted. “Passport, and customs papers for everything in this apartment that’s come from abroad. But first of all, change your clothes.”

He talked coldly, sure of himself. Professional, completely different from that other Ignacio, tender and almost childlike, whom I had stored in my memory.

“Can you show me some sort of credentials?” I said quietly. I guessed that he wasn’t lying, but I wanted to buy time to take it all in.

He drew a wallet from his inside jacket pocket. He opened it with the same hand that held it, with the facility of someone accustomed to proving his identity over and over again. And there indeed was his face and his name alongside the job and the ministry he had just mentioned.

“Just a moment,” I mumbled.

I went to my room; I quickly unhooked a white blouse and blue skirt from my closet, then opened the underwear drawer, about to take out something clean to put on, when my fingers brushed against Beigbeder’s letters, hidden under the folded slips. I hesitated a few seconds, unsure what to do about them, whether to leave them where they were or quickly find someplace safer. I ran my eyes hungrily across the room: maybe on top of the closet, maybe under the mattress. Perhaps between the sheets. Or behind the dressing-table mirror. Or in a shoe box.

“Be quick, please,” Ignacio shouted from far away.

I pushed the letters to the back, covered them completely with half a dozen bits of underwear, and closed the drawer with a dry thud. Anywhere else might be as good a place or as bad, but it wasn’t worth tempting fate.

I dried off, changed, took my passport from the nightstand, and returned to the living room.

“Arish Agoriuq,” he read slowly after I’d handed it over. “Born in Tangiers, resident in Tangiers. Shares your birthday—what a coincidence.”

I didn’t reply. I was suddenly overtaken by a terrible desire to throw up and had to struggle to stop myself.

“Might I know what this change in nationality was in aid of?”

My mind fabricated a lie, fast as the blinking of an eye. I’d never envisaged finding myself in a situation like this, nor had Hillgarth.

“I had my passport stolen and wasn’t able to request my papers from Madrid because it was the middle of the war. A friend fixed it for me to be given Moroccan citizenship so that I could travel without any trouble. It’s not a fake passport, you can check.”

“I already have done. And the name?”

“They thought it was better to change it, to make it more like an Arab name.”

“Arish Agoriuq? Is that Arab?”

“It’s Cherja,” I lied. “The dialect of the Rif villages,” I added, remembering Beigbeder’s linguistic skills.

He remained silent a few seconds, not taking his eyes off me. I could still feel my stomach turning over, but I fought to keep it under control to avoid having to run to the bathroom.

“I also need to know the objective of your stay in Madrid,” he insisted finally.

“To work. Sewing, as usual,” I replied. “This is a dressmaker’s studio.”

“Show me.”

I took him through to the back room and wordlessly showed him the rolls of material, the pictures of designs, and the magazines. Then I led him along the hallway and opened the doors to all the rooms. The spotless fitting rooms. The clients’ bathroom. The sewing room filled with fabric, patterns, and mannequins with half-assembled bits of clothing. The ironing room with various items awaiting their turn. And finally the storeroom. We walked together, side by side, as we’d walked so many times all those years before. I recalled that then he was almost a head taller than I—the difference didn’t seem so great now. It wasn’t that memory was playing tricks on me, however; when I was just a seamstress’s apprentice and he a would-be civil servant I wore shoes with barely any heel on them; five years on, my heels raised my height to halfway up his face.

“What’s in the back?” he asked.

“My bedroom, a couple of bathrooms, and four other rooms, two of them for guests and the other two empty. And also a lunch room, kitchen, and service quarters,” I reeled off.

“I want to see them.”

“What for?”

“I don’t have to give you an explanation.”

“Very well.”

I showed him the rooms one by one, my stomach tight, feigning a coolness that was a world away from my genuine state and trying not to let him see how my hand shook as it switched on the lights and opened the doors. I’d left Beigbeder’s letters to Rosalinda in the closet in my bedroom beneath my underwear; my legs trembled at the idea that it might occur to him to open the drawer and that he might find them. As he stepped into the room I watched him with my heart clenched. He went through it slowly and deliberately. He leafed through the novel I had on my nightstand with feigned interest, then put it back in its place; then he ran his fingers along the foot of the bed, picked up a brush from the dressing table, and looked out through the balcony doors a few seconds. I was praying that that would bring his visit to a close, but it didn’t. The part I most feared was still to come. He opened one side of the closet, the one containing my outer clothes. He touched the sleeve of a long jacket and the belt of another, then closed it. He opened the next door and I held my breath. He was face to face with a stack of drawers. He pulled out the first: scarves. He lifted the corner of one of them, then another, and another; and closed it back up again. He pulled out the next and I gulped: stockings. He closed it. When his fingers touched the third I felt the floor turn to liquid under my feet. There, covered by the silk slips, were the handwritten documents that revealed in detail and in the first person the circumstances of the scandalous ministerial dismissal that was being passed by word of mouth across all of Spain.

“I think you’re going too far, Ignacio,” I managed to whisper.

He kept his fingers on the handle of the drawer a few seconds more, as though considering what to do. I felt hot, I felt cold, anxious, thirsty. I felt as though it was about to be over. Until I noticed his lips parting for him to speak. “Let’s go on,” was all he said. He closed the closet door while I held back a sigh of relief and a desperate desire to burst into tears. I masked my emotions as best I could and resumed my role as a guide under duress. He saw the bathroom where I bathed and the table where I ate, the larder where I kept my food, the sink where the girls washed the clothes. Perhaps he didn’t go any further out of respect for me, maybe out of simple modesty, or because the protocols of his job set out certain restrictions he didn’t dare transgress; I never found out. We returned to the living room without a word while I thanked heaven that his search hadn’t been more exhaustive.