María Dueñas - The Time in Between

Arish, my dear, let me introduce you to my father-in-law-to-be, Gonzalo Alvarado. He’s very keen to talk to you about his travels to Tangiers and the friends he left there; you probably know some of them.”

And there indeed he was, Gonzalo Alvarado, my father. Dressed in tails and holding a crystal glass of whiskey that he had half drunk. The very first moment our eyes met I knew he was well aware of who I was. The second moment, I guessed that my invitation to that party had been his idea. But when he took my hand and brought it to his mouth to greet me with just the lightest trace of a kiss, no one in that hall could ever have imagined that the five fingers he was holding belonged to his own daughter. We’d only seen each other for a couple of hours in our lives, but they say that the call of blood is so powerful that sometimes recognitions like this are possible. Though, upon consideration, I wondered if perhaps it was his perceptiveness and good memory that outweighed any paternal instinct.

He was thinner and his hair whiter, but he still looked very fine. The orchestra struck up with “Aquellos ojos verdes,” and he asked me to dance.

“You can’t imagine how pleased I am to see you again,” he said. I could make out something like sincerity in his tone of voice.

“Me, too,” I lied. The truth was, I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or not; I was still too overwhelmed by the surprise to be able to formulate a reasonable judgment about it.

“So you’ve got a new name now, a new surname, and they say you’re Moroccan. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what’s behind all those changes.”

“No, I don’t think I will. Besides, Señor Alvarado, I don’t think it would be of much interest to you; it’s my own affair.”

“Please, don’t call me Señor Alvarado.”

“As you wish. And would you like me to call you papá, then?” I asked with a trace of sarcasm.

“No, thank you. Gonzalo is fine.”

“Very well. How are you, Gonzalo? I thought they’d killed you in the war.”

“I survived, as you can see. It’s a long story, too grim for a New Year’s Eve. How’s your mother?”

“Well. She’s living in Morocco now, we have an atelier in Tetouan.”

“So you listened to my advice after all and left Spain at the right moment?”

“More or less. Ours is a long story, too.”

“Perhaps you’d like to tell it to me one day. We could meet for a chat; let me invite you to lunch,” he suggested.

“I don’t think I can. I don’t have much of a social life, I have a lot of work. I came today at the behest of some clients. Naïve of me; at first I thought their insistence was completely disinterested. Turns out that behind an innocent, friendly invitation extended to the dressmaker of the moment there was something else. Because the idea came from you, didn’t it?”

He didn’t say yes or no, but the affirmative hovered in the air, hanging between the chords of the bolero.

“Marita, my son’s fiancée, is a good girl: affectionate and lively, more than most, though none too smart. In any case, I’m very grateful to have her: she’s the only girl who’s been able to tame your fly-by-night brother Carlos, and she’ll be walking him down the aisle within a couple of months.”

We both looked over toward my client. At just that moment she was whispering to her sister Teté, both of them keeping their eyes fixed on us, both of them in dresses from Chez Arish. With a false smile tightly on my lips, I solemnly promised myself never again to trust clients who with their siren songs lured solitary souls into danger on sad nights like this, marking the end of a year.

Gonzalo, my father, went on.

“I’ve seen you three times over the autumn. One time you were getting out of a taxi and going into Embassy; I was walking my dog just one hundred feet from the door, but you didn’t notice.”

“No, I didn’t notice, you’re right. I’m almost always in a hurry.”

“It looked like you, but I was only able to see you for a few seconds, and I thought it might have been no more than an illusion. The second time was a Saturday morning at the Prado Museum. I like to go from time to time, and I followed you from a distance as you walked through a number of rooms. I still wasn’t sure that you were who I thought you were. Then you headed for the cloakroom to pick up your portfolio and you sat down to draw opposite the portrait of Isabella of Portugal, the one by Titian. I positioned myself in the opposite corner of the same room and stayed there watching, till you started gathering up your things. I left convinced that I hadn’t made a mistake. It was you with a new style: more mature, more confident and elegant, but without a doubt the same daughter I met when she was scared as a mouse just before the war broke out.”

I didn’t want to allow the tiniest chink of melancholy in, so I interrupted at once.

“And the third?”

“Just a couple of weeks ago. You were walking along Velázquez, I was in the car with Marita; I was taking her home after a lunch at her friends’ house, Carlos had things to do. The two of us saw you at the same time, and she—to my great surprise—pointed to you and told me you were her new designer, that you were from Morocco, and that you were called Arish something-or-other.”

“Agoriuq. Actually it’s my usual surname, turned back to front. Quiroga, Agoriuq.”

“It sounds good. Shall we get a drink, Señorita Agoriuq?” he asked, with a teasing smile.

We made our way through, took two glasses of champagne from the silver tray that a waiter held out to us, and moved over to one side of the hall as the orchestra began playing a rumba and the dance floor filled up again with couples.

“I presume you’d rather I didn’t reveal your real name to Marita, or my relationship to you,” he said once we’d managed to withdraw from the hubbub. “As I’ve said, she’s a good girl, but she loves gossip, and discretion isn’t exactly her strong suit.”

“I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t say anything to anyone. I do want you to understand, in any case, that my new name is official and my Moroccan passport is real.”

“I imagine you have some serious reason for making the change.”

“Naturally. I gain an air of exoticism in the eyes of my clientele, and at the same time I avoid the pursuit of the police over the charges your son is pressing against me.”

“Carlos is pressing charges against you?” The hand holding his glass had stopped halfway to his mouth—his surprise seemed altogether genuine.

“Not Carlos; your other son, Enrique. Just before the war started. He accused me of having stolen the money and jewels that you gave me.”

He smiled with his lips closed, bitterly.

“Enrique was killed three days after the uprising. A week earlier we’d had a terrible argument. He was deeply involved in politics; he sensed that something serious was about to happen and was very keen that we should get all the money we had in cash out of Spain, as well as the jewels and other valuables. I had to tell him that I’d given you a part of my estate: truth is, I could have remained silent, but I chose not to. Which was why I told him about Dolores, and I talked about you…”

“… and he took it badly,” I finished the sentence for him. “He became like a man possessed and said all sorts of atrocious things. Then he called Servanda, the old servant—I imagine you remember her. He questioned her about you. She told him that you’d rushed out carrying a package and then he must have come up with this ridiculous story about the theft. After the argument he left, giving the door a slam that shook the walls of the building. The next time I saw him was eleven days later, in the morgue at the Metropolitan Stadium with a bullet in his head.”