María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, a gesture of resignation. I could see a great sorrow in his eyes.

“He was foolish and wild, but he was my son. Our relationship toward the end was unpleasant and stormy; he was a member of the Falange, and I didn’t like it. Looking back now, however, that Falange seems almost a blessing. At least they shared some romantic ideals and some principles that were rather utopian but still moderately reasonable. Its members were a gang of spoiled brats, dreamers, mostly quite idle, but mercifully they didn’t have much to do with today’s opportunists, who chant out the ‘Cara al sol’ anthem with their arms raised in salute and the veins in their neck throbbing, invoking the name of Primo de Rivera as though he were the Sacred Host, when before the war began they’d never even heard of him. They’re no better than a gang of arrogant, grotesque good-for-nothings…”

Suddenly he returned to the blaze of the chandeliers, the sound of the maracas and the trumpets, the measured movement of the bodies to the time of “El manisero.” He was back to reality, and back with me; he touched my arm, caressed it gently.

“I’m sorry, sometimes I get more worked up than I realize. I’m boring you, this isn’t the time to be talking about such things. Do you want to dance?”

“No, I don’t, thank you. I’d rather keep talking to you.”

A waiter approached. We deposited our empty glasses on the tray and took full ones.

“We were talking about Enrique pressing charges against you,” he said.

I didn’t let him go on; first I wanted to clarify something that had been turning over in my mind since the beginning of our meeting.

“Before I tell you about that, tell me one thing—where’s your wife?”

“I’m a widower. Before the war, not long after seeing you and your mother, in the spring of thirty-six. María Luisa was in the south of France with her sisters. One of them had a Hispano-Suiza and a driver who was too fond of nighttime parties. One morning he picked them up to take them to Mass; he probably hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and in a moment of extreme recklessness he went off the road. Two of the sisters were killed, María Luisa and Concepción. The driver lost a leg, and the third of the sisters, Soledad, ended up escaping injury. One of life’s ironies, she was the eldest of the three.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Sometimes I think it was best for her. She was very fearful, by nature she was extremely easily alarmed. The tiniest domestic occurrence upset her terribly. I don’t think she could have borne the war, whether in Spain or outside it. And of course she never would have gotten over Enrique’s death. So perhaps it was divine Providence doing her a favor by taking her before her time. And now, tell me more: we were talking about Enrique’s accusation—do you know anything further, do you have any idea how the matter stands now?”

“No. In September, before I came over, the police commissioner in Tetouan tried to investigate.”

“To incriminate you?”

“No, to help me. Commissioner Vázquez isn’t exactly a friend, but he’s always been good to me. You have a daughter who’s been in some trouble, do you realize that?”

It must have been clear from my tone that I wasn’t joking.

“Will you tell me about it? I’d like to be able to help you.”

“I don’t think I need any help just now; at the moment everything’s more or less under control, but thank you for the offer. In any case, you might be right: we should see each other again and talk at more leisure. These problems of mine partly affect you, too.”

“Give me some idea first.”

“I no longer have your mother’s jewels.”

He seemed not to be too perturbed.

“You had to sell them?”

“They were stolen.”

“And the money?”

“That, too.”

“All of it?”

“Everything.”

“Where?”

“In a hotel in Tangiers.”

“Who?”

“Someone extremely undesirable.”

“Did you know him?”

“Yes. And now, if you don’t mind, let’s change the subject. Some other time I’ll tell you the details more calmly.”

It wasn’t long till midnight now, and all around the room there were more and more bodies in tails, dress uniforms, and evening gowns, and décolletages covered in jewels. There were Spaniards mostly, but also a good number of foreigners. German, English, American, Italian, Japanese—a whole potpourri of countries at war, in between a tangle of respectable, wealthy local citizens, all of them, for just a few hours, far away from the savage shredding of Europe and the squalor of a devastated people about to say good riddance to one of the most savage years in their history. Everywhere there was laughter and couples still sliding about to the infectious rhythm of the congas and guaracha folk songs that the orchestra of black musicians played without a break. The liveried lackeys who had received us, flanking the staircase, began to distribute small baskets of grapes and urged the guests to move out to the terrace to follow tradition and eat them in time with the chiming of the Puerta del Sol clock next door. My father offered me his arm and I took it; although we’d each arrived separately, we’d somehow silently agreed to see in the new year together. On the terrace we met up with a few friends, his son and my scheming clients. He introduced me to Carlos, my half brother, who looked like him and not in the least like me. How could he have guessed that the woman standing in front of him was a parvenue dressmaker of his own blood, whom his brother had accused of having done both of them out of a good slice of their inheritance?

No one seemed to mind the intense cold on the terrace: the number of guests had multiplied, and the waiters circulated tirelessly between them, emptying bottles of champagne wrapped in large white napkins. The animated conversations, the laughs and clinking of glasses seemed suspended in the air, about to touch the dark winter sky. From the street, meanwhile, like a hoarse roaring, rose the sound of the voices of the unfortunate masses, those whom bad luck had doomed to remain out on the streets, sharing some cheap wine or a bottle of harsh liquor.

The chimes began, first the quarters, then the hour chimes. I began to eat my grapes, concentrating hard. Dong—one—dong—two—dong—three—dong—four. On the fifth I noticed that Gonzalo had brought his arm down to rest on my shoulders and was pulling me toward him; on the sixth my eyes filled with tears. The seventh, eighth, and ninth I swallowed blindly, struggling to stop myself from crying. On the tenth I succeeded, with the eleventh I gathered myself together, and as the last one chimed I turned to embrace my father for the second time in my life.

In mid-January I met up with him again, to explain the details of the theft of my inheritance. I presumed that he believed the story; if he didn’t, he hid it well. We had lunch at Lhardy and he suggested that we go on seeing each other. I said no, without having any very solid reason. Perhaps I thought it was too late for us to try to recover all those things we’d never shared. He kept insisting and seemed unprepared to accept my refusal easily. And he succeeded in part: bit by bit the wall of my resistance began to give way. We had lunch again, we went to the theater, to a concert at El Real; we even spent a Sunday morning together walking through El Retiro just as thirty years earlier he had done with my mother. He had a lot of time on his hands, since he was no longer working; when the war came to an end he’d had the opportunity to recover his foundry but chose not to reopen it. Then he sold the land where it stood and began to live off the income from the sale. Why didn’t he want to go on, why didn’t he start his business back up after the conflict? Out of sheer disappointment, I think. He never told me in any detail about the vicissitudes of those years, but comments dropped in other conversations we shared in those days allowed me more or less to reconstruct his painful journey. He didn’t seem to be a resentful man, though: he was too rational to allow his emotions to take charge of his life. Although he belonged to the winning side, he was also extremely critical of the new regime. He was witty and a fine conversationalist, and between the two of us there grew a special relationship that we didn’t intend as a compensation for his absence over all those years of my childhood and youth, but as a starting from scratch by way of a friendship between adults. There were mutterings about us in his circle, people speculated about the nature of the connection that held us together, a thousand wild assumptions reached his ears, which he shared with me, amused, never bothering to put anyone right.