María Dueñas - The Time in Between

The crowd attending the races was immense: a mass of people thronging around the ticket desks and in long lines to place their bets. The stands and the area closest to the track were filled to bursting with nervous, noisy groups of spectators. The privileged few who occupied the reserved boxes floated about in an altogether different dimension: untroubled, removed from the shouting, sitting in proper chairs rather than on cement steps, and being attended to by waiters in spotless jackets ready to provide diligent service.

As we entered the box, I could feel, deep down, something like the bite of an iron jaw. It only took me a couple of seconds to recognize the absurdity of my situation there, with only a handful of Spaniards mixed in with a large number of English men and women, glasses in hand and armed with binoculars, smoking, drinking, and chatting in their language while they waited for the galloping to begin. And lest there was any doubt about their cause or their origins, a large British flag had been draped over the handrail.

I wanted the earth to swallow me up, but my time hadn’t come quite yet: my capacity for astonishment had not yet peaked. For that to happen, all I needed to do was take a few steps back and look over to my left. In the neighboring box, still nearly empty, three vertical banners fluttered in the wind: on the red background of each one was a white circle with a black swastika in the middle. The Germans’ box, separated from ours by a low fence barely more than three feet high, awaited the arrival of its occupants. For now the only people in it were a couple of soldiers guarding the entrance and a handful of waiters setting up, but given the time and the haste with which they were making their preparations, I had no doubt at all that the Germans wouldn’t be long in arriving.

Before I was able to calm myself down sufficiently to decide the quickest way to escape from this nightmare, Gonzalo explained to me in a whisper who all those subjects of His Gracious Majesty were.

“I forgot to tell you we’d be meeting some old friends I’ve not seen in a while, English engineers from the Río Tinto mines. They’ve come over with some of their compatriots from Gibraltar, and I imagine there will be some embassy people coming, too. They’re all very excited about the reopening of the Hippodrome; you know they’re crazy about horses.”

I didn’t know, nor did I care: at that moment I had other urgent matters to deal with besides these people’s hobbies. How to fly from them like the plague, for example. Hillgarth’s words in the American legation in Tangiers were still echoing in my ears—absolutely no contact with the English. And still less, he should have said, right under the noses of the Germans. When my father’s friends became aware of our arrival, they started up with their greetings for “Gonzalo, old boy” and for his unexpected young companion. I returned the greetings with very few words, trying to mask my nerves behind a smile as weak as it was false, while at the same time secretly weighing up just how risky my situation was. As I clasped the hands that the anonymous faces held out to me, my eyes scanned my surroundings, looking for somewhere I might disappear without showing my father up. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Not at all. To the left was the Germans’ stand with its ostentatious banners; the right-hand side was occupied by a handful of individuals with generous bellies and thick gold rings, smoking cigars the size of torpedoes in the company of women with bleach-blond hair and lips as red as poppies, for whom I would never have sewn so much as a handkerchief in my workshop. I looked away from them all: the black marketeers and their gorgeous darlings didn’t interest me in the least.

As I was blocked to my left and right, and with a handrail in front suspended over the void, the only solution was to escape the way we’d come, though I knew that would be extremely rash. There was only one means of access to those boxes, I’d learned on my arrival: a sort of brick-paved passageway only nine feet wide. If I decided to return that way, I ran a good risk of running straight into the Germans. And among them no doubt I’d bump into the thing that scared me the most: German clients whose careless mouths had often dropped tasty pieces of information that I’d gathered, with my most false of smiles, and passed on to the Secret Intelligence Service of their enemy country; ladies I’d have to stop to say hello to, and who without any doubt would wonder suspiciously what their Moroccan couturière was doing running from a box filled with Englishmen like a soul with the devil in pursuit.

Not knowing what to do, I left Gonzalo still greeting his friends and sat down in the corner best protected from the stand, with my shoulders hunched, the lapels of my jacket raised, and my head slightly bowed, trying—or so I was fooling myself—to pass unnoticed in an open space where I knew all too well it was impossible to hide.

“Are you feeling all right? You look pale,” said my father, holding out a fruit cup.

“I think I’m just a bit queasy, it’ll pass soon enough,” I lied.

If there was anything darker than black on the spectrum of colors, my soul would have been about to turn that shade the moment the German box began to buzz with movement. Out of the corner of my eye I saw more soldiers coming in; behind them their solid-looking superior, giving orders, pointing this way and that, throwing glances filled with contempt toward the English box. They were followed by various officers in shiny boots, peaked caps, and the inevitable swastika on their arms. They didn’t even deign to look over toward us: they just remained haughty and distant, their ramrod posture demonstrating an obvious contempt for the occupants of the neighboring box. A few other men in civilian clothes followed, and I noticed with a shudder that some of the faces were familiar to me. They had probably all—soldiers and civilians—dovetailed that event with a preceding one, which was why they’d arrived practically all together, already in their little clusters, and just in time to see the first race. At the moment there were only men; unless I was very much mistaken their wives wouldn’t be far behind.

With each passing second the atmosphere became livelier, and my anxiety along with it. The British group had fed themselves, the field glasses were being passed from hand to hand, and the conversation flowed just as easily on the subjects of turf, paddock, and jockeys as it did on the invasion of Yugoslavia, the dreadful bombings of London, or Churchill’s latest radio broadcast. And it was then that I saw him. I saw him and he saw me. And I caught my breath. Captain Alan Hillgarth had just entered the box with an elegant blond woman on his arm: his wife, most probably. His eyes lighted on me for just a fraction of a second and then, hiding a minute expression of alarm and distress that no one noticed but I, he looked swiftly over to the German box, where an endless trickle of people were still arriving.

I avoided him, getting up so as not to have to face him, convinced that I’d come to the end, that there was no earthly way of getting out of that mousetrap. I couldn’t have foreseen a more pathetic denouement to my brief career as a collaborator with British intelligence: I was about to be unmasked in public, in front of my clients, my boss, and my own father. I grabbed hold of the handrail, squeezing tight, and wished with all my heart that this day had never come: that I’d never left Morocco, absolutely never accepted the ludicrous proposal that I’d received from an unwise, ridiculously clumsy conspirator. The gun went off for the first race, the horses began their feverish gallop, and the enthusiastic cries of the crowds tore through the air. My gaze seemed to be fixed on the track, but my thoughts were trotting along far from the horses’ hooves. I sensed that the Germans must have been filling up their box and guessed at Hillgarth’s unease as he tried to find some way to handle the setback that we were just about to face. And then, like a flash, the solution appeared before my eyes when I noticed a couple of Red Cross stretcher bearers leaning lazily against a wall in anticipation of a mishap. If I couldn’t leave that poisoned box myself, someone would have to remove me.