María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“It would be best if I were to put them down on a flat surface myself, they’re very delicate. Orchids,” he explained.

I hesitated a few seconds. Although Marcus was hidden in the bathroom, it was rash to allow that man into the bedroom, but at the same time if I didn’t let him through it would look as though I were hiding something. And at that moment the last thing I wanted was to arouse suspicions.

“Come in,” I accepted at last. “Please, put them down on the desk.”

And then I realized. And wished the ground would open up under my feet and swallow me. That I’d be ingested in one gulp, sucked in, vanished forever. That way I wouldn’t have to face the consequences of what I’d just seen. There in the center of the table, between the telephone and a golden lamp, was something inconvenient. Something immensely inconvenient that nobody ought to see there. Still less the trusty manservant of Manuel Da Silva.

I corrected myself as quickly as I spotted it.

“Oh, no, it’d be better to put them here, on the stool at the foot of the bed.”

He obeyed without comment, but I also knew that he’d noticed. How could he not have? The thing that was on that polished wooden desk surface was something that was so unconnected to me and so incongruous in a bedroom occupied by an unaccompanied woman that it had to stand out: Marcus’s hat.

He came out of his hiding place when he heard the door close.

“Go, Marcus. Get out of here—please,” I insisted, trying to guess how long it would take Gamboa to tell his boss what he’d just seen. If Marcus had realized the scale of the disaster that his hat could unleash, he gave no sign of it. “Stop worrying about me: tomorrow night I’m going back to Madrid. Today will be my last day, as of—”

“You’re really leaving tomorrow?” he asked, taking hold of my shoulders. Despite my anxiety and fear, a feeling ran down my spine that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

“Tomorrow night, yes. On the Lusitania Express.”

“And you’re not coming back to Portugal?”

“No, right now I’m not planning to.”

“And to Morocco?”

“Not there either. I’ll stay in Madrid; that’s where I have my workshop and my life.”

We were silent for a few seconds. We were probably both thinking the same thing: how unlucky that once again our destinies had crossed paths at such a stormy time, how sad to have to lie to each other like this.

“Take good care of yourself.”

I nodded, without a word. He brought his hand to my face and slowly ran a finger down my cheek.

“It was a pity we never got closer in Tetouan, wasn’t it?”

I went up onto my tiptoes and brought my mouth toward his face to kiss him good-bye. When I smelled his scent and he smelled mine, when my skin brushed his and my breath spilled into his ear, I whispered my answer.

“Yes it was, such a pity.”

He left without a sound and I remained behind, in the company of the most beautiful orchids I would ever see in my life, struggling against my desperate desire to run after him and hold him, as I tried to measure the consequences of that mistake.

As we approached I saw several cars parked in a row on one side of the road. Big cars, dazzling, dark and imposing.

Da Silva’s estate was in the countryside, not too far from Estoril, but far enough that I’d never be able to get back on my own. I made a mental note of a few signs: Malveira, Sintra, Colares, Guincho. All the same, I didn’t have the faintest idea where we were.

João braked gently and the tires crunched on the gravel. I waited for someone to open the door for me. I put one foot out first, gradually, then the other. Then I saw his hand held out to me.

“Welcome to the Quinta da Fonte, Arish.”

I got out of the car slowly. The gold lamé clung to my body, accentuating its contours, while in my hair I was wearing one of the three orchids that he’d sent me. I glanced quickly about, looking for the assistant, but he wasn’t there.

The night smelled of orange trees and cooling cypresses, and the lamps on the façade gave off a light that seemed to melt on the stones of the grand house. As I climbed the front steps on his arm, I noticed that above the main entrance there hung a massive coat of arms.

“The Da Silva family crest, I presume.”

I was well aware that his tavern-owning grandfather could hardly have had an ancestral crest even in his wildest dreams, but I didn’t think he’d notice the irony.

The guests were waiting in a grand hall full of heavy furnishings, with a large unlit fireplace at one end. The floral arrangements throughout the room weren’t enough to mitigate the chilly atmosphere. Nor did the uncomfortable silence of all those present help to warm it up. I counted them quickly. Two, four, six, eight, ten. Ten people, five couples. And Da Silva. And me. Twelve altogether.

As though he’d been reading my thoughts, Manuel announced: “There’s still one more to come, another German guest who won’t be long. Come, Arish, let me introduce you.”

At that point the ratio was almost balanced: three Portuguese couples, two German couples, plus the one still to come. But that was where the symmetry ended, because everything else was curiously dissonant. The German men were dressed in dark clothes—reserved, discreet, in keeping with the place and the occasion. Their wives, though not displaying a dazzling elegance, wore their dresses with sophistication and poise. The Portuguese, on the other hand, were a different kettle of fish altogether. The men, the women—all of them. Although the men’s suits were cut from good cloth, their quality was marred by the scant elegance of the peasant bodies wearing them: short legged, thick necked, with broad hands full of calluses and broken nails. In the breast pocket of their jackets they each ostentatiously displayed a pair of gleaming fountain pens, and whenever they smiled their mouths revealed several shiny gold teeth. Their wives, likewise vulgar in style, were trying hard to keep their balance in their shiny high-heeled shoes into which their swollen feet could barely fit. One of them was wearing her hat askew; another had a huge fur stole dangling over one shoulder, which kept slipping down onto the floor; the third wiped her mouth with the back of her hand each time she ate a canapé.

Before arriving I’d thought that Manuel had invited me in order to show me off in front of his guests—an exotic decorative object that reinforced his position as a powerful male, someone who might be useful to entertain the ladies with talk about fashion, anecdotes about high-ranking Germans in Spain, and other trivialities of the kind. No sooner had I gotten a sense of the atmosphere, however, than I knew I’d been wrong. Although I’d been welcomed as just another guest, Da Silva hadn’t invited me there to fill out the numbers, but to share the role of host with him and to help him to tend to this curious fauna with finesse. My role would be to act as liaison, to provide a bridge between the German women and the Portuguese women; otherwise, the two groups wouldn’t have been able to do more than look at each other all night long. If he had important matters to resolve, the last thing he wanted was a lot of bored, ill-tempered women desperate for their husbands to get them out of there. That’s what he wanted me there for, to give him a hand. I’d thrown down the gauntlet the previous day, and he’d taken it up: we both stood to gain something by it.

Well then, Manuel, I’m going to give you what you want, I thought. I hope you do the same for me later. And in order for everything to work just as he’d planned it, I squeezed all my fears into a tight little ball, swallowed them down, and brought out the most entrancing side of my false personality. With that façade as my banner, I stretched my apparent charm to its limit and radiated warmth, spreading it equally between the two nationalities. I praised in turn the hat and the stole of the women from Beira, I made a couple of jokes that everybody laughed at, I allowed one of the Portuguese men’s hands to graze my backside, and I extolled the virtues of the German people. Shamelessly.