María Dueñas - The Time in Between

Although he hadn’t been able to put us in different rooms, Manuel did at least manage to keep us in separate areas. The men were at one end of the large hall, on leather armchairs facing the unlit fireplace, the women beside a large window that opened out onto the garden.

They started talking business while we praised the quality of the chocolates. The Germans opened the conversation, asking their questions in a restrained tone, while I did my best to sharpen my hearing and make a mental note of everything I was able to catch at that distance. Wells, concessions, licenses, tons. The Portuguese men pointed out difficulties and brought up objections, raising the volume, talking fast. Perhaps the Germans wanted to steal their very innards from inside them, while the men from Beira—coarse mountain dwellers who weren’t in the habit of trusting even their own fathers—weren’t ready to let themselves be bought at any price. The mood, to my good fortune, began to heat up. The voices were entirely audible now, sometimes even explosive. And my head, like a machine, recorded everything they said. Even though I didn’t yet have a complete picture of what it was they were negotiating, I was able to take in a large amount of loose information. Galleries, baskets, and trucks; boreholes and skips. Free tungsten and controlled tungsten. High-quality tungsten, without any quartz or pyrite. Export taxes. Six hundred thousand escudos per ton. Bonds, gold ingots, and bank accounts in Zurich. And I was also able to get a few tasty morsels, complete portions of information. About how Da Silva had spent weeks cleverly pulling strings to get the main owners of the deposits to join forces to start dealing exclusively with the Germans. How if everything went according to plan, within two weeks they’d collectively put an abrupt stop to any sales to the English.

The quantities of money being discussed made clear to me the reasons for the nouveau riche behavior of these tungsten mine owners and their wives. Humble peasants were being transformed overnight into prosperous owners who no longer even needed to work: the fountain pens, the gold teeth, and the fur stoles were only a small clue to the millions of escudos they stood to make if they allowed the Germans exclusive rights to drill on their land.

The night went on, and as my mind continued to get a sense of the true magnitude of the deal, my fears increased. What I was hearing was so confidential, so appalling, so compromising that I preferred not to consider the consequences I’d have to face if Manuel Da Silva found out who I was and whom I worked for. The men’s conversation went on for almost two hours, but the livelier it got, the more the women’s gathering deflated. Each time I got the sense that the negotiations were getting bogged down by a particular point that didn’t add anything new, I concentrated my attention on the wives. But the Portuguese women had long ago given up on me and my attempts to keep them entertained, and they were already beginning to nod off, unable to fight their sleepiness. In their rough, rural day-to-day life, they probably went to bed at sunset and rose at dawn to feed the animals and see to the chores of countryside and kitchen; that late night, with all its wine, candy, and opulence, had far exceeded what they were able to handle. So I focused on the German women instead, but they weren’t particularly communicative either: once we’d been over our shared ground, we didn’t have enough in common or sufficient linguistic ability to keep our chat going.

I was running out of an audience and also rather short of resources: my effectiveness as hostess was fading away, and I had to think of some way of stopping it from dying once and for all. At the same time I had to remain alert and keep taking in information. Suddenly, from the men’s side of the room, came a big collective laugh. Then handshakes, hugs, and congratulations. The deal was done.

The first-class carriage, cabin number eight,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Manuel.

I showed him the ticket.

“Perfect. I’ll go with you.”

“There’s really no need.”

He ignored me.

The suitcases I’d arrived in Lisbon with were now joined by several hatboxes and two large traveling bags full of whimsical purchases; everything had left the hotel that afternoon, earlier than planned. The rest of the purchases for the atelier would be arriving in Madrid over the course of the coming days, sent directly by the suppliers. As hand baggage I had just a small bag with the things I would need for the night. And one more thing—a sketchbook filled with information.

As soon as we’d left the car, Manuel insisted on carrying the overnight bag.

“It hardly weighs anything, there’s no need,” I said, trying not to let go of it.

The battle was lost even before I’d begun, and I knew that I couldn’t insist. We went into the main hall of the train station, the most elegant couple of the evening—I wrapped in all my glamour, and he unwittingly carrying the evidence of his betrayal. Santa Apolónia Station, looking like a huge mansion, was receiving the trickle of nighttime travelers bound for Madrid. Couples, families, friends, men traveling alone. Some of them seemed ready to set off with cool indifference, as though leaving something that hadn’t affected them at all; others shed tears, hugged, sighed, made promises for the future that they might never keep. I didn’t fit into either one of those categories: I wasn’t one of the detached, nor one of the sentimental. I was quite different—one of those running away, trying to put some distance between themselves and this place, to dust themselves off and forget what they’d left behind forever.

I’d spent most of the day in my room preparing for my return journey. Supposedly. Yes, I took the clothes down from their hangers, emptied the drawers, and put everything in the suitcases. But that didn’t take me long. I spent the rest of the time dedicated to something more important: transferring all the information I’d gathered at Da Silva’s party into thousands of little pencil-sketched stitches. The task took me many hours. I started on it as soon as I’d arrived back at the hotel in the small hours of the morning, when everything I’d heard was still fresh in my mind; there were so many dozens of details that a lot of it ran the risk of dissolving into oblivion if I didn’t make note immediately. I slept no more than three or four hours; when I woke up, I set about finishing the job. Over the course of the morning and the early afternoon, one piece of information at a time, stitch by stitch, I emptied my head out onto the paper until it made up an arsenal of terse messages. The result comprised more than forty supposed patterns covered in names, numbers, dates, places, and operations, all gathered in the pages of my innocent sketchbook. Patterns for sleeves, cuffs, and backs; for waistbands, body lengths, and fronts; outlines for parts and segments of clothing I would never sew, within whose edges were hidden the details of a grim business transaction intended to facilitate the devastating progress of the German troops.

In the midmorning the telephone rang. The call made me jump, so much so that one of the telegraphic dashes I’d been marking down at that moment was transformed into a harsh twisted stroke that I had to erase.

“Arish? Good morning, it’s Manuel. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Though I was wide awake—showered and alert, having been working for several hours—I contorted my voice to sound sleepy. Under no circumstances could I let him know that what I’d seen and heard the previous night had sent me off into a torrent of nonstop activity.

“Don’t worry, it must be terribly late already…,” I lied.