María Dueñas - The Time in Between

While awaiting concrete news from the owners of Pitman Academies, we were lodged at the Hotel Continental, overlooking the port and just beside the old town. Ramiro cabled the Argentine firm to inform them of our change of address, and I took charge of making daily inquiries to the hotel management concerning the letter that would mark the beginning of our future. Once we had received our reply, we’d decide whether to remain in Tangiers or install ourselves in the Protectorate. In the meantime, while the communication took its time crossing the Atlantic, we began to move about the city among other expats like ourselves, part of that mass of beings with varied pasts and unpredictable futures who were dedicated body and soul to the exhausting chores of chatting, drinking, dancing, watching shows at the Teatro Cervantes, and gambling their futures on a hand of cards, unable to ascertain whether life had a sparkling destiny in store for them or a sinister end in some dark alleyway.

We began to be like them and entered a time that was anything but tranquil. There were vast hours of love in our bedroom in the Continental while the white curtains fluttered with sea breezes; furious passion beneath the monotonous sound of the fan blades mingling with the labored rhythm of our breaths; and the salty taste of sweat on our skin and the rumpled sheets overflowing the bed, spilling onto the floor. We went out constantly, enjoying the streets night and day. At first, not knowing anyone, we went around alone, just the two of us. On days when the east wind wasn’t blowing too hard, we’d go to the beach by the Diplomatic Forest; in the afternoons we’d walk along the recently constructed Boulevard Pasteur, or watch American movies at the Florida Kursaal or the Capitol, or we’d sit at some café in the Small Souq, the pulsing center of the city, where Arabs and Europeans intermingled congenially.

Our isolation, however, lasted only a few weeks: Tangiers was small, Ramiro sociable in the extreme, and in those days everyone seemed to have a great urgency to interact with one another. Soon we started greeting faces, learning names, and joining up with groups when we walked into places. We’d have lunch and dinner at the Bretagne, Roma Park, or the Brasserie de la Plage, and at night we’d go to the Bar Russo, or Chatham, or the Detroit on the Place de France. Or to the Central with its group of Hungarian dancers, or to watch the M’Sallah music-hall shows in their great glazed pavilion, filled to bursting with the French, the English, Spaniards, Jews of various nationalities, Moroccans, Germans, and Russians who danced, drank, and discussed politics, either local or international, in a jumble of languages against the backdrop of a spectacular orchestra. Sometimes we’d end up at the Café Hafa by the sea, sitting under the awnings till dawn, on mats laid over the ground, with people reclining as they smoked hashish and drank tea. Rich Arabs, Europeans of uncertain fortune who at some time in the past might perhaps have been rich, too, or perhaps not. It was unusual for us to go to bed before dawn in those bewildering days, between our anticipation of news from Argentina and the idleness imposed by its delay. We’d frequent the new European quarter of the city and wander through the Moorish one, living with the combined presence of exiles and locals, with waxy-complexioned ladies wearing sun hats and pearls as they walked their poodles and dark-skinned barbers working in the open air with their ancient tools. With the street vendors of creams and ointments, the diplomatic corps in their impeccable attire, the herds of goats, and the fleeting, almost faceless silhouettes of the Muslim women in their haiks and caftans.

News came daily from Madrid. Sometimes we’d read articles in the local Spanish-language newspapers, Democracia, El Diario de África , or the republican El Porvenir ; other times we’d just hear them from the mouths of the newspaper vendors in the Small Souq shouting their headlines in a jumble of languages: La Vedetta di Tangeri in Italian, Le Journal de Tanger in French. Occasionally I’d receive letters from my mother—brief, simple, distant letters. That was how I learned that my grandfather had died, silent and peaceful in his rocking chair, and between the lines I gathered how hard it was becoming, day by day, for her just to survive.

It was a time of discoveries, too. I learned a few phrases in Arabic, but nothing very useful. My ears got used to the sound of other languages—French, English—and to other accents in my own language, such as Haketia, that dialect of the Moroccan Sephardic Jews with its roots in old Spanish that also incorporated words from Arabic and Hebrew. I discovered that there are substances you can smoke or inject or snort that will jumble your senses, that there are people capable of gambling away their mother at a baccarat table, and that there are passions of the flesh that allow for far more combinations than just those of a man and a woman horizontally on a mattress. I learned, too, that there are things that happen in the world that my dim education had never touched upon: I found out that years earlier there had been a great war in Europe, that Germany was being ruled by someone called Hitler who was admired by some and feared by others, and that someone who one day occupied a given place with a feeling of permanence could the following day vanish in order to save his skin, to avoid being beaten to death or ending up in a place worse than his darkest nightmare.

And I discovered to my utmost dismay that at any moment and with no apparent cause, everything we believe to be stable can be upset, derailed, twisted from its course. Unlike what I had learned about people’s political leanings, about European affairs and the history of the countries of the people who surrounded us, this wasn’t a piece of knowledge I acquired because anybody taught me, but because I happened to experience it myself. I don’t recall the exact moment, and what happened wasn’t absolutely concrete, but at some indeterminate point things between Ramiro and me began to change.

At first it was nothing more than a difference in our routines. Our involvement with other people grew, and he started to have a more focused interest in going to this or that place; we no longer wandered aimlessly, unhurried through the streets, no longer let ourselves be carried away by inertia as we had in the early days. I preferred our former state, alone, with no one but each other and the remote world around us. But I understood that Ramiro, with his larger-than-life personality, had begun to be liked by people all over the place. And since whatever he did seemed to me to be well done, I put up unquestioningly with the endless hours we spent surrounded by strangers, despite the fact that most times I barely understood what they were talking about, sometimes because they were speaking in languages that were not my own, sometimes because they were discussing places and subjects as yet unknown to me: concessions, Nazism, Poland, Bolsheviks, visas, extraditions. Ramiro could get by reasonably well in French and Italian, he had a bit of broken English and knew a few expressions in German. He had worked for international companies and developed contacts with foreigners, and what he wasn’t able to manage with exact words he filled in with gestures, roundabout expressions, and inferences. I transformed into his shadow, into a presence that was almost always mute, indifferent to anything but feeling him beside me and being an appendage of his, an always obliging extension of his person.

There was a while, a time that lasted the duration of the spring, more or less, when we managed to combine the two sides and find a balance. We retained our periods of intimacy, our hours just to ourselves. We kept alive the flame of the Madrid days and at the same time opened ourselves up to new friends and joined in the comings and goings of local life. At a certain moment, however, the balance began to shift. Slowly, ever so gradually, but irreversibly. Public hours began to filter into the space of our private moments. Familiar faces stopped being just sources of conversation and anecdotes and began to emerge as people with a past, with plans for the future and the capacity to interfere. Their personalities emerged from anonymity and began to take shape more roundly, to become interesting, attractive. I still remember some of their names; I can still recollect their faces, even though they are now long dead, and their distant origins, which at the time I was unable to locate on a map. Ivan, the elegant, silent Russian, slender as a reed, with a fleeting glance and a handkerchief always poking out of his jacket pocket like an out-of-season silk flower. That Polish baron whose name now escapes me, who boasted of his supposed fortune to the four winds and had only a walking stick with a silver handle and two shirts with collars that had gradually frayed over the passing years. Isaac Springer, the Austrian Jew with his gold cigarette case. The Croatian couple, the Jovovics, both of them so beautiful, so alike and so ambiguous that at times they passed for lovers and at others for siblings. The sweaty Italian who always watched me with cloudy eyes; Mario he was called, or perhaps Mauricio, I no longer know. And Ramiro began to get more intimate with them, to make himself a part of their desires and concerns, an active part of their plans. And I watched as, day by day, he very smoothly became closer to them and farther from me.