María Dueñas - The Time in Between

In the midday chaos, with customers coming in and out of the dining room and the noise of the waiters, all the people weaving back and forth and the voices in languages I didn’t understand, almost nobody seemed to notice my departure. Only Hamid, the little bellhop who looked like just a boy though he no longer was one, approached solicitously to help me carry my suitcase. I refused him wordlessly and went out. I began to walk at a pace that was neither firm nor unsteady, without the slightest idea of where I was headed and not worrying about it. I remember having gone up the slope of the Rue de Portugal; I still have a few scattered images of the Grand Souq: a mass of kiosks, animals, voices, and djellabas. I wandered aimlessly and occasionally had to move aside to stand against a wall when I heard a motorcar horn behind me or the cries of Balak, balak from some Moroccan hastily transporting his merchandise. In my confused ramblings I passed at some point by the English cemetery, the Catholic church, Rue Siaghine, Paseo de la Marina Española, and the Great Mosque. I walked for a time that was endless and imprecise, without noticing any tiredness or any sensation, moved by an alien force that propelled my legs as though they belonged to a body not my own. I could have gone on walking much longer: hours, nights, maybe weeks, years and years until the end of time. But I did not, because on the Cuesta de la Playa, as I passed like a ghost in front of the Escuelas Españolas, a taxi stopped beside me.

“Need me to take you anywhere, mademoiselle?” asked the driver in a mixture of Spanish and French.

I think I nodded. The suitcase must have made him assume I meant to travel.

“To the port, or the station, or will you be taking a bus?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes.”

“Yes the bus?”

I nodded again: it was all the same to me, bus or train, a boat or the bottom of an abyss. Ramiro had left me and I had nowhere to go, so any place was as bad as any other. Or worse.

Agentle voice tried to wake me, and with a massive effort I managed to half open my eyes. Beside me I could make out two figures—blurry at first, then clearer. One of them was that of a man whose face, though vague, turned out to be faintly familiar. The other silhouette belonged to a nun in an impeccable white headdress. I tried to get my bearings and could only see high ceilings above me, beds alongside, the smell of medicine and sunlight coming in through the windows in torrents. Then I realized I was in a hospital. The first words I murmured are still in my memory.

“I want to go back home.”

“And where is your home, my child?”

“In Madrid.”

It seemed to me that the figures exchanged a quick glance. The nun took my hand and squeezed it gently.

“I think right now that won’t be possible.”

“Why not?” I asked.

It was the man who answered: “Traffic in the Strait has been stopped. They’ve declared a state of war.”

I couldn’t understand what that meant, because no sooner did the words enter my ears than I fell back down into a well of weakness and infinite sleepiness from which it took me days to rouse myself. When I did, I remained hospitalized for some time. Those weeks I spent immobilized in the Tetouan Hospital Civil served to put my feelings into something like order and to allow me to weigh up the extent of what the recent months had entailed. But that was at the end, in the final days. In the early days, in those mornings and afternoons, in the small hours, at the times when others had visitors but I never did, when they brought me food I was unable to taste, all I did was cry. I didn’t think, didn’t consider, didn’t even remember. I just cried.

When those days were over, when my eyes dried because I no longer had any capacity for crying, memories began to return to my bed like a precisely ordered procession. I could almost see them harassing me, lining up to come in through the door at the end of that big, light-filled hospital ward. Memories that were alive and autonomous, big and small, that approached, single file, suddenly scaling the mattress and invading my body through an ear, or under my fingernails, or through the pores of my skin, until they entered my brain and battered at it without the slightest pity, with images and moments that my will had wanted never again to recall. And then, when the tribe of memories was still arriving but their presence was becoming less noisy, something else began to invade me with a dreadful coldness, like a rash: the necessity to analyze everything, to find a cause and a reason for everything that had happened in my life during the past eight months. That phase was the worst: the most aggressive, the most tormenting. The one that hurt most. And though I cannot calculate how long it lasted, I do know with absolute certainty that what managed to put an end to it was an unexpected arrival.

Up till then, all the days had passed among women giving birth, the Sisters of Charity, and white-painted metal beds. From time to time a doctor in a smock would appear, and at certain hours of the day the families of the other residents would arrive, speaking in murmurs, cuddling the newborn babies and between sighs consoling those who—like me—had been left along the way. I was in a city where I did not know a soul: no one had ever been to see me, nor did I expect anyone to. I wasn’t even completely clear what I was doing among that alien population: I only managed to retrieve a muddled recollection of the circumstances of my arrival. A swamp of thick uncertainty occupied the place in my memory that should have held the logical reasons that had brought me here. Over the course of those days my only companions were memories mixed with the murkiness of my thoughts, the discreet presence of the nuns, and the desire—half longing, half fearful—to return to Madrid as soon as possible.

My solitude was broken one morning quite unexpectedly. Preceded by the white, rounded figure of Sister Virtudes, there appeared the face of that man who so many days earlier had spoken a few blurry words to me about a war.

“I’ve brought you a visitor, my child,” announced the nun. I thought I could make out a slight trace of concern in her singsong tone. When the new arrival identified himself, I understood why.

“Commissioner Claudio Vázquez, ma’am,” said the stranger by way of greeting. “Or is it ‘miss’?”

He had a tanned face in which two dark, shrewd eyes shone. His hair was almost white, his bearing supple, and he wore a light-colored summer suit. In my weakened state I wasn’t able to tell whether he was an older man with the bearing of a younger man or a younger man prematurely grey. In any case, it mattered little at that moment: the more urgent thing for me was to find out what it was he wanted from me. Sister Virtudes gestured him toward a chair along a nearby wall; swiftly he drew it closer to the right side of my bed and sat down, placing his hat at his feet. With a smile as kind as it was firm he gestured to the sister that he’d rather she leave.

The light was coming in in torrents through the broad windows of the hospital pavilion. Beyond them, the wind was lightly rustling the garden’s palm and eucalyptus trees beneath a dazzling blue sky, testimony to a magnificent summer day for anyone who didn’t have to spend it lying in a hospital bed in the company of a police commissioner. With their impeccable white sheets stretched taut, the two beds on either side of me, like almost all the others, were unoccupied. When the sister left, disguising her vexation at not being able to witness the meeting, the commissioner and I were left in the pavilion with only the company of two or three distant bedridden patients and a young nun silently scrubbing the floor at the far end. I was scarcely sitting up, with the sheet covering me up to my chest, allowing only two increasingly weakened bare arms, my bony shoulders, and my head to emerge. My hair was pulled back into a dark plait to one side of my face, which was thin and ashen, drained by my collapse.