María Dueñas - The Time in Between

And so my stay at the La Luneta boardinghouse began in this way, surrounded by these people about whom I never learned much more than their given names and—very superficially—the reasons they were lodging there. The schoolmaster and the civil servant, both elderly bachelors, were longtime residents; the sisters had traveled from Soria to Morocco in mid-July to bury a relative and saw the Strait closed to marine traffic before they were able to return home; something similar had happened to the hair products salesman, kept in the Protectorate against his will as a result of the insurgency. The mother and son had other reasons that were less clear, though everyone assumed they had come in search of an elusive husband and father who one fine morning had gone out to buy tobacco on Toledo’s Plaza de Zocodover and decided never to return home. In time, amid the almost daily skirmishes at the boardinghouse, along with the actual war advancing relentlessly throughout the summer and followed minutely from afar by that gathering of displaced, irate, frightened creatures, I began to get used to this boardinghouse and its underworld. I became closer as well to the owner of the business, which, considering the nature of the clientele, I assumed could not bring her very much income.

I didn’t go out much in those days: I had nowhere to go, nor anyone to see. I was usually alone, or with Jamila, or with Candelaria when she was around, which was infrequently. Sometimes, when she wasn’t bustling off to do her wheeling and dealing, she would insist on taking me out with her, for us to find some work for me. “Otherwise you’ll end up with a face like old parchment, girl, if you don’t give yourself so much as a flicker of sunlight,” she would say. Sometimes I felt unable to accept the invitation, not feeling strong enough, but other times I’d agree, and then she’d take me here and there, through the fiendish maze of streets of the Moorish quarter and the modern, gridlike roads of the Spanish ensanche with its beautiful houses and well-turned-out residents. In every establishment whose owner she knew, she would ask if they could find a position for me, if they knew of anyone who had a job for this girl who was so dedicated and ready to work day and night, as I was supposed to be. But those were difficult times, and even though the sounds of gunfire were still far away, everyone seemed discouraged by the uncertain outcome of the fighting, worried about their people back home, about the whereabouts of this one or that one, the advancing of the troops at the front, who had lived and who had died, and what was still to come. In such circumstances almost nobody was interested in expanding a business or hiring new staff. And even though we usually concluded those outings with a glass of mint tea and a tray of savory morsels in some seedy café on the Plaza de España, every frustrated attempt was for me one more shovelful of anxiety dumped onto the pile, and for Candelaria—though she never said as much—a new gnawing worry.

My health improved at the same rate as my spirits, a snail’s pace. I was still all skin and bones, and the pallid tone of my complexion contrasted with the faces around me tanned by the summer sun. My emotions were still taut, my soul weary; I still felt as torn apart by Ramiro’s abandonment as I had on that first day. I was still pining for the child whose existence I had only been aware of for a few hours, and I was once again consumed with worry over what had become of my mother in Madrid. Still frightened by the charges against me and by Don Claudio’s warnings, terrorized at the thought of being unable to make restitution and the possibility of ending up in prison, I had panic as my constant companion.

One of the effects of being crazily, obsessively in love is that it dulls your senses, your capacity for perception, till you no longer notice what is happening around you. It causes you to focus your attention so much on a single person that it isolates you from the rest of the universe, imprisons you inside a shell, and keeps you at a distance from other realities, even those right in front of you. When everything was thrown to the wind, I realized that those eight months I’d spent alongside Ramiro had been so intense that I’d barely had close contact with anyone else. Only then did I become aware of the scale of my loneliness. In Tangiers I hadn’t bothered to form relationships with anyone: I wasn’t interested in anyone but Ramiro and things to do with him. In Tetouan, however, he was no longer there, and with him had gone my grip on things and my points of reference. So I had to learn to live alone, to think of myself, and to struggle to make the weight of his absence gradually less devastating. As the Pitman Academies leaflet had said, long and steep is the path of life.

August came to an end, and September arrived with its shorter evenings and cooler mornings. The days passed slowly over the bustle of La Luneta. People went in and out of the shops, cafés, and bazaars, crossed streets, paused outside shop windows, and chatted to acquaintances on street corners. As I observed from my vantage point the changing light and all that unstoppable energy, I realized that I, too, urgently needed to get myself moving, to begin some sort of productive activity in order to stop living off Candelaria’s charity and to start gathering the money to pay off my debt. I hadn’t yet figured out how to do this, however, and to compensate for my inactivity and my nonexistent contribution to the economy of the household, I forced myself at least to participate in some of the domestic chores and not be just a lazy lump of furniture. I peeled potatoes, set the table, hung the clothes out to dry on the rooftop terrace. I helped Jamila do the dusting and clean the windows, I learned a few Arabic words from her and allowed her to lavish her endless smiles upon me. I watered the flowers, shook out the pillows, and anticipated little necessities that sooner or later someone would have to deal with. As the temperature changed, the boardinghouse in turn began to ready itself for the arrival of autumn and I helped with that. We stripped the beds in all the rooms—we changed sheets, took off the summer bedcovers, and brought the winter blankets down from the attic. I noticed then that a lot of the linens needed mending, so I took a big basket of bed linen out to the balcony and sat down to mend tears, strengthen hems, and tidy up frayed edges.

And that day something unexpected happened. I never could have imagined that the feeling of a needle between my fingers would be so pleasing. Those rough bedspreads and coarse linen sheets had nothing in common with the silks and muslins of Doña Manuela’s workshop, and the mending of their imperfections was a world away from the delicate backstitching that I had dedicated myself to in order to assemble clothes for the fine ladies of Madrid. Nor did Candelaria’s modest dining room resemble Doña Manuela’s workshop, nor did the presence of the Moorish girl and the incessant comings and goings of the rest of the quarrelsome guests correspond with the figures of my old working companions and the refinement of our customers. But the rhythm of my wrist was just the same, and the needle was once again moving quickly before my eyes as my fingers toiled away to get the stitches just right, just as they had done for years, day after day, in another place and for other ends. The satisfaction of sewing again was so pleasing that for a couple of hours I was taken back to happier times and managed temporarily to dissolve the leaden weight of my own miseries. It was like being back home.

Evening fell and there was barely any light left by the time Candelaria returned from one of her incessant outings. She found me surrounded by piles of recently mended clothes, with the last towel in my hands.