María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“Girl, don’t tell me you know how to sew.”

For the first time in a long while, I smiled, and my reply was an almost triumphant yes. And then the boardinghouse owner, relieved at having finally found some use for the burden that my presence had become, took me to her bedroom and proceeded to dump out the entire contents of her closet onto the bed.

“You can lower the hem of this dress and turn out the collar of this coat. This shirt has seams that need fixing, and the skirt needs to be let out a little at the waist since I’ve put on a bit of weight lately and there’s no way I can get into it.”

And so on, until there was a huge mountain of old clothes I could barely carry. It took me just one morning to fix the imperfections in her worn-out wardrobe. Satisfied with my efficiency, and resolved to gauge the full potential of my productivity, Candelaria came home that afternoon with a piece of cheviot wool for a three-quarter coat.

“English wool, the very best. We used to bring it over from Gibraltar before all this fuss started; now it’s extremely difficult to get hold of. Do you dare?”

“Get me a good pair of scissors, two yards of lining, half a dozen tortoiseshell buttons, and a spool of brown thread. I’ll take your measurements right now and tomorrow morning it’ll be ready for you.”

With those frugal means and the dining table as my center of operations, by dinnertime I had the commission ready for trying on. It was all complete before breakfast. No sooner had she opened her eyes, still sticky with sleep, and her hair held in a net, than Candelaria had arranged the coat over her nightdress and incredulously considered the effect in the mirror. The shoulders sat impeccably on her frame, and the lapels opened out to the sides in perfect symmetry, masking the excessive size of her bosom. The fit was graceful with a generous waist and a skillful cut so that it disguised the bulk of her marelike hips. The broad, elegant cuffs put the finishing touch on my work and her arms. The result couldn’t have been more satisfactory. She looked at herself, facing forward and in profile, from the back and three-quarters on. Once, again; now buttoned, now open, collar up, collar down. Her talkativeness contained for the moment, she focused on making a precise evaluation of the product. Again from the front, again from the side. And at last, the verdict.

“Well, I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you ever tell me you had hands like that, my angel?”

Two new skirts, three blouses, a shirtdress, a couple of suits, an overcoat, and a winter smock soon took their places on her hangers as she bargained for new pieces of fabric on the street, paying as little as she could.

“Chinese silk, just feel that, touch it,” she chattered excitedly as she opened her parcel and laid before my eyes a couple of yards of flame-colored fabric. “The Indian from the lower bazaar got two American lighters out of me for this—damn him to hell and back—it’s just as well I had a couple of them left from last year, because the bastard only wants silver hassani coins now; everyone’s saying they’re going to withdraw the Republican money and replace it with Nationalist banknotes—girl, such madness…”

On another outing she brought back a half roll of gabardine—“the good stuff, honey, the good stuff.” A pearly satin remnant arrived the following day, accompanied by the corresponding account of how she’d gotten hold of it, and none-too-honorable references to the mother of the Jew from whom she’d acquired it. A leftover piece of caramel-colored flannel, a bit of alpaca, seven yards of patterned satin, and so on, until between dealing and swapping we had reached almost a dozen fabrics, which I cut and sewed and she tried on and praised. Until one day, when her clever ways of getting hold of the material were exhausted, or she thought her new wardrobe was at last well stocked, or she had decided the time had come to focus her attention on other tasks.

“With all the things you’ve made for me, your debt to me up to today is settled,” she announced. And without even giving me time to savor my relief, she went on: “Now we’re going to talk about the future. You’ve got a lot of talent, girl, and that shouldn’t be wasted, specially not at this moment when you’re just a little bit lacking in the cash to get yourself out of the mess you’re in. You’ve seen how complicated it is to find you a position, so it seems to me that the best thing for you to do is to concentrate on sewing for the people in Tetouan. But the way things are, I’m afraid you’ll find it hard to get people to open their doors to you. You’ll have to have your own place, set up your own workshop, and even then it’s not going to be easy for you to get customers. We’ve really got to think it through.”

Candelaria the Matutera knew every living creature in Tetouan, but to be quite sure of the state of the sewing business and focus on finding just the right location, it was necessary to go out quite a few times, catch up with the odd contact here and there, and do a thorough study of the situation. A couple of days after the birth of the idea we had a one hundred percent reliable picture of the lay of the land. I learned then that there were two or three well-established prestigious designers who were frequented by the wives and daughters of the military commanders, a few respected doctors, and the businessmen who were still solvent. One level down, you’d find four or five decent dressmakers for street wear and Sunday coats for the women of the more well-to-do families of the administrative staff. And finally there were several handfuls of insignificant seamstresses who made their rounds from house to house, cutting percale smocks, altering hand-me-downs, taking up hems, and darning socks. The landscape was hardly ideal: there was considerable competition, but somehow I’d have to work things out and manage to find a niche for myself. And even though, according to Candelaria, none of those sewing professionals was by any means dazzling, and most of them were made up of a cast of characters who were domestic, almost family, that wasn’t any reason to underestimate them: when they worked well, dressmakers could earn their clients’ loyalties for life.

The idea of going back to being active again raised conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand it managed to create a little flutter of hopefulness that I hadn’t felt for an eternity. Being able to earn money to support myself and settle my debts by doing something I liked and I knew I was good at was the best thing that could have happened to me just then. At the same time, anxiety and uncertainty plagued my soul. To open my own business, humble though it might be, required initial capital, contacts, and a whole lot more luck than life had been offering me lately. It wouldn’t be easy to carve out a space for myself as just one more dressmaker; to overcome loyalties and win customers I’d have to come up with something out of the ordinary, to set me apart.

While Candelaria and I struggled to find a path for me to follow, a number of her friends and acquaintances began coming to the boardinghouse to place a few orders with me: just this blouse, girl, if you wouldn’t mind; just a few overcoats for the kiddies before the cold sets in. On the whole they were humble women, with spending power to match. They would arrive with many children and a few scraps of fabric, and they’d sit down to talk to Candelaria while I sewed. They sighed over the war and cried about the luck of their people in Spain, drying their tears with the end of the handkerchief they kept bundled up in their sleeve. They complained about the poverty of the times and wondered anxiously what they would do to help their offspring to get on in life if the conflict continued or an enemy bullet killed their husband. They paid little and late, or sometimes not at all, as best they could. And yet, in spite of the constraints of the clientele and the modest nature of their commissions, the mere fact of being back at my sewing managed to mitigate the harshness of my distress and open up a tiny chink through which a slim ray of light began to filter.