María Dueñas - The Time in Between

At the end of the month it began to rain, one afternoon, then the next, and the next. In three days the sun barely came out; there was thunder, lightning, and mad winds that scattered leaves onto the wet ground. I kept working on the garments that the neighborhood women commissioned from me: clothes with neither grace nor class, creations in coarse fabrics whose function was to protect bodies from the inclemencies of the weather with little attention to aesthetics. Until one afternoon, when I had just finished a jacket for a neighbor’s grandson and was about to start on a pleated skirt ordered by the janitor’s daughter, Candelaria came in, enveloped in one of her excitable moods.

“I’ve got it, girl, it’s all set, it’s all arranged!”

She’d come in from the street wearing her new woolen jacket tied tightly at the waist, a shawl over her head, and her old shoes with the twisted heels covered in mud. She continued to chatter rapidly as she removed her outer clothes, recounting the details of her great discovery. Her powerful bust rose and fell rhythmically with her labored breathing as she spelled out her news while peeling off layers like an onion.

“I’ve just come from the hairdresser’s where my dear friend Remedios works. I had a few bits and pieces of business to sort out with her, and while Reme was doing a permanent wave on a gabacha —”

“A what?” I interrupted.

“A gabacha. A frog. A Frenchy,” she clarified hurriedly before going on. “The truth is, that’s how it looked to me, that she was a gabacha. I then discovered that she wasn’t French, she was a German I hadn’t met before, because all the others, the consul’s wife, and the wives of Gumpert and Bernhardt, and Langenheim’s, too, who isn’t German but Italian, those ones I do know all too well, as we’ve had some small dealings. Anyway, as I was saying, as Reme was combing away, she asked me where I got such a splendid jacket. And I, of course, told her that I’d had it made for me by a friend, and then the gabacha , who, as I said, turned out not to be a gabacha at all but a German, looked at me and did a double take. Then she got into the conversation, and with that accent of hers that sounds like she’s about to sink her teeth into your neck, well, she told me she needs someone to sew for her, and if I know any high-quality dressmaker’s establishment, really high end, because she hasn’t been long in Tetouan and she’ll be staying awhile, and basically that she needs someone. So I said to her—”

“That she should come here for me to sew for her,” I concluded.

“What are you saying, girl? I can’t have a dame like that here. These women go around with generals’ wives and colonels’ wives, and they’re used to other kinds of things and other kinds of places, you have no idea how stylish this German woman was, and the kind of money she must have.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know what crazy things were happening in my head, but I told her straight out that I’d heard that there’s going to be a haute couture house opening.”

I swallowed hard.

“And I’m supposed to run it?”

“Well, of course, my angel, who else?”

I tried to swallow again but this time couldn’t manage it. My throat had suddenly gone dry as sandpaper.

“How am I supposed to set up a haute couture house, Candelaria?” I asked, fearful.

Her first response was to laugh. Her second, five words enunciated with such self-confidence that it left no room for the least doubt on my part.

“With me, honey, with me.”

I survived dinner with a battalion of nerves dancing through my guts. Before dinner Candelaria hadn’t been able to clarify anything more for me because no sooner had she made her announcement than the sisters arrived in the dining room with a triumphant commentary on the liberation of Alcázar de Toledo. Soon the rest of the guests joined us, one group overflowing with satisfaction and the other brooding in disgust. Then Jamila began to lay the table and Candelaria had no choice but to head for the kitchen to set about organizing dinner: sautéed cauliflower and one-egg omelet; everything economical, everything nice and soft so that the guests couldn’t re-create a battle at the front by hurling cutlet bones furiously at one another’s heads.

The well-seasoned dinner came to an end with its customary strains, and each of the residents retired promptly from the dining room. The women and Paquito headed for the sisters’ room to listen to Queipo de Llano’s nightly harangue on Radio Seville. The men left for the Unión Mercantil to have their final coffee of the day and chat with one another about the progress of the war. Jamila cleared the table and I was about to help her with the dishes when Candelaria, with a solemn expression on her dark face, pointed me toward the corridor.

“Go to your room and wait for me, I’ll be right there.”

It didn’t take her two minutes to join me, which she spent speedily putting on her nightdress and housecoat, checking from the balcony that the three men were well on their way up Callejón de Intendencia and making sure that the women were conveniently enthralled by the crazy radiophonic torrent of words from the rebel general. “Good evening, gentlemen! Be of good cheer!” I was waiting for her with the lights out, barely settled on the edge of my bed, troubled and nervous. It was a relief hearing her arrive.

“We’ve got to talk, girl. You and I have to have a very serious talk,” she said in a low voice as she sat down beside me. “So let’s see—are you all ready to set up a workshop? Are you ready to be the best dressmaker in Tetouan, to sew clothes no one has ever sewn before?”

“I’m ready to, of course I am, Candelaria, but—”

“I’m not interested in any ‘buts.’ Now you listen closely and don’t interrupt. After the meeting with the German woman at my friend the hairdresser’s, I’ve been asking around and it turns out that lately we’ve started to have people here in Tetouan we never had before. Like you, or the scrawny sisters, or Paquito and his fat mother, or Matías the hair products man. With the uprising you all ended up here, trapped like rats, unable to cross the Strait to return to your homes. Well, other people have had more or less the same thing happen to them, but instead of being a herd of starvelings like the lot of you, whom fortune has dropped on me, they’re people of means, do you understand what I’m telling you, girl? There’s a very famous actress who came over with her company and had to stay. There’s a handful of foreign ladies, especially Germans, whose husbands—according to what people are saying—helped Franco get his troops across the Peninsula. And others like that: not many, true, but enough to give you work for quite a while if you can get them as clients. They don’t have loyalty to any other dressmakers because they’re not from here. And what’s more—and this is most important of all—they’ve got good money. They’re foreign and this war doesn’t mean anything to them, so they feel like partying and they’re not going to spend however long this mess lasts dressing themselves in rags and torturing themselves over who’s won what battle, you understand me, my angel?”

“Of course, I do, Candelaria, but—”

“Sssshhhh! I’ve told you I don’t want to hear any ‘buts’ till I’ve finished talking. Now let’s see: what you need now, right now, right away, without delay, is a high-class place where you can offer your customers the best of the best. I swear on my mother’s grave I’ve never seen anyone sew like you in my life, so you’ve got to get to work immediately. And yes, I know you haven’t got a bean, but that’s what Candelaria is for.”