María Dueñas - The Time in Between

Finally Candelaria spoke, her firm words emphasizing her certainty. “You’ve got to deal with it yourself, Sira. We have no other way out of this.”

“I can’t do it, I can’t…,” I stammered.

“You’ve got to do it, honey,” she repeated darkly. “If you don’t, we’re lost.”

“But you’re forgetting everything else they have over me, Candelaria—the hotel debt, the accusations against me by the company and by my half brother. If they catch me doing this, I’ll be finished.”

“You’ll be finished if Palomares turns up tonight and finds us with all this in the house,” she replied, gazing back to the guns.

“But Candelaria, listen…,” I insisted.

“No, you listen to me now, girl, and listen well,” she said imperiously. She spoke with a powerful hiss, her eyes open like saucers. Crouched down beside the bed till she was at my level, she proceeded to grab me by the arms and made me look right at her. “I’ve tried everything, I’ve thrown everything I’ve got into this, and things didn’t work out,” she said. “Luck can be a bitch like that: sometimes she lets you win, and other times she spits in your face and makes you lose. And tonight she said to me, No way, Matutera. I haven’t got any ammunition left, Sira, the game’s up for me. But not for you. You’re the only person now who can stop us from going under, the only one who can take out the merchandise and bring back the money. If it weren’t necessary I wouldn’t be asking you, God knows. But we have no choice, child: you’ve got to get going. You’re in this just like I am; this one’s both of ours, and we’ve got a lot riding on it. Our future is disappearing, girl, our whole future. If we don’t get this money, we won’t make it through. Now everything is in your hands. You must do it, for you and for me, Sira. For both of us.”

I wanted to keep refusing; I knew I had powerful reasons to say no, no way, absolutely not. But at the same time I knew Candelaria was right. I had agreed to be a part of that dark game, no one had forced me. We’d formed a team, each of us with a role to play. Candelaria’s was first to negotiate; mine, to work afterward. But we were both aware that sometimes the boundaries of things are elastic and imprecise, that they can shift, become blurred or diluted like ink in water. She’d done her part of the deal, and she’d tried. Luck had turned her back on her and she hadn’t managed to succeed, but that didn’t mean that all the possibilities had been exhausted. It was only fair that now I should take the risk.

I took a few seconds to speak; first I had to clear out of my head some images that threatened to leap at my jugular: the commissioner, his prison, the unknown face of this Palomares.

“Have you thought about how I’d do it?” I asked finally in a whisper.

Candelaria breathed out noisily in relief, recovering her lost spirits.

“The easiest thing in the world, my precious. Wait just a second, and I’ll tell you how.”

She left the room still half naked and returned in less than a minute, her arms filled with what seemed to be a huge piece of white linen.

“You’re going to dress like a little Moorish girl, with a haik,” she said, closing the door behind her. “You could fit the whole universe in one of these.”

That was certainly true. Every day I saw Arab women wrapped up inside these broad shapeless clothes, which resembled large cloaks and covered their heads, their arms, their whole bodies, front and back. Underneath this garment, one could certainly hide anything one wanted. A piece of fabric usually covered their mouth and nose, and the top part came down over their eyebrows. Only their eyes, their ankles, and their feet remained in view. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to go through the streets hiding a small arsenal of pistols.

“But first there’s something else we have to do, honey; let’s get to work.”

I obeyed without a word, allowing her to direct the situation. Without a thought she pulled the top sheet off my bed and brought it to her mouth. With a fierce bite she tore off the top hem and then began to rip the material, tearing a strip a couple of hand spans wide.

“Do the same thing with the bottom sheet,” she commanded. Between teeth and tearing it took us only a few minutes to reduce the sheets off my bed to a couple of dozen long strips of cotton. “And now, what we’re going to do is tie these strips around your body to hold the pistols. Raise your arms, I’m doing the first one.”

And so, without my even taking off my nightdress, the nineteen revolvers were attached around me, bandaged firmly with the strips of bedsheet. Each strip was for one pistol: first Candelaria would wrap the weapon in a folded-over piece of the fabric, then she’d put it against my body and go around me two or three times with the band. And finally she’d tie the ends tight.

“You’re all skin and bones, girl, you don’t have any meat left on you where I can tie the next one,” she said, having completely covered me front and back.

“My thighs,” I suggested.

And so she did, until—spread out under my chest and over my ribs, kidneys, shoulder blades, sides, arms, hips, and thighs—all of the cargo had finally been accommodated. I was like a mummy, covered in white bandages that made all my movements difficult, but that I’d have to learn to move around in right away.

“Put these on, they’re Jamila’s,” she said, placing at my feet some worn brownish-colored leather slippers. “And now the haik,” she added, holding up the large white linen cloak. “That’s it, wrap yourself up right to the head, and let me see how that looks on you.”

She looked at me with a half smile.

“Perfect, just another little Moorish girl. Before leaving, don’t forget, you’ve also got to arrange the veil over your face so it covers your mouth and nose. Come on, then, let’s go out, I’ve got to explain quickly to you where you’re going.”

I started to walk with difficulty, finding it hard to move my body at a normal pace. The pistols were heavy as lead and forced me to keep my legs apart and my arms away from my sides. We went out into the corridor, Candelaria walking ahead and me moving clumsily behind her; a big white bulk that bumped into the walls, the furniture, and the door jambs. Without noticing I knocked into a shelf, throwing its contents onto the floor: a plate from Talavera, an unlit oil lamp, and a sepia-colored portrait of some relative of Candelaria’s. The glass and porcelain shattered as soon as they hit the floor tiles, and the noise made the mattress springs creak in the four adjacent rooms as the sleeping guests were disturbed.

“What’s happened?” shouted the fat mother from her bed.

“Nothing, I just dropped a glass of water. Everyone back to sleep,” replied Candelaria with finality.

I tried to reach down to pick up the mess, but I couldn’t bend my body.

“Leave it, girl, leave it, I’ll sort it out later,” she said, moving some bits of glass aside with her foot.

And then, unexpectedly, a door opened just ten feet away from us. We were met by the curler-covered head of Fernanda, one of the aged sisters. Before she had the chance to ask us what had happened and what a Moorish woman in a haik was doing knocking over the furniture in the corridor at that hour of the morning, Candelaria launched a dart at her that rendered her mute and unable to react.

“If you don’t get back to bed this instant, when I wake up tomorrow I’ll tell Sagrario you’ve been seeing the assistant from the dispensary on Fridays in the cornisa. ”

Fear that her pious sister should learn of her amours was more powerful than her curiosity, and without a word Fernanda slipped like an eel back into her bedroom.