María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“You there—halt!” shouted one of them as soon as he saw me. My body stiffened against the metal weapons stuck to it.

“Leave her, Churruca, can’t you see she’s a Moor?” another said immediately.

I remained still, neither advancing nor retreating. They didn’t approach but remained where they were, some fifty feet away, discussing what to do.

“I don’t care one way or another if she’s Moorish or Christian. The sergeant said we have to ask everybody for identification.”

“Christ, Churruca, you’re so slow. We’ve told you ten times already that he meant everybody Spanish, not the Muslims,” the other soldier explained. “Why can’t you learn?”

“You’re the ones who don’t learn. Come on, ma’am, let’s see your papers.”

I thought my legs were going to fold under me, that I was about to collapse. It seemed the game was up. I held my breath and felt a cold sweat soaking my skin.

“You’re so dumb, Churruca,” said another one standing behind him. “The natives don’t wander around with their ID documents—when are you going to learn that this is Africa, not your village square?”

Too late: the scrupulous soldier was already two steps away from me, a hand held out for some document as he searched for my gaze among the folds of fabric covering me. He didn’t find it, however—my eyes remained fixed on the ground, focused on his mud-stained boots, on my old slippers, and the little space that separated our two pairs of feet.

“If the sergeant finds out you’ve been bothering a Moroccan woman who’s not under any suspicion, you’re going to swallow three long nights of arrest in the Alcazaba, kid.”

The grim possibility of that punishment finally made this Churruca see sense. I couldn’t see the face of my savior—my gaze was still fixed on the ground. But the threat of arrest had its abrupt effect, and the punctilious pigheaded soldier, after thinking about it for a few nerve-wracking seconds, withdrew his hand, turned, and moved away from me.

I blessed the good sense of his companion who had stopped him, and when the four soldiers were back together under the arch I turned and resumed my course. Making my way slowly along the platform, heading nowhere in particular, I attempted to recover my composure. Once I’d done that, I was finally able to concentrate my efforts on getting to the urinals. I began to pay attention to my surroundings then: a couple of Arabs dozing on the ground, leaning their backs on the walls, and a scrawny dog crossing the tracks. It took me a while to find my goal; to my good fortune it was almost at the other end of the platform, far from where the soldiers were. Holding my breath, I pushed the glass-paneled door and went into a kind of anteroom. There was barely any light, but I didn’t want to look for the switch, preferring instead to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I could make out the sign for men to my left and women to my right. And at the back, against the wall, I could see what seemed like a heap of fabric that was slowly beginning to shift. A head covered by a hood emerged cautiously from the bulk, eyes meeting mine in the gloom.

“Have you brought the merchandise?” asked a low voice quickly in Spanish.

I nodded and the bulk rose up stealthily until it had been transformed into the figure of a man dressed, like me, in the Moorish style.

“Where is it?”

I lowered my veil to be able to speak more easily, opening the haik and showing him my bound-up body.

“Here.”

“My God,” was all he muttered. There was a world of emotions concentrated in those two words: fear, anxiety, urgency. His tone was serious; he seemed to be a well-educated man.

“Can you take it off yourself?” he asked then.

“I’ll need time,” I whispered.

He pointed me toward the women’s section and we both went in. It was a narrow space, with a small window through which traces of moonlight glimmered, sufficient enough that we didn’t need any more.

“Hurry, we can’t waste any time. The morning patrol is about to arrive, and they search the station from top to bottom before the first train leaves. I’ll have to help you,” he said, closing the door behind him.

I let the haik drop to the floor and held my arms out to the sides so that this stranger could start rummaging around every corner of me, untying knots, loosening bandages, and freeing my frame from its sinister covering.

Before starting he lowered the hood of his djellaba, and I found myself looking at a serious, pleasant-faced Spaniard, middle-aged, with several days of stubble. His hair was brown and curly, disheveled by the effects of the big garment under which he’d probably been hidden for quite some time. His fingers began to work, but it wasn’t an easy task. Candelaria really had made an effort, and not one of the guns had shifted position, but the knots were so tight and there were so many yards of fabric that undoing them took us longer than we both would have wished. Neither of us spoke, surrounded by white tiles and only accompanied by the squat toilet in the floor, the rhythmic sound of our breathing, and an occasional murmur that punctuated the process: there we go, this way now, move a little, that’s it, bring your arm up a little, careful. Despite the pressure, the man from Larache acted with infinite delicacy, almost modesty, avoiding my more intimate areas or grazing past my naked skin an inch beyond what was strictly necessary. As though afraid to stain my integrity with his hands, as though the cargo I had attached to me was an exquisite wrapping of tissue paper and not a black casing of objects destined to kill. At no point did his physical closeness trouble me, neither his involuntary caresses nor the intimacy of our almost-touching bodies. It was without question the most pleasurable moment of the night—not because a man was running his hands across my body after so many months, but because I believed that, with that action, my ordeal was almost over.

Everything proceeded at a good pace. The pistols came out of their hiding places one by one, ending up in a heap on the floor. When there were only a few left, just three or four, I calculated that in five minutes, ten at the most, we’d be done. Then suddenly the calm was broken, making us hold our breaths and freeze in the middle of what we were doing. From outside in the distance came the agitated sounds of the beginning of some new activity.

The man breathed in hard and took a watch out of his pocket.

“They’re here already, the relief patrol, they’ve come early,” he said. In his cracked voice I could make out distress and anxiety, and the wish not to convey either of those feelings.

“What do we do now?” I whispered.

“Get out as quickly as possible,” he said immediately. “Get dressed, fast.”

“And the pistols that are left?”

“Doesn’t matter. What you’ve got to do now is escape: it won’t be long before the soldiers come in to check that everything’s in order.”

As I wrapped myself in the haik, my hands trembling, he unstrapped a filthy canvas sack from his belt and began shoving the pistols inside.

“Which way do we get out?” I whispered.

“That way,” he said, raising his head and gesturing at the window with his chin. “You jump first, then I’ll throw the pistols and come out myself. But listen carefully: if I’m not able to join you, take the pistols, run with them parallel to the tracks, and leave them next to the first sign you see announcing a stop or a station, and someone will go get them. Don’t look back and don’t wait for me; just run and escape. All right, let’s go—get ready to get up there, put a foot in my hands.”

I looked up at the narrow window. It seemed impossible that we’d fit through it, but I didn’t say anything. I was so afraid that I just did exactly what I was told, blindly trusting the decisions of this anonymous Mason whose name I’d never learned.