María Dueñas - The Time in Between

I still didn’t catch her eye, trying to look as though I was concentrating on finding a space to put the bottles down amid the mountain of odds and ends that occupied the table. A mortar, a pot of soup, a large dish of custard. An earthenware bowl filled with olives, three heads of garlic, a sprig of bay leaves. She went on talking, close and sure.

“But bit by bit it all passes, you’ll see. I’m sure your mother is fine, that tonight she’ll be having dinner with her neighbors, and that even though she’s remembering you and missing you, she’ll be glad to know that at least you have the luck of being outside Madrid, far away from the war.”

Perhaps Candelaria was right and my absence was more of a consolation to my mother than a sorrow. Maybe she thought I was still with Ramiro in Tangiers. She might have imagined us spending the evening having dinner in some stunning hotel, surrounded by unconcerned foreigners who danced between one course and the next, far from the suffering on the other side of the Strait. Although I’d tried to keep her informed by letter, everyone knew that the post from Morocco didn’t get to Madrid, so those messages had probably never even left Tetouan.

“You’re right,” I murmured, barely parting my lips. I was still holding the bottles of wine, looking carefully at the table, unable to find a place to put them. And I wasn’t brave enough to look Candelaria in the eye either, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to hold back my tears.

“I certainly am, child, don’t think about it anymore. However hard absence may be, knowing your daughter is far from the bombs and machine guns is a good reason to be glad. So come on—be happy, be happy!” she shouted, grabbing one of the bottles from my hand. “You’ll see, we’ll be livening up very soon, dear heart.” She opened it and raised it up. “To your mother, who gave you life,” she said. Before I had a chance to reply she had taken a long swallow of sparkling wine. “Now you,” she commanded, after wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I didn’t have the least desire to drink, but I obeyed. It was to Dolores’s health. Anything for her.

We started dinner, but in spite of Candelaria’s efforts to keep spirits merry, the rest of us didn’t talk much. No one was even in the mood for an argument. The schoolmaster coughed till he looked like his sternum was going to split, and the shriveled-up sisters, even more shriveled up than usual, shed tears. The fat mother sighed, sniffed. The wine went to her Paquito’s head, he started talking nonsense, the telegraph man answered him back, and finally we laughed. Then Candelaria got up and raised her cracked glass to everyone. To those present, those absent, each and every one. We hugged, we cried, and for one night there was only one faction, the one made up of our sorry troupe.

The first months of the new year were calm and filled with nonstop work. During that time my neighbor Félix Aranda became an everyday presence. Besides the proximity of our homes, I was also brought closer to him in another dimension that couldn’t be gauged spatially. His somewhat peculiar behavior and my repeated need for assistance helped to establish a friendship between us at late hours of the night that would last for decades, through many phases of our lives. After those first sketches that solved my problem with the tennis player’s attire, there would be more occasions when Doña Encarna’s son offered a hand to help me leap gracefully over apparently insurmountable obstacles. Unlike the case of the Schiaparelli trouser-skirt, the second stumbling block that led me to seek another favor from him shortly after the first wasn’t prompted by artistic necessity, but by my ignorance in matters of money. It had all begun some time earlier with a small inconvenience that wouldn’t have posed any problem for anyone with a somewhat privileged education. However, the few years I had attended the modest school in my Madrid neighborhood hadn’t amounted to much. Which was why, at eleven o’clock on the night before my workshop’s first invoice was due to be delivered to the client, I had found myself hopelessly vexed by my inability to put in writing a description and price that corresponded to the work I had done.

It was in November. Over the course of the afternoon the sky had been turning dark grey, and when night fell it began to rain heavily, the prelude to a storm on its way over from the nearby Mediterranean: one of those storms that uprooted trees, knocked down electric wires, and made people huddle under their covers muttering a feverish torrent of litanies to Saint Barbara. Just a couple of hours before the weather changed, Jamila had taken the first orders, just completed, over to Frau Heinz’s house. My first five pieces of work—two for evening, two for daytime, and one for tennis—had been taken down from their hangers in the workshop, where they had been kept awaiting their final ironing. Then they had been packed up in their canvas bags and conveyed in three successive trips to their destination. Jamila’s return from the last trip brought with it a request.

“Frau Heinz ask that Jamila bring tomorrow morning bill in German marks.”

And in case the message hadn’t been absolutely clear, she handed me an envelope bearing a card with the message written on it. I sat down to think about how the hell I was going to make up an invoice, and for the first time my great ally, memory, refused to get me off the hook. Right through the setting up of the business and the creation of the first items of clothing, the designs I still treasured from the world of Doña Manuela had served as a resource I could draw on. The images I had memorized, the skills I’d learned, the mechanical movements and actions so often repeated had up till that moment furnished me with the inspiration to keep going and make a success of it. I knew down to the last detail how a good dressmaker’s studio worked, how to take measurements, cut the patterns, pleat skirts, affix sleeves, and attach lapels, but however hard I searched my mental catalog of techniques and observations, I found nothing that would serve as a reference point for how to create an invoice. I had handled so many of them when I worked for Doña Manuela in Madrid, and it had been my job to deliver them to the homes of our clients; in some cases I’d even returned with the payment in my pocket. Yet I had never stopped to open one of those envelopes and examine its contents.

I considered resorting as usual to Candelaria, but looking out over the balcony I could see how dark it was already, with the imperious wind driving an ever denser rain as relentless flashes of lightning approached from the sea. In consideration of this scenario, the walk over to the boardinghouse seemed to be the sheerest path to hell. So I decided to sort it out on my own: I got hold of a pencil and some paper and sat down at the kitchen table, all ready to begin the task. An hour and a half later and I was still there, with countless scraps of crumpled-up paper surrounding me as I sharpened the pencil with a knife for the fifth time, but still with no idea how many German marks would be equivalent to the two hundred and seventy-five pesetas I had planned on charging her. And right then, in the middle of the night, something suddenly clattered hard against the windowpane. I leapt to my feet so fast that I knocked over the chair. I saw immediately that there was light in the kitchen opposite, and in spite of the rain, and in spite of the time, I could see in it the chubby figure of my neighbor Félix, with his glasses, his sparse, curling hair, and his arm raised, ready to throw a second fistful of almonds. I opened the window to ask him angrily for an explanation for such incomprehensible behavior, but before I’d had the chance to say a word his voice crossed the gap between us, filtered through the thick splattering of the rain on the tiles of the building’s central courtyard. The content of his message, however, came over loud and clear.