María Dueñas - The Time in Between

Following my arrival on Sidi Mandri and the night of the storm, my home became a permanent refuge for him. He would come over to leaf through magazines, to bring me ideas, to draw sketches and tell me funny things about the world, about my clients and all those people I used to pass every day with, but whom I didn’t know. And so, night by night, I learned about Tetouan and its people: where they had come from and for what reasons. All those families in this alien land; who those ladies were that I sewed for; who had power, who had money; who did what, and why, and when and how.

But Doña Encarna’s devotion to the bottle didn’t always have soothing effects, and then, regrettably, things would turn upside down. When the anisette wasn’t enough to calm her, with the drunkenness would come hell. Those nights were the worst, because the mother didn’t get into a state of harmless catatonia, she was transformed into a thundering Zeus capable of demolishing the dignity of the strongest person with her bellowing. And Félix, knowing that the morning hangover would erase any trace of her memory, would match her with other equally indecorous insults with the perfect knack of a knife thrower. Foul witch, evil bitch, crooked whore. God, what a scandal it would have been if their acquaintances from the pastry shop, pharmacy, and church pew had heard them! The following day, however, it seemed that forgetfulness had settled on them and cordiality would reign once more on their evening walk as though there had never been the slightest tension between them. Would you like a sugared bun with your tea today, Mama, or would you rather a meat pie? Whatever you prefer, Félix, you’re always so good at choosing for me—go ahead, come on then, let’s go now, we’ve got to pay our condolences to María Angustias, I’ve heard that her nephew has fallen at the battle of Jarama; oh, such a shame, my angel, just as well that being the son of a widow spared you from being called up; what would I have done—Holy Mother of God—if I’d been left alone here with my son at the front?

Félix was smart enough to know that there was some unhealthy abnormality hanging over that relationship but not brave enough to put a stop to it once and for all. Perhaps that was why he tried to dodge his pitiful reality by turning his mother gradually into a drunk, escaping like a vampire in the small hours or laughing at his own miseries while searching for blame in a thousand ridiculous symptoms and contemplating the most outlandish remedies. One of his diversions was finding odd cures among the advertisements in the newspapers, lying on the sofa in my living room while I finished off a cuff or backstitched the final buttonhole of the day.

And then he’d say things like this to me:

“Do you think my mother’s Hydra behavior has something to do with her nerves? Most likely this will take care of it. Listen, listen—‘Nervional. Awakens the appetite, aids digestion, normalizes the stomach. Eliminates changeable moods and dejection. Take Nervional—count on it.’ ”

Or this:

“If you ask me, the thing with Mama is a hernia. I’d already thought about giving her an orthopedic corset, to see if her bad tempers might pass, but listen to this: ‘If you’ve got a hernia, you can avoid risks and discomforts with the unbeatable, innovative automatic compressor, a mechanical-scientific wonder that—without nuisances, straps, or encumbrances—will completely defeat your affliction.’ It might just work—what do you think, girl, should I get her one?”

Or perhaps:

“What if it turns out it’s something to do with her blood? Look what it says here. ‘Richelet Blood Tonic. Vascular complaints. Varicose veins and ulcers. Remedy for tainted blood. Effective at eliminating uric toxins.’ ”

Or some other nonsense:

“What if it’s piles? Or she has something wrong with her eye? How about if I find a witch doctor in the Moorish quarter to cast a spell on her? Truthfully, I don’t think I ought to worry so much, because I trust that her Darwinian tendency will end up eroding her liver and will put an end to her soon enough, now that a bottle doesn’t even last the old lady two days and she’s burning a hole in my pocket.” He stopped his speech, perhaps awaiting a reply, but he received none. Or at least not in words. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me with that face, girl,” he added after a pause.

“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about, Félix.”

“You don’t know what I’m referring to when I talk about a Darwinian tendency? Do you not know who I mean by Darwin either? The one with the monkeys, the one with the theory that we humans are all descended from primates. If I say my mother has a Darwinian tendency it’s because she’s crazy about El Mono anisette, you see? Girl, you have a divine sense of style and you sew like the very angels, but on matters of general culture you really are rather in the dark, aren’t you?”

I was, in fact. I knew I had a facility for learning new things and retaining information, but I was also aware of my educational deficiencies. I’d accumulated very little of the kind of knowledge one found in encyclopedias: little more than the names of a handful of kings recited by rote, and that Spain’s northern limit is bounded by the Cantabrian Sea and the Pyrenees Mountains separating it from France. I could rattle off my times tables and was quick at using numbers in daily situations, but I’d never read a book in my life, and as far as history, geography, art, or politics was concerned, all I knew was what I’d picked up during my months of living with Ramiro and in the constant free-for-all in Candelaria’s boardinghouse. I apparently could get away with passing myself off as a young woman with style and an exclusive dressmaker, but I was aware that as soon as anyone scratched beneath my outer shell they would have no trouble finding the fragility on which it was supported. Which was why, that first winter in Tetouan, Félix gave me an odd gift: he began to educate me.

It was worth it. For both of us. On my part, for what I learned and how I refined myself. On his part, because thanks to our meetings he filled his solitary hours with affection and company. In spite of his laudable intentions, however, my neighbor turned out to be a far from conventional teacher. Félix Aranda was a creature with aspirations to a free spirit who spent four-fifths of his time constrained between the despotic outbursts of his mother and the relentless tedium of the most bureaucratic of jobs, which meant that in his free hours the last thing one could expect of him was order, measure, and patience. To find that, I would have had to go back to La Luneta, for Don Anselmo to draw up a didactic plan to suit my ignorance. In any case, while Félix was never a methodical or organized sort of teacher, he did instruct me in many other matters as incoherent as they were disordered, which in the long run, one way or another, would be of quite some use to me in making my way through the world. And so, thanks to him, I became familiar with characters like Modigliani, Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker, learned to tell cubism from Dadaism, discovered what jazz was, managed to locate the European capitals on a map, memorized the names of their best hotels and cabarets, and got as far as counting to a hundred in English, French, and German.

Also thanks to Félix I learned what my Spanish compatriots were doing in that distant land. I discovered that Spain had been exercising its protectorate over Morocco since 1912, a year after signing the Treaty of Algeciras with France, according to which—as often happens with poor relations—the Spanish nation had been left with the worst part of the country. The less prosperous part, the least desirable. The African cutlet, they called it. There were a number of things Spain was hoping to achieve there: revive the imperial dream; partake in the African colonial banquet being enjoyed by the nations of Europe, albeit dining only on the crumbs that the great powers conceded to them; and aspire to reach the ankle of France and England, now that Cuba and the Philippines had slipped out of our hands and our old Spain was as poor as a cockroach.