María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“When can we take it away?” Ignacio asked.

Ramiro Arribas consulted his watch.

“The boy from the warehouse is doing a few errands and won’t be coming back this afternoon. I fear it won’t be possible to get your model till tomorrow.”

“And this one? We can’t keep this one?” Ignacio insisted, keen to close the negotiations as soon as possible. Once the model had been chosen, everything else seemed to him to be bothersome procedures that he wanted to eliminate swiftly.

“Please, don’t even suggest such a thing. I can’t allow Miss Sira to use a typewriter that other customers have been fiddling with. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll have a new one ready, with its own case and packaging. If you let me have your address,” he said, looking at me, “I’ll take charge personally of getting one to your house before noon.”

“We’ll come and collect it ourselves,” I interrupted. I could sense that the man was capable of anything, and a wave of terror made me shudder to think that he might show up before my mother, asking for me.

“I can’t come over till the evening, I have to work,” said Ignacio. As he spoke, an invisible rope seemed to tie itself slowly around his neck, ready to hang him. Ramiro barely had to take the trouble to pull at it just a little.

“And what about you, miss?”

“I don’t work,” I said, avoiding his gaze.

“You could arrange to make the payment, then?” he suggested casually.

I couldn’t find the words to say no, and Ignacio didn’t even sense how that simple-seeming proposal was looming over us. Ramiro Arribas accompanied us to the door and bid us farewell warmly, as though we were the best customers in the shop’s history. With his left hand he vigorously patted my fiancé’s back, with his right he shook mine once again. And he had words for us both.

“You’ve made a superb choice in coming to Casa Hispano-Olivetti, Ignacio, believe me. I assure you, you won’t forget this day for a long time. And you, Sira, please come back at about eleven o’clock. I’ll be waiting for you.”

I spent the night tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep. It was madness, and I still had time to get out of it. All I had to do was to decide not to go back to the shop. I could stay home with my mother, help her to beat the mattresses and scrub the floor with linseed oil, chat with the women who lived next door on the square, then make my way toward the Cebada market for a quarter pound of chickpeas or a piece of cod. I could wait for Ignacio to return home from the ministry and make excuses for my failure to fulfill my task with any simple lie: that my head hurt, that I thought it was going to rain. I could lie down awhile after lunch, feigning some general malaise. And then Ignacio would go alone, he would complete the payment to the manager, pick up the typewriter, and it would all be over. We would never hear of Ramiro Arribas again, he’d never again cross our path. Bit by bit his name would sink into oblivion and we’d move ahead with our little everyday lives. As though he’d never caressed my hands, desire just there below the surface; as though he’d never consumed me with his eyes from behind the blinds. It was that easy, that simple. And I knew it.

I knew it, but I pretended not to know. The next day I waited for my mother to go out on her errands. I didn’t want her to see me getting myself ready: she would have suspected I was up to something strange if she’d seen me all done up so early in the morning. As soon as I’d heard the door close behind her, I began hastily to get myself together. I filled a basin to wash myself, I sprinkled myself with lavender water, heated the curling tongs on the stove, ironed my only silk blouse, and removed my stockings from the line where they’d spent the night drying in the night dew. They were the same ones from the previous day: I had no others. I forced myself to calm down and put them on carefully, so that I wouldn’t cause a run. And each of those mechanical movements, repeated a thousand times in the past, for the first time had a defined recipient, an objective and a goal: Ramiro Arribas. It was for him that I was dressing and perfuming myself, for him to see me, for him to smell me, for him to touch me lightly once again and once again lose himself in my eyes. It was for him that I decided to leave my hair loose, falling lustrous halfway down my back. For him I tightened my waist, squeezing the belt hard over my skirt till I could scarcely breathe. For him: all just for him.

I made my way along the streets with determination, prompting eager glances and impudent compliments. I forced myself not to think: I avoided calculating the significance of my actions and didn’t want to stop and guess whether that trajectory was taking me to the threshold of paradise or directly to the slaughterhouse. I went down the Costanilla de San Andrés, crossed the Plaza de los Carros, and down Cava Baja headed for the Plaza Mayor. In twenty minutes I was at the Puerta del Sol; in less than half an hour I reached my destination.

Ramiro was waiting for me. He quickly sensed my silhouette at the door and broke off the conversation he was holding with another employee and headed toward me, collecting his hat and a raincoat on his way. When he was standing there beside me I wanted to tell him I had the money in my pocket, that Ignacio sent his regards, that I would perhaps start learning to type that very afternoon. He didn’t let me. He didn’t even greet me. He only smiled, holding a cigarette in his mouth, gently grazed his hand over the small of my back, and said, “Let’s go.” And with him I went.

The chosen place could not have been more innocent: he took me to the Café Suizo. Having confirmed with relief that our surroundings were safe, I believed that I might still be able to effect my salvation. I even thought—as he looked for a table and invited me to sit down—that perhaps this meeting had no more duplicity to it than the simple display of attentiveness to a client. I even began to suspect that all that brazen flirtation might have been nothing more than an excess of fantasy on my part. But that was not how it was. In spite of the irreproachable surroundings, our second meeting brought me back to the edge of the abyss.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a single minute since you left yesterday,” he whispered in my ear the moment we had settled.

I felt unable to reply. The words couldn’t reach my lips: like sugar in water, they dissolved in some uncertain place in my brain. He took my hand again and caressed it just as he had done the previous afternoon, without taking his eyes off it.

“You have calluses on your hands—tell me, what have these fingers been doing before they came to me?”

His voice still sounded close and sensual, quite apart from the noises that surrounded us: the clink of the glass and crockery against the marble of the tabletops, the buzz of morning conversations, and the voices of waiters placing orders at the counter.

“Sewing,” I whispered, not lifting my eyes from my lap.

“So you’re a seamstress?”

“I was. Not anymore.” I lifted my gaze, finally. “There hasn’t been much work lately,” I added.

“Which is why you want to learn to use a typewriter.”

He spoke with complicity, familiarly, as though he knew me: as though his soul and mine had been waiting for each other since the beginning of time.

“My fiancé thought about enrolling me to take some examinations so that I could become a civil servant like him,” I said with a touch of shame.

The arrival of the refreshments halted our conversation. For me, a cup of hot chocolate. For Ramiro, coffee, black as night. I took advantage of the pause to look at him while he exchanged a few phrases with the waiter. He was wearing a different suit than on the previous day, another impeccable shirt. He had elegant manners, and at the same time, within that refinement that was so alien to the men who surrounded me, he oozed masculinity from every pore of his body: as he smoked, as he adjusted the knot of his tie, as he took his wallet from his pocket or brought the cup to his lips.