María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“Whenever I can. And now be quiet and keep praying, and let’s see whether between us all we can’t get Don Anselmo up to heaven.”

The wake went on until dawn, and on the following day we buried the schoolteacher at the Catholic mission with solemn prayers for the departed and all the paraphernalia befitting the most fervent of believers. We accompanied the casket to the cemetery. It was very windy, as it so often was in Tetouan: a bothersome wind that ruffled the veils, lifted up skirts, and made the eucalyptus leaves snake along the ground. As the priest pronounced the last verses of the prayer I leaned over to Candelaria and conveyed my curiosity in a whisper.

“If the sisters really thought the schoolmaster was an atheist son of Lucifer, I don’t know how they arranged this burial for him.”

“Enough of that, enough of that, his soul is probably wandering in hell and his spirit will soon be coming to drag us off in our sleep…”

I had to struggle not to laugh.

“For God’s sake, Candelaria, don’t be so superstitious.”

“Just trust me, all right? I’m an old dog and I know what I’m talking about.”

Without another word, she went back to concentrating on the liturgy and didn’t so much as look at me again until after the final requiescat in pace . Then they lowered the body down into the grave, and when the gravediggers started to throw the first shovelfuls of earth onto him the group began to break up. We were making our way in an orderly manner toward the cemetery gate when Candelaria suddenly crouched down, and, pretending to refasten the buckle on her shoe, she let the sisters go on ahead with the fat woman and the neighbors. We watched them, lagging behind as they went off, their backs to us like a flock of crows, their black veils hanging down to their waists: half cloaks, they called them.

“Come on then, you and I are going off to pay a tribute to the memory of poor old Don Anselmo—all this sadness, my child, it makes me ever so hungry…”

We wandered over to El Buen Gusto and chose our pastries, then sat down to eat them on a bench in the church square, between palm trees and flower beds. Finally I asked her the question I’d been keeping on the tip of my tongue since first thing that morning.

“Have you been able to find out anything about what I said?”

She nodded, her mouth full of meringue.

“It’s complicated. And costs a great deal.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s someone who deals with arrangements from Tetouan. I haven’t been able to find out all the details, but it seems that in Spain things are being done through the International Red Cross. They track people down in the Republican Red Zone, and somehow they’re able to bring them to a port on the Mediterranean, don’t ask me how because I don’t have the damnedest idea. Disguised, in trucks, on foot, God only knows. That’s where they board their ships, anyway. The ones who want to go into the Nationalist zone cross the border in the Basque country and go to France. And the ones who want to come to Morocco, they send them to Gibraltar if they can, though often things are difficult and they have to take them to other Mediterranean ports first. Their next destination is usually Tangiers and then, finally, they arrive in Tetouan.”

I could feel my pulse racing.

“And do you know who I’d have to talk to?”

She smiled, a little sadly, and gave me an affectionate little slap on the thigh that left my skirt stained with icing.

“Before you talk to anyone, the first thing you need is to have a good pile of banknotes available. And in pounds sterling. Did I or did I not tell you that English money was the best?”

“I have everything I’ve saved these past months, which I haven’t touched,” I explained, ignoring her question.

“And you still have the debt outstanding at the Continental.”

“Perhaps it’ll be enough for both.”

“I doubt that very much, my angel. It will cost you two hundred and fifty pounds.”

Suddenly my throat was dry and the puff pastry lodged in it like a sticky paste. I started coughing, and the Matutera patted me on the back. When I was finally able to swallow, I blew my nose and asked, “You couldn’t lend it to me, Candelaria?”

“I haven’t got a cent, child.”

“And the money from the workshop that I’ve been giving you?”

“It’s already spent.”

“On what?”

She sighed deeply.

“Paying for this funeral, the medicines he’s needed lately, and a handful of bills that Don Anselmo left here and there. And it’s just as well Doctor Maté was a friend of his and isn’t going to charge me for the visits.”

I looked at her in disbelief.

“But he must have had some money saved from his pension,” I suggested.

“He didn’t have a cent left.”

“That’s impossible: it’d been months since he’d been out, he didn’t have any expenses…”

She smiled with a mixture of sympathy, sadness, and mockery.

“I don’t know how the old devil arranged it, but he managed to get all his savings to the International Red Aid.”

Far though I was from having the amount of money I needed to bring my mother to Morocco and also pay off my debt, the idea didn’t stop rumbling around in my head. That night I hardly slept, preoccupied with turning the subject around in my mind a thousand times. I fantasized about the craziest possibilities and kept counting and recounting the notes I’d saved, but despite all my efforts, I couldn’t get them to multiply. And then, when dawn was almost breaking, another solution occurred to me.

The conversations, bursts of laughter, and rhythmic clattering of the typewriters all fell silent in unison as the four pairs of eyes turned to look at me. The room was grey, filled with smoke, smelling of tobacco and the rancid stench of concentrated humanity. There was no sound but the buzzing of a thousand flies and the lethargic rhythm of the blades of a wooden fan turning above our heads. And after a few seconds, the admiring whistle of someone passing along the corridor who saw me standing there in my best suit, surrounded by four desks behind which four sweaty bodies in shirtsleeves were trying to work. Or at least, that’s how it looked.

“I’ve come to see Commissioner Vázquez,” I announced.

“He’s not in,” said the fattest one.

“But he won’t be long,” said the youngest one.

“You can wait for him,” said the skinniest one.

“Have a seat if you want,” said the oldest one.

I settled in a chair with a gutta-percha seat and waited there, motionless, for more than an hour and a half. Over the course of those endless ninety minutes, the quartet tried to give the impression that they were going back to their activities, but they weren’t. They just made a point of pretending to be working, looking at me brazenly and killing flies with a newspaper folded in two, exchanging obscene gestures and passing scrawled notes, no doubt full of references to my breasts, my behind, and my legs, and everything they could do to me if I showed any warmth toward them. Finally Don Claudio arrived, acting like a one-man band—walking fast, simultaneously taking off his hat and jacket, firing off orders while trying to decipher a couple of notes that someone had just handed him.

“Juárez, I want you out on Calle del Comercio, there have been some stabbings. Cortés, if you don’t have the thing about the match factory on my desk before I count to ten, I’m sending you to Ifni in the blink of an eye. Bautista, what’s happened with the robbery in the Wheat Souq? Cañete…”

And there he stopped. He stopped because he’d seen me. And Cañete, who was the skinny one, was left without an assignment.