María Dueñas - The Time in Between

I didn’t interrupt her, but vague images were forming in my mind of hungry Moors fighting in a foreign land, offering up their blood for a cause that wasn’t their own in exchange for a wretched wage and the pounds of sugar and flour that the army was said to give to families in the Moroccan villages while their men were fighting at the front. The organization that recruited those poor Arabs, Félix had told me, was run by our good friend Beigbeder.

“Anyway,” she went on, “that same night he managed to bring all the Islamic authorities over to the side of the uprising, which was crucial to the success of the military operation. Afterward, in recognition of this, Franco named him high commissioner. They already knew each other from before, they’d been together somewhere or other. But they weren’t exactly friends, no, no. Actually, even though he’d accompanied Sanjurjo to Berlin a few months before, to begin with, Juan Luis hadn’t been party to the plans for the uprising; the organizers hadn’t counted on his involvement, I don’t know why. In those days he was in a much more administrative role, as undersecretary for Indigenous Affairs; he lived on the fringes of the military and on the edge of conspiracies, in his own world. He’s a very special man, more an intellectual than a military man of action. You know what I mean? He likes to read, talk, discuss, learn new languages… my dear, querido Juan Luis, he’s so, so romantic…”

I was still finding it hard to marry the idea of the charming, romantic man my client was describing with a commanding officer of the rebel army, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of letting on. We arrived at a checkpoint manned by local soldiers armed to the teeth.

“Por favor, give me your passport.”

I took it out of my handbag together with the border pass that Don Claudio had provided me with on the previous day. I held out both documents of accreditation; she took the first and discarded the second without even looking at it. She put my passport together with hers and a folded piece of paper, which was probably an infinitely powerful safe-conduct that could have allowed her access to the very end of the world, if she were interested in visiting it. She accompanied the whole lot with her best smile and handed it over to one of the Moorish soldiers— mejanis , they call them. He took it all away with him into a little whitewashed hut. Immediately a Spanish soldier came out, stood to attention facing us with his most martial salute, and without a word returned our documents and gestured that we could continue on our way. She resumed her monologue, picking it up just where she had left off a few minutes earlier. Meanwhile, I was trying to recover my composure. I knew I had no reason to be nervous, that everything was officially in order, but just the same I couldn’t help that a feeling of anxiety had swarmed over my body like a rash.

“In October last year I boarded a coffee ship in Liverpool that was headed for the West Indies with a stop in Tangiers. And there I stayed, just as I’d planned. Disembarking was absolutely crazy! The port at Tangiers is so, so dreadful—you do know it, right?”

This time I nodded, actually knowing what she was talking about. How could I have forgotten my arrival with Ramiro more than a year earlier? The lights, the boats, the beach, the white houses descending from the green hill till they reached the sea. The ships’ foghorns and the smell of salt and tar. I turned my attention back to Rosalinda and her adventurous travels: now wasn’t the moment to start reopening that sack of melancholy.

“Imagine, I had Johnny with me—my son—and Joker, my cocker spaniel, as well as the car and sixteen trunks of my things: clothes, rugs, porcelain, my books by Kipling and Evelyn Waugh, photograph albums, golf clubs, and my HMV—you know, the portable gramophone—with all my records: Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong… And of course I’d brought a good number of letters of introduction with me. That was one of the most important things my father taught me when I was just a girl, apart from horse riding and playing bridge, por supuesto. Never travel without letters of introduction, he always said; poor Daddy, he died a few years ago, of a heart attack,” she said.

“I then made English friends right away, thanks to my letters: old civil servants who’d retired from the colonies, army officers, people from the diplomatic corps, the usual people. Quite dull, most of them, to tell you the truth, but it was thanks to them that I met other people who were delightful. I rented a charming little house next to the Dutch legation, found a servant, and settled there for a few months.”

A few scattered little white structures had begun to dot our route, in anticipation of our arrival in Tangiers. The number of people walking on the side of the road was increasing, too: groups of Muslim women laden with bundles, children running bare-legged under their short djellabas, men covered in hoods and turbans, animals, yet more animals—donkeys carrying buckets of water, a skinny flock of sheep, occasionally a few chickens running excitedly about. Bit by bit the city began to take shape, and Rosalinda drove skillfully toward the center, turning corners at full speed as she went on describing the house in Tangiers that she’d liked so much and that she hadn’t left so very long ago. Meanwhile I was starting to recognize familiar places and trying not to remember the man I’d been there with in a time I’d thought was happy. At last she parked in the Place de France, with a screech of brakes that made dozens of passersby turn to look at us. Oblivious to them all, she removed the kerchief from her head and touched up her rouge in the rearview mirror.

“I’m dying for a morning cocktail at the El Minzah bar. But I’ve got a little bit of business to sort out first—will you come with me?”

“Where?”

“To the Bank of London and South America. To see if my loathsome husband has sent me my damned allowance once and for all.”

I also took off my headscarf, all the while wondering when that woman would stop shattering my assumptions. Not only had she turned out to be a loving mother when I’d supposed her to be a freewheeling young woman; not only had she asked to borrow my clothes to go to a reception of expatriate Nazis when I’d assumed she’d have a luxurious wardrobe sewn by great international designers; not only did she have as her lover a powerful soldier twice her age when I’d expected her to be in love with a handsome, frivolous young foreigner. All that still wasn’t enough to put an end to all my suppositions, nothing of the sort. Now it turned out that there was also a husband in her life, absent but living, who didn’t seem too eager to support her.

“I don’t think I can go with you, I’ve also got things to do,” I said in response to her invitation. “But we can arrange to meet up later.”

“Muy bien.” She looked at her watch. “One o’clock?”

I accepted. It wasn’t yet eleven; I’d have more than enough time for myself. I wouldn’t necessarily have any luck, but I would at least have time.

The bar of the El Minzah Hotel was just as it had been a year earlier. Animated clusters of stylishly dressed European men and women filled the tables and the bar drinking whiskey, sherry, and cocktails, forming groups in which the conversation jumped from language to language as easily as one might shift gears. In the middle of the room a pianist was lightening up the atmosphere with his melodious music. No one seemed to be in a hurry, everything seemed to be just as it had been in the summer of 1936 with the sole exception that there wasn’t a man waiting for me at the bar, speaking Spanish to the barman, but an Englishwoman chatting to him in English as she held a glass in one hand.