María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“And why would a woman like you want to spend her life in a ministry, if that’s not too forward a question?” he asked after taking his first sip of coffee.

I shrugged. “So we can have a better life, I guess.”

Again he came slowly closer to me, again his hot voice was in my ear: “Do you really want to start living better, Sira?”

I took refuge in a sip of chocolate to avoid answering.

“You’ve got a smudge; let me wipe it,” he said.

And then he brought his hand to my face and opened it over the contour of my jaw, adjusting it to my bones as though this were the mold from which I had once been formed. Then he put his thumb in the place where the smudge supposedly was, close to where my lips met. He caressed me smoothly, slowly. I let him do it: a mixture of terror and pleasure prevented me from moving.

“You’ve got some here, too,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, moving his finger.

Its destination was one end of my lower lip. He repeated the caress. More slowly, more tenderly. A shiver ran up my spine; my fingers gripped the velvet of the seat.

“And here, too,” he said again. Then he caressed my whole mouth, millimeter by millimeter, from one end to the other, rhythmically, slowly, more slowly. I was about to sink into a well of something soft that I could not define. I didn’t care if the whole thing was a lie and there was no trace of chocolate on my lips. I didn’t care that at the next table three venerable old men suspended their chatter to contemplate the scene, burning with desire, furiously wishing they were thirty years younger.

Then a noisy group of students trooped into the café, and their racket and laughter destroyed the magic of the moment like someone bursting a soap bubble. And right away, as though awaking from a dream, I became aware of several things at once: that the ground hadn’t melted but was still solid beneath my feet, that the finger of a man I didn’t know was about to go into my mouth, that an eager hand was crawling along my left thigh, and that I was a heartbeat away from throwing myself headfirst off a precipice. My clarity of thought now recovered, I jumped to my feet. Rushing to take up my bag, I knocked over a glass of water that the waiter had brought with my chocolate.

“Here’s the money for the typewriter. At the end of the afternoon my fiancé will come by to collect it,” I said, leaving the bundle of notes on the marble.

He held me by the wrist.

“Don’t go, Sira; don’t be angry with me.”

I tugged myself free. I didn’t look at him or say good-bye; I just turned and with forced dignity began to make my way to the door. It was only then that I noticed I’d spilled the water on myself and that my left foot was soaked.

He didn’t follow me; he probably sensed it wouldn’t do him any good. He just stayed sitting there, and as I moved away he launched his final dart at my back.

“Come back another day. You know where to find me now.”

I pretended not to hear him. I picked up my pace through the crowd of students and blended into the hubbub of the street.

Eight times I went to bed hoping that when morning came things would be different, and the eight mornings that followed I awoke with the same obsession in my head: Ramiro Arribas. His memory assaulted me at every turn, and I couldn’t keep him from my thoughts for a single minute: making the bed, blowing my nose, as I peeled an orange or went down the stairs one by one with his face engraved on my retina.

Meanwhile, Ignacio and my mother worked away at the plans for the wedding, but they were incapable of making me share their enthusiasm. Nothing pleased me, nothing could raise the slightest interest in me. It must be nerves, they thought. I struggled, meanwhile, to get Ramiro out of my head, not to recall his voice in my ear, his finger caressing my mouth, his hand running up my thigh, and the last words he fixed in my eardrums when I turned my back on him in the café, convinced that by walking away I’d be putting an end to the madness. Come back another day, Sira. Come back.

I fought with all my strength to resist. I fought, and I lost. There was nothing I could do to impose the least rationality on the uncontrolled attraction that man had made me feel. However much I looked around me, I was unable to find the resources, the strength, anything to cling to in order to stop myself from being dragged away. Neither the husband-to-be whom I planned to marry in less than a month, nor the upright mother who had struggled so hard to bring me up to be a decent, responsible woman. I wasn’t even stopped by the uncertainty of barely knowing who that stranger was and what destiny had in store for me at his side.

Nine days after my first visit to the Casa Hispano-Olivetti, I returned. Like the previous times, I was once again greeted by the tinkling of the bell over the door. No fat salesman came to greet me, no shop boy, no other employee. Only Ramiro.

I approached, trying to make my steps sound firm; I had my words ready. I wasn’t able to say them. He didn’t let me. As soon as he had me within his reach he put his hand to the back of my neck and planted on my mouth a kiss so intense, so carnal and prolonged that my body was startled by it, ready to melt and be transformed into a puddle of honey.

Ramiro Arribas was thirty-four years old, had a past filled with comings and goings and a capacity for seduction so powerful that not even a concrete wall could have contained it. First came attraction, doubt, and anxiety. Then passion, and the abyss. I drank in the air he breathed and I walked beside him, floating six inches above the cobblestones. The rivers could burst their banks, the buildings could crumble, and the streets could be wiped off the maps; the heavens could meet the earth and the whole universe could collapse at my feet, and I could bear it if Ramiro were there.

Ignacio and my mother began to suspect that something unusual was happening to me, something more than the simple tension brought about by the imminent marriage. They were not, however, able to figure out the reason for my excitement, nor did they find any cause to justify the excessive secrecy with which I moved at all hours, my erratic departures, and the hysterical laughter I occasionally found myself unable to contain. I managed to maintain the equilibrium of that double life for just a few days, just enough to see how the scales tipped with every passing minute, how Ignacio’s side fell and Ramiro’s rose. In less than a week I knew that I had to cut myself off from everything and launch myself into the void. The moment had come for me to take a scythe to my past. To level it to the ground.

Ignacio arrived at our house in the evening.

“Wait for me in the square,” I whispered, opening the door just a few inches.

My mother had learned about my decision at lunchtime; I couldn’t let him go on any longer without knowing. I went down five minutes later, my lips painted, my new bag in one hand and the Lettera 35 in the other. He was waiting for me on the usual bench, on that bit of cold stone where we’d spent so many hours planning a common future that would never come.

“You’re going off with someone else, aren’t you?” he asked when I sat down beside him. He didn’t look at me; he just kept his eyes fixed on the ground, on the dusty earth that the tip of his shoe was busy turning up.

I just nodded. A round, wordless yes. Who is it? he asked. I told him. Around us the usual noises continued: children, dogs, and bicycle bells; the tolling of San Andrés calling to last Mass, the wheels of the carts over the cobbles, the tired mules heading for the end of the day. Ignacio took a while to speak again. He must have sensed such determination, such certainty in my decision that he didn’t even let me see his confusion. He didn’t make a scene, nor did he demand explanations. He only spoke one more sentence, slowly, as though allowing it to slip out.