María Dueñas - The Time in Between

He clung to nostalgia as a shipwrecked man clings to a piece of timber in the middle of a stormy ocean, but like the shadow of a scythe the acid tongue of Serrano was never far away, ready to rip him out of his dream.

“For God’s sake, Beigbeder, stop with this business of us Spaniards all being Moors, once and for all. Do I happen to look like a Moor? Does El Caudillo look like a Moor? So stop repeating this shit, I’ve had it up to here, the same damn song all day long.”

Those were difficult days for both of them. In spite of Rosalinda’s tenacious efforts to ingratiate herself with British ambassador Peterson, things didn’t right themselves in the months that followed. The only gesture she received from her compatriots toward the end of that victory year was an invitation to join the other mothers in singing carols with their children around the embassy piano. She would have to wait till May 1940 for things to turn around, when Churchill was named prime minister and decided abruptly to replace his diplomatic representative in Spain. And from then on, the situation changed radically, for everyone.

Sir Samuel Hoare arrived in Madrid at the end of May 1940, boasting the pompous title of Extraordinary Ambassador on Special Mission. He’d never before set foot on Spanish soil and didn’t speak a word of our language. Nor did he show the slightest sympathy for Franco or his regime, but Churchill placed every confidence in him and had urged him to accept the posting since Spain was a key player in the future of the European war and he wanted a strong man as his standard-bearer. It was fundamental to British interests that the Spanish government should maintain a neutral position, respecting a Gibraltar free from invasion and preventing the Atlantic ports from falling into German hands. In order to secure a minimum of cooperation, they’d used foreign trade to put pressure on a hungry Spain, restricting the supply of oil and squeezing them till they choked. As the German troops advanced across Europe, however, that ceased to be enough: the British needed to become involved in Madrid in a more active, more operational way. And with that goal in mind this small, rather worn-out-looking man, seemingly so unimpressive, landed in the capital: Sir Sam to his close colleagues, Don Samuel to the few friends he would end up making in Spain.

Hoare didn’t take up the post with much optimism: he didn’t like the place he’d been sent, had no sympathy for the quirks of Spanish life, and knew absolutely nobody in that devastated, dusty foreign town. He realized he wouldn’t be well received and that the Franco government was openly anti-British. Just so that this would be absolutely clear to him from the outset, on the very morning of his arrival the Falangists gathered in front of his embassy with a noisy protest, welcoming him with shouts of “Gibraltar for the Spanish!”

Having presented his credentials to the Generalísimo, he began the tortuous ordeal that was to become his life during the four years of his posting. Countless times he regretted having accepted the position: he felt tremendously uncomfortable in such a hostile atmosphere, to a degree that he’d never experienced in any of his previous assignments. The mood was tense, the heat unbearable. The Falangists demonstrated outside his embassy daily; they threw stones at his windows, tore the flags and crests off his official cars, and insulted the British staff without the authorities batting an eyelid. The press began an aggressive campaign accusing Great Britain of responsibility for the famine that was ravaging Spain. The only people with any sympathy for him were a small number of conservative monarchists, just a few people nostalgic for Queen Victoria Eugenie with little room to maneuver in the government and clinging to the idea of a past to which they would never be able to return.

He felt alone, groping his way through the darkness. Madrid overwhelmed him. He found it absolutely impossible to breathe in that atmosphere: the terribly slow way the administrative machinery worked oppressed him; he stared with bewilderment at the streets filled with police and Falangists armed to the teeth; he watched how the Germans behaved, emboldened and threatening. Plucking up his courage, and fulfilling the obligations of his position, as soon as he was settled he set about establishing relations with the Spanish government, and in particular with its three key figures: General Franco and ministers Serrano Suñer and Beigbeder. In his meetings with each of them, he sounded them out, and from each received quite a different response.

He was granted an audience with the Generalísimo in El Pardo Palace one sunny summer’s day. In spite of the weather, Franco received him with the curtains closed and the electric light on, sitting behind a desk over which large signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini glared arrogantly. During this awkward encounter, in which they spoke through an interpreter and without the possibility of any proper dialogue, Hoare was struck by just how disconcertingly self-confident the head of state was—he possessed the smugness of a man who believed himself to have been chosen by Providence to rescue his country and create a new world.

Everything that went badly with Franco went worse with Serrano Suñer. The In-law-ísimo’s power was at its most dazzling peak. The whole country was in his hands—the Falange, the press, the police—and he enjoyed unlimited personal access to El Caudillo, for whom many people suspected he felt a certain contempt as his intellectual inferior. While Franco, hidden away in El Pardo, was barely seen, Serrano seemed to be everywhere, with a finger in every pie, so different from that discreet man who’d come out to the Protectorate in the middle of wartime, the one who bent down to retrieve my powder compact and whose ankles I stared at for so long under that sofa. As though he had been reborn with the regime, a new Ramón Serrano Suñer appeared: impatient, arrogant, always tense, quick as a flash in both word and deed, his catlike eyes ever alert, his Falangist uniform well starched, and his nearly white hair combed back like a movie star’s. He was exquisitely disparaging toward any representative of what he called the “plutodemocracies.” Neither on that first meeting nor on the many more they were required to have during Hoare’s posting did the two men ever come close to anything resembling a mutual understanding.

The only one of the three dignitaries with whom the ambassador was able to get along was Beigbeder. From his very first visit to the Santa Cruz Palace, the communication between the two men was very fluid. The minister listened, acted, tried to fix things, to resolve problems. In Hoare’s presence he declared himself to be a keen supporter of nonintervention in the war. He openly recognized the great needs of the hungry population and struggled to come to agreements and negotiate pacts to fill those needs. It’s true that at first the ambassador did think him a little quaint in appearance, at times even eccentric: his sensibility, culture, manners, and ironic tone utterly incongruous in a Madrid with its arm raised in a military salute, the city of “order and command,” as the military saying would have it. To Hoare’s eyes, Beigbeder seemed obviously uncomfortable amid the Germans’ aggressiveness, the Falangists’ arrogance, and his own government’s despotic attitudes, as well as the daily miseries of the capital. Perhaps for this reason, because of Beigbeder’s own abnormality in that world of madmen, Hoare found him a pleasant sort, a singular minister with a Moorish temperament, a balm that soothed the lashings Hoare received from the rest of the government. They had their disagreements, naturally: points of view that conflicted and diplomatic positions openly argued; objections, complaints, and dozens of crises that they attempted to resolve together. Such as when Spanish troops entered Tangiers in June, finally putting an end to its status as an international city. Or when the government was about to authorize parades of German troops through the streets of San Sebastián. Or so many other incidents in those days of disorder and haste. Despite everything, the relationship between Beigbeder and Hoare became closer and more comfortable by the day, and the urbane Spaniard became the ambassador’s only place of refuge in that stormy land where problems sprung up like weeds.