María Dueñas - The Time in Between

As he slowly adapted to the country, Hoare became aware of just how extensive the Germans’ influence in Spanish affairs was, their considerable reach into almost every aspect of public life. Businessmen, executives, salesmen, movie producers—people involved in a range of activities with excellent contacts in the administration and power structures—were working as agents in the service of the Nazis. He soon learned, too, of the iron grip the Germans exerted on the communications media. The press office of the German embassy, with the full approval of Serrano Suñer, made a daily decision about what information about the Third Reich would be published in Spain, how and in what words, inserting all the Nazi propaganda they wanted into the Spanish papers, and in the most brazen, offensive way into Arriba, the organ of the Falange, which monopolized most of the paper that was available for newspapers in those penurious times. The campaigns against the British were unrelenting and bloody, marked by lies, insults, and perverse distortions. Churchill was the subject of the most malicious caricatures and the British Empire the object of constant mockery. The simplest accident in a factory or on a mail train in any Spanish province was, without the slightest qualm, attributed to sabotage by the perfidious English. The ambassador’s complaints about these falsehoods would always—inexcusably—fall on deaf ears.

And as Sir Samuel Hoare settled somehow or other into his new post, the antagonism between the ministers of Governance and Foreign Affairs became ever more apparent. From his all-powerful position, Serrano Suñer arranged a strategic campaign in his own style: he put out poisonous rumors about Beigbeder, supplementing them by spreading the notion that things could only be resolved if they were given into his own hands. And as the former high commissioner’s star plummeted like a stone in water, Franco and Serrano, Serrano and Franco, two men with absolutely no knowledge of international politics, neither of whom had barely seen anything of the world, sat down to drink hot chocolate with fried bread in El Pardo and sketched out a new global order on the teatime tablecloth with the shocking audacity that can only come from ignorance and overweening pride.

Until Beigbeder snapped. They were going to throw him out, and he knew it. They were going to wash their hands of him, give him a kick in the rear, and send him packing: he was no longer useful in their glorious crusade. They had torn him away from his beloved Morocco and appointed him to a highly desirable position, only to bind his hands and feet and stuff a gag into his mouth. They’d never valued his opinions: in fact, they’d probably never even asked for them. He’d never been able to take the initiative or express his views; all they wanted was to have his name on the cabinet list while he acted as a servile functionary, timid and mute. All the same, even though he didn’t like the situation one bit, he complied with the restrictions and worked tirelessly in everything they asked of him, putting up for months with the systematic mistreatment meted out by Serrano. First it was the treading on toes, the shoving around, the that’s-not-for-you-that-one’s-for-me. It wasn’t long before those shoves had been transformed into humiliating cuffs to the neck. And those rabbit punches soon turned into kidney punches, which ended up becoming knives in the jugular. And at the point when Beigbeder could tell that the next move would be stamping on his head, he finally snapped.

He was tired, fed up with the In-law-ísimo’s rudeness and haughtiness, with Franco’s obscurantism in his decision making; fed up with swimming against the current and being isolated from everything, in command of a ship that from the moment it set off had been headed in the wrong direction. Which was why he decided simply to throw himself into a decision, boldly. The time had come for the discreet friendship he’d maintained with Hoare to come out into the daylight and be made public, to transcend the boundaries of private sanctuaries, offices, and halls where it had remained till now. And with this as his banner, he threw himself out into the street in broad daylight, with no protection. Into the fresh air, under the ruthless summer sun. They took to having lunch together almost every day, at the most visible tables in the best-known restaurants. And then, like two Arabs walking the narrow alleyways of the Moorish quarter of Tetouan, Beigbeder would take the ambassador’s arm, calling him “brother Samuel,” and with ostentatious ease they would wander the sidewalks of Madrid. Beigbeder was issuing a challenge, provoking, almost quixotic. On one day, and the next, and the next, chatting familiarly with the man sent as an envoy by the enemy, arrogantly demonstrating his contempt for the Germans and the Germanophiles. In that way they wandered past the General Secretariat of the Movement on Calle Alcalá, past the headquarters of the Arriba newspaper and the German embassy on the Paseo de la Castellana, past the very doors of the Palace or the Ritz, veritable beehives of Nazis, so that everyone could plainly see how well Franco’s minister and the ambassador of the undesirables got along. And all the while Serrano—on the verge of a nervous breakdown and with his ulcer troubling him—paced back and forth across his office, ruffling his hair and asking himself at the top of his lungs where this lunatic Beigbeder’s mad behavior would lead.

Although Rosalinda’s efforts had managed to awake in him a certain amount of sympathy for Great Britain, Beigbeder was not so incautious that he would throw himself into the arms of a foreign country—just as nightly he threw himself into the arms of his beloved—for no other reason than pure romanticism. Yes, he had developed a certain amount of sympathy for that country thanks to her. But if he threw himself at Hoare so completely that by doing so he burned all his bridges, it was for other reasons. Perhaps because he was a utopian and he believed that in the New Spain things weren’t working as he felt they ought to. Maybe it was because this was the only way he had of openly showing his opposition to entering the war on the side of the Axis powers. He might have done it as a rejection of the man who had humiliated him utterly, someone with whom he had expected to be working shoulder to shoulder to lift the country up out of the ruins, the country whose demolition they had participated in with such eagerness. And possibly he moved closer to Hoare because he felt alone, terribly alone in a hostile and bitter environment.

I didn’t learn about this firsthand, but rather because during those months Rosalinda kept me up to date with a string of long letters that I received in Tetouan like a godsend. In spite of her lively social life, illness still forced her to spend many hours in bed, hours she dedicated to writing letters and reading what her friends sent her. And in that way we established a habit that kept us connected to each other, an invisible thread binding us across space and time. In her most recent piece of news from late August 1940 she told me that the Madrid newspapers were already discussing the imminent departure of the minister of foreign affairs from the government. But for that we had to wait a few weeks yet, six or seven. And over that time, things happened that—yet again—transformed the course of my life forever.

One of the activities with which I’d passed my time since my mother’s arrival in Tetouan was reading. She usually went to bed early, Félix no longer came across the landing, and I began to have a lot of free hours, until yet again he came up with an idea for filling up that tedium. It had the name of two women and arrived between a pair of covers: Fortunata and Jacinta. From then on, I devoted my leisure time to reading the massive novels in my neighbor’s house. As the months passed, I was able to finish them all and moved on to the shelves in the Protectorate library. When the summer of 1940 came to a close, I’d already polished off the two or three dozen novels in the little library and wondered what I’d be able to find to keep me entertained from then on. And then, quite unexpectedly, a new text arrived at my door. Not in the form of a novel, but a telegram on blue paper. And not for me to take pleasure in reading, but for me to act on the instructions it contained. “Personal invitation. Private party in Tangiers. Madrid friendships waiting. September 1. 7 p.m. Dean’s Bar.”