María Dueñas - The Time in Between

My stomach clenched, but despite that I couldn’t help giving a little laugh. I knew who had sent the message; there was no need for a signature. Dozens of recollections swarmed back into my memory: music, laughter, cocktails, unexpected emergencies and foreign words, little adventures, excursions with the car roof down, a joy for living. I compared those days in the past with my current calm present in which the weeks went monotonously by with sewing and fittings, radio serials and walks with my mother at dusk. My only moderately exciting experience was the occasional film Félix would drag me along to see, and the misfortunes and love affairs of the characters in the books that I devoured nightly to overcome my boredom. Knowing that Rosalinda was waiting for me in Tangiers gave me a little shudder of happiness. Although they wouldn’t last long, my feelings of hopefulness were reemerging.

At the appointed day and time, however, I didn’t find any sort of party at the El Minzah where Dean worked, just four or five little isolated groups of people I didn’t know and a couple of solitary drinkers at the bar. Dean wasn’t behind the bar, either, and it was perhaps too early for the pianist. The atmosphere was flat, unlike so many nights in the past. I sat down to wait at a discreet table and shooed away the waiter who approached. Ten past seven, a quarter past, twenty past, and still no sign of a party. At seven thirty I went up to the bar and asked after Dean. He no longer worked there, they told me. He’d opened his own business, Dean’s Bar. Where? In the Rue Amérique du Sud. I was there in two minutes, as the places were only a few hundred feet apart. Dean, gaunt and dark as ever, spotted me from behind the bar the moment my silhouette appeared at the entrance. His bar was livelier than the one at the hotel: there weren’t more patrons, but the conversations were louder, more relaxed, and you could hear people laughing. The owner didn’t greet me, but with a quick glance as black as coal he gestured me toward a curtain at the back. I went over. I drew the heavy green velvet aside and went in.

“You’re late for my party.”

Neither the dirty walls, nor the dim light of the one sad bulb, not even the crates of liquor and sacks of coffee piled all around could take away a speck of my friend’s glamour. She, or perhaps Dean, or maybe the two of them before opening the bar that evening, had temporarily transformed the small storeroom into an exclusive little shelter for a private meeting. So private that there were just two chairs, separated by a barrel covered in a white tablecloth. On top of that were a couple of glasses, a cocktail shaker, a pack of Turkish cigarettes, and an ashtray. In one corner, balancing on a big stack of wooden crates, a portable gramophone played Billie Holiday singing “Summertime.”

We hadn’t seen each other for a whole year, since her departure for Madrid. She was still extremely thin, her skin transparent, and that wave of blond hair was constantly about to tumble into her eyes. But her expression wasn’t the same one I knew from her untroubled days in the past, not even from the most difficult periods of living with her husband or her subsequent convalescence. I couldn’t tell where exactly the change was to be found, but everything about her had altered a little. She seemed rather older, more mature. A little tired, perhaps. Through her letters I’d learned about the difficulties that Beigbeder and she faced in the capital. She hadn’t told me, however, that she’d planned a trip to Morocco.

We hugged, laughed like schoolgirls, complimented each other on our outfits, and began laughing again. I’d missed her so much. I had my mother, of course. And Félix. And Candelaria. And my atelier and my new passion for reading. But I’d felt her absence keenly—those unexpected arrivals, her way of seeing things from a completely different perspective from the rest of the world. Her witty remarks, her little eccentricities, her riotous chatter. I wanted to know everything about her new life and unleashed a torrent of questions: how was Madrid, how was Johnny, how was Beigbeder getting along, what was it that had brought her back to Africa? She gave me vague replies, avoiding any reference to the difficulties they’d been facing. Only when I stopped tormenting her with my curiosity, and only then, as she filled the glasses, did she finally state clearly what was on her mind.

“I’ve come to offer you a job.”

I laughed.

“I’ve got a job already.”

“I’m going to propose another one.”

I laughed again and drank. Pink gin, as on so many other occasions.

“Doing what?” I said.

“The same as you’re doing now, but in Madrid.”

When I realized she was being quite serious, my laughter dried up, and I, too, changed my tone of voice.

“I’m comfortable in Tetouan. Things are going well here, better every day. My mother likes living here, too. Our atelier is going wonderfully well; actually, we’re thinking about taking on an apprentice to help us. We haven’t made plans to go back to Madrid.”

“I’m not talking about your mother, Sira, only about you. And there won’t be any need to close the workshop in Tetouan; I’m sure this will only be a temporary thing. Or at least I hope it will. When it’s all over, you can come back.”

“When what’s all over?”

“The war.”

“The war ended more than a year ago.”

“Yes, yours did. But now there’s another one.”

She got up, changed the record, and raised the volume. More jazz, just instrumental this time. She was trying to prevent our conversation from being heard on the other side of the curtain.

“There’s another war, a terrible one. My country is in it and yours might enter at any moment. Juan Luis has done everything he can to keep Spain on the sidelines, but the course of events seems to indicate that it’ll be very hard. Which is why we want any help we can get to minimize the pressure that Germany is putting on Spain. If our plan works, your nation will stay out of the war, and mine will have a better chance of winning it.”

I still didn’t understand what my job had to do with all that, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“Juan Luis and I,” she went on, “are trying to make a few of our friends aware so that they’ll contribute in any way that they can. He hasn’t been able to put any pressure on the government from the ministry, but it’s possible to do things from outside, too.”

“What sorts of things?” I asked in a whisper. I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going through her head. My expression must have been amusing, because she finally laughed.

“Don’t panic, querida. We’re not talking about planting bombs in the German embassy or sabotaging major military operations. I’m referring to discreet campaigns of resistance. Observing. Infiltrating. Obtaining information through little gaps here and there. Juan Luis and I are not alone in this. We’re not just a couple of idealists looking for foolhardy friends to get involved in some implausible plot.”

She refilled the glasses and turned up the volume on the gramophone again. We each lit another cigarette. She sat down again and her blue eyes fixed themselves on mine. Around them were dark circles I’d never seen before.

“We’re trying to set up a network of underground collaborators in Madrid linked to the British secret services. Collaborators with no connection to political life, to the diplomatic service or the military. People who aren’t known, who under the appearance of a normal life can find out about things and then pass them on to the SOE.”

“What’s the SOE?” I murmured.

“The Special Operations Executive. A new organization within the secret services that has just been created by Churchill, for matters relating to the war, and on the fringes of what the regular agents are doing. They’re signing people up all over Europe. It’s like an espionage service, but not a very orthodox one. Not a very conventional one.”