María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“Well, Sira, so this is your father, you meet him at last. His name is Gonzalo Alvarado, he’s an engineer, the owner of a foundry, and he has lived in this house forever. He used to be the son and now he’s the master of the house, that’s how it goes. A long time ago I used to come here to sew for his mother. We met then, and well, anyway, you were born three years later. Don’t think it was some cheap soap opera in which the unscrupulous young master tricks the poor little dressmaker or anything of the sort. When our relationship began, I was twenty-two years old, he was twenty-four: we both knew perfectly well who we were, where we were, and what we were up against. There was no deception on his part, nor any more than the appropriate illusions on mine. It was a relationship that ended because it couldn’t go anywhere, because it never should have begun. I was the one who decided to end it, it wasn’t him deciding to abandon you and me. And it has always been me who has insisted that you should have no contact. Your father tried not to lose us, insistently at first; then, bit by bit, he began to get used to the situation. He married and had other children, two boys. For a long time I heard nothing of him, until the day before yesterday when I received a message from him. He didn’t tell me why he wanted to meet you at this point; that we will learn now.”

As she talked, he watched her attentively, with serious appreciation. When she fell silent, he waited a few moments before speaking. He seemed to be thinking, measuring his words so that they might express precisely what he wanted to say. I made the most of those moments to observe him, and the first thing that occurred to me was that I never would have been able to imagine a father like this for myself. I was dark, my mother was dark, and in the very rare imaginary evocations I’d had of my progenitor, I’d always painted him like us, just another man, with a tanned complexion, dark hair and slim build. Also, I had always associated the image of a father with the appearance of those around me: our neighbor Norberto, the fathers of my friends, the men who filled the taverns and the streets of my neighborhood. Normal fathers of normal people: postal workers, salespeople, clerks, café waiters, or at most owners of a tobacconist’s, a grocer’s, or a vegetable stand in the Cebada market. The gentlemen I saw in my comings and goings along Madrid streets delivering orders from Doña Manuela’s workshop were to me like beings from another world, another species who in no way fit the mold I had mentally cast as paternal. And yet before me was just such a specimen. A man who was still good looking despite his somewhat excessive corpulence, with hair already greying that in its day must have been fair, and honey-colored eyes now a little red, dressed in dark grey, the owner of a grand home and patriarch of an absent family. A father unlike all the other fathers, who finally began to speak, addressing my mother and me alternately, sometimes both of us at once, sometimes neither.

“Well now, let’s see, this isn’t easy,” he said by way of beginning.

A deep breath, a drag on the cigar, smoke out. Eyes raised to meet mine at last. Then right to my mother’s. Then to mine again. And then he spoke again, and barely paused, for such a long and intense time that when I finally noticed we were almost in darkness, our bodies had been transformed into shadows, and the only light we had was the weak, distant reflection from a green tulip lamp on the desk.

“I’ve found you because I’m afraid that one of these days they’re going to kill me. Or I’ll end up killing someone and they’ll put me in prison, which would be like a death in life, it comes to the same thing. The political situation is about to explode, and when that happens only God knows what will become of all of us.”

I looked at my mother out of the corner of my eye, seeking some reaction, but her face didn’t betray the slightest sign of concern: as though instead of the warnings of an imminent death she’d heard someone announcing the time or predicting a cloudy day. He, meanwhile, went on voicing his premonitions and exuding streams of bitterness.

“And since I know that my days are numbered, I’ve set about doing an inventory of my life, and what have I found that I own among my belongings? Yes, money. Properties, too. And a company with two hundred employees for which I’ve worked myself to the bone for three decades, and where when they don’t organize a strike they humiliate me and spit in my face. And a wife who when she saw that someone had set fire to a couple of churches went with her mother and sisters to pray rosaries at San Juan de Luz. And two sons I don’t understand, a couple of wastrels who’ve turned fanatic and spend their days shooting people from the rooftops and worshipping the revered son of Primo de Rivera, who has brainwashed all the young gentlemen of Madrid with his romantic nonsense about reaffirming the national spirit. If I could, I would take them all into the foundry and get them working twelve hours a day to see if the national spirit might be restored in them by blows of the hammer and anvil.

“The world has changed so much, Dolores, don’t you see? The workers are no longer satisfied with going to the festival of San Cayetano and to the Carabanchel bulls, as the words of the zarzuela would have it. Now they’re trading their donkeys for bicycles, they’re joining unions, and the first time things go bad for them they threaten the boss with a bullet between the eyes. Probably they’re not wrong; living a life filled with deprivation and working from sunrise to sunset from your earliest years isn’t to anybody’s taste. But what’s needed here is much more than this. Raising a fist, hating those they have above them, and singing The Internationale won’t fix much; countries don’t change to the rhythm of an anthem. They naturally have more than enough reasons for rebelling, as there have been centuries of starvation here and a lot of injustice, too, but this won’t be fixed by biting the hand that feeds them. For that, to modernize this country, we’d need brave employers and qualified workers, a solid education system, and serious government leaders who remain in their posts long enough to get something done. But everything here is a disaster, everyone looks after himself, and no one bothers to work seriously to put an end to such madness. The politicians on both sides spend their days lost in their diatribes and fancy speeches in the parliament. The king is doing just fine where he is: he should have left long ago. The socialists, anarchists, and communists fight for their own interests just as they should, except that they ought to do it with good sense and order, without grudges or explosive tempers. The wealthy and the monarchists, meanwhile, flee like cowards abroad. And between one lot and the other, we’ll finally see the military take over, and then we’re going to be sorry. Or we’ll get ourselves into a civil war, unite against one another, take up arms, and end up killing one another, killing our brothers.”

He spoke emphatically, without pausing. Until suddenly he seemed to come back down to reality and understand that both my mother and I, in spite of having kept our composure, were utterly disconcerted, not knowing where he was going with the discouraging predictions he was making or what we had to do with that crude vomiting up of words.

“Sorry to be telling you all this in such an impulsive way, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I’ve now reached the moment to act. This country is falling apart. It’s a madness, it’s senseless, and as for me, as I’ve told you, one of these days they’re going to kill me. The ways of the world are changing, and it’s not easy to adjust to them. I’ve spent more than thirty years working like a beast, losing sleep for my business and trying to do my duty. But either the times aren’t on my side or I’m very wrong about something because in the end it’s all turned its back on me, and life seems to be suddenly spitting its vengeance at me. My sons have left me, my wife has abandoned me, and the day-to-day life in my company has turned into a hell. I’ve been left alone, I have no one’s support, and I’m convinced the situation can only get worse. Which is why I am preparing myself, putting my affairs in order, my papers, my accounts, arranging my final wishes, and trying to leave everything organized in case one day I don’t come back. And just as in my business, I’m also trying to put some order in my memories and my feelings, some of which I still have, though not many. The blacker everything around me becomes, the more I rummage among my feelings and retrieve the memory of the good things life has given me. And now that my days are running out, I’ve recognized one of the few things that was really worthwhile. Do you know what that was, Dolores? You. You and this daughter of ours who’s the spitting image of you in the years we were together. That was why I wanted to see you.”