María Dueñas - The Time in Between

“And what are we to buy, señorita?” Dora asked, eyes like saucers.

“Whatever you can find. They’re saying there isn’t much of anything right now. Whatever you see—didn’t you tell me you can cook? Well then, get to it.”

The timidity took some time to disappear, though it did dissolve bit by bit. What were they afraid of, what was it that made them so introverted? Everything. Working for the strange African lady they believed me to be, the imposing building that housed my new home, the fear of not knowing how to get by in a sophisticated dressmaker’s atelier. As the days went by, however, they adapted themselves to their new lives: to the house, to the daily routines, to me. Dora—the elder—turned out to have a knack for sewing and was soon able to start helping me. Martina, meanwhile, was more like Jamila, more like I’d been in my youth—she liked being out on the street, the errands, the constant coming and going. Between them they managed the household; they were efficient and discreet, good girls, as they said in those days. They mentioned Beigbeder once; I never told them that I knew him. Don Juan, they called him. They remembered him fondly: they associated him with Berlin, with a time in the past from which they still retained vague memories and the residuals of the language.

Everything progressed according to Hillgarth’s expectations. More or less. The first clients appeared; some of them were the ones he’d predicted, others weren’t. The season opened with Gloria von Fürstenberg, beautiful, majestic, her ebony-black hair combed into thick plaits that gathered at the back of her neck like the black crown of an Aztec goddess. Sparks flew from her large eyes when she saw the fabrics I had. She examined them, felt them, determined their caliber, asked about prices, discarded some of them immediately, tested the effect of others against her body. With her expert hand she chose the ones that best suited her out of the ones that weren’t excessively overpriced. She also ran her expert eye over the magazines, pausing on the designs that complemented her body and style. That Mexican woman with the German name knew exactly what she wanted, so she didn’t ask me for any advice, nor did I bother to give her any. Finally she opted for a gown in chocolate-colored silk gazar and an Ottoman evening coat. The first time she came alone and we spoke Spanish. For the first fitting she brought a friend, Anka von Fries, who ordered a wide dress in georgette and a ruby-colored velvet cloak decorated with ostrich feathers. As I listened to them talking to each other in German, I asked Dora to come in and join us. Well dressed, well fed, well groomed, the girl retained no trace of the terrified little sparrow who’d arrived with her sister just a few weeks earlier: she’d been transformed into a slender, silent assistant who kept mental notes of everything she heard and discreetly left the room every few minutes to jot the details down in a notebook.

“I always like to keep exhaustive records of all my clients,” I’d warned Dora. “I want to understand what they say so I know where they’re going, who they’re going around with, and what plans they have. That way I may be able to get hold of new clients. I’ll be in charge of whatever they say in Spanish, but when they’re speaking German you’re responsible for that.”

If Dora thought there was anything strange about the close attention paid to our clients, she didn’t show it. She probably thought it was quite reasonable, that this was normal behavior in this business that was so new to her. But of course it wasn’t. Noting down every syllable of names, positions, places, and dates that came out of the mouths of one’s clients isn’t normal in the least, but we did it every day, devoted and methodical, like good students. Then at night I’d go through my notes and Dora’s, extract any information I thought might be of interest, synthesize it into brief phrases, and finally transcribe it into inverted Morse code, adapting the long and short dashes to the straight and curving lines of the patterns that would never be part of a complete piece of work. The bits of paper with the handwritten notes were transformed to ashes in the small hours of each morning with a simple match. By the following dawn not a word of what had been written down remained, only a handful of messages hidden in the outlines of a lapel, a waistband, or a camisole.

I acquired Baroness de Petrino as a client, too; wife to the powerful press officer Lazar, she was less spectacular than the Mexican woman but had far more money to spend. She chose the most expensive fabrics and didn’t skimp on indulging her whims. She brought me more clients—two German women, as well as a Hungarian. Over the course of many mornings my atelier was transformed into their main social meeting place, buzzing with a jumble of languages. I taught Martina to prepare tea the Moorish way, with the mint we planted in clay pots on the kitchen windowsill. I instructed her how to handle the teapots, how to casually pour the boiling water into the little glasses with silver filigree; I even taught her to paint her eyes with kohl and sewed her a silky gardenia-patterned caftan to give her an exotic air. A stand-in for my Jamila, so that I would have her with me always.

Everything was going well, surprisingly well. I was moving ahead in my new life with complete confidence, entering the finest places with a sure step. When I was with my clients I acted with aplomb and decisiveness, protected by the armor of my fake exoticism. I brazenly muddled words from French and Arabic into my conversations; I might have been saying all kinds of nonsense in these languages, bearing in mind that I was only repeating simple expressions I’d heard on the streets of Tangiers and Tetouan whose precise meaning and usage I didn’t know. I made sure that in my polyglotism—as false as it was chaotic—I didn’t allow any bursts of the broken English I’d learned from Rosalinda to slip out. My position as a newly arrived foreigner allowed me a useful refuge for covering up my weak points and avoiding treacherous territory. No one seemed at all interested in my origins, however: they were more interested in my materials and what I was able to make from them. My clients would talk freely in the atelier; they seemed to feel comfortable there. They’d chat to one another and to me about what they’d done, what they were going to do, their common friends, their husbands and their lovers. And meanwhile Dora and I worked tirelessly—with materials, designs, and measurements out in the open; with secret notes in the back room. I didn’t know whether all those pieces of information I recorded every day had any value at all to Hillgarth and his people, but just in case, I tried to be minutely rigorous. On Wednesday afternoon, before my session at the hairdresser’s, I’d leave the tube of patterns in the predetermined locker. On Saturdays I’d visit the Prado, marveling so much at the artwork that I’d sometimes forget that I had something important to do there besides being enraptured by the paintings. Nor did I have the slightest problem with the transfer of envelopes filled with coded patterns: everything progressed so smoothly that my nerves didn’t even get a chance to gnaw at my innards. My portfolio was always received by the same person, a thin, bald employee who was probably also the one responsible for extracting my messages, although he never gave me the slightest sign of complicity.

I went out from time to time, not too often. I went to Embassy on a few occasions at aperitif time. On my first visit I spotted Captain Hillgarth far off drinking whiskey on the rocks as he sat amid a group of compatriots. He noticed me right away, too—he couldn’t not have. But I was the only person who knew it—he didn’t make the slightest move at my arrival. I held my bag firmly in my right hand and we pretended not to have seen each other. I greeted a couple of clients who publicly praised my workshop to some other ladies; I drank a cocktail with them, received appreciative glances from several young men, and from the fake vantage point of my cosmopolitanism I discreetly watched the people around me. Class, frivolity, and money in their purest form spread across the counter and around the tables of a small corner bar decorated without the least bit of showiness. There were women in outfits made of the finest wools, alpacas, and tweeds, soldiers with swastikas on their armbands, and others in foreign uniforms I didn’t recognize, all of them with cuffs adorned with military stripes and many-pointed stars. There were incredibly elegant ladies dressed in two-piece suits, with three strands of hazelnut-sized pearls around their necks, with impeccable lipstick on their lips and divine hats, caps, and turbans on their perfectly coiffed heads. There were conversations in several languages, discreet laughter, and the sound of glass against glass. And floating in the air, subtle traces of perfumes from Patou and Guerlain, the feeling of cosmopolitan savoir faire and the smoke of a thousand Virginia cigarettes. The Spanish war that had just come to an end and the brutal conflict that was devastating Europe seemed to be tales from another galaxy in that environment of pure, simple sophistication.