The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Twelve

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I found the door of the boardinghouse open and the guests awake, gathered around the dining room table where they daily hurled their insults and oaths. The sisters in their dressing gowns and curlers, sobbing, as the schoolmaster Don Anselmo tried to console them with quiet words I couldn’t hear. Paquito and the traveling salesman were retrieving the picture of the Last Supper from the floor, in order to return it to its place on the wall. The telegraph man, in his pajama bottoms and undershirt, smoking nervously in a corner. The fat mother, meanwhile, was trying to cool her linden tea by blowing on it lightly. Everything was topsy-turvy, with bits of broken glass and the curtains torn down from their rods.

No one seemed surprised at the arrival of a Moorish woman at that time of the morning; they must have thought I was Jamila. I stood there contemplating the scene for a few seconds, still trapped in my haik, until a potent hissing from the corridor caught my attention. Turning my head I saw Candelaria waving her arms like a woman possessed while holding a broom in one hand and the dustpan in the other.

“Come inside, honey,” she commanded, agitated. “Come in and tell me, I’ve been sick with worry not knowing what happened.”

I’d decided to keep the more shocking details to myself and share with her only the final result. That we no longer had the pistols, and we did have the money: that was what Candelaria wanted to hear, and that’s what I was going to tell her. The rest of the story I’d keep to myself.

I talked as she removed the covering from my head.

“It all turned out fine,” I whispered.

“Ay, my angel, come here and let me hug you! And isn’t my Sira worth more than all the gold in Peru, isn’t my girl greater than the Lord’s day!” squealed the Matutera. She threw the cleaning things on the floor, captured me in her bosom, and covered my face with big noisy kisses.

“Be quiet, Candelaria, for God’s sake; quiet, they’ll hear you,” I objected, fear still clinging to my skin. With no intention of heeding my warning, she strung her jubilation into a thread of curses directed at the policeman who had turned the house upside down earlier that night.

“What do I care if they hear me now that it’s all over? Damn you to hell, Palomares, you and all your kin! Damn you to hell—you couldn’t catch me!”

Sensing that this explosion of emotion after a long night of nerves wasn’t going to end there, I grabbed Candelaria’s arm and dragged her to my room, as she continued raining down curses.

“Screw you, son of a bitch! Screw you, Palomares, you didn’t find a thing in my house, even knocking over my furniture and tearing open the mattresses!”

“Quiet now, Candelaria, once and for all be quiet,” I insisted. “Forget about Palomares, calm down and let me tell you how it went.”

“Yes, child, yes, down to the last detail,” she said, finally trying to calm herself. She was still breathing hard, her housecoat was misbuttoned, and locks of tousled hair had escaped from her hairnet. She looked pitiful, and yet she radiated enthusiasm. “Sure enough, the big brute came at five in the morning and chucked us out into the street . . . and also . . . also . . . Well then, let’s forget about him, what’s past is past. You talk now, my jewel, tell me everything nice and slow.”

I narrated my adventure to her briefly, as I removed the bundle of money that the man from Larache had hung around my neck. I didn’t mention escaping out of the window, nor the threatening shouts of the soldier, nor the pistols abandoned under the lone sign for the Malalien stop. I just handed her the contents of the pouch and then started to take off the haik and the nightdress I was wearing underneath.

“You can go rot, Palomares!” she shouted, laughing, throwing the banknotes in the air. “Go rot in hell, you haven’t caught me!”

Then her clamor stopped dead, and it wasn’t because she had suddenly recovered her good sense, but because what she had before her eyes prevented her from carrying on her excitement.

“But you’ve been massacred, child! You look just like the Christ of the Five Wounds!” she exclaimed on seeing my naked body. “Does it hurt a lot, my child?”

“A little,” I murmured, as I let myself drop like a dead weight onto the bed. I was telling a lie. The truth was that I was hurting right down to my soul.

“And you’re filthy as if you’d just been rolling around in a rubbish dump,” she said, her good sense fully recovered. “I’m going to put some pots of water on the fire to prepare you a nice hot bath. And then some liniment compresses for you where you’re hurt, and then . . .”

I didn’t hear any more. Before the Matutera had finished her sentence, I’d fallen asleep.