The Time in Between A Novel

PART TWO



TANGIERS IN THE 1930s





Chapter Sixteen

___________


Over the course of the autumn there were other clients, moneyed foreigners, for the most part—my business partner the Matutera had been correct in her prediction. Several Germans. The occasional Italian. Several Spanish ladies, too, almost always the wives of businessmen, since the administration and the army were going through some stormy times. The occasional rich Jew, Sephardic, beautiful, with her smooth old Spanish in different cadences, speaking Haketia with its melodious rhythm and strange, archaic words.

Bit by bit the business began to flourish, word began to spread. Money was coming in: in Nationalist pesetas, in French and Moroccan francs, in silver hassani currency. I put it all away in a small strongbox under lock and key in the second drawer of my nightstand. On the last day of every month I’d bring the total over to Candelaria. It took the Matutera less time than an amen! to separate a handful of pesetas for day-to-day expenses and roll all the rest of the notes into a tight bundle that she would place deftly down her cleavage. With the monthly earnings in the hot refuge of her opulent breasts, she would rush out to see which of the moneychangers would give her the best deal. Not long afterward she would return to the boardinghouse, out of breath and with a thick roll of sterling pounds protected in the same hiding place. Still catching her breath from all that haste, she would draw the loot out. “Just sticking to what’s reliable, honey, because if you ask me the English are the smartest of the lot. Neither you nor I nor anyone else is going to be saving up Franco’s pesetas, since if the Nationalists end up losing the war, they won’t be any use to us at all, not even to wipe our asses with.” She divided it up fairly—half for me, half for her. “And may we never do without again, my angel.”

I got used to living alone, calm, unafraid. To being responsible for the workshop and myself. I worked a lot, entertained myself little. The volume of orders didn’t require extra hands, so I continued working alone. The activity was incessant nonetheless—threads, scissors, imagination, and an iron. Sometimes I’d go out in search of materials, to stock up on buttons or choose spools of thread and fasteners. I made the most of my Fridays above all: I’d approach the neighboring Plaza de España—the Feddán, the Moors called it—to see the caliph come out of his palace and cross over to the mosque on a white horse, under a green parasol, surrounded by local soldiers in fantastic uniforms, an imposing spectacle. Then I’d usually walk along what was already beginning to be called the Calle del Generalísimo, continuing as far as Plaza de Muley el Mehdi to pass in front of the church of Our Lady of Victories, the Catholic mission, which the war had packed full of prayers and people in mourning.

The war: so far away, and yet so present. From the other side of the Strait we would receive news that came in waves, from the press and by word of mouth. In their homes people would mark out the advances with colored pins on maps fixed to the walls. I learned about what was going on in my country in the solitude of my own home. The only extravagance I allowed myself in those months was to purchase a radio; thanks to this, I learned before the year was out that the government of the Republic had moved to Valencia and left the people to defend Madrid alone. The International Brigades arrived to help the Republicans; Hitler and Mussolini recognized Franco’s legitimacy; Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante prison; my savings reached eighty pounds; Christmas arrived.

I spent that first African Christmas Eve in the boardinghouse. Though I tried to refuse the invitation, its owner persuaded me yet again with her overwhelming insistence.

“You’re coming for dinner at La Luneta, and that’s all there is to it—as long as Candelaria has room at her table nobody spends the holidays alone.”

I couldn’t refuse, but it cost me a tremendous effort. As the holiday approached, gusts of sadness began their invasion, through chinks in the windows and spaces under the doors, until the entire workshop was permeated with melancholy. How was my mother, how was she bearing the uncertainty of not hearing any word from me, how was she managing to support herself in these dreadful times? Unanswered questions assailed me at every moment, increasing my sense of uneasiness. My neighborhood did little to cheer me: there was barely a flicker of joy to be felt there despite the shop decorations, the people exchanging greetings, and the children of the neighboring apartments humming carols as they trotted down the stairs. The sure knowledge of what was happening in Spain was so dark and heavy that no one seemed in the mood to celebrate.

I reached the boardinghouse after eight in the evening, after passing hardly anyone on the streets. Candelaria had roasted a couple of turkeys: the first proceeds from the new business had introduced a certain prosperity to her larder. I brought two bottles of sparkling wine and a round Dutch cheese brought over from Tangiers at the price of gold. I found the guests worn down, bitter, so very sad. Candelaria, on the other hand, tried hard to rally everyone’s spirits, her sleeves rolled up, singing at the top of her voice as she put the finishing touches on the dinner.

“I’m here, Candelaria,” I said, coming into the kitchen.

She stopped singing and stirring the pot.

“And what’s the matter with you, if I might know? Coming in with that miserable face like you’re being led off to the slaughterhouse.”

“Nothing’s the matter with me—what could be?” I said, looking for somewhere to put down the bottles while avoiding her gaze.

She wiped her hands on a cloth, grabbed my arm, and forced me to turn toward her.

“You don’t fool me, girl. It’s about your mother, isn’t it?”

I didn’t look at her, or answer.

“The first Christmas Eve out of the nest is ever so shitty, but you’ve got to grin and bear it, honey. I still remember mine, and you know in my house we were poor as mice and hardly did anything the whole night except sing, dance, and clap, with very little there to fill your belly. And yet for all that, blood is thicker than water, even if the only things you’ve shared with your people have been hardships and miseries.”

I still didn’t catch her eye, trying to look as though I was concentrating on finding a space to put the bottles down amid the mountain of odds and ends that occupied the table. A mortar, a pot of soup, a large dish of custard. An earthenware bowl filled with olives, three heads of garlic, a sprig of bay leaves. She went on talking, close and sure.

“But bit by bit it all passes, you’ll see. I’m sure your mother is fine, that tonight she’ll be having dinner with her neighbors, and that even though she’s remembering you and missing you, she’ll be glad to know that at least you have the luck of being outside Madrid, far away from the war.”

Perhaps Candelaria was right and my absence was more of a consolation to my mother than a sorrow. Maybe she thought I was still with Ramiro in Tangiers. She might have imagined us spending the evening having dinner in some stunning hotel, surrounded by unconcerned foreigners who danced between one course and the next, far from the suffering on the other side of the Strait. Although I’d tried to keep her informed by letter, everyone knew that the post from Morocco didn’t get to Madrid, so those messages had probably never even left Tetouan.

“You’re right,” I murmured, barely parting my lips. I was still holding the bottles of wine, looking carefully at the table, unable to find a place to put them. And I wasn’t brave enough to look Candelaria in the eye either, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to hold back my tears.

“I certainly am, child, don’t think about it anymore. However hard absence may be, knowing your daughter is far from the bombs and machine guns is a good reason to be glad. So come on—be happy, be happy!” she shouted, grabbing one of the bottles from my hand. “You’ll see, we’ll be livening up very soon, dear heart.” She opened it and raised it up. “To your mother, who gave you life,” she said. Before I had a chance to reply she had taken a long swallow of sparkling wine. “Now you,” she commanded, after wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I didn’t have the least desire to drink, but I obeyed. It was to Dolores’s health. Anything for her.

We started dinner, but in spite of Candelaria’s efforts to keep spirits merry, the rest of us didn’t talk much. No one was even in the mood for an argument. The schoolmaster coughed till he looked like his sternum was going to split, and the shriveled-up sisters, even more shriveled up than usual, shed tears. The fat mother sighed, sniffed. The wine went to her Paquito’s head, he started talking nonsense, the telegraph man answered him back, and finally we laughed. Then Candelaria got up and raised her cracked glass to everyone. To those present, those absent, each and every one. We hugged, we cried, and for one night there was only one faction, the one made up of our sorry troupe.


The first months of the new year were calm and filled with nonstop work. During that time my neighbor Félix Aranda became an everyday presence. Besides the proximity of our homes, I was also brought closer to him in another dimension that couldn’t be gauged spatially. His somewhat peculiar behavior and my repeated need for assistance helped to establish a friendship between us at late hours of the night that would last for decades, through many phases of our lives. After those first sketches that solved my problem with the tennis player’s attire, there would be more occasions when Doña Encarna’s son offered a hand to help me leap gracefully over apparently insurmountable obstacles. Unlike the case of the Schiaparelli trouser-skirt, the second stumbling block that led me to seek another favor from him shortly after the first wasn’t prompted by artistic necessity, but by my ignorance in matters of money. It had all begun some time earlier with a small inconvenience that wouldn’t have posed any problem for anyone with a somewhat privileged education. However, the few years I had attended the modest school in my Madrid neighborhood hadn’t amounted to much. Which was why, at eleven o’clock on the night before my workshop’s first invoice was due to be delivered to the client, I had found myself hopelessly vexed by my inability to put in writing a description and price that corresponded to the work I had done.

It was in November. Over the course of the afternoon the sky had been turning dark grey, and when night fell it began to rain heavily, the prelude to a storm on its way over from the nearby Mediterranean: one of those storms that uprooted trees, knocked down electric wires, and made people huddle under their covers muttering a feverish torrent of litanies to Saint Barbara. Just a couple of hours before the weather changed, Jamila had taken the first orders, just completed, over to Frau Heinz’s house. My first five pieces of work—two for evening, two for daytime, and one for tennis—had been taken down from their hangers in the workshop, where they had been kept awaiting their final ironing. Then they had been packed up in their canvas bags and conveyed in three successive trips to their destination. Jamila’s return from the last trip brought with it a request.

“Frau Heinz ask that Jamila bring tomorrow morning bill in German marks.”

And in case the message hadn’t been absolutely clear, she handed me an envelope bearing a card with the message written on it. I sat down to think about how the hell I was going to make up an invoice, and for the first time my great ally, memory, refused to get me off the hook. Right through the setting up of the business and the creation of the first items of clothing, the designs I still treasured from the world of Doña Manuela had served as a resource I could draw on. The images I had memorized, the skills I’d learned, the mechanical movements and actions so often repeated had up till that moment furnished me with the inspiration to keep going and make a success of it. I knew down to the last detail how a good dressmaker’s studio worked, how to take measurements, cut the patterns, pleat skirts, affix sleeves, and attach lapels, but however hard I searched my mental catalog of techniques and observations, I found nothing that would serve as a reference point for how to create an invoice. I had handled so many of them when I worked for Doña Manuela in Madrid, and it had been my job to deliver them to the homes of our clients; in some cases I’d even returned with the payment in my pocket. Yet I had never stopped to open one of those envelopes and examine its contents.

I considered resorting as usual to Candelaria, but looking out over the balcony I could see how dark it was already, with the imperious wind driving an ever denser rain as relentless flashes of lightning approached from the sea. In consideration of this scenario, the walk over to the boardinghouse seemed to be the sheerest path to hell. So I decided to sort it out on my own: I got hold of a pencil and some paper and sat down at the kitchen table, all ready to begin the task. An hour and a half later and I was still there, with countless scraps of crumpled-up paper surrounding me as I sharpened the pencil with a knife for the fifth time, but still with no idea how many German marks would be equivalent to the two hundred and seventy-five pesetas I had planned on charging her. And right then, in the middle of the night, something suddenly clattered hard against the windowpane. I leapt to my feet so fast that I knocked over the chair. I saw immediately that there was light in the kitchen opposite, and in spite of the rain, and in spite of the time, I could see in it the chubby figure of my neighbor Félix, with his glasses, his sparse, curling hair, and his arm raised, ready to throw a second fistful of almonds. I opened the window to ask him angrily for an explanation for such incomprehensible behavior, but before I’d had the chance to say a word his voice crossed the gap between us, filtered through the thick splattering of the rain on the tiles of the building’s central courtyard. The content of his message, however, came over loud and clear.

“I need refuge. I don’t like thunderstorms.”

I could have asked him if he was crazy. I could have informed him that he’d given me a terrible fright, shouted at him that he was an idiot, and closed the window without another word. But I did none of these things, because at that very moment a little light came on in my brain: perhaps this bizarre request could now be turned to my favor.

“I’ll let you come over if you help me out,” I said, addressing him informally without even thinking about it.

“Open the door, I’ll be right over.”

Needless to say, my neighbor knew that the exchange for two hundred and seventy-five pesetas was twelve Reichsmarks fifty. Just as he knew very well that a presentable invoice couldn’t be drawn up on a cheap little sheet of paper with a worn old pencil, so he went back over to his house and returned at once with several pieces of marble-colored English paper and a Waterman fountain pen from which purple ink flowed out to create exquisite calligraphy. And he displayed all his ingenuity (which was considerable) and all his artistic talent (likewise considerable) and in just half an hour, between thunderclaps, and in his pajamas, he had not only drawn up the most elegant invoice that any European dressmaker in North Africa could ever have imagined, but he had also given my business a name. Chez Sirah had been born.

Félix Aranda was an unusual man. Amusing, imaginative, and cultured, yes. And also curious, and a busybody. And a bit eccentric and somewhat intrusive, too. The nighttime transit between his apartment and mine became a familiar ritual. Not exactly daily, but frequently. Sometimes we’d go three or four days without seeing each other, sometimes he’d come over five nights in a week. Or six. Or even seven. The regularity of our meetings just depended on something quite apart from us: on how drunk his mother was. What a strange relationship, what a dismal familial existence was being lived out behind the door opposite. Since the death of their father and husband years earlier, Félix and Doña Encarna had traveled through life together, to all appearances utterly harmonious. Every evening between six and seven they would take a walk together; they would attend masses and novenas together, stock up on medicine at the Benatar pharmacy, greet their acquaintances courteously, and have tea and pastries at La Campana. He, always offering her his arm, protecting her affectionately, walking at her pace: careful there, Mama, don’t trip, this way, Mama, careful, careful. She—proud of her child—boasting of his talents left and right: my Félix says, my Félix does, my Félix thinks, oh, my Félix, what would I do without him?

The solicitous chick and the clucking hen were transformed, however, into a couple of monsters when they entered their most private territory. No sooner had they crossed the threshold of their home than the old lady wrapped herself in the uniform of a tyrant and took out her invisible whip to inflict the utmost humiliation on her son. Scratch my leg, Félix, my calf itches; not there, higher; you’re so useless, child, how could I have given birth to an offspring like you? Put the tablecloth on properly, I can see it’s not straight; not like that, that’s even worse; put it back the way it was, you ruin everything you touch, little piece of shit, why couldn’t I have left you in the foundling hospital when you were born? Look in my mouth and see if my pyorrhea has gotten any worse, get out the Agua de Carmen that relieves my flatulence, rub my back with camphorated alcohol, file down this callus, cut my toenails, be careful, you fat lump of lard, you’ll have my toe off; bring over the handkerchief so I can cough up some phlegm, bring me a Sor Virginia patch for my lumbago; wash my hair and put my curlers in, more carefully, idiot, you’re going to make me bald . . .

That was how Félix grew up, with a double life whose two sides were as disparate as they were pitiful. No sooner had his father died than the beloved son stopped being that overnight: while he was still growing, and without anyone outside suspecting a thing, he became the focus of affection and treats in public and the object of all his mother’s furies and frustrations in private. As though with the slash of a scythe, all his dreams were hacked down to the ground: leaving Tetouan to study fine art in Seville or Madrid, working out his confused sexuality and meeting other people like him, beings with unconventional spirits yearning to fly free. Instead he found himself facing the prospect of living permanently under the black wing of Doña Encarna. He completed his bachelor’s with the Marianists at the Colegio del Pilar with brilliant qualifications that were of no use to him because his mother had taken advantage of her position as a suffering widow to get him an administrative position that was colored rat grey. Stamping forms in the General Supplies Office of the Municipal Services Division: the perfect job to beat down the most brilliant kind of creativity and keep it chained like a dog—now I’m offering you a slice of succulent meat, now I’m kicking you hard enough to burst your belly.

He bore the blows with a monklike patience. And so, over the years, they maintained their imbalance unchanged, her tyrannizing him, and him docile, bearing up, tolerating. It was hard to know what it was that Félix’s mother was looking for in him, why she treated him like that, what she wanted from her son apart from what he would always have been ready to give. Love, respect, compassion? No, she had these without having to make the least effort. He wasn’t stingy with his affections—far from it, dear old Félix. Doña Encarna wanted something more. Devotion, unconditional availability, attention to her most ludicrous whims. Submissiveness, submission. Precisely what her husband had demanded of her in life. I assumed this was why she had gotten rid of him. Félix never told me openly, but like the boy in the fairy tale leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him, he left me clues along the way. All I did was follow them to reach my conclusion. The late Don Nicasio had probably been killed by his wife just as one dark night Félix would perhaps end up disposing of his mother.

It would be hard to say how long he would have been able to bear that wretched daily life had a solution not come to him in the most unexpected way. Somebody grateful for a well-done piece of work; a sausage and a couple of bottles of El Mono anisette as a gift; let’s try it, Mama, go on, just a little glass, just wet your whistle. But it wasn’t only Doña Encarna’s lips that enjoyed the sickly sweet taste of the liqueur, but also her tongue, and her palate, and her throat, and her intestinal tract, and from there the fumes went to her head, and that same alcoholic night Félix found himself faced with a way out. From then on, the bottle of anisette was his great ally, his one salvation and escape route out to the third dimension of his life. And never again was he just a model son when out in the public eye and a disgusting little rag in private; from then on he also became an uninhibited night walker, a fugitive in search of the oxygen he was lacking at home.

“A little bit more of the El Mono, Mama?” he would ask after dinner, without fail.

“Oh, go on then, give me just a drop. To clear my throat a bit better, I think I caught a chill in church this afternoon.”

The four fingers of thick liquid went down Doña Encarna’s gullet at vertiginous speed.

“It’s what I’ve told you before, Mama, you don’t wrap yourself up enough,” Félix went on affectionately as he refilled the glass to the same level. “Come on, drink it up quickly, you’ll see how fast you’ll warm up.” Ten minutes and three drinks of anisette later, Doña Encarna was snoring, half conscious, and her son was fleeing like a just-freed sparrow on the way to seedy dives, to meet up with people whom in daylight and in the presence of his mother he wouldn’t have dared even to greet.

Following my arrival on Sidi Mandri and the night of the storm, my home became a permanent refuge for him. He would come over to leaf through magazines, to bring me ideas, to draw sketches and tell me funny things about the world, about my clients and all those people I used to pass every day with, but whom I didn’t know. And so, night by night, I learned about Tetouan and its people: where they had come from and for what reasons. All those families in this alien land; who those ladies were that I sewed for; who had power, who had money; who did what, and why, and when and how.

But Doña Encarna’s devotion to the bottle didn’t always have soothing effects, and then, regrettably, things would turn upside down. When the anisette wasn’t enough to calm her, with the drunkenness would come hell. Those nights were the worst, because the mother didn’t get into a state of harmless catatonia, she was transformed into a thundering Zeus capable of demolishing the dignity of the strongest person with her bellowing. And Félix, knowing that the morning hangover would erase any trace of her memory, would match her with other equally indecorous insults with the perfect knack of a knife thrower. Foul witch, evil bitch, crooked whore. God, what a scandal it would have been if their acquaintances from the pastry shop, pharmacy, and church pew had heard them! The following day, however, it seemed that forgetfulness had settled on them and cordiality would reign once more on their evening walk as though there had never been the slightest tension between them. Would you like a sugared bun with your tea today, Mama, or would you rather a meat pie? Whatever you prefer, Félix, you’re always so good at choosing for me—go ahead, come on then, let’s go now, we’ve got to pay our condolences to María Angustias, I’ve heard that her nephew has fallen at the battle of Jarama; oh, such a shame, my angel, just as well that being the son of a widow spared you from being called up; what would I have done—Holy Mother of God—if I’d been left alone here with my son at the front?

Félix was smart enough to know that there was some unhealthy abnormality hanging over that relationship but not brave enough to put a stop to it once and for all. Perhaps that was why he tried to dodge his pitiful reality by turning his mother gradually into a drunk, escaping like a vampire in the small hours or laughing at his own miseries while searching for blame in a thousand ridiculous symptoms and contemplating the most outlandish remedies. One of his diversions was finding odd cures among the advertisements in the newspapers, lying on the sofa in my living room while I finished off a cuff or backstitched the final buttonhole of the day.

And then he’d say things like this to me:

“Do you think my mother’s Hydra behavior has something to do with her nerves? Most likely this will take care of it. Listen, listen—‘Nervional. Awakens the appetite, aids digestion, normalizes the stomach. Eliminates changeable moods and dejection. Take Nervional—count on it.’ ”

Or this:

“If you ask me, the thing with Mama is a hernia. I’d already thought about giving her an orthopedic corset, to see if her bad tempers might pass, but listen to this: ‘If you’ve got a hernia, you can avoid risks and discomforts with the unbeatable, innovative automatic compressor, a mechanical-scientific wonder that—without nuisances, straps, or encumbrances—will completely defeat your affliction.’ It might just work—what do you think, girl, should I get her one?”

Or perhaps:

“What if it turns out it’s something to do with her blood? Look what it says here. ‘Richelet Blood Tonic. Vascular complaints. Varicose veins and ulcers. Remedy for tainted blood. Effective at eliminating uric toxins.’ ”

Or some other nonsense:

“What if it’s piles? Or she has something wrong with her eye? How about if I find a witch doctor in the Moorish quarter to cast a spell on her? Truthfully, I don’t think I ought to worry so much, because I trust that her Darwinian tendency will end up eroding her liver and will put an end to her soon enough, now that a bottle doesn’t even last the old lady two days and she’s burning a hole in my pocket.” He stopped his speech, perhaps awaiting a reply, but he received none. Or at least not in words. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me with that face, girl,” he added after a pause.

“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about, Félix.”

“You don’t know what I’m referring to when I talk about a Darwinian tendency? Do you not know who I mean by Darwin either? The one with the monkeys, the one with the theory that we humans are all descended from primates. If I say my mother has a Darwinian tendency it’s because she’s crazy about El Mono anisette, you see? Girl, you have a divine sense of style and you sew like the very angels, but on matters of general culture you really are rather in the dark, aren’t you?”

I was, in fact. I knew I had a facility for learning new things and retaining information, but I was also aware of my educational deficiencies. I’d accumulated very little of the kind of knowledge one found in encyclopedias: little more than the names of a handful of kings recited by rote, and that Spain’s northern limit is bounded by the Cantabrian Sea and the Pyrenees Mountains separating it from France. I could rattle off my times tables and was quick at using numbers in daily situations, but I’d never read a book in my life, and as far as history, geography, art, or politics was concerned, all I knew was what I’d picked up during my months of living with Ramiro and in the constant free-for-all in Candelaria’s boardinghouse. I apparently could get away with passing myself off as a young woman with style and an exclusive dressmaker, but I was aware that as soon as anyone scratched beneath my outer shell they would have no trouble finding the fragility on which it was supported. Which was why, that first winter in Tetouan, Félix gave me an odd gift: he began to educate me.

It was worth it. For both of us. On my part, for what I learned and how I refined myself. On his part, because thanks to our meetings he filled his solitary hours with affection and company. In spite of his laudable intentions, however, my neighbor turned out to be a far from conventional teacher. Félix Aranda was a creature with aspirations to a free spirit who spent four-fifths of his time constrained between the despotic outbursts of his mother and the relentless tedium of the most bureaucratic of jobs, which meant that in his free hours the last thing one could expect of him was order, measure, and patience. To find that, I would have had to go back to La Luneta, for Don Anselmo to draw up a didactic plan to suit my ignorance. In any case, while Félix was never a methodical or organized sort of teacher, he did instruct me in many other matters as incoherent as they were disordered, which in the long run, one way or another, would be of quite some use to me in making my way through the world. And so, thanks to him, I became familiar with characters like Modigliani, Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker, learned to tell cubism from Dadaism, discovered what jazz was, managed to locate the European capitals on a map, memorized the names of their best hotels and cabarets, and got as far as counting to a hundred in English, French, and German.

Also thanks to Félix I learned what my Spanish compatriots were doing in that distant land. I discovered that Spain had been exercising its protectorate over Morocco since 1912, a year after signing the Treaty of Algeciras with France, according to which—as often happens with poor relations—the Spanish nation had been left with the worst part of the country. The less prosperous part, the least desirable. The African cutlet, they called it. There were a number of things Spain was hoping to achieve there: revive the imperial dream; partake in the African colonial banquet being enjoyed by the nations of Europe, albeit dining only on the crumbs that the great powers conceded to them; and aspire to reach the ankle of France and England, now that Cuba and the Philippines had slipped out of our hands and our old Spain was as poor as a cockroach.

It wasn’t easy to secure control over Morocco, even though the area allocated by the Treaty of Algeciras was small, the local population scant, and the land harsh and poor. It came at the cost of rebuffs and internal revolts in Spain, and thousands of Spanish and African deaths in the bloody madness of the brutal Rif War. They did manage it, however: they took control and almost twenty-five years after the official establishment of the Protectorate, with any internal resistance now having yielded, there my compatriots still were, with their capital firmly established and continuing to grow. Military men of every rank; civil servants from the postal service, customs, and public works; auditors, bank employees, businessmen and midwives, schoolteachers and nuns, bootblacks, barmen. Whole families who attracted other families in search of good salaries and a future there for the making, living alongside other cultures and religions. And me among them, just one person more. In exchange for its enforced presence over a quarter of a century, Spain had offered Morocco technical advances, developments in sanitation and infrastructure, the first steps toward a moderate improvement in agricultural yields, a school of the arts, and support for traditional crafts. And the native population obtained additional benefits as a result of satisfying the demands of the colonizers: electrification, better drinking water, schools and academies, businesses, public transport, dispensaries, and hospitals; a train linking Tetouan and Ceuta, as well as the one that still took passengers to the Río Martín beach. Spain had in material terms benefited very little from Morocco: there were barely any resources to be exploited. In human terms, however, they had obtained something important for one of the two sides in their civil strife: thousands of soldiers from the local Moroccan forces who were now fighting like wild beasts on the other side of the Strait for the distant cause of the rebel army under Franco.

Apart from learning about these matters and more besides, I enjoyed other things from Félix: company, friendship, and ideas for my business. Some of them turned out to be excellent and others altogether eccentric, but at least they gave us two solitary souls something to laugh about at the end of the day. He never managed to persuade me to transform my workshop into a studio for experimenting in surrealism in which the hats would be shaped like shoes and telephones. Nor did he get me to use sea snails for the beading or bits of esparto grass on the belts, or convince me that I should refuse to take any client lacking in glamour. I did pay attention to him on other matters, however.

Following his recommendation, for example, I changed the way I spoke. I eliminated any slang and all colloquial expressions from my speech and created a new manner to allow me a greater air of sophistication. I started using certain French words and phrases that I’d heard repeatedly in Tangiers and had picked up from nearby conversations in which I’d almost never participated or from unexpected meetings with people with whom I’d never exchanged more than three lines. It was only a handful of expressions, just half a dozen of them, but he helped me to polish up my pronunciation and calculate just the right moments to use them. They were all aimed at my clients, those now and those to come. I’d ask permission to fix pins with a vous permettez?, finalize things with voilà tout, and praise results with a très chic. I’d talk of maisons de haute couture whose owners one might have assumed had once been my friends, and of gens du monde whom I had perhaps met in my supposed wanderings here and there. Whenever I proposed a style, pattern, or accessory, I’d hang from it the verbal tag à la française; all ladies were addressed as Madame. To highlight the patriotic dimension of the moment, we decided that whenever I had Spanish clients I would make appropriate reference to people and places I’d known in the old days when I’d been hobnobbing around the best houses in Madrid. I’d drop names and titles as easily as one might drop a handkerchief: lightly, without clamor or ostentation. That such-and-such a suit was inspired by the one I’d made a couple of years before for my friend the Marquise of Puga to debut at the Puerta de Hierro polo festival; how such-and-such a fabric was identical to the one that the eldest daughter of the Count and Countess of Encina used for her coming-out party in their palace on the Calle Velázquez.

It was also at Félix’s suggestion that I ordered a box of ivory-white cards from La Papelera Africana bearing the name and address of the business and had a gilt plaque made for the door, inscribed in ornate script: Chez Sirah—Grand Couturier. Couturier, he said, was what the best French fashion houses called themselves in those days. That final h was his touch, too, to give the workshop a more international flavor, he said. I played along with him—and why not? After all, I wasn’t hurting anyone with that little folie de grandeur. I heeded his advice on this matter and on a thousand other details, thanks to which I wasn’t just able to make my way into the future more securely, but I also managed—drumroll, please—to pull a past out of my top hat, too. I didn’t have to try too hard: with three or four poses, a handful of careful brushstrokes, and a few recommendations from my own personal Pygmalion, my small clientele set me up with a whole life in just a couple of months.

To the little colony of exclusive ladies who made up my clientele within that expatriate universe, I became a young haute couture dressmaker, daughter of a ruined millionaire, betrothed to an incredibly handsome aristocrat—both a seducer and an adventurer. It was also supposed that we had lived in several countries and found ourselves obliged by the political instability to shut up our homes and businesses in Madrid. At that moment my betrothed was off managing some prosperous firms in Argentina while I awaited his return in the capital of the Protectorate because I had been advised of the benefits of that climate for my delicate health. As my life had always been so active, so full of bustle, and so worldly, I felt incapable of just sitting around watching the time go by without devoting myself to some activity or other, and so I had decided to open a small atelier in Tetouan. Just for my own amusement, basically. Which explained why I didn’t charge astronomical prices, nor turn down any kind of commission.

I never denied a single iota of the image that had been constructed for me thanks to the picturesque suggestions of my friend Félix. Nor did I add to it. I just left it all hanging in the air, feeding the mystique and making myself less defined, more indistinct: a superb hook for bringing out people’s baser instincts and catching new clients. If only the other dressmaking girls from Doña Manuela’s workshop could have seen me then. Or the women who lived next door to us on the Plaza de la Paja, or my mother. My mother. I tried to think of her as little as possible, but her memory was constantly assailing me. I knew she was strong and determined; I realized that she would know how to get through the hard times. But all the same, how I yearned to hear from her, to learn how she was managing to get on day to day, how she was coping without any company or income. I so wanted to let her know I was well, alone again, and that I’d gone back to sewing. I kept myself informed by listening to the wireless, and every morning Jamila would go to the Alcaraz store to buy La Gaceta de África. A Second Triumphant Year under the Aegis of Franco, read the headlines. Even though all the news came to us sifted through the filter of the Nationalist side, I kept more or less up to date with the situation in Madrid and the Resistance. For all that, it was still proving impossible to get any direct word from my mother. How I missed her, how much I would have given to share everything in that strange and luminous city with her, to have set up the workshop together, to go back to eating her stews and hearing her pronouncements, always so sure. But Dolores wasn’t there and I was. Surrounded by strangers, unable to go anywhere, struggling to survive as I made up a fraudulent persona that I could step into each morning, I fought to ensure that no one discovered that an unscrupulous con man had battered my soul and a pile of pistols had enabled me to set up my business, thanks to which I had enough to feed myself each day.

I would often remember Ignacio, my first boyfriend, as well. I didn’t miss his physical presence, since Ramiro’s had been so brutally intense that his—so sweet, so mild—already seemed distant and vague to me, a nearly faded shadow. But I couldn’t prevent myself from nostalgically recalling his loyalty, his tenderness, and the certainty that nothing painful could happen to me by his side. And much, much more frequently than it should have, the memory of Ramiro assailed me abruptly, stabbing me sharply in the gut. It hurt, of course it hurt, horribly. Still, I managed to get used to living with it like someone carrying a heavy load: dragging it along though it slows your pace and demands great effort, but not allowing it to prevent you from making your way onward.

All those invisible presences—Ramiro, Ignacio, my mother, things lost, things past—began to transform themselves into companions that were more or less volatile, more or less intense, companions that I’d have to learn to live with. They invaded my mind when I was alone, in the silent evenings toiling away in the workshop between patterns and bastings, when I went to bed or in the gloom of the living room on the nights when Félix wasn’t there, when he was off on his clandestine wanderings. The rest of the day they usually left me alone, probably sensing that I was too busy to stop and pay them any attention. I had enough to think about with a business to run and an invented personality to continue fabricating.