The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Twenty-Eight

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Doubt assailed me the moment I set foot in the street. I realized that perhaps I’d been too hasty in accepting the journalist’s proposal without first consulting Rosalinda, who might have had quite different plans for her enforced guest. My second thoughts didn’t take long to disappear, however: as soon as she arrived that afternoon for a fitting, she was in a flurry of haste.

“I’ve only got half an hour,” she said, unbuttoning her silk blouse with nimble fingers. “Juan Luis is waiting for me, there are still a thousand details that need preparing for Serrano Suñer’s visit.”

I’d planned to put my question to her tactfully, choosing my words with care, but I decided to take advantage of the moment and broach the subject right away.

“Marcus Logan has asked me to go to the reception with him.”

I didn’t look at her as I spoke, pretending to concentrate on removing her outfit from the mannequin.

“You don’t say!”

I gathered from her tone that the news had come as a pleasant surprise to her.

“You think it’s all right for me to go with him?” I asked, still uncertain.

“Of course! It would be wonderful having you around. Juan Luis will have a very official role to play, so I expect to be able to spend a bit of time with the two of you. What are you going to wear?”

“I don’t know yet, I’ll have to think about it. I think I’ll make myself something with this material,” I said, pointing to a roll of raw silk leaning against the wall.

“Dios mío, you’re going to be stunning.”

“If I survive,” I muttered, my mouth full of pins.

After several weeks without too much work, the headaches and obligations were thronging around me all of a sudden, threatening to bury me at any moment. I had so many commissions to finish that I was up every day at dawn like a rooster, and it was rare for me to make it to bed before three in the morning. The doorbell didn’t stop ringing, and clients were endlessly coming in and out of the workshop. I wasn’t bothered about feeling so overwhelmed, however—I was almost grateful for it. This way I had less time to think about what the hell I was going to do at that reception, which was now just over a week away.

Having got past the obstacle of Rosalinda, the second person to hear about the unexpected invitation, inevitably, was Félix.

“My, my, you sneaky little thing, you’re so lucky! You’re making me green with envy!”

“I’d gladly swap places with you,” I said, quite truthfully. “The party doesn’t thrill me in the slightest; I know I’ll feel out of place, there with a man I barely know and surrounded by strangers, by soldiers and politicians whose fault it is that my city is under siege and I can’t go back home.”

“Come on, girl, don’t be silly. You’re going to be part of a spectacular event that’ll go down in the history of this little corner of the African map. And besides, you’ll be there with a man who’s not bad at all, really not bad at all.”

“How do you know, if you don’t know him?”

“What do you mean I don’t know him? Where do you think I took the old she-wolf for afternoon tea today?”

“The Nacional?” I asked, incredulous. “Exactly. It came out three times as expensive as the buns at La Campana, because the old tart filled herself up to the eyeballs with tea and scones, but it was worth it.”

“So you got to see him then?”

“And to talk to him. He even gave me a light.”

“You’re shameless!” I said, unable to hold back a smile. “And what did you make of him?”

“Pleasingly attractive when his wounds heal. In spite of the limp and the half of his face that’s massacred, he’s not bad looking and seems every inch the gentleman.”

“Do you think he’ll be trustworthy, Félix?” I asked with a trace of concern. Even though Logan had asked me to trust him, I still wasn’t sure I could. My neighbor responded to my question with a laugh.

“I wouldn’t have thought so, but you needn’t worry about that. Your new friend is just a simple journalist passing through, who’s involved in some deal with the woman who has mesmerized the high commissioner. So for his own sake, if he doesn’t want to leave this country in an even worse state than when he arrived, he’d be wise to behave himself with you.”

Félix’s perspective made me see things differently. The disastrous way my interlude with Ramiro had ended had made me distrustful and suspicious, but what was at stake with Marcus Logan wasn’t a question of personal loyalty but a straightforward exchange of interests. You give me, then I’ll give you; otherwise, no deal. Those were the rules; there was no need for me to go on obsessing about how trustworthy he was. He was the person with the greatest interest in maintaining good relations with the high commissioner, so he had no reason to let me down.

That same night Félix also told me who exactly Serrano Suñer was. I’d often heard him spoken about on the radio and I’d read his name in the newspapers, but I knew hardly anything about the person hidden behind those two names. Félix, as he so often did, supplied me with the most comprehensive information.

“As I imagine you already know, querida, Serrano is Franco’s brother-in-law, married to Zita, the younger sister of Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo. This woman is quite a bit younger, more beautiful, and less conceited than Franco’s wife, as far as I’ve been able to make out from a few photographs. They say he’s an extraordinarily brilliant guy, with an intellectual capacity a thousand times greater than the Generalísimo’s, something it would seem that Franco himself doesn’t appreciate all that much. Before the war he was a state attorney and member of parliament for Zaragoza.”

“From the right.”

“Naturally. The insurgency, however, trapped him in Madrid. He was detained because of his political affiliations, he was locked up in the Modelo Prison and finally managed to get himself transferred to a hospital. He has an ulcer or something like that. They say that then, thanks to the help of Dr. Marañón, he escaped from there dressed as a woman, with a wig, a hat, and his trousers rolled up under his coat: what a picture.”

We laughed as we imagined the scene.

“He then managed to get out of Madrid and reached Alicante. From there, disguised as an Argentine sailor, he left the Peninsula on a torpedo boat.”

“He left Spain for good?” I asked.

“No, he disembarked in France and came back into the Nationalist zone by land, with his wife and his string of little kids, I think he’s got four or five. From Irún they arranged to get themselves to Salamanca, which is where the Nationalist faction originally had their headquarters.”

“That would be easy, as a relative of Franco’s.”

He gave an evil smile.

“Oh, nothing of the sort, my dear. They say General Franco—El Caudillo, as they call him—didn’t lift a finger for them. He could have offered his brother-in-law in a trade, something that happened on both sides of the conflict, but he never did. And when they did manage to get to Salamanca, apparently the reception they received wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. Franco and his family were settled in the Episcopal Palace and they say that all of the Serrano Polo troops were lodged in an attic on rickety cots while Franco’s little girl had an enormous bedroom with a bathroom to herself. The truth is, apart from all these slanders that are being passed from mouth to mouth at the moment, I haven’t been able to learn much about Serrano Suñer’s private life; I’m sorry, love. What I do know is that in Madrid two of his brothers were killed who had nothing to do with his own political causes. This seems to have traumatized him and motivated him to get actively involved in the construction of what they’re calling the New Spain. And the thing is now he’s managed to transform himself into the general’s right-hand man. Which is why they’ve taken to calling him the In-law-ísimo—a joke on his brother, the Generalísimo. They also say that much of his current power is thanks to the influence of the powerful Doña Carmen, who was already fed up that her fly-by-night other brother-in-law, Nicolás Franco, had so much influence on her husband. So the moment Serrano appeared, she made herself absolutely clear: ‘From now on, Paco, more Ramón and less Nicolás.’ ”

His impression of the voice of Franco’s wife made us both laugh.

“Serrano’s a really smart guy, they say,” Félix went on. “Very wise, much more experienced than Franco on political, intellectual, and human matters. Besides that, he’s hugely ambitious and works tirelessly; they say he spends his days trying to construct a judicial basis for legitimizing the Nationalist faction and his relative’s ultimate power. That is to say, he’s working to provide a civil institutional order for a structure that is purely military, you see?”

“In case they win the war,” I said.

“In case they win the war, who knows?”

“And what do people think of Serrano? Do they like him?”

“So-so. The old arrastrasables—the high-ranking officers, that is—don’t like him all that much. They consider him an inconvenient intruder; they speak different languages, they don’t understand each other. They’d be happiest with an entirely military state, but Serrano, who’s smarter than all of them, is trying to make them see that this would be a crazy idea, that they’d never be able to get legitimacy or international recognition that way. And Franco, even though he hasn’t a clue about politics, does trust him in this. So even if they don’t like it, the others just have to swallow it. Nor has he quite managed to persuade all the long-standing Falangists. It seems he used to be close friends with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, with whom he studied at the university, but he never belonged to the Falange before the war. Now he does: he had no choice, he’s currently Falangist to the bone, but the people who were Falangists before, the old guard, see him as an arriviste, an opportunist who’s only just adopted their creed.”

“So who supports him? Just Franco?”

“And his blessed wife, which is no small matter. Though we’ll see how long the affection lasts.”

Félix was a lifesaver in the lead-up to the event. From the moment I told him the news, and with a theatrical gesture he pretended to gnaw on the five fingers on his hand to demonstrate his envy, there wasn’t a night when he didn’t come by my house to bring me some interesting piece of information about the party, stray bits that he’d picked up here and there in his constant exploratory zeal. We didn’t spend those evenings in the living room as we used to do: I had so much work that our nighttime meetings had been transferred temporarily to the workroom. This small move didn’t seem to matter to him, however: he loved observing the threads, the fabrics, and all that was hidden behind the stitching. And he always had some idea to bring to the design I was working on. Sometimes he was right; many other times, however, he suggested the most outrageous nonsense.

“This velvet marvel of a gown you said you’re making for the wife of the president of the High Court? Make a hole in the ass, see if anyone is actually looking at her. What a waste of material, look how ugly the old whore is,” he said, running his fingers along the pieces of fabric assembled on a mannequin.

“Don’t touch,” I warned him severely, concentrated on my backstitching without even looking at him.

“Sorry, it’s just that the fabric’s got such a beautiful sheen.”

“That’s exactly why: be careful or you’ll leave fingerprints all over it. Come on, let’s get down to business, Félix—tell me, what have you learned today?”

In those days Serrano Suñer’s visit was the talk of Tetouan. In the shops, at the tobacconist’s and the hairdresser’s, in any doctor’s office, in cafés and in groups gathered on the sidewalks, at market stalls and on the way out of Mass, no one talked of anything else. I, however, had so much work that I barely had a minute free to step out onto the street—that was what my good neighbor was for.

“No one is going to miss out on him, the best people in local society are going to gather there for their rendezvous with the In-law-ísimo: the caliph and his great retinue, the grand vizier and the Makhzen, his entire government. All the senior authorities from the Spanish administration, soldiers laden with decorations, attorneys and magistrates, representatives from Morocco’s political parties and the Jewish community, the whole diplomatic corps, the directors of the banks, posh civil servants, powerful businessmen, doctors, every Spaniard, Arab, and Jew of high social standing, and—naturally—the odd parvenu like you, you shameless little thing, slipping in through the back door with your limping reporter on your arm.”

Rosalinda had warned me, though, that the sophistication and glamour of the event would be kept to a minimum: Beigbeder meant to welcome his guest with every honor, but he hadn’t forgotten that we were in a time of war. So there wouldn’t be showy displays, or dancing, or any music other than the caliph’s band. All the same, in spite of the austerity, it was going to be the most dazzling reception the High Commission had organized in a long while, which was why the capital of the Protectorate was in agitated preparation.

Félix also instructed me on some matters of protocol. I never found out where he’d learned them, since his social background was nil and his circle of friends almost as paltry as my own. His life was bounded by his routine work at the General Supplies Office, his mother and her wretchedness, his sporadic nighttime excursions to squalid dives, and the recollection of occasional trips to Tangiers before the war—that was all. He hadn’t so much as set foot in Spain his whole life. But he loved cinema and knew all the American movies shot by shot, in addition to being a voracious reader of foreign magazines, a shameless observer, and the most incorrigible busybody. And cunning as a fox, so that when he went to one source or other it was easy for him to furnish himself with the tools he needed to train me and transform me into an elegant guest with no trace whatsoever of my lack of pedigree.

Some of his pieces of advice were so obvious they were unnecessary. In the time I’d spent with the undesirable Ramiro, I’d known and observed people from the most varied social strata and origins. Together we’d been to a thousand parties and dozens of assorted establishments and good restaurants, in Tangiers as well as Madrid; as a result I had assimilated a host of little routines to get by confidently at social gatherings. Just the same, Félix decided to begin my instruction with the most basic information.

“Don’t speak with your mouth full, don’t make noise while you’re eating, and don’t wipe your mouth on your sleeve, or put your fork all the way into your mouth, or gulp down all your wine at once, or hold up your glass whimpering to the waiter to fill it back up for you. Use ‘please’ and ‘thank you very much’ where appropriate, but only murmured, not overly effusively. And as you know, say a simple ‘pleased to meet you’ each time you’re introduced to someone, none of that ‘the pleasure is all mine’ or vulgarities of that sort. If people talk to you about things you don’t know about or don’t understand, give them one of your dazzling smiles and keep nice and quiet, just nodding from time to time. And when you have no choice but to speak, remember to keep your lies to an absolute minimum, or you’ll find yourself caught in them: it’s one thing having told just a few teeny little fibs to promote yourself as a haut couturier, but quite another putting yourself in the lion’s mouth strutting around in front of people with enough insight or enough class to spot your lies the moment they’re out of your mouth. If anything astonishes you or delights you, just say ‘that’s good’ or ‘most impressive’ or a similar adjective; at no point should you demonstrate your enthusiasm with excessive arm waving, slapping your thigh, or using phrases such as ‘well I never!’ or ‘you don’t say!’ If someone makes a comment you find funny, don’t laugh wildly, showing your wisdom teeth, or double over holding your belly. Just smile, blink, and avoid making any comment at all. And don’t give your opinion when you aren’t asked for it or say indiscreet things like ‘And who might you be, my good man?’ or ‘Don’t tell me that fat lady is your wife?’ ”

“But I know all this, Félix dear,” I said, laughing. “I may be only a simple dressmaker, but I wasn’t brought up in a cave. Tell me some things that are a little more interesting, please.”

“Very well, then, darling, as you wish; I was only trying to be useful, in case any little detail eluded you. Down to the serious stuff, then.”

And so over the course of several nights, Félix sketched out for me the profiles of the most distinguished, and one by one I went about memorizing their names, positions, and responsibilities, and on several occasions their faces, too, thanks to the array of newspapers, magazines, photographs, and catalogs that he brought over. In this way I learned where they lived, what they did with their time, how wealthy they were, and where they were ranked in the local hierarchy. To tell the truth, these things really didn’t interest me all that much, but Marcus Logan was counting on my being able to identify the relevant people, and to do that I needed to prepare myself.

“I would imagine that given where your companion is from, the two of you will probably be mostly with the foreigners,” he said. “And I suppose, apart from the locals, there will be a few others coming over from Tangiers; the In-law-ísimo has no plans to go there on his tour, so, as you know, if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain . . .”

That gave me some comfort: mixed up with a group of expatriates I’d never seen before and whom I’d probably never see again in my life, I’d feel much safer than surrounded by locals I might run into daily on a street corner. Félix informed me, too, of the order of protocol, how the guests would be greeted and the sequence of events, one step at a time. I listened to him, memorizing the details while sewing more intensely than I’d ever sewed before.

Until at last the big day arrived. Over the course of the morning the final orders left the workshop in Jamila’s arms; at noon all the work had been delivered and there was calm at last. I imagined that the other guests would already be finishing their lunches now, getting ready to take a rest in the dark of their bedrooms with their shutters closed or waiting their turn at Justo and Miguel’s haute coiffure salon. I envied them: with barely a moment to get a bite to eat, I still had to devote my siesta time to sewing my outfit. When I set to work, it was a quarter to three. The reception was due to start at eight, and Marcus Logan had sent me a message notifying me that he would be coming to collect me at half past seven. I still had a world of things to do and less than five hours ahead to do them all.