The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Thirty-Five

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Sir Samuel Hoare arrived in Madrid at the end of May 1940, boasting the pompous title of Extraordinary Ambassador on Special Mission. He’d never before set foot on Spanish soil and didn’t speak a word of our language. Nor did he show the slightest sympathy for Franco or his regime, but Churchill placed every confidence in him and had urged him to accept the posting since Spain was a key player in the future of the European war and he wanted a strong man as his standard-bearer. It was fundamental to British interests that the Spanish government should maintain a neutral position, respecting a Gibraltar free from invasion and preventing the Atlantic ports from falling into German hands. In order to secure a minimum of cooperation, they’d used foreign trade to put pressure on a hungry Spain, restricting the supply of oil and squeezing them till they choked. As the German troops advanced across Europe, however, that ceased to be enough: the British needed to become involved in Madrid in a more active, more operational way. And with that goal in mind this small, rather worn-out-looking man, seemingly so unimpressive, landed in the capital: Sir Sam to his close colleagues, Don Samuel to the few friends he would end up making in Spain.

Hoare didn’t take up the post with much optimism: he didn’t like the place he’d been sent, had no sympathy for the quirks of Spanish life, and knew absolutely nobody in that devastated, dusty foreign town. He realized he wouldn’t be well received and that the Franco government was openly anti-British. Just so that this would be absolutely clear to him from the outset, on the very morning of his arrival the Falangists gathered in front of his embassy with a noisy protest, welcoming him with shouts of “Gibraltar for the Spanish!”

Having presented his credentials to the Generalísimo, he began the tortuous ordeal that was to become his life during the four years of his posting. Countless times he regretted having accepted the position: he felt tremendously uncomfortable in such a hostile atmosphere, to a degree that he’d never experienced in any of his previous assignments. The mood was tense, the heat unbearable. The Falangists demonstrated outside his embassy daily; they threw stones at his windows, tore the flags and crests off his official cars, and insulted the British staff without the authorities batting an eyelid. The press began an aggressive campaign accusing Great Britain of responsibility for the famine that was ravaging Spain. The only people with any sympathy for him were a small number of conservative monarchists, just a few people nostalgic for Queen Victoria Eugenie with little room to maneuver in the government and clinging to the idea of a past to which they would never be able to return.

He felt alone, groping his way through the darkness. Madrid overwhelmed him. He found it absolutely impossible to breathe in that atmosphere: the terribly slow way the administrative machinery worked oppressed him; he stared with bewilderment at the streets filled with police and Falangists armed to the teeth; he watched how the Germans behaved, emboldened and threatening. Plucking up his courage, and fulfilling the obligations of his position, as soon as he was settled he set about establishing relations with the Spanish government, and in particular with its three key figures: General Franco and ministers Serrano Suñer and Beigbeder. In his meetings with each of them, he sounded them out, and from each received quite a different response.

He was granted an audience with the Generalísimo in El Pardo Palace one sunny summer’s day. In spite of the weather, Franco received him with the curtains closed and the electric light on, sitting behind a desk over which large signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini glared arrogantly. During this awkward encounter, in which they spoke through an interpreter and without the possibility of any proper dialogue, Hoare was struck by just how disconcertingly self-confident the head of state was—he possessed the smugness of a man who believed himself to have been chosen by Providence to rescue his country and create a new world.

Everything that went badly with Franco went worse with Serrano Suñer. The In-law-ísimo’s power was at its most dazzling peak. The whole country was in his hands—the Falange, the press, the police—and he enjoyed unlimited personal access to El Caudillo, for whom many people suspected he felt a certain contempt as his intellectual inferior. While Franco, hidden away in El Pardo, was barely seen, Serrano seemed to be everywhere, with a finger in every pie, so different from that discreet man who’d come out to the Protectorate in the middle of wartime, the one who bent down to retrieve my powder compact and whose ankles I stared at for so long under that sofa. As though he had been reborn with the regime, a new Ramón Serrano Suñer appeared: impatient, arrogant, always tense, quick as a flash in both word and deed, his catlike eyes ever alert, his Falangist uniform well starched, and his nearly white hair combed back like a movie star’s. He was exquisitely disparaging toward any representative of what he called the “plutodemocracies.” Neither on that first meeting nor on the many more they were required to have during Hoare’s posting did the two men ever come close to anything resembling a mutual understanding.

The only one of the three dignitaries with whom the ambassador was able to get along was Beigbeder. From his very first visit to the Santa Cruz Palace, the communication between the two men was very fluid. The minister listened, acted, tried to fix things, to resolve problems. In Hoare’s presence he declared himself to be a keen supporter of nonintervention in the war. He openly recognized the great needs of the hungry population and struggled to come to agreements and negotiate pacts to fill those needs. It’s true that at first the ambassador did think him a little quaint in appearance, at times even eccentric: his sensibility, culture, manners, and ironic tone utterly incongruous in a Madrid with its arm raised in a military salute, the city of “order and command,” as the military saying would have it. To Hoare’s eyes, Beigbeder seemed obviously uncomfortable amid the Germans’ aggressiveness, the Falangists’ arrogance, and his own government’s despotic attitudes, as well as the daily miseries of the capital. Perhaps for this reason, because of Beigbeder’s own abnormality in that world of madmen, Hoare found him a pleasant sort, a singular minister with a Moorish temperament, a balm that soothed the lashings Hoare received from the rest of the government. They had their disagreements, naturally: points of view that conflicted and diplomatic positions openly argued; objections, complaints, and dozens of crises that they attempted to resolve together. Such as when Spanish troops entered Tangiers in June, finally putting an end to its status as an international city. Or when the government was about to authorize parades of German troops through the streets of San Sebastián. Or so many other incidents in those days of disorder and haste. Despite everything, the relationship between Beigbeder and Hoare became closer and more comfortable by the day, and the urbane Spaniard became the ambassador’s only place of refuge in that stormy land where problems sprung up like weeds.

As he slowly adapted to the country, Hoare became aware of just how extensive the Germans’ influence in Spanish affairs was, their considerable reach into almost every aspect of public life. Businessmen, executives, salesmen, movie producers—people involved in a range of activities with excellent contacts in the administration and power structures—were working as agents in the service of the Nazis. He soon learned, too, of the iron grip the Germans exerted on the communications media. The press office of the German embassy, with the full approval of Serrano Suñer, made a daily decision about what information about the Third Reich would be published in Spain, how and in what words, inserting all the Nazi propaganda they wanted into the Spanish papers, and in the most brazen, offensive way into Arriba, the organ of the Falange, which monopolized most of the paper that was available for newspapers in those penurious times. The campaigns against the British were unrelenting and bloody, marked by lies, insults, and perverse distortions. Churchill was the subject of the most malicious caricatures and the British Empire the object of constant mockery. The simplest accident in a factory or on a mail train in any Spanish province was, without the slightest qualm, attributed to sabotage by the perfidious English. The ambassador’s complaints about these falsehoods would always—inexcusably—fall on deaf ears.

And as Sir Samuel Hoare settled somehow or other into his new post, the antagonism between the ministers of Governance and Foreign Affairs became ever more apparent. From his all-powerful position, Serrano Suñer arranged a strategic campaign in his own style: he put out poisonous rumors about Beigbeder, supplementing them by spreading the notion that things could only be resolved if they were given into his own hands. And as the former high commissioner’s star plummeted like a stone in water, Franco and Serrano, Serrano and Franco, two men with absolutely no knowledge of international politics, neither of whom had barely seen anything of the world, sat down to drink hot chocolate with fried bread in El Pardo and sketched out a new global order on the teatime tablecloth with the shocking audacity that can only come from ignorance and overweening pride.

Until Beigbeder snapped. They were going to throw him out, and he knew it. They were going to wash their hands of him, give him a kick in the rear, and send him packing: he was no longer useful in their glorious crusade. They had torn him away from his beloved Morocco and appointed him to a highly desirable position, only to bind his hands and feet and stuff a gag into his mouth. They’d never valued his opinions: in fact, they’d probably never even asked for them. He’d never been able to take the initiative or express his views; all they wanted was to have his name on the cabinet list while he acted as a servile functionary, timid and mute. All the same, even though he didn’t like the situation one bit, he complied with the restrictions and worked tirelessly in everything they asked of him, putting up for months with the systematic mistreatment meted out by Serrano. First it was the treading on toes, the shoving around, the that’s-not-for-you-that-one’s-for-me. It wasn’t long before those shoves had been transformed into humiliating cuffs to the neck. And those rabbit punches soon turned into kidney punches, which ended up becoming knives in the jugular. And at the point when Beigbeder could tell that the next move would be stamping on his head, he finally snapped.

He was tired, fed up with the In-law-ísimo’s rudeness and haughtiness, with Franco’s obscurantism in his decision making; fed up with swimming against the current and being isolated from everything, in command of a ship that from the moment it set off had been headed in the wrong direction. Which was why he decided simply to throw himself into a decision, boldly. The time had come for the discreet friendship he’d maintained with Hoare to come out into the daylight and be made public, to transcend the boundaries of private sanctuaries, offices, and halls where it had remained till now. And with this as his banner, he threw himself out into the street in broad daylight, with no protection. Into the fresh air, under the ruthless summer sun. They took to having lunch together almost every day, at the most visible tables in the best-known restaurants. And then, like two Arabs walking the narrow alleyways of the Moorish quarter of Tetouan, Beigbeder would take the ambassador’s arm, calling him “brother Samuel,” and with ostentatious ease they would wander the sidewalks of Madrid. Beigbeder was issuing a challenge, provoking, almost quixotic. On one day, and the next, and the next, chatting familiarly with the man sent as an envoy by the enemy, arrogantly demonstrating his contempt for the Germans and the Germanophiles. In that way they wandered past the General Secretariat of the Movement on Calle Alcalá, past the headquarters of the Arriba newspaper and the German embassy on the Paseo de la Castellana, past the very doors of the Palace or the Ritz, veritable beehives of Nazis, so that everyone could plainly see how well Franco’s minister and the ambassador of the undesirables got along. And all the while Serrano—on the verge of a nervous breakdown and with his ulcer troubling him—paced back and forth across his office, ruffling his hair and asking himself at the top of his lungs where this lunatic Beigbeder’s mad behavior would lead.

Although Rosalinda’s efforts had managed to awake in him a certain amount of sympathy for Great Britain, Beigbeder was not so incautious that he would throw himself into the arms of a foreign country—just as nightly he threw himself into the arms of his beloved—for no other reason than pure romanticism. Yes, he had developed a certain amount of sympathy for that country thanks to her. But if he threw himself at Hoare so completely that by doing so he burned all his bridges, it was for other reasons. Perhaps because he was a utopian and he believed that in the New Spain things weren’t working as he felt they ought to. Maybe it was because this was the only way he had of openly showing his opposition to entering the war on the side of the Axis powers. He might have done it as a rejection of the man who had humiliated him utterly, someone with whom he had expected to be working shoulder to shoulder to lift the country up out of the ruins, the country whose demolition they had participated in with such eagerness. And possibly he moved closer to Hoare because he felt alone, terribly alone in a hostile and bitter environment.

I didn’t learn about this firsthand, but rather because during those months Rosalinda kept me up to date with a string of long letters that I received in Tetouan like a godsend. In spite of her lively social life, illness still forced her to spend many hours in bed, hours she dedicated to writing letters and reading what her friends sent her. And in that way we established a habit that kept us connected to each other, an invisible thread binding us across space and time. In her most recent piece of news from late August 1940 she told me that the Madrid newspapers were already discussing the imminent departure of the minister of foreign affairs from the government. But for that we had to wait a few weeks yet, six or seven. And over that time, things happened that—yet again—transformed the course of my life forever.