The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Sixty-One

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As we approached I saw several cars parked in a row on one side of the road. Big cars, dazzling, dark and imposing.

Da Silva’s estate was in the countryside, not too far from Estoril, but far enough that I’d never be able to get back on my own. I made a mental note of a few signs: Malveira, Sintra, Colares, Guincho. All the same, I didn’t have the faintest idea where we were.

João braked gently and the tires crunched on the gravel. I waited for someone to open the door for me. I put one foot out first, gradually, then the other. Then I saw his hand held out to me.

“Welcome to the Quinta da Fonte, Arish.”

I got out of the car slowly. The gold lamé clung to my body, accentuating its contours, while in my hair I was wearing one of the three orchids that he’d sent me. I glanced quickly about, looking for the assistant, but he wasn’t there.

The night smelled of orange trees and cooling cypresses, and the lamps on the façade gave off a light that seemed to melt on the stones of the grand house. As I climbed the front steps on his arm, I noticed that above the main entrance there hung a massive coat of arms.

“The Da Silva family crest, I presume.”

I was well aware that his tavern-owning grandfather could hardly have had an ancestral crest even in his wildest dreams, but I didn’t think he’d notice the irony.

The guests were waiting in a grand hall full of heavy furnishings, with a large unlit fireplace at one end. The floral arrangements throughout the room weren’t enough to mitigate the chilly atmosphere. Nor did the uncomfortable silence of all those present help to warm it up. I counted them quickly. Two, four, six, eight, ten. Ten people, five couples. And Da Silva. And me. Twelve altogether.

As though he’d been reading my thoughts, Manuel announced: “There’s still one more to come, another German guest who won’t be long. Come, Arish, let me introduce you.”

At that point the ratio was almost balanced: three Portuguese couples, two German couples, plus the one still to come. But that was where the symmetry ended, because everything else was curiously dissonant. The German men were dressed in dark clothes—reserved, discreet, in keeping with the place and the occasion. Their wives, though not displaying a dazzling elegance, wore their dresses with sophistication and poise. The Portuguese, on the other hand, were a different kettle of fish altogether. The men, the women—all of them. Although the men’s suits were cut from good cloth, their quality was marred by the scant elegance of the peasant bodies wearing them: short legged, thick necked, with broad hands full of calluses and broken nails. In the breast pocket of their jackets they each ostentatiously displayed a pair of gleaming fountain pens, and whenever they smiled their mouths revealed several shiny gold teeth. Their wives, likewise vulgar in style, were trying hard to keep their balance in their shiny high-heeled shoes into which their swollen feet could barely fit. One of them was wearing her hat askew; another had a huge fur stole dangling over one shoulder, which kept slipping down onto the floor; the third wiped her mouth with the back of her hand each time she ate a canapé.

Before arriving I’d thought that Manuel had invited me in order to show me off in front of his guests—an exotic decorative object that reinforced his position as a powerful male, someone who might be useful to entertain the ladies with talk about fashion, anecdotes about high-ranking Germans in Spain, and other trivialities of the kind. No sooner had I gotten a sense of the atmosphere, however, than I knew I’d been wrong. Although I’d been welcomed as just another guest, Da Silva hadn’t invited me there to fill out the numbers, but to share the role of host with him and to help him to tend to this curious fauna with finesse. My role would be to act as liaison, to provide a bridge between the German women and the Portuguese women; otherwise, the two groups wouldn’t have been able to do more than look at each other all night long. If he had important matters to resolve, the last thing he wanted was a lot of bored, ill-tempered women desperate for their husbands to get them out of there. That’s what he wanted me there for, to give him a hand. I’d thrown down the gauntlet the previous day, and he’d taken it up: we both stood to gain something by it.

Well then, Manuel, I’m going to give you what you want, I thought. I hope you do the same for me later. And in order for everything to work just as he’d planned it, I squeezed all my fears into a tight little ball, swallowed them down, and brought out the most entrancing side of my false personality. With that façade as my banner, I stretched my apparent charm to its limit and radiated warmth, spreading it equally between the two nationalities. I praised in turn the hat and the stole of the women from Beira, I made a couple of jokes that everybody laughed at, I allowed one of the Portuguese men’s hands to graze my backside, and I extolled the virtues of the German people. Shamelessly.

Until a black cloud appeared in the doorway.

“Excuse me, my friends,” Da Silva announced. “I’d like to introduce you to Johannes Bernhardt.”

He was older, had put on some weight and lost some hair, but without a doubt he was the same Bernhardt from Tetouan. The one who so often used to stroll along the Calle del Generalísimo, on the arm of a lady who wasn’t with him at the moment. The one who negotiated with Serrano Suñer to install German antennas on Moroccan territory and agreed to keeping these matters from Beigbeder. The one who never knew that I’d been listening to them, lying on the floor, hidden behind a sofa.

“Sorry I’m late. Our car broke down and we had to make a long stop in Elvas.”

I tried to hide my unease, accepting a glass from a waiter while I did some quick calculations: when the last time was that we’d been in the same place, how many times we’d passed each other on the street, how long I’d spent with him that night at the High Commission. When Hillgarth had informed me that Bernhardt had settled on the Peninsula and was in charge of the large corporation that managed the Nazis’ economic interests in Spain, I told him that he probably wouldn’t recognize me if he ever met me again. Now, however, I wasn’t so sure.

As Bernhardt’s introductions began, I kept my back turned to the group of men chatting and devoted myself to the task of being charming to the ladies. The new topic of conversation was the orchid in my hair, and as I bent slightly and turned my head so that everyone could admire it, I was trying to catch snippets of information. I registered the names again, so that my memory of them would be more secure: Weiss and Wolters were the Germans whom Bernhardt, who’d only just got in from Spain, didn’t know. Almeida, Rodrigues, and Ribeiro were the Portuguese from Beira, men from mountain country. Mine owners—or rather, to be more accurate, owners of shabby little pieces of land where divine Providence had happened to place some valuable minerals. What kind of minerals? That was still a mystery to me: at this point I still didn’t know what the “spit of the wolf” was that Beatriz Oliveira had mentioned in the church. And then at last I heard the word I’d been waiting for: “tungsten.”

From somewhere deep in my memory I retrieved the information Hillgarth had furnished me with in Tangiers: it was a mineral crucial to the production of projectiles for the war. And as I held on to that memory, I recovered another: one of the people involved in buying it on a massive scale was Johannes Bernhardt. Except that Hillgarth had talked to me about his interest in deposits in Galicia and Extremadura; at the time he probably couldn’t have predicted that Bernhardt’s tentacles would end up crossing the border into Portugal and entering negotiations with a treacherous businessman who’d decided to stop supplying the English in order to fulfill the demands of their enemies. I felt my legs tremble and sought refuge in a sip of champagne. Manuel Da Silva wasn’t busy buying and selling silk, wood, or any other equally innocuous products from the colonies, but something much more dangerous, more sinister: his new business concerned a metal that the Germans would use to reinforce their weaponry and enhance their capacity to kill.

The guests demanded my attention, pulling me out of my reverie. They wanted to know where I’d obtained that wonderful flower resting behind my left ear, to get confirmation that it was in fact real, to know how they were grown: a thousand questions I took absolutely no interest in, but that I couldn’t refuse to answer. It was a tropical flower; yes, absolutely natural, of course; no, I had no idea of whether Beira would be a suitable place for cultivating orchids.

“Ladies, allow me to introduce you to our last guest,” Manuel interrupted us again.

I held my breath until it was my turn. The last one.

“And this is my dear friend, Senhorita Arish Agoriuq.”

He looked at me without blinking for a second. Two. Three.

“Have we met?”

Smile, Sira, smile, I commanded myself.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, holding out my right hand languidly.

“Unless you crossed paths somewhere in Madrid,” Manuel added. Fortunately he didn’t seem to know Bernhardt well enough to be aware that at some point in his past he’d lived in Morocco.

“At Embassy, perhaps?” I suggested.

“No, no; I’ve been in Madrid very little lately. I travel a lot and my wife likes the sea, so we’ve settled in Denia, close to Valencia. No, your face is very familiar from somewhere else, but . . .”

I was saved by the butler. Ladies, gentlemen, dinner is served.

In the absence of a consort to play hostess, Da Silva ignored protocol and placed me at one end of the table. He took the other. I tried to hide my nerves, turning my attention to the guests, but I was so anxious I could barely eat. The shock caused by Gamboa’s visit to my room had now been elevated by the unexpected arrival of Bernhardt and the confirmation of the dirty business Da Silva was implicated in. As if that wasn’t enough, I also had to maintain my composure and play the role of lady of the house.

The soup arrived in a silver tureen, the wine in crystal decanters, and the seafood on huge trays overflowing with crustaceans. I went out of my way to seem attentive to all the guests. I discreetly indicated to the Portuguese women which cutlery they should use at any given moment and exchanged phrases with the Germans: yes, of course I knew Baroness von Stohrer; yes, Gloria von Fürstenberg, too; of course, yes, of course I’d heard that Horcher would soon be opening its doors in Madrid. The dinner proceeded without incident, and to my good fortune Bernhardt paid me no more attention.

“Well, ladies, now—if you don’t mind—we gentlemen will retire to chat,” Manuel announced when we’d finished dessert.

I forced myself not to react, twisting the end of the tablecloth between my fingers. It wasn’t possible, he couldn’t do this to me. I’d done my part; now it was my turn to get something back. I’d satisfied everyone, I’d behaved like an exemplary hostess even though I wasn’t, and I needed my recompense. At the very moment that they were going to talk about just the thing I was interested in, I couldn’t let them escape. Fortunately, our dinner had been accompanied by a substantial quantity of wine, and moods seemed to have relaxed. Those of the Portuguese, particularly.

“Oh no, Da Silva, for God’s sake!” shouted one of them, slapping the table loudly. “Don’t be so old-fashioned, my friend! In the modern world men and women go everywhere together!”

Manuel wavered a second; no doubt he would have preferred to keep the rest of the conversation private, but the Beira crowd gave him no choice: they got up noisily and headed back to the living room all excited. One of them draped his arm over Da Silva’s shoulders, another offered his to me. Once they’d gotten over their initial reticence at being received in a rich man’s grand home, they seemed utterly delighted. That night they were going to close a deal that would allow them to slam the door on poverty for themselves, their children, and their children’s children; there was no reason whatsoever why they should do it behind their own wives’ backs.

They served coffee, liqueurs, and candies; I remembered that Beatriz Oliveira had been responsible for buying these as well as the floral displays, which were elegant without being too showy. I guessed it had been she, too, who had ordered the orchids I’d received that same afternoon, and I felt another shudder as I recalled the unexpected visit from Marcus.

A double shudder. Of affection and gratitude toward him for having been worried about me like that; of fear, again, at the memory of the incident of the hat right under the assistant’s nose. There was still no sign of Gamboa; perhaps with a little bit of luck he’d be dining on a homemade stew with his family somewhere, listening to his wife complaining about the price of meat and forgetting that he’d suspected the presence of another man in the bedroom of the foreign woman who was being courted by his boss.

Although he hadn’t been able to put us in different rooms, Manuel did at least manage to keep us in separate areas. The men were at one end of the large hall, on leather armchairs facing the unlit fireplace, the women beside a large window that opened out onto the garden.

They started talking business while we praised the quality of the chocolates. The Germans opened the conversation, asking their questions in a restrained tone, while I did my best to sharpen my hearing and make a mental note of everything I was able to catch at that distance. Wells, concessions, licenses, tons. The Portuguese men pointed out difficulties and brought up objections, raising the volume, talking fast. Perhaps the Germans wanted to steal their very innards from inside them, while the men from Beira—coarse mountain dwellers who weren’t in the habit of trusting even their own fathers—weren’t ready to let themselves be bought at any price. The mood, to my good fortune, began to heat up. The voices were entirely audible now, sometimes even explosive. And my head, like a machine, recorded everything they said. Even though I didn’t yet have a complete picture of what it was they were negotiating, I was able to take in a large amount of loose information. Galleries, baskets, and trucks; boreholes and skips. Free tungsten and controlled tungsten. High-quality tungsten, without any quartz or pyrite. Export taxes. Six hundred thousand escudos per ton. Bonds, gold ingots, and bank accounts in Zurich. And I was also able to get a few tasty morsels, complete portions of information. About how Da Silva had spent weeks cleverly pulling strings to get the main owners of the deposits to join forces to start dealing exclusively with the Germans. How if everything went according to plan, within two weeks they’d collectively put an abrupt stop to any sales to the English.

The quantities of money being discussed made clear to me the reasons for the nouveau riche behavior of these tungsten mine owners and their wives. Humble peasants were being transformed overnight into prosperous owners who no longer even needed to work: the fountain pens, the gold teeth, and the fur stoles were only a small clue to the millions of escudos they stood to make if they allowed the Germans exclusive rights to drill on their land.

The night went on, and as my mind continued to get a sense of the true magnitude of the deal, my fears increased. What I was hearing was so confidential, so appalling, so compromising that I preferred not to consider the consequences I’d have to face if Manuel Da Silva found out who I was and whom I worked for. The men’s conversation went on for almost two hours, but the livelier it got, the more the women’s gathering deflated. Each time I got the sense that the negotiations were getting bogged down by a particular point that didn’t add anything new, I concentrated my attention on the wives. But the Portuguese women had long ago given up on me and my attempts to keep them entertained, and they were already beginning to nod off, unable to fight their sleepiness. In their rough, rural day-to-day life, they probably went to bed at sunset and rose at dawn to feed the animals and see to the chores of countryside and kitchen; that late night, with all its wine, candy, and opulence, had far exceeded what they were able to handle. So I focused on the German women instead, but they weren’t particularly communicative either: once we’d been over our shared ground, we didn’t have enough in common or sufficient linguistic ability to keep our chat going.

I was running out of an audience and also rather short of resources: my effectiveness as hostess was fading away, and I had to think of some way of stopping it from dying once and for all. At the same time I had to remain alert and keep taking in information. Suddenly, from the men’s side of the room, came a big collective laugh. Then handshakes, hugs, and congratulations. The deal was done.