The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Eight

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And so my stay at the La Luneta boardinghouse began in this way, surrounded by these people about whom I never learned much more than their given names and—very superficially—the reasons they were lodging there. The schoolmaster and the civil servant, both elderly bachelors, were longtime residents; the sisters had traveled from Soria to Morocco in mid-July to bury a relative and saw the Strait closed to marine traffic before they were able to return home; something similar had happened to the hair products salesman, kept in the Protectorate against his will as a result of the insurgency. The mother and son had other reasons that were less clear, though everyone assumed they had come in search of an elusive husband and father who one fine morning had gone out to buy tobacco on Toledo’s Plaza de Zocodover and decided never to return home. In time, amid the almost daily skirmishes at the boardinghouse, along with the actual war advancing relentlessly throughout the summer and followed minutely from afar by that gathering of displaced, irate, frightened creatures, I began to get used to this boardinghouse and its underworld. I became closer as well to the owner of the business, which, considering the nature of the clientele, I assumed could not bring her very much income.

I didn’t go out much in those days: I had nowhere to go, nor anyone to see. I was usually alone, or with Jamila, or with Candelaria when she was around, which was infrequently. Sometimes, when she wasn’t bustling off to do her wheeling and dealing, she would insist on taking me out with her, for us to find some work for me. “Otherwise you’ll end up with a face like old parchment, girl, if you don’t give yourself so much as a flicker of sunlight,” she would say. Sometimes I felt unable to accept the invitation, not feeling strong enough, but other times I’d agree, and then she’d take me here and there, through the fiendish maze of streets of the Moorish quarter and the modern, gridlike roads of the Spanish ensanche with its beautiful houses and well-turned-out residents. In every establishment whose owner she knew, she would ask if they could find a position for me, if they knew of anyone who had a job for this girl who was so dedicated and ready to work day and night, as I was supposed to be. But those were difficult times, and even though the sounds of gunfire were still far away, everyone seemed discouraged by the uncertain outcome of the fighting, worried about their people back home, about the whereabouts of this one or that one, the advancing of the troops at the front, who had lived and who had died, and what was still to come. In such circumstances almost nobody was interested in expanding a business or hiring new staff. And even though we usually concluded those outings with a glass of mint tea and a tray of savory morsels in some seedy café on the Plaza de España, every frustrated attempt was for me one more shovelful of anxiety dumped onto the pile, and for Candelaria—though she never said as much—a new gnawing worry.

My health improved at the same rate as my spirits, a snail’s pace. I was still all skin and bones, and the pallid tone of my complexion contrasted with the faces around me tanned by the summer sun. My emotions were still taut, my soul weary; I still felt as torn apart by Ramiro’s abandonment as I had on that first day. I was still pining for the child whose existence I had only been aware of for a few hours, and I was once again consumed with worry over what had become of my mother in Madrid. Still frightened by the charges against me and by Don Claudio’s warnings, terrorized at the thought of being unable to make restitution and the possibility of ending up in prison, I had panic as my constant companion.

One of the effects of being crazily, obsessively in love is that it dulls your senses, your capacity for perception, till you no longer notice what is happening around you. It causes you to focus your attention so much on a single person that it isolates you from the rest of the universe, imprisons you inside a shell, and keeps you at a distance from other realities, even those right in front of you. When everything was thrown to the wind, I realized that those eight months I’d spent alongside Ramiro had been so intense that I’d barely had close contact with anyone else. Only then did I become aware of the scale of my loneliness. In Tangiers I hadn’t bothered to form relationships with anyone: I wasn’t interested in anyone but Ramiro and things to do with him. In Tetouan, however, he was no longer there, and with him had gone my grip on things and my points of reference. So I had to learn to live alone, to think of myself, and to struggle to make the weight of his absence gradually less devastating. As the Pitman Academies leaflet had said, long and steep is the path of life.

August came to an end, and September arrived with its shorter evenings and cooler mornings. The days passed slowly over the bustle of La Luneta. People went in and out of the shops, cafés, and bazaars, crossed streets, paused outside shop windows, and chatted to acquaintances on street corners. As I observed from my vantage point the changing light and all that unstoppable energy, I realized that I, too, urgently needed to get myself moving, to begin some sort of productive activity in order to stop living off Candelaria’s charity and to start gathering the money to pay off my debt. I hadn’t yet figured out how to do this, however, and to compensate for my inactivity and my nonexistent contribution to the economy of the household, I forced myself at least to participate in some of the domestic chores and not be just a lazy lump of furniture. I peeled potatoes, set the table, hung the clothes out to dry on the rooftop terrace. I helped Jamila do the dusting and clean the windows, I learned a few Arabic words from her and allowed her to lavish her endless smiles upon me. I watered the flowers, shook out the pillows, and anticipated little necessities that sooner or later someone would have to deal with. As the temperature changed, the boardinghouse in turn began to ready itself for the arrival of autumn and I helped with that. We stripped the beds in all the rooms—we changed sheets, took off the summer bedcovers, and brought the winter blankets down from the attic. I noticed then that a lot of the linens needed mending, so I took a big basket of bed linen out to the balcony and sat down to mend tears, strengthen hems, and tidy up frayed edges.

And that day something unexpected happened. I never could have imagined that the feeling of a needle between my fingers would be so pleasing. Those rough bedspreads and coarse linen sheets had nothing in common with the silks and muslins of Doña Manuela’s workshop, and the mending of their imperfections was a world away from the delicate backstitching that I had dedicated myself to in order to assemble clothes for the fine ladies of Madrid. Nor did Candelaria’s modest dining room resemble Doña Manuela’s workshop, nor did the presence of the Moorish girl and the incessant comings and goings of the rest of the quarrelsome guests correspond with the figures of my old working companions and the refinement of our customers. But the rhythm of my wrist was just the same, and the needle was once again moving quickly before my eyes as my fingers toiled away to get the stitches just right, just as they had done for years, day after day, in another place and for other ends. The satisfaction of sewing again was so pleasing that for a couple of hours I was taken back to happier times and managed temporarily to dissolve the leaden weight of my own miseries. It was like being back home.

Evening fell and there was barely any light left by the time Candelaria returned from one of her incessant outings. She found me surrounded by piles of recently mended clothes, with the last towel in my hands.

“Girl, don’t tell me you know how to sew.”

For the first time in a long while, I smiled, and my reply was an almost triumphant yes. And then the boardinghouse owner, relieved at having finally found some use for the burden that my presence had become, took me to her bedroom and proceeded to dump out the entire contents of her closet onto the bed.

“You can lower the hem of this dress and turn out the collar of this coat. This shirt has seams that need fixing, and the skirt needs to be let out a little at the waist since I’ve put on a bit of weight lately and there’s no way I can get into it.”

And so on, until there was a huge mountain of old clothes I could barely carry. It took me just one morning to fix the imperfections in her worn-out wardrobe. Satisfied with my efficiency, and resolved to gauge the full potential of my productivity, Candelaria came home that afternoon with a piece of cheviot wool for a three-quarter coat.

“English wool, the very best. We used to bring it over from Gibraltar before all this fuss started; now it’s extremely difficult to get hold of. Do you dare?”

“Get me a good pair of scissors, two yards of lining, half a dozen tortoiseshell buttons, and a spool of brown thread. I’ll take your measurements right now and tomorrow morning it’ll be ready for you.”

With those frugal means and the dining table as my center of operations, by dinnertime I had the commission ready for trying on. It was all complete before breakfast. No sooner had she opened her eyes, still sticky with sleep, and her hair held in a net, than Candelaria had arranged the coat over her nightdress and incredulously considered the effect in the mirror. The shoulders sat impeccably on her frame, and the lapels opened out to the sides in perfect symmetry, masking the excessive size of her bosom. The fit was graceful with a generous waist and a skillful cut so that it disguised the bulk of her marelike hips. The broad, elegant cuffs put the finishing touch on my work and her arms. The result couldn’t have been more satisfactory. She looked at herself, facing forward and in profile, from the back and three-quarters on. Once, again; now buttoned, now open, collar up, collar down. Her talkativeness contained for the moment, she focused on making a precise evaluation of the product. Again from the front, again from the side. And at last, the verdict.

“Well, I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you ever tell me you had hands like that, my angel?”

Two new skirts, three blouses, a shirtdress, a couple of suits, an overcoat, and a winter smock soon took their places on her hangers as she bargained for new pieces of fabric on the street, paying as little as she could.

“Chinese silk, just feel that, touch it,” she chattered excitedly as she opened her parcel and laid before my eyes a couple of yards of flame-colored fabric. “The Indian from the lower bazaar got two American lighters out of me for this—damn him to hell and back—it’s just as well I had a couple of them left from last year, because the bastard only wants silver hassani coins now; everyone’s saying they’re going to withdraw the Republican money and replace it with Nationalist banknotes—girl, such madness . . .”

On another outing she brought back a half roll of gabardine—“the good stuff, honey, the good stuff.” A pearly satin remnant arrived the following day, accompanied by the corresponding account of how she’d gotten hold of it, and none-too-honorable references to the mother of the Jew from whom she’d acquired it. A leftover piece of caramel-colored flannel, a bit of alpaca, seven yards of patterned satin, and so on, until between dealing and swapping we had reached almost a dozen fabrics, which I cut and sewed and she tried on and praised. Until one day, when her clever ways of getting hold of the material were exhausted, or she thought her new wardrobe was at last well stocked, or she had decided the time had come to focus her attention on other tasks.

“With all the things you’ve made for me, your debt to me up to today is settled,” she announced. And without even giving me time to savor my relief, she went on: “Now we’re going to talk about the future. You’ve got a lot of talent, girl, and that shouldn’t be wasted, specially not at this moment when you’re just a little bit lacking in the cash to get yourself out of the mess you’re in. You’ve seen how complicated it is to find you a position, so it seems to me that the best thing for you to do is to concentrate on sewing for the people in Tetouan. But the way things are, I’m afraid you’ll find it hard to get people to open their doors to you. You’ll have to have your own place, set up your own workshop, and even then it’s not going to be easy for you to get customers. We’ve really got to think it through.”

Candelaria the Matutera knew every living creature in Tetouan, but to be quite sure of the state of the sewing business and focus on finding just the right location, it was necessary to go out quite a few times, catch up with the odd contact here and there, and do a thorough study of the situation. A couple of days after the birth of the idea we had a one hundred percent reliable picture of the lay of the land. I learned then that there were two or three well-established prestigious designers who were frequented by the wives and daughters of the military commanders, a few respected doctors, and the businessmen who were still solvent. One level down, you’d find four or five decent dressmakers for street wear and Sunday coats for the women of the more well-to-do families of the administrative staff. And finally there were several handfuls of insignificant seamstresses who made their rounds from house to house, cutting percale smocks, altering hand-me-downs, taking up hems, and darning socks. The landscape was hardly ideal: there was considerable competition, but somehow I’d have to work things out and manage to find a niche for myself. And even though, according to Candelaria, none of those sewing professionals was by any means dazzling, and most of them were made up of a cast of characters who were domestic, almost family, that wasn’t any reason to underestimate them: when they worked well, dressmakers could earn their clients’ loyalties for life.

The idea of going back to being active again raised conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand it managed to create a little flutter of hopefulness that I hadn’t felt for an eternity. Being able to earn money to support myself and settle my debts by doing something I liked and I knew I was good at was the best thing that could have happened to me just then. At the same time, anxiety and uncertainty plagued my soul. To open my own business, humble though it might be, required initial capital, contacts, and a whole lot more luck than life had been offering me lately. It wouldn’t be easy to carve out a space for myself as just one more dressmaker; to overcome loyalties and win customers I’d have to come up with something out of the ordinary, to set me apart.

While Candelaria and I struggled to find a path for me to follow, a number of her friends and acquaintances began coming to the boardinghouse to place a few orders with me: just this blouse, girl, if you wouldn’t mind; just a few overcoats for the kiddies before the cold sets in. On the whole they were humble women, with spending power to match. They would arrive with many children and a few scraps of fabric, and they’d sit down to talk to Candelaria while I sewed. They sighed over the war and cried about the luck of their people in Spain, drying their tears with the end of the handkerchief they kept bundled up in their sleeve. They complained about the poverty of the times and wondered anxiously what they would do to help their offspring to get on in life if the conflict continued or an enemy bullet killed their husband. They paid little and late, or sometimes not at all, as best they could. And yet, in spite of the constraints of the clientele and the modest nature of their commissions, the mere fact of being back at my sewing managed to mitigate the harshness of my distress and open up a tiny chink through which a slim ray of light began to filter.