The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Nine

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At the end of the month it began to rain, one afternoon, then the next, and the next. In three days the sun barely came out; there was thunder, lightning, and mad winds that scattered leaves onto the wet ground. I kept working on the garments that the neighborhood women commissioned from me: clothes with neither grace nor class, creations in coarse fabrics whose function was to protect bodies from the inclemencies of the weather with little attention to aesthetics. Until one afternoon, when I had just finished a jacket for a neighbor’s grandson and was about to start on a pleated skirt ordered by the janitor’s daughter, Candelaria came in, enveloped in one of her excitable moods.

“I’ve got it, girl, it’s all set, it’s all arranged!”

She’d come in from the street wearing her new woolen jacket tied tightly at the waist, a shawl over her head, and her old shoes with the twisted heels covered in mud. She continued to chatter rapidly as she removed her outer clothes, recounting the details of her great discovery. Her powerful bust rose and fell rhythmically with her labored breathing as she spelled out her news while peeling off layers like an onion.

“I’ve just come from the hairdresser’s where my dear friend Remedios works. I had a few bits and pieces of business to sort out with her, and while Reme was doing a permanent wave on a gabacha—”

“A what?” I interrupted.

“A gabacha. A frog. A Frenchy,” she clarified hurriedly before going on. “The truth is, that’s how it looked to me, that she was a gabacha. I then discovered that she wasn’t French, she was a German I hadn’t met before, because all the others, the consul’s wife, and the wives of Gumpert and Bernhardt, and Langenheim’s, too, who isn’t German but Italian, those ones I do know all too well, as we’ve had some small dealings. Anyway, as I was saying, as Reme was combing away, she asked me where I got such a splendid jacket. And I, of course, told her that I’d had it made for me by a friend, and then the gabacha, who, as I said, turned out not to be a gabacha at all but a German, looked at me and did a double take. Then she got into the conversation, and with that accent of hers that sounds like she’s about to sink her teeth into your neck, well, she told me she needs someone to sew for her, and if I know any high-quality dressmaker’s establishment, really high end, because she hasn’t been long in Tetouan and she’ll be staying awhile, and basically that she needs someone. So I said to her—”

“That she should come here for me to sew for her,” I concluded.

“What are you saying, girl? I can’t have a dame like that here. These women go around with generals’ wives and colonels’ wives, and they’re used to other kinds of things and other kinds of places, you have no idea how stylish this German woman was, and the kind of money she must have.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know what crazy things were happening in my head, but I told her straight out that I’d heard that there’s going to be a haute couture house opening.”

I swallowed hard.

“And I’m supposed to run it?”

“Well, of course, my angel, who else?”

I tried to swallow again but this time couldn’t manage it. My throat had suddenly gone dry as sandpaper.

“How am I supposed to set up a haute couture house, Candelaria?” I asked, fearful.

Her first response was to laugh. Her second, five words enunciated with such self-confidence that it left no room for the least doubt on my part.

“With me, honey, with me.”

I survived dinner with a battalion of nerves dancing through my guts. Before dinner Candelaria hadn’t been able to clarify anything more for me because no sooner had she made her announcement than the sisters arrived in the dining room with a triumphant commentary on the liberation of Alcázar de Toledo. Soon the rest of the guests joined us, one group overflowing with satisfaction and the other brooding in disgust. Then Jamila began to lay the table and Candelaria had no choice but to head for the kitchen to set about organizing dinner: sautéed cauliflower and one-egg omelet; everything economical, everything nice and soft so that the guests couldn’t re-create a battle at the front by hurling cutlet bones furiously at one another’s heads.

The well-seasoned dinner came to an end with its customary strains, and each of the residents retired promptly from the dining room. The women and Paquito headed for the sisters’ room to listen to Queipo de Llano’s nightly harangue on Radio Seville. The men left for the Unión Mercantil to have their final coffee of the day and chat with one another about the progress of the war. Jamila cleared the table and I was about to help her with the dishes when Candelaria, with a solemn expression on her dark face, pointed me toward the corridor.

“Go to your room and wait for me, I’ll be right there.”

It didn’t take her two minutes to join me, which she spent speedily putting on her nightdress and housecoat, checking from the balcony that the three men were well on their way up Callejón de Intendencia and making sure that the women were conveniently enthralled by the crazy radiophonic torrent of words from the rebel general. “Good evening, gentlemen! Be of good cheer!” I was waiting for her with the lights out, barely settled on the edge of my bed, troubled and nervous. It was a relief hearing her arrive.

“We’ve got to talk, girl. You and I have to have a very serious talk,” she said in a low voice as she sat down beside me. “So let’s see—are you all ready to set up a workshop? Are you ready to be the best dressmaker in Tetouan, to sew clothes no one has ever sewn before?”

“I’m ready to, of course I am, Candelaria, but—”

“I’m not interested in any ‘buts.’ Now you listen closely and don’t interrupt. After the meeting with the German woman at my friend the hairdresser’s, I’ve been asking around and it turns out that lately we’ve started to have people here in Tetouan we never had before. Like you, or the scrawny sisters, or Paquito and his fat mother, or Matías the hair products man. With the uprising you all ended up here, trapped like rats, unable to cross the Strait to return to your homes. Well, other people have had more or less the same thing happen to them, but instead of being a herd of starvelings like the lot of you, whom fortune has dropped on me, they’re people of means, do you understand what I’m telling you, girl? There’s a very famous actress who came over with her company and had to stay. There’s a handful of foreign ladies, especially Germans, whose husbands—according to what people are saying—helped Franco get his troops across the Peninsula. And others like that: not many, true, but enough to give you work for quite a while if you can get them as clients. They don’t have loyalty to any other dressmakers because they’re not from here. And what’s more—and this is most important of all—they’ve got good money. They’re foreign and this war doesn’t mean anything to them, so they feel like partying and they’re not going to spend however long this mess lasts dressing themselves in rags and torturing themselves over who’s won what battle, you understand me, my angel?”

“Of course, I do, Candelaria, but—”

“Sssshhhh! I’ve told you I don’t want to hear any ‘buts’ till I’ve finished talking. Now let’s see: what you need now, right now, right away, without delay, is a high-class place where you can offer your customers the best of the best. I swear on my mother’s grave I’ve never seen anyone sew like you in my life, so you’ve got to get to work immediately. And yes, I know you haven’t got a bean, but that’s what Candelaria is for.”

“But you don’t have any money either; you spend all day complaining that you don’t have enough to feed us.”

“You’re right, I’m broke. It’s been very hard to get hold of merchandise lately at the borders. They’ve posted soldiers armed up to the teeth, and it’s not humanly possible to get past them to Tangiers to find goods unless you have fifty thousand safe-conducts, which no one is going to give me. And getting to Gibraltar is even harder, with the Strait closed to traffic and the low-flying warplanes ready to bomb anything that moves. But I’ve got a way for us to get the rooms we need to set up the business; something that—for the first time in my whole damned life—has come to me without my seeking it out and for which I haven’t even had to leave my house. Come over here and I’ll show you.”

Then she went over to the corner of the room where all the useless odds and ends were heaped.

“First just pop down the corridor and check if the sisters have still got their radio on,” she commanded in a whisper.

By the time I returned with confirmation that that was indeed the case, she had moved away the cages, the basket, the chamber pots, and the basins. All that was left in front of her was the trunk.

“Lock the door, turn on the light, and come over here,” she demanded imperiously without raising her voice any more than she had to.

The bare bulb on the ceiling quickly filled the room with a dim glow. When I appeared at her side she had just lifted the lid. At the bottom of the trunk was a piece of rumpled, filthy blanket. She lifted it out carefully, almost delicately.

“Take a good look in there.”

What I saw rendered me speechless, nearly lifeless. A pile of dark pistols, ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen or twenty of them were scattered at the bottom in disarray, their barrels pointed every which way, like a platoon of sleeping assassins.

“Did you see them?” she whispered. “I’ll close it back up. Give me the material to put on top, and turn the light out again.”

Candelaria’s voice, though quiet, was just as it always was; I never knew how mine sounded because the impact of what I’d just seen prevented me from formulating a single word for quite some time. We returned to the bed and she resumed her whispering.

“Some say this business with the uprising took people by surprise, but that’s a dirty lie. Absolutely everybody knew there was some powerful stuff brewing. Everyone was preparing for quite some time, and not only in the barracks and at the Llano Amarillo. They say that even in the Spanish Casino there was an arsenal hidden behind the bar; it’s anyone’s guess whether that’s true or not. In the first weeks of July, I had a customs agent lodged in this room awaiting his posting, or at least that’s what he said. Things smelled a bit fishy to me, why should I lie to you, because if you ask me that man wasn’t a customs agent or anything even close. But, well, since I never ask questions because I don’t like people getting involved in my dealings either, I made up his room, put a hot meal on the table for him, and that was that. After July eighteenth I never saw him again. Whether he joined the uprising, or he ran off through the Moorish villages to the French zone, or they took him off to Monte Hacho and had him shot the next morning, I haven’t the faintest idea. And I didn’t ask, either. The thing was, after four or five days, they sent this little lieutenant over to me to collect his belongings. Without a word I handed over what little there was in the wardrobe, made the sign of the cross, considered the matter closed. But when Jamila was cleaning the room for the next guest and sweeping under the bed I suddenly heard her scream as if she’d seen the devil himself holding his pitchfork, or whatever the Muslims take for the devil. Right there, in the corner, she’d run the broom into this pile of guns.”

“So then you kept them?” I asked in a whisper.

“What else was I going to do? Was I supposed to go out searching for the lieutenant at headquarters with everything that was going on?”

“You could have handed them over to the commissioner.”

“To Don Claudio? You’re crazy, girl!”

This time it was me who with a loud “sssshhhh” quieted her down. “Why would I give the pistols to Don Claudio? As it is, he’s got me on a leash, you want him to lock me up for life? I kept them because they were in my house, and what’s more, the customs agent still owed me for two weeks, so the guns were more or less payment. They’re worth a lot of money, girl, even more now, the way things are, so those pistols are mine and I can do whatever I please with them.”

“And you’re planning to sell them? That could be very dangerous.”

“Well, for crying out loud, of course it’s dangerous, but we need the cash to set up your business.”

“Candelaria, don’t tell me you’re going to get yourself mixed up in all this trouble just for me . . .”

“No, child, no,” she interrupted. “Let’s see if I can explain. I’m not getting mixed up in any trouble on my own, we’re doing it together. I’ll be responsible for finding someone who wants to buy the merchandise and with whatever I can get for it we’ll set up your workshop and split the profits fifty-fifty.”

“Why don’t you sell them yourself and get what you can for them without setting up a business for me?”

“Because that’s bread for today and hunger tomorrow, and I’m more interested in something that’ll give me a return in the long run. If I sell the goods and in two or three months everything I get for them goes straight into the cooking pot, what will I live on if the war goes on?”

“What if they catch you trying to sell the pistols?”

“Then I’ll tell Don Claudio it’s something we’re both in together, and we’ll end up going wherever he sends us.”

“To prison?”

“Or the civilian cemetery, depending on where the bastard decides.”

Although she had made this last grim prediction with a teasing wink, my feeling of panic was increasing by the second. Commissioner Vázquez’s steely stare and his severe warnings remained fresh in my memory. Stay away from any trouble, don’t mess around with me, behave respectably. His words had created a whole chain of undesirable associations: police station, women’s prison, robbery, fraud, debt, charge, trial. And now, as if that were not enough, arms dealing.

“Don’t get yourself mixed up in this trouble, Candelaria, it’s too dangerous,” I begged her, scared to death.

“Then what will we do?” she asked in a rushed whisper. “Live on air? Eat snot? You arrived without a cent, and I no longer have any means myself. As for the other guests, the only ones who pay me are the mother, the schoolteacher, and the telegraph man, and we’ll see just how long they manage to stretch out the little they have. The other three wretches and you have showed up with just the clothes on your backs, but I can’t throw you out on the street. Them out of charity and you because the last thing I need would be to have Don Claudio coming after me for explanations. So you tell me how I’m going to manage.”

“I can keep sewing for the same women; I’ll work more, I’ll stay awake all night if I have to. We’ll split what I earn between the two of us . . . ”

“And how much is that? How much do you think you can earn making tatty old clothes for the neighbors? A few coins here and there? Have you already forgotten how much you owe in Tangiers? Are you planning to live in this lousy little room for the rest of your life?” The words tumbled out of her mouth in a flustered, hissing torrent. “Look, honey, with those hands of yours you’ve got an enormous treasure, and it’s a terrible sin not to make the most of it as God wants you to. I know life has given you some harsh blows, that your fiancé behaved very badly toward you, that you’re in a city where you don’t want to be, far from your country and your family, but this is what there is, what’s happened has happened and time never goes backward. You’ve got to press ahead, Sira. You’ve got to be brave, take risks, fight for yourself. With the misadventures you’ve been through, no nice young gentleman is about to come knocking on your door to set you up in an apartment. What’s more, after your experience, I don’t think you’re going to want to depend on a man for quite some time, either. You’re very young, and at your age you can still hope to make a new life for yourself. Something better than letting your best years shrivel away sewing hems and sighing over what you’ve lost.”

“But this thing with the guns, Candelaria, selling the guns . . . ,” I murmured fearfully.

“That’s what there is, child; that’s what we’ve got, and I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I mean to get as much as I can from them. You think I wouldn’t prefer that it was something cleaner, that instead of pistols they’d left me a cargo of Swiss watches or silk stockings? Of course I would. But it just so happens that the only things we’ve got are weapons, and it just so happens that we’re at war, and it just so happens that there are people who might be interested in buying them.”

“But what if they catch you?” I asked again uneasily.

“And there she goes again! Well, if they pick me up, we pray to Christ of Medinaceli that Don Claudio has a little pity in him, we swallow a spell in the clink, and that’s all there is to it. I should remind you that you only have eleven months left to pay your debt, and at the rate you’re going you won’t be able to cover it in twenty years sewing for the women on the streets. So however honorable you may want to be, the way you’re insisting on going about things, not even a guardian angel will be able to keep you out of prison. Or from ending up spreading your legs in some run-of-the-mill brothel giving soldiers just back from the front a little release.”

“I don’t know, Candelaria, I don’t know. It scares me so much . . .”

“You know, I get the shits, too, thinking of death, even though you may think I’m made of stone. Doing my usual little deals isn’t the same thing as trying to put a dozen and a half revolvers on the market during wartime. But we have no other way out, child.”

“How would you do it?”

“Don’t you worry about that, I’ll track down my contacts. I don’t think it’ll take more than a few days to shift the merchandise. And then we’ll find a place in the best part of Tetouan, we’ll set everything up, and you’ll get started.”

“What do you mean, ‘you’ll get started’? What about you? Aren’t you going to be in the workshop with me?”

She laughed silently and shook her head.

“No, child, no I won’t. I’ll be in charge of getting you the money to pay the first few months’ rent and buy what you need. Then, when everything’s ready, you’ll get to work and I’ll stay here, in my house, waiting for the end of the month when we divide up the profits. What’s more, it’s better if people don’t associate you with me: I’ve hardly got the best reputation, and I don’t belong to the same class as the ladies we need as customers. So I’ll take charge of providing the initial money, and you provide the hands. Then we share. That’s what’s called an investment.”

A slight scent of Pitman Academies and Ramiro’s plans suddenly invaded the darkness in the room, and I was about to travel back to an earlier phase in my life that I had no wish to relive. I banished the feeling with invisible slaps and returned to reality in search of more clarification.

“What if I don’t earn anything? If I can’t get the customers?”

“Well, then we’re in a mess. But don’t be too pessimistic. There’s no need to go expecting the worst: we’ve got to be positive and just face up to the matter. No one is going to come along and sort out your life or mine what with all the miseries we have behind us, so we either struggle for ourselves or we won’t be left with any choice but to fight hunger off with our fists.”

“But I gave the commissioner my word that I wouldn’t get into any trouble.”

Candelaria had to struggle not to laugh.

“And my Francisco promised me—in front of the village priest—that he’d respect me till the end of his days, and the son of a bitch beat me more than a rug, damn him. It’s hard to believe, girl, just how innocent you still are after all the blows luck has given you lately. Think about yourself, Sira, think about yourself and forget everything else, because in these bad times, it’s a case of eat or be eaten. What’s more, things aren’t really as serious as all that: we’re not going to shoot anyone, we’re just going to move some merchandise we have left over, and as they say, if it’s a gift from God, then Saint Peter should bless it. If everything works out well, Don Claudio will see your business all set up, nice and clean and shiny, and if he ever asks you where you got the cash, you tell him I lent it to you out of my savings, and if he doesn’t believe you or he doesn’t like the idea, he should have left you in the hospital in the care of the Sisters of Charity instead of bringing you to my place. He’s always tied up with a heap of problems and never wants any trouble, so if we give him everything without making any noise, he won’t bother with investigations. I’m telling you, I know him well; we’ve been butting heads for years now. You don’t have to worry about him.”

Despite her bravado and her peculiar philosophy of life, I knew that Candelaria was right. The more times we went around and around the subject, however much we turned it upside down and inside out, looked at it front and back, this pitiful plan was quite simply a reasonable solution to remedy the miseries of two poor women, alone and rootless, who in rough times were dragging heavy pasts behind them. Propriety and honor were lovely concepts, but they didn’t give you food to eat, or pay your debts, or take away your cold on winter nights. Moral principles and irreproachable behavior were for another kind of creature, not for an unhappy pair with battered souls.

Candelaria interpreted my silence as a proof of assent. “Well then? I start moving the goods tomorrow?”

I felt myself dancing blindly on the edge of a precipice. In the distance, the radio waves were still broadcasting General Queipo’s incendiary speech from Seville between bits of interference. I sighed deeply. My voice sounded, at last, low and sure. Or almost.

“Let’s do it.”

My partner-to-be, satisfied, smiled and gave me a tender pinch on the cheek. Then the wily old survivor got ready to leave, rearranging her housecoat and hoisting her large frame up over the shabby old cloth slippers that had probably been with her for half her lifetime. Candelaria the Matutera, the opportunist, quarrelsome, shameless, and charming, was already at the door on her way out to the hallway when, still speaking in a half whisper, I threw out my last question. In reality, it hardly had anything to do with what we’d been talking about that night, but I felt a certain curiosity to know what her reply would be.

“Candelaria, whose side are you on in this war?”

She turned, surprised, but didn’t hesitate a second before replying in a potent whisper.

“Me? I’m a diehard supporter of whichever side wins, my angel.”