"The Time In Between"

Now this is a novel that would have benefited from abridgement. The historical period was interesting, so are the real historical figures Maria Duenas incorporated into the story, but the narrator did her best to kill the listerner's interest.

• my mother, when I was eight or nine, ventured to offer me a few crumbs of information. That he had another family, that it was impossible for him to live with us. I swallowed up those details with the same haste and scant appetite with which I polished off the last spoonfuls of the Lenten broth before me
• Months passed as if turning on a Ferris wheel: autumns spent making coats in fine fabrics and between-season dresses, springs sewing flighty dresses destined for long, faraway Cantabrian holidays, the beaches at La Concha or El Sardinero.
• In the meantime, unable to allow himself costly diversions, and yet utterly devoted to making me happy, Ignacio feted me with the humble possibilities that his extremely meager pocket would allow: a cardboard box filled with silkworms and mulberry leaves, cones of roasted chestnuts, and promises of eternal love on the grass under the viaduct.
• The Second Republic had instilled a sense of apprehension in the comfortable prosperity surrounding our customers. Madrid was turbulent and frantic, the political tension permeating every street corner. The good families extended their northern summer holidays indefinitely, seeking to remain on the fringes of the unsettled, rebellious capital where the Mundo Obrero was declaimed loudly in the squares while the shirtless proletariat from the outskirts made their way, without retreat, into the Puerta del Sol.
• Although the new breezes that swept in with the Republic carried on them the fashion for civil weddings, my mother—whose soul housed simultaneously, and with no contradiction, her condition as single mother, an iron Catholic spirit, and a nostalgic loyalty to the deposed monarchy—encouraged us to celebrate a religious wedding in the neighboring church of San Andrés. Ignacio and I agreed; how could we not, without toppling that hierarchy of order in which he submitted to all my desires and I deferred to my mother’s without argument.
• His brand-new post in administration had opened his eyes to a new world: that of the administration of the Republic, an area where there existed professional destinies for women that lay beyond the stove, the wash house, and drudgery; through which the female sex could beat a path, elbow to elbow with men, in the same conditions and with their sights set on the same dreams. The first women were already sitting as deputies in the parliament; the equality of the sexes in public life was proclaimed. There had been recognition of our legal status, our right to work, and universal suffrage.
• I was aware that my daring would bring down all that comfortable domesticity. I knew that it would topple the scaffolding of more lives than just my own, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. My decision was firm as a post: there would be no wedding and no civil service exams; I wouldn’t learn to type on the little table
• “You’ve got a smudge; let me wipe it,” he said. <> And then he brought his hand to my face and opened it over the contour of my jaw, adjusting it to my bones as though this were the mold from which I had once been formed. Then he put his thumb in the place where the smudge supposedly was, close to where my lips met. He caressed me smoothly, slowly.
• When our relationship began, I was twenty-two years old, he was twenty-four: we both knew perfectly well who we were, where we were, and what we were up against. There was no deception on his part, nor any more than the appropriate illusions on mine.
• the revered son of Primo de Rivera, who has brainwashed all the young gentlemen of Madrid with his romantic nonsense about reaffirming the national spirit
• But either the times aren’t on my side or I’m very wrong about something because in the end it’s all turned its back on me, and life seems to be suddenly spitting its vengeance at me.
• That Polish baron whose name now escapes me, who boasted of his supposed fortune to the four winds and had only a walking stick with a silver handle and two shirts with collars that had gradually frayed over the passing years. Isaac Springer, the Austrian Jew with his gold cigarette case. The Croatian couple, the Jovovics, both of them so beautiful, so alike and so ambiguous that at times they passed for lovers and at others for siblings.
• When those days were over, when my eyes dried because I no longer had any capacity for crying, memories began to return to my bed like a precisely ordered procession. I could almost see them harassing me, lining up to come in through the door at the end of that big, light-filled hospital ward. Memories that were alive and autonomous, big and small, that approached, single file, suddenly scaling the mattress and invading my body through an ear, or under my fingernails, or through the pores of my skin, until they entered my brain and battered at it without the slightest pity, with images and moments that my will had wanted never again to recall.
• It was here that the insurrection arose; it was from here, from Morocco, that General Franco appeared and the troop movements began. There were bombardments in the first few days; the Republic’s air force attacked the High Commission in response to the uprising, but through bad luck they missed their target and one of the Fokkers caused quite a few civilian injuries, the death of several Moorish children, and the destruction of a mosque, which was considered by the Muslims to have been an attack on them, and they automatically took the side of the rebels.
• Then it was as though hunting season had opened. The three men on one side and the three women on the other raised their voices almost as one, a chicken coop in which no one was listening to anyone and everyone started yelling, letting insults and outrages fly from their mouths. Vicious commie, sanctimonious old cow, son of Lucifer, bitter old hag, atheist, degenerate, and dozens of other epithets shot through the air in a crossfire of angry shouts.
• 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.
• “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.
• 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,
• 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.
• “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.”
• 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.
• In the area where vendors’ stands with honey sweets, round flatbreads, mountains of spices, and bunches of basil might have helped me to orient myself, I found only locked doors and bolted shutters. Time seemed to have stopped, everything seemed like an empty stage set without the voices of the merchants and the buyers, without the trains of donkeys laden with panniers
• In the previous few months I’d slammed the door on my entire yesterday; I’d stopped being a humble dressmaker and transformed myself successively into a whole heap of different women. A civil-service candidate, heiress of a major industrialist, globe-trotting lover to a scoundrel, hopeful aspirant to run an Argentine company, frustrated mother of an unborn child, a woman suspected of fraud and theft in debt up to her eyebrows, and a gunrunner camouflaged as an innocent local woman.
• She took it all on, bringing to it her ingenuity as well as the banknotes, ready to sacrifice her very eyelashes to this business whose fortunes remained uncertain.
• I mentally took apart the outfits from the magazines, and when I couldn’t get any more out of the pictures I sharpened my imagination and intuited the things I wasn’t able to see. I marked up the materials with a bit of soap and cut pieces with as much fear as precision. I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. I tacked, overcast, attached, took apart, and reconstructed on a mannequin until the result looked satisfactory.
• Tired of carrying around such heavy guilt, burdened down like those unfortunate Moorish women I used to see walking along together slowly, bent over, wrapped in their haiks and dragging their feet, carrying packages and bundles of firewood on their backs, or bunches of dates, little kids, buckets of clay, and sacks of lime. I was fed up with feeling afraid, humiliated; fed up with living such a sad life in that strange land. Tired, drained, exhausted, and yet ready to fight my way out of my ruin tooth and nail.
• As the holiday approached, gusts of sadness began their invasion, through chinks in the windows and spaces under the doors, until the entire workshop was permeated with melancholy.
• he went back over to his house and returned at once with several pieces of marble-colored English paper and a Waterman fountain pen from which purple ink flowed out to create exquisite calligraphy. And he displayed all his ingenuity (which was considerable) and all his artistic talent (likewise considerable) and in just half an hour, between thunderclaps, and in his pajamas, he had not only drawn up the most elegant invoice that any European dressmaker in North Africa could ever have imagined, but he had also given my business a name. Chez Sirah had been born.
• No sooner had his father died than the beloved son stopped being that overnight: while he was still growing, and without anyone outside suspecting a thing, he became the focus of affection and treats in public and the object of all his mother’s furies and frustrations in private.
• Stamping forms in the General Supplies Office of the Municipal Services Division: the perfect job to beat down the most brilliant kind of creativity and keep it chained like a dog—now I’m offering you a slice of succulent meat, now I’m kicking you hard enough to burst your belly.
• From then on, the bottle of anisette was his great ally, his one salvation and escape route out to the third dimension of his life. And never again was he just a model son when out in the public eye and a disgusting little rag in private; from then on he also became an uninhibited night walker, a fugitive in search of the oxygen he was lacking at home.
• I discovered that Spain had been exercising its protectorate over Morocco since 1912, a year after signing the Treaty of Algeciras with France, according to which—as often happens with poor relations—the Spanish nation had been left with the worst part of the country. The less prosperous part, the least desirable. The African cutlet, they called it.
• Spain had in material terms benefited very little from Morocco: there were barely any resources to be exploited. In human terms, however, they had obtained something important for one of the two sides in their civil strife: thousands of soldiers from the local Moroccan forces who were now fighting like wild beasts on the other side of the Strait for the distant cause of the rebel army under Franco.
• The person who created the design, my dear ignoramus, was Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, son of the great Mariano Fortuny, who was probably the best painter of the nineteenth century after Goya. He was an incredible artist, closely linked to Morocco, as a matter of fact. He came over during the African war and was stunned by the light and exoticism of this place. He took it upon himself to give it shape in many of his paintings; one of his best known, in fact, is The Battle of Tetouan.
• “We’re going to try and make an emergency Delphos—do you know what I’m talking about?”
• Your client, sweetheart, is the lover of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Luis Beigbeder y Atienza, Spain’s high commissioner in Morocco and governor general of the Spanish enclaves. The most important military and administrative post in the whole Protectorate, to be quite clear.”... “Let my mother live to eighty fit as a fiddle if I’m lying to you.
• I can’t bear the idea that your war should end in favor of the Nationalist army and that Germany should end up being the great ally of the Spanish people, and Great Britain, meanwhile, an enemy power. And I’m going to do it for two reasons. The first, simple sentimental patriotism: because I want the country of the man I love to be friends with my own. However, the second reason is a much more pragmatic, objective one: we English don’t trust the Nazis, and things are turning ugly.
• “There are people like that. They’re called pimpernels. Lance is a rather singular individual, a sort of crusader for lost causes. According to him, there’s nothing political about what he’s doing; the concerns that move him are purely humanitarian. Most likely he’d have done the same for Republicans if he’d found himself in the Nationalist zone... As you Spaniards say, ‘Without praying to either God or the Devil,’ he opened the embassy as a refuge for British citizens—barely more than three hundred of them at that time, as I’ve heard.
• Quick bursts of conflicting thoughts rushed through my mind: some of them advised me to refuse, insisting that this was a pointless extravagance; others reminded me of the old saying I’d so often heard from my mother’s lips, about how being well bred is about knowing how to be thankful.
• I looked. But before fixing my eyes on the cracked mirror I tried quickly to make out what else he was holding in his so-slender fingers. <> “Yes, seems to be broken,” I murmured, delicately running my index finger over the splintered surface that he still held in his hands. My just-painted nails were reflected in it a hundred times.
• But then I got worse, so much so that the medical tests showed that my intestine had shrunk till it was almost totally constricted. They ruled out surgery and decided that only with absolute rest might I manage to get even a tiny bit better. That way, they thought, the organisms that were invading me wouldn’t continue advancing through the rest of my body. Do you know what that first period of rest was like?”... “Six months tied to a board, with leather straps holding me still, over my shoulders and my thighs. Six whole months, with its days, its nights.”
• Now everything fitted much better into the mental map that I’d built up to understand Rosalinda. The pieces began to link to one another; they were no longer fragments of a life that were independent and hard to connect. Everything now began to make sense. I wished with all my strength that things would turn out well for her: now that I finally knew her life hadn’t all been a bed of roses, I thought her more deserving of a happy fate.
• Rosalinda explained to me. “And Juan Luis thinks Peter is a snob, a ridiculous, incomprehensible snob. So they are like two parallel lines: they can never come into conflict because they’ll never find a point where they meet. The only difference being—for me—that as a man Peter doesn’t even come up to Juan Luis’s heel.” <> “And no one has told your husband about the two of you?”
• He would eat directly from the serving dishes with three fingers, in the Moorish fashion, and wouldn’t stop repeating to anyone who’d listen that we were all brothers, the Moroccans and the Spaniards. Sometimes, when he was finally alone after fighting his way through a thousand and one battles over the course of his day, listening to the squeaking of the trams that made their way down dirty streets crammed full of people, he thought he could hear the rhythm of the Moorish reed pipes, flutes, and tambourines. On the greyest mornings he even thought that mingled with the foul vapors emanating from the sewers his nose could detect the scent of orange blossoms, jasmine, and mint. Then he could see himself once again walking between the whitewashed walls of the Tetouani medina, under the light filtering through the shadow of the creepers, amid the sound of the water spouting from the fountains and the wind stirring the cane fields. <> He clung to nostalgia as a shipwrecked man clings to a piece of timber in the middle of a stormy ocean, but like the shadow of a scythe the acid tongue of Serrano was never far away, ready to rip him out of his dream.
• 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.
• those factories that haven’t closed down are focusing on fulfilling the basic needs of the population or developing materials destined for the war. They use the cotton to make uniforms; the linen, bandages; any sort of fabric has a function that’s a higher priority than fashion. You’ll be able to overcome this problem by bringing fabrics from Tangiers.
• For a few seconds my mind went back to my early months in Tetouan, to the night Candelaria showed me the pistols and proposed that we sell them to open the atelier. The feeling of panic was just the same, and the scenario was similar: two women hidden away in a dark little room, one laying out a dangerous, fully thought out plan, and the other, terrified, refusing to accept it.
• I went out, leaving behind someone else’s nightdress and the dent of my body in the sheets. My fear didn’t want to be left behind, so it came with me.
• “Join them, child. Help them, collaborate. Our poor Spain can’t get into another war, it hasn’t the strength left.” <> “But, Mother . . .”
• Again following the table, I transcribed the seven letters: —.——.——. .. . .—. . . .
  “Excellent. Now look at it closely. Does it remind you of anything? Does it look at all familiar?”
  I looked at what I’d written. I smiled. Of course it looked familiar. How was I not going to recognize something I’d spent my whole life doing?
  “It’s like stitches,” I said quietly.
• Do you know what became of your neighbors and your friends during all these years?” <> His questions echoed like heavy blows to my conscience, like a fistful of salt thrown deliberately into my open eyes. I had no answer to that: I didn’t know anything because I’d chosen not to know...  I’d been an excellent and obedient agent in the service of British intelligence. Scrupulously obedient. Disgustingly obedient. I’d followed the instructions they’d given me to the letter: I hadn’t returned to my neighborhood or set foot on the paving stones of my past.
• Confidence, mastery over myself: that’s what my image emanated, as though I were a fish, and that opulence, water; as though that sumptuous place were my natural milieu.
• Looking back now, however, that Falange seems almost a blessing. At least they shared some romantic ideals and some principles that were rather utopian but still moderately reasonable. Its members were a gang of spoiled brats, dreamers, mostly quite idle, but mercifully they didn’t have much to do with today’s opportunists, who chant out the ‘Cara al sol’ anthem with their arms raised in salute and the veins in their neck throbbing, invoking the name of Primo de Rivera as though he were the Sacred Host
• It was thanks to him that I learned that even though the newspapers never reported it, the country was going through a constant governmental crisis, in which rumors of dismissals and resignations, ministerial changeovers, rivalries, and conspiracies multiplied like the loaves and fishes.
• In the pharmacies, cafés, and barbershops people passed around satirical magazines and books of crosswords that were gifts from the Germans; the jokes and stories were mixed up with accounts of victorious military operations, and the correct solution to all the puzzles was always politically inclined, and in favor of the Nazi cause.
• And when I’d left the meeting with Hillgarth I felt a burst of hostility toward him and his people. They’d entangled me in a strange, sinister adventure that was supposedly in my country’s interests, but as the months passed nothing appeared to straighten itself out, and the fear that Spain would enter the war continued to hang in the air on every street corner. All the same, I kept to his conditions without venturing from the rules—they’d forced me to become selfish and insensitive, to stick to an unreal side of Madrid and be disloyal to my people and my past.
• I didn’t dare to ask her what they were, these new plans that followed his being hurled into the pit with those who’d been stripped of glory. The ex-minister who was so friendly toward the English had very little clout in the New Spain that was so cozy with the Axis;
• “Who are you with, Marcus?” <> On the back seat, invisible but so close, we were joined by a third passenger in the car: suspicion.
• What happened in Spain after the European war, as well as the traces of many people who have passed through this account—Beigbeder, Rosalinda Fox, Serrano Suñer, and others—can be found in history books and archives, and in the memories of older generations... What happened after the war to Marcus and me and to those in our immediate circle, however, was never recorded. Our destinies might have gone in any direction, as we succeeded in remaining unnoticed, forever on the reverse side of history, crisscrossed by stitches, invisible lives from the time in between.