The Time in Between: A Novel (10 page)

A
gentle voice tried to wake me, and with a massive effort I managed to half open my eyes. Beside me I could make out two figures—blurry at first, then clearer. One of them was that of a man whose face, though vague, turned out to be faintly familiar. The other silhouette belonged to a nun in an impeccable white headdress. I tried to get my bearings and could only see high ceilings above me, beds alongside, the smell of medicine and sunlight coming in through the windows in torrents. Then I realized I was in a hospital. The first words I murmured are still in my memory.

“I want to go back home.”

“And where is your home, my child?”

“In Madrid.”

It seemed to me that the figures exchanged a quick glance. The nun took my hand and squeezed it gently.

“I think right now that won’t be possible.”

“Why not?” I asked.

It was the man who answered: “Traffic in the Strait has been stopped. They’ve declared a state of war.”

I couldn’t understand what that meant, because no sooner did the words enter my ears than I fell back down into a well of weakness and
infinite sleepiness from which it took me days to rouse myself. When I did, I remained hospitalized for some time. Those weeks I spent immobilized in the Tetouan Hospital Civil served to put my feelings into something like order and to allow me to weigh up the extent of what the recent months had entailed. But that was at the end, in the final days. In the early days, in those mornings and afternoons, in the small hours, at the times when others had visitors but I never did, when they brought me food I was unable to taste, all I did was cry. I didn’t think, didn’t consider, didn’t even remember. I just cried.

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. And then, when the tribe of memories was still arriving but their presence was becoming less noisy, something else began to invade me with a dreadful coldness, like a rash: the necessity to analyze everything, to find a cause and a reason for everything that had happened in my life during the past eight months. That phase was the worst: the most aggressive, the most tormenting. The one that hurt most. And though I cannot calculate how long it lasted, I do know with absolute certainty that what managed to put an end to it was an unexpected arrival.

Up till then, all the days had passed among women giving birth, the Sisters of Charity, and white-painted metal beds. From time to time a doctor in a smock would appear, and at certain hours of the day the families of the other residents would arrive, speaking in murmurs, cuddling the newborn babies and between sighs consoling those who—like me—had been left along the way. I was in a city where I did not know a soul: no one had ever been to see me, nor did I expect anyone
to. I wasn’t even completely clear what I was doing among that alien population: I only managed to retrieve a muddled recollection of the circumstances of my arrival. A swamp of thick uncertainty occupied the place in my memory that should have held the logical reasons that had brought me here. Over the course of those days my only companions were memories mixed with the murkiness of my thoughts, the discreet presence of the nuns, and the desire—half longing, half fearful—to return to Madrid as soon as possible.

My solitude was broken one morning quite unexpectedly. Preceded by the white, rounded figure of Sister Virtudes, there appeared the face of that man who so many days earlier had spoken a few blurry words to me about a war.

“I’ve brought you a visitor, my child,” announced the nun. I thought I could make out a slight trace of concern in her singsong tone. When the new arrival identified himself, I understood why.

“Commissioner Claudio Vázquez, ma’am,” said the stranger by way of greeting. “Or is it ‘miss’?”

He had a tanned face in which two dark, shrewd eyes shone. His hair was almost white, his bearing supple, and he wore a light-colored summer suit. In my weakened state I wasn’t able to tell whether he was an older man with the bearing of a younger man or a younger man prematurely grey. In any case, it mattered little at that moment: the more urgent thing for me was to find out what it was he wanted from me. Sister Virtudes gestured him toward a chair along a nearby wall; swiftly he drew it closer to the right side of my bed and sat down, placing his hat at his feet. With a smile as kind as it was firm he gestured to the sister that he’d rather she leave.

The light was coming in in torrents through the broad windows of the hospital pavilion. Beyond them, the wind was lightly rustling the garden’s palm and eucalyptus trees beneath a dazzling blue sky, testimony to a magnificent summer day for anyone who didn’t have to spend it lying in a hospital bed in the company of a police commissioner. With their impeccable white sheets stretched taut, the two beds on either side of me, like almost all the others, were unoccupied. When
the sister left, disguising her vexation at not being able to witness the meeting, the commissioner and I were left in the pavilion with only the company of two or three distant bedridden patients and a young nun silently scrubbing the floor at the far end. I was scarcely sitting up, with the sheet covering me up to my chest, allowing only two increasingly weakened bare arms, my bony shoulders, and my head to emerge. My hair was pulled back into a dark plait to one side of my face, which was thin and ashen, drained by my collapse.

“The sister told me you’re already somewhat recovered, so we’ve got to talk, all right?”

I assented with just a nod of the head, unable even to guess what that man wanted with me; as far as I knew, being torn apart and confused were not against the law. Then the commissioner drew a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and consulted some notes. He must have been going over them recently because he didn’t have to riffle through pages to find them; he simply directed his gaze to the page in front of him and there they were.

“Well then, I’ll begin by asking you some questions; just answer with a simple yes or no. You are Sira Quiroga Martín, born in Madrid on June eighth, 1911, correct?”

His tone was courteous, which didn’t mean it was not direct and inquisitive. A certain deference to my condition lessened the professional tone of the meeting, but it didn’t hide it completely. I corroborated the accuracy of my personal details with a nod.

“And you arrived in Tetouan this past July fifteenth, coming from Tangiers.”

I nodded again.

“In Tangiers you were lodged from March twenty-third at the Hotel Continental.”

Another nod.

“In the company of”—he consulted his notebook—“Ramiro Arribas Querol, native of Vitoria, born October twenty-third, 1901.”

I nodded again, this time lowering my gaze. It was the first time I had heard his name after all that time had passed. Commissioner
Vázquez didn’t seem to notice that I was beginning to lose my composure, or perhaps if he did, he didn’t want me to notice it; in any case he proceeded with his interrogation, ignoring my reaction.

“And at the Hotel Continental you left an outstanding bill of three thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine French francs.”

I didn’t reply. I just turned my head to one side to avoid catching his eye.

“Look at me,” he said.

I ignored him.

“Look at me,” he repeated. His tone remained neutral: it was no more insistent the second time than the previous time, neither friendlier nor more demanding. It was, quite simply, the same. He waited patiently for a few moments until I obeyed him and looked at him. But I didn’t reply. He reformulated his question without losing his temper.

“Are you aware that at the Hotel Continental you left an outstanding bill of three thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine francs?”

“I think so,” I replied finally in a whisper. And again I drew my eyes away from his and turned my head back to one side. And I started to cry.

“Look at me,” he insisted a third time.

He waited awhile, until he realized that this time I no longer had the intention, or the strength, or the courage to face him. Then I heard him get up from his chair, walk around the foot of the bed, and approach on the other side. He sat down on the neighboring bed, on which my eyes were set, his body destroying the smoothness of the sheets, and fixed his eyes on mine.

“I’m trying to help you, ma’am. Or miss, it’s all the same to me,” he explained firmly. “You’ve gotten yourself into a tremendous bit of trouble, although I realize it’s not your own fault. I think I know how it all happened, but I need you to confirm my suspicions. If you don’t help me, I won’t be able to help you, you understand?”

With some effort I managed to say yes.

“Well then, stop crying and let’s get down to it.”

I dried my tears with the turndown of the sheet. The commissioner
gave me a brief minute. No sooner had he sensed that my crying had abated than he was conscientiously back at his task.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” I murmured.

“Look, you’ve been accused by the management of the Hotel Continental of having left a pretty sizable bill unpaid, but that’s not all. The matter, regrettably, is much more complicated. We’ve learned that there is also a charge against you from the Casa Hispano-Olivetti for fraud to the value of twenty-four thousand eight hundred and ninety pesetas.”

“But I, but . . .”

He gestured for me to stop talking. He had more to say.

“There is another charge against you for stealing jewelry from a private residence in Madrid.”

The impact of what I’d heard destroyed any capacity I had to think or answer coherently. The commissioner, aware of my confusion, tried to calm me.

“I know, I know. Calm down, don’t trouble yourself. I’ve read all the papers you were carrying in your suitcase and from them I’ve been able more or less to reconstruct what happened. I’ve found the note you were left by your husband, or your fiancé, or lover, or whatever this Arribas was, and also a certificate confirming these jewels were given to you, and a document setting out that the previous owner of these jewels really is your father.”

I didn’t remember having brought those papers with me; I didn’t know what had become of them since Ramiro had put them away, but if they were among my things it had to be because I had taken them from the hotel room myself without being aware of doing so at the moment of my departure. I sighed with some relief to learn that in them might perhaps be found the key to my redemption.

“Talk to him, please, talk to my father,” I begged. “He’s in Madrid, his name is Gonzalo Alvarado, he lives on Calle Hermosilla, number nineteen.”

“There’s no way we can track him down. Communication with Madrid is terrible. The capital is in turmoil, a lot of people are displaced: detained, fled, or leaving, or hidden, or dead. Besides, things
for you are even more complicated because the charge came from Alvarado’s own son, Enrique, I think that’s his name, your half brother, right? Yes, Enrique Alvarado,” he confirmed after checking his notes. “It seems a servant informed him a few months back that you had been in the house and had left quite changed, carrying some parcels: they suppose that the jewels were in them, they believe that Alvarado senior might have been the victim of blackmail or submitted to some kind of extortion. In short, a pretty ugly business, even if these documents do appear to exonerate you.”

Then he drew from one of the outer pockets of his jacket the papers that my father had given me when we had met months earlier.

“Luckily for you, Arribas didn’t take them with him along with the jewels and the money, perhaps because they might have been compromising for him. He ought to have destroyed them in order to protect himself, but in his rush to disappear he didn’t. You should be grateful to him, because right now that’s the only thing that’s going to save you from prison,” he observed ironically. Then immediately afterward he closed his eyes briefly, as though trying to draw his last words back in. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to offend you; I imagine that in your state you have no intention of being grateful to a man who’s treated you as he has.”

I didn’t reply to his apology, just weakly formulated another question.

“Where is he now?”

“Arribas? We don’t know for sure. Perhaps in Brazil, could be Buenos Aires. Maybe in Montevideo. He boarded a transatlantic ship under the Argentine flag, but he could have disembarked at a number of ports. It seems he was accompanied by three other individuals: a Russian, a Pole, and an Italian.”

“And you aren’t going to go after him? You aren’t going to do anything to follow his trail and arrest him?”

“I’m afraid not. We don’t have much on him, just an unpaid bill that he shares with you. Unless you want to press charges for the jewels and the money he took from you, though to tell you the truth I don’t think it would be worth it. It’s true that it was all yours, but the source
is pretty unreliable and you’re being accused of theft as well. Anyway, I think it unlikely that we’ll hear of his whereabouts again. They’re usually pretty smart, these con men, they know the ways of the world and how to disappear and reinvent themselves four days later at any spot on the globe in the most unexpected manner.”

“But we were going to start up a new life, we were going to open a business, we were just waiting for confirmation,” I babbled.

“You’re referring to the thing with the typewriters?” he asked, taking another envelope out of his pocket. “You wouldn’t have been able to do it—you didn’t have the authorization. The owners of the academies in Argentina didn’t have the least interest in expanding their business to the other side of the Atlantic, and they made this clear in April.” He saw the confusion in my face. “Arribas never told you that, did he?”