The Time in Between: A Novel (25 page)

“But bit by bit it all passes, you’ll see. I’m sure your mother is fine, that tonight she’ll be having dinner with her neighbors, and that even though she’s remembering you and missing you, she’ll be glad to know that at least you have the luck of being outside Madrid, far away from the war.”

Perhaps Candelaria was right and my absence was more of a consolation to my mother than a sorrow. Maybe she thought I was still with Ramiro in Tangiers. She might have imagined us spending the evening having dinner in some stunning hotel, surrounded by unconcerned foreigners who danced between one course and the next, far from the suffering on the other side of the Strait. Although I’d tried to keep her informed by letter, everyone knew that the post from Morocco didn’t get to Madrid, so those messages had probably never even left Tetouan.

“You’re right,” I murmured, barely parting my lips. I was still holding the bottles of wine, looking carefully at the table, unable to find a place to put them. And I wasn’t brave enough to look Candelaria in the eye either, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to hold back my tears.

“I certainly am, child, don’t think about it anymore. However hard absence may be, knowing your daughter is far from the bombs
and machine guns is a good reason to be glad. So come on—be happy, be happy!” she shouted, grabbing one of the bottles from my hand. “You’ll see, we’ll be livening up very soon, dear heart.” She opened it and raised it up. “To your mother, who gave you life,” she said. Before I had a chance to reply she had taken a long swallow of sparkling wine. “Now you,” she commanded, after wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I didn’t have the least desire to drink, but I obeyed. It was to Dolores’s health. Anything for her.

We started dinner, but in spite of Candelaria’s efforts to keep spirits merry, the rest of us didn’t talk much. No one was even in the mood for an argument. The schoolmaster coughed till he looked like his sternum was going to split, and the shriveled-up sisters, even more shriveled up than usual, shed tears. The fat mother sighed, sniffed. The wine went to her Paquito’s head, he started talking nonsense, the telegraph man answered him back, and finally we laughed. Then Candelaria got up and raised her cracked glass to everyone. To those present, those absent, each and every one. We hugged, we cried, and for one night there was only one faction, the one made up of our sorry troupe.

The first months of the new year were calm and filled with nonstop work. During that time my neighbor Félix Aranda became an everyday presence. Besides the proximity of our homes, I was also brought closer to him in another dimension that couldn’t be gauged spatially. His somewhat peculiar behavior and my repeated need for assistance helped to establish a friendship between us at late hours of the night that would last for decades, through many phases of our lives. After those first sketches that solved my problem with the tennis player’s attire, there would be more occasions when Doña Encarna’s son offered a hand to help me leap gracefully over apparently insurmountable obstacles. Unlike the case of the Schiaparelli trouser-skirt, the second stumbling block that led me to seek another favor from him shortly after the first wasn’t prompted by artistic necessity, but by my ignorance in matters of money. It had all begun some time earlier with a small inconvenience that wouldn’t have posed any problem for anyone with a
somewhat privileged education. However, the few years I had attended the modest school in my Madrid neighborhood hadn’t amounted to much. Which was why, at eleven o’clock on the night before my workshop’s first invoice was due to be delivered to the client, I had found myself hopelessly vexed by my inability to put in writing a description and price that corresponded to the work I had done.

It was in November. Over the course of the afternoon the sky had been turning dark grey, and when night fell it began to rain heavily, the prelude to a storm on its way over from the nearby Mediterranean: one of those storms that uprooted trees, knocked down electric wires, and made people huddle under their covers muttering a feverish torrent of litanies to Saint Barbara. Just a couple of hours before the weather changed, Jamila had taken the first orders, just completed, over to Frau Heinz’s house. My first five pieces of work—two for evening, two for daytime, and one for tennis—had been taken down from their hangers in the workshop, where they had been kept awaiting their final ironing. Then they had been packed up in their canvas bags and conveyed in three successive trips to their destination. Jamila’s return from the last trip brought with it a request.

“Frau Heinz ask that Jamila bring tomorrow morning bill in German marks.”

And in case the message hadn’t been absolutely clear, she handed me an envelope bearing a card with the message written on it. I sat down to think about how the hell I was going to make up an invoice, and for the first time my great ally, memory, refused to get me off the hook. Right through the setting up of the business and the creation of the first items of clothing, the designs I still treasured from the world of Doña Manuela had served as a resource I could draw on. The images I had memorized, the skills I’d learned, the mechanical movements and actions so often repeated had up till that moment furnished me with the inspiration to keep going and make a success of it. I knew down to the last detail how a good dressmaker’s studio worked, how to take measurements, cut the patterns, pleat skirts, affix sleeves, and attach lapels, but however hard I searched my mental catalog of techniques
and observations, I found nothing that would serve as a reference point for how to create an invoice. I had handled so many of them when I worked for Doña Manuela in Madrid, and it had been my job to deliver them to the homes of our clients; in some cases I’d even returned with the payment in my pocket. Yet I had never stopped to open one of those envelopes and examine its contents.

I considered resorting as usual to Candelaria, but looking out over the balcony I could see how dark it was already, with the imperious wind driving an ever denser rain as relentless flashes of lightning approached from the sea. In consideration of this scenario, the walk over to the boardinghouse seemed to be the sheerest path to hell. So I decided to sort it out on my own: I got hold of a pencil and some paper and sat down at the kitchen table, all ready to begin the task. An hour and a half later and I was still there, with countless scraps of crumpled-up paper surrounding me as I sharpened the pencil with a knife for the fifth time, but still with no idea how many German marks would be equivalent to the two hundred and seventy-five pesetas I had planned on charging her. And right then, in the middle of the night, something suddenly clattered hard against the windowpane. I leapt to my feet so fast that I knocked over the chair. I saw immediately that there was light in the kitchen opposite, and in spite of the rain, and in spite of the time, I could see in it the chubby figure of my neighbor Félix, with his glasses, his sparse, curling hair, and his arm raised, ready to throw a second fistful of almonds. I opened the window to ask him angrily for an explanation for such incomprehensible behavior, but before I’d had the chance to say a word his voice crossed the gap between us, filtered through the thick splattering of the rain on the tiles of the building’s central courtyard. The content of his message, however, came over loud and clear.

“I need refuge. I don’t like thunderstorms.”

I could have asked him if he was crazy. I could have informed him that he’d given me a terrible fright, shouted at him that he was an idiot, and closed the window without another word. But I did none of these things, because at that very moment a little light came on
in my brain: perhaps this bizarre request could now be turned to my favor.

“I’ll let you come over if you help me out,” I said, addressing him informally without even thinking about it.

“Open the door, I’ll be right over.”

Needless to say, my neighbor knew that the exchange for two hundred and seventy-five pesetas was twelve Reichsmarks fifty. Just as he knew very well that a presentable invoice couldn’t be drawn up on a cheap little sheet of paper with a worn old pencil, so 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.

Félix Aranda was an unusual man. Amusing, imaginative, and cultured, yes. And also curious, and a busybody. And a bit eccentric and somewhat intrusive, too. The nighttime transit between his apartment and mine became a familiar ritual. Not exactly daily, but frequently. Sometimes we’d go three or four days without seeing each other, sometimes he’d come over five nights in a week. Or six. Or even seven. The regularity of our meetings just depended on something quite apart from us: on how drunk his mother was. What a strange relationship, what a dismal familial existence was being lived out behind the door opposite. Since the death of their father and husband years earlier, Félix and Doña Encarna had traveled through life together, to all appearances utterly harmonious. Every evening between six and seven they would take a walk together; they would attend masses and novenas together, stock up on medicine at the Benatar pharmacy, greet their acquaintances courteously, and have tea and pastries at La Campana. He, always offering her his arm, protecting her affectionately, walking at her pace: careful there, Mama, don’t trip, this way, Mama, careful, careful. She—proud of her child—boasting of his talents left and right:
my Félix says, my Félix does, my Félix thinks, oh, my Félix, what would I do without him?

The solicitous chick and the clucking hen were transformed, however, into a couple of monsters when they entered their most private territory. No sooner had they crossed the threshold of their home than the old lady wrapped herself in the uniform of a tyrant and took out her invisible whip to inflict the utmost humiliation on her son. Scratch my leg, Félix, my calf itches; not there, higher; you’re so useless, child, how could I have given birth to an offspring like you? Put the tablecloth on properly, I can see it’s not straight; not like that, that’s even worse; put it back the way it was, you ruin everything you touch, little piece of shit, why couldn’t I have left you in the foundling hospital when you were born? Look in my mouth and see if my pyorrhea has gotten any worse, get out the Agua de Carmen that relieves my flatulence, rub my back with camphorated alcohol, file down this callus, cut my toenails, be careful, you fat lump of lard, you’ll have my toe off; bring over the handkerchief so I can cough up some phlegm, bring me a Sor Virginia patch for my lumbago; wash my hair and put my curlers in, more carefully, idiot, you’re going to make me bald . . .

That was how Félix grew up, with a double life whose two sides were as disparate as they were pitiful. 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. As though with the slash of a scythe, all his dreams were hacked down to the ground: leaving Tetouan to study fine art in Seville or Madrid, working out his confused sexuality and meeting other people like him, beings with unconventional spirits yearning to fly free. Instead he found himself facing the prospect of living permanently under the black wing of Doña Encarna. He completed his bachelor’s with the Marianists at the Colegio del Pilar with brilliant qualifications that were of no use to him because his mother had taken advantage of her position as a suffering widow to get him an administrative position that was colored rat grey. 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.

He bore the blows with a monklike patience. And so, over the years, they maintained their imbalance unchanged, her tyrannizing him, and him docile, bearing up, tolerating. It was hard to know what it was that Félix’s mother was looking for in him, why she treated him like that, what she wanted from her son apart from what he would always have been ready to give. Love, respect, compassion? No, she had these without having to make the least effort. He wasn’t stingy with his affections—far from it, dear old Félix. Doña Encarna wanted something more. Devotion, unconditional availability, attention to her most ludicrous whims. Submissiveness, submission. Precisely what her husband had demanded of her in life. I assumed this was why she had gotten rid of him. Félix never told me openly, but like the boy in the fairy tale leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him, he left me clues along the way. All I did was follow them to reach my conclusion. The late Don Nicasio had probably been killed by his wife just as one dark night Félix would perhaps end up disposing of his mother.

It would be hard to say how long he would have been able to bear that wretched daily life had a solution not come to him in the most unexpected way. Somebody grateful for a well-done piece of work; a sausage and a couple of bottles of El Mono anisette as a gift; let’s try it, Mama, go on, just a little glass, just wet your whistle. But it wasn’t only Doña Encarna’s lips that enjoyed the sickly sweet taste of the liqueur, but also her tongue, and her palate, and her throat, and her intestinal tract, and from there the fumes went to her head, and that same alcoholic night Félix found himself faced with a way out. 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.