The Time in Between: A Novel (80 page)

“It will,” I said, getting up and walking toward him.

“So, have I earned my reward?”

I didn’t say anything. I just approached him, lowered myself onto his lap, and brought my mouth to his ear. My made-up face brushed against his freshly shaved skin; my lips, bright with lipstick, spilled out a whisper just half an inch from his earlobe. I noticed how he tensed when he felt my closeness.

“Yes, you’ve earned your reward. But you might find that this gift is poisoned.”

“Perhaps. If I’m to know that, I need to find out about you now. When I left you in Tetouan you were a young dressmaker filled with tenderness and innocence, and when I found you in Lisbon you’d been transformed into a grown woman who had become close to someone entirely inappropriate. I want to know what happened in between.”

“You’ll find out very soon. And so that you absolutely trust my story, you’re going to hear it from someone else, someone I believe you already know. Come with me.”

We walked arm in arm down the corridor. I heard my father’s powerful
voice in the distance and once again couldn’t help remembering the day I’d met him. How many turns had my life taken since then? How many times had I been nearly drowned, unable to come up for air, and how many times had I managed to get my head back above the surface? But that was all in the past now, and the days for looking back were past. It was time to concentrate on the present alone, to face it head-on in order to attend to the future.

I guessed that the other two guests were already there and that everything had gone according to plan. When we arrived at our destination we unlocked our arms, though our fingers were still entwined. Until we both saw who was waiting for us. And then I smiled. Marcus did not.

“Good evening, Mrs. Hillgarth; good evening, Captain. I’m glad to see you,” I said, interrupting their conversation.

The room filled with a dense silence. A dense, anxious silence—electrifying.

“Good evening, miss,” replied Hillgarth after a few everlasting seconds. His voice sounded as though it were coming out of a cave. A dark, cold cave, because the head of the British secret service in Spain, the man who knew everything or ought to know everything, was feeling his way blind. “Good evening, Logan,” he added after a pause. His wife, this time without the makeup from the beauty salon, was so stunned to see us together that she was unable to respond. “I thought you’d gone back to Lisbon,” continued the naval attaché, addressing Marcus. “And I wasn’t aware that you two knew each other.”

I noticed Marcus was on the verge of saying something, but I didn’t let him. His hand was still in mine and I gave it a hard squeeze and he understood. I didn’t look at him, either: I didn’t want to see whether he was as confused as the Hillgarths were, and I didn’t want to see his reaction to them sitting there in that unfamiliar living room. We’d talk about it later, when everything had calmed down. I was sure that we would have plenty of time for that.

Looking into the wife’s big, light-colored eyes, I saw only confusion. It was she who had given me the guidelines for my Portuguese mission; she was completely involved with her husband’s activities.
They were probably both struggling to connect the same dots I’d finished connecting the last time the captain and I had met. Da Silva and Lisbon, Marcus’s untimely arrival in Madrid, the same information delivered by the two of us just a few hours apart. All that, quite clearly, wasn’t merely the product of chance. How could they have missed it?

“Agent Logan and I have known each other for years, Captain, but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and we’re just finishing catching up on what we’ve each been doing,” I explained. “I know all about his situation and his responsibilities now, and since you were extremely helpful to me not so long ago, I thought you might be so kind as to assist me again by informing him about mine. And that way my father can hear about it at the same time. Oh—sorry! I’d forgotten to tell you: Gonzalo Alvarado is my father. And don’t worry: we’ll try to be seen in public together as little as we can, but you can understand that breaking off my relations with him completely won’t be possible.”

Hillgarth didn’t reply: he looked at us both again with a granite stare from under his bushy eyebrows.

Imagine Gonzalo’s bewilderment: it was probably as extreme as Marcus’s, but neither of them spoke so much as a syllable. They just waited—as did I—for Hillgarth to digest my boldness. His wife, uneasy, resorted to a cigarette, opening the case with nervous fingers. A few uncomfortable seconds passed in which the only sound was the repeated click of her lighter. Until at last the naval attaché spoke.

“If I don’t reveal it, I presume you’d do it yourself anyway . . .”

“I fear you wouldn’t leave me any other choice,” I said, giving him my best smile. A new smile—full, confident, and slightly challenging.

The silence was only broken by the clink of the ice cubes against the glass as he brought the whiskey to his mouth. His wife hid her confusion behind a thick drag on her Craven A.

“I suppose this is the price we have to pay for what you brought us from Lisbon,” he said at last.

“For that, and for all the missions to come in which I’ll work myself to the bone, I give you my word on that. My word as a dressmaker, and my word as a spy.”

__________

W
hat I received this time wasn’t the straightforward bunch of roses tied with a ribbon covered in coded dashes that Hillgarth used to send when he needed to get a message to me. Nor were they exotic flowers like the ones Manuel Da Silva had sent to me before deciding that having me killed would be better. What Marcus brought to my house that night was just a small, almost insignificant single bud that had been pulled off some rosebush that had grown up miraculously against an adobe wall that spring after a terrible winter. A tiny flower, almost scrawny. Dignified in its simplicity, without any subterfuge.

I wasn’t expecting him, and at the same time I was. He’d left my father’s house a few hours earlier, with Hillgarth; the naval attaché had invited him to accompany him, no doubt wanting to talk to him without me present. I returned home alone, not knowing when he would reappear. Or if he was going to come back at all.

“For you,” was his greeting.

I took the little rose and let him in. His tie was undone, as though he’d actively made the decision that he was going to relax. He walked
slowly into the middle of the living room; it was as though with each step he was calculating the words he had to say to string together a thought. Finally he turned and waited for me to approach.

“You know what we’ve got ahead of us, don’t you?”

I did know. Of course I knew. Our lives moved in swamps of murky waters, in a jungle of lies and furtive creatures with teeth that could cut like glass. An undercover love in a time of hatred, privations, and betrayal, that’s what we were facing.

“Yes, I do know what we have ahead of us.”

“It won’t be easy,” he added.

“Nothing’s ever easy,” I added.

“It could be very hard.”

“Perhaps.”

“And dangerous.”

“That, too.”

Outwitting traps, overcoming risks and setbacks. Without any plans, in the shadows; that was how we’d have to live. Combining willingness and daring. With integrity, courage, and the realization that we were fighting for a common cause.

We looked hard at each other and my memory of the African land where it had all begun flooded back to me. His world and my world—so far away then, and now so close—had locked together at last. Then he embraced me, and in the tenderness and heat of our closeness I felt with absolute certainty that this was another mission at which we would not fail.

   •   •   •   

And that is my story, or at least that’s how I remember it, perhaps varnished over with the sheen that decades and nostalgia give to things. 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. Their comings and goings, their glories and miseries were objective facts that
in their day filled newspapers and fed the salons and the clusters of people gossiping on street corners.

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.

__________

T
he conventions of the academic life to which I have been bound for more than twenty years demand that writers recognize their sources in an ordered, rigorous way; this is why I’ve decided to include a list of the more significant bibliographic references I consulted. A large proportion of the resources I’ve depended on when re-creating settings, describing certain historical figures, and bringing some coherence to the plot, however, go beyond the margins of the printed page, so I want to mention them here.

In order to reconstruct the details of colonial Tetouan, I’ve made use of countless testimonials that have been gathered in the bulletins of the La Medina Association of Former Residents of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, and for these I would like to acknowledge the collaboration of its nostalgic members and the kindness of its directors Francisco Trujillo and Adolfo de Pablos. Equally useful and touching were the Moroccan recollections unearthed by my mother and my aunts Estrella Vinuesa and Paquita Moreno, as well as the countless documents provided by Luis Álvarez, who was almost as excited by this project as I was. The bibliographical reference supplied by translator Miguel Sáenz, about a curious book partly set in Tetouan, was also extremely useful; it provided the inspiration for two of the supporting characters in this story.

In my reconstruction of the complicated life journey of Juan Luis Beigbeder, I was greatly interested in the information supplied by the Moroccan historian Mohamed Ibn Azzuz, zealous custodian of his
legacy. For my introduction to him, and for welcoming me into the headquarters of the Tetouan-Asmir Association—the beautiful old Indigenous Affairs Bureau—I’d like to thank Ahmed Mgara, Abdeslam Chaachoo, and Ricardo Barceló. I would like to extend my thanks, too, to José Carlos Canalda for biographical details about Beigbeder; to José María Martínez-Val for dealing with my queries about his novel
Llegará tarde a Hendaya
, in which the then-minister appears as a character; to Domingo del Pino, who through his article opened the door for me to the memoirs of Rosalinda Powell Fox, vital to the plotline of the novel; and to Michael Brufal de Melgarejo for offering to help me follow her unclear trail in Gibraltar.

For providing me with firsthand information about Alan Hillgarth, the British Secret Services in Spain, and the Embassy cover, I’d like to acknowledge the personal kindness of Patricia Martínez de Vicente, author of
Embassy, or the Mambrú Intelligence
, and the daughter of an active participant in those clandestine operations. I’d like to extend my thanks to Professor David A. Messenger of the University of Wyoming for his article on the SOE’s activities in Spain.

Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to all those who one way or another were close to me during the process of creating this story, reading the whole or parts, encouraging, correcting, supplying wolf whistles and applause, or simply stepping from one day to the next by my side. To my parents for their unconditional support. To Manolo Castellanos, my husband, and my children Bárbara and Jaime, whose unceasing vitality has been a daily reminder of what it is that really matters. To my many siblings and their many circumstances, to my extended family, to my
in vino amicitia
friends and my dear colleagues from the Anglophile
crème
.

To Lola Gulias, from the Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency, for having been the first person to take a chance on my writing.

And very especially to my editor Raquel Gisbert, for her redoubtable professionalism, her positivity, and her energy, and for having put up with my arm-wrestling with indefatigable steadfastness and good humor.

__________

Alcaraz, Ignacio.
Entre España y Marruecos. Testimonio de una época: 1923–75
. Madrid: Catriel, 1999.

———.
Retratos en la memoria
. Madrid: Catriel, 2002.

Alpert, Michael. “Operaciones secretas inglesas en España durante la segunda guerra mundial.”
Espacio, tiempo y forma,
series V,
Historia Contemporánea
no. 15, (2002).

Armero, José Mario.
La política exterior de Franco
. Barcelona: Planeta, 1978.

Barfour, Sebastián, and Paul Preston.
España y las grandes potencias en el siglo XX
. Barcelona: Crítica, 1999.

Berdah, Jean-François. “La propaganda cultural británica en España durante la segunda guerra mundial a través de la acción del British Council: Un aspecto de las relaciones hispano-británicas 1939–46.” In
El régimen de Franco: Política y relaciones exteriores
, edited by J. Tusell. Madrid: UNED, 1993.

Cardona, Gabriel.
Franco y sus generales: La manicura del tigre
. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2001.

Caruana, Leonardo. “A wolfram in sheep’s clothing: Economic warfare in Spain, 1940–44.”
Journal of Economic History
16, no. 1 (2003).

Collado, Carlos.
España refugio nazi.
Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005.

Eccles, David.
By Safe Hand: The Letters of Sybil & David Eccles, 1939–42
. London: The Bodley Head, 1983.

Fox, Rosalinda Powell.
The Grass and the Asphalt.
Puerto de Sotogrande: Harter & Associates, 1997.

Franco Salgado-Araujo, Francisco.
Mis conversaciones privadas con Franco
. Barcelona: Planeta, 1976.

Halstead, Charles R. “Un africain méconnu: le colonel Juan Beigbeder.”
Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale
21 (1971).