The Time in Between: A Novel (48 page)

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O
ne of the activities with which I’d passed my time since my mother’s arrival in Tetouan was reading. She usually went to bed early, Félix no longer came across the landing, and I began to have a lot of free hours, until yet again he came up with an idea for filling up that tedium. It had the name of two women and arrived between a pair of covers:
Fortunata and Jacinta.
From then on, I devoted my leisure time to reading the massive novels in my neighbor’s house. As the months passed, I was able to finish them all and moved on to the shelves in the Protectorate library. When the summer of 1940 came to a close, I’d already polished off the two or three dozen novels in the little library and wondered what I’d be able to find to keep me entertained from then on. And then, quite unexpectedly, a new text arrived at my door. Not in the form of a novel, but a telegram on blue paper. And not for me to take pleasure in reading, but for me to act on the instructions it contained. “Personal invitation. Private party in Tangiers. Madrid friendships waiting. September 1. 7 p.m. Dean’s Bar.”

My stomach clenched, but despite that I couldn’t help giving a little laugh. I knew who had sent the message; there was no need for a signature. Dozens of recollections swarmed back into my memory: music, laughter, cocktails, unexpected emergencies and foreign words,
little adventures, excursions with the car roof down, a joy for living. I compared those days in the past with my current calm present in which the weeks went monotonously by with sewing and fittings, radio serials and walks with my mother at dusk. My only moderately exciting experience was the occasional film Félix would drag me along to see, and the misfortunes and love affairs of the characters in the books that I devoured nightly to overcome my boredom. Knowing that Rosalinda was waiting for me in Tangiers gave me a little shudder of happiness. Although they wouldn’t last long, my feelings of hopefulness were reemerging.

At the appointed day and time, however, I didn’t find any sort of party at the El Minzah where Dean worked, just four or five little isolated groups of people I didn’t know and a couple of solitary drinkers at the bar. Dean wasn’t behind the bar, either, and it was perhaps too early for the pianist. The atmosphere was flat, unlike so many nights in the past. I sat down to wait at a discreet table and shooed away the waiter who approached. Ten past seven, a quarter past, twenty past, and still no sign of a party. At seven thirty I went up to the bar and asked after Dean. He no longer worked there, they told me. He’d opened his own business, Dean’s Bar. Where? In the Rue Amérique du Sud. I was there in two minutes, as the places were only a few hundred feet apart. Dean, gaunt and dark as ever, spotted me from behind the bar the moment my silhouette appeared at the entrance. His bar was livelier than the one at the hotel: there weren’t more patrons, but the conversations were louder, more relaxed, and you could hear people laughing. The owner didn’t greet me, but with a quick glance as black as coal he gestured me toward a curtain at the back. I went over. I drew the heavy green velvet aside and went in.

“You’re late for my party.”

Neither the dirty walls, nor the dim light of the one sad bulb, not even the crates of liquor and sacks of coffee piled all around could take away a speck of my friend’s glamour. She, or perhaps Dean, or maybe the two of them before opening the bar that evening, had temporarily transformed the small storeroom into an exclusive little shelter for a private meeting. So private that there were just two chairs, separated by
a barrel covered in a white tablecloth. On top of that were a couple of glasses, a cocktail shaker, a pack of Turkish cigarettes, and an ashtray. In one corner, balancing on a big stack of wooden crates, a portable gramophone played Billie Holiday singing “Summertime.”

We hadn’t seen each other for a whole year, since her departure for Madrid. She was still extremely thin, her skin transparent, and that wave of blond hair was constantly about to tumble into her eyes. But her expression wasn’t the same one I knew from her untroubled days in the past, not even from the most difficult periods of living with her husband or her subsequent convalescence. I couldn’t tell where exactly the change was to be found, but everything about her had altered a little. She seemed rather older, more mature. A little tired, perhaps. Through her letters I’d learned about the difficulties that Beigbeder and she faced in the capital. She hadn’t told me, however, that she’d planned a trip to Morocco.

We hugged, laughed like schoolgirls, complimented each other on our outfits, and began laughing again. I’d missed her so much. I had my mother, of course. And Félix. And Candelaria. And my atelier and my new passion for reading. But I’d felt her absence keenly—those unexpected arrivals, her way of seeing things from a completely different perspective from the rest of the world. Her witty remarks, her little eccentricities, her riotous chatter. I wanted to know everything about her new life and unleashed a torrent of questions: how was Madrid, how was Johnny, how was Beigbeder getting along, what was it that had brought her back to Africa? She gave me vague replies, avoiding any reference to the difficulties they’d been facing. Only when I stopped tormenting her with my curiosity, and only then, as she filled the glasses, did she finally state clearly what was on her mind.

“I’ve come to offer you a job.”

I laughed.

“I’ve got a job already.”

“I’m going to propose another one.”

I laughed again and drank. Pink gin, as on so many other occasions.

“Doing what?” I said.

“The same as you’re doing now, but in Madrid.”

When I realized she was being quite serious, my laughter dried up, and I, too, changed my tone of voice.

“I’m comfortable in Tetouan. Things are going well here, better every day. My mother likes living here, too. Our atelier is going wonderfully well; actually, we’re thinking about taking on an apprentice to help us. We haven’t made plans to go back to Madrid.”

“I’m not talking about your mother, Sira, only about you. And there won’t be any need to close the workshop in Tetouan; I’m sure this will only be a temporary thing. Or at least I hope it will. When it’s all over, you can come back.”

“When what’s all over?”

“The war.”

“The war ended more than a year ago.”

“Yes, yours did. But now there’s another one.”

She got up, changed the record, and raised the volume. More jazz, just instrumental this time. She was trying to prevent our conversation from being heard on the other side of the curtain.

“There’s another war, a terrible one. My country is in it and yours might enter at any moment. Juan Luis has done everything he can to keep Spain on the sidelines, but the course of events seems to indicate that it’ll be very hard. Which is why we want any help we can get to minimize the pressure that Germany is putting on Spain. If our plan works, your nation will stay out of the war, and mine will have a better chance of winning it.”

I still didn’t understand what my job had to do with all that, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“Juan Luis and I,” she went on, “are trying to make a few of our friends aware so that they’ll contribute in any way that they can. He hasn’t been able to put any pressure on the government from the ministry, but it’s possible to do things from outside, too.”

“What sorts of things?” I asked in a whisper. I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going through her head. My expression must have been amusing, because she finally laughed.

“Don’t panic, querida. We’re not talking about planting bombs
in the German embassy or sabotaging major military operations. I’m referring to discreet campaigns of resistance. Observing. Infiltrating. Obtaining information through little gaps here and there. Juan Luis and I are not alone in this. We’re not just a couple of idealists looking for foolhardy friends to get involved in some implausible plot.”

She refilled the glasses and turned up the volume on the gramophone again. We each lit another cigarette. She sat down again and her blue eyes fixed themselves on mine. Around them were dark circles I’d never seen before.

“We’re trying to set up a network of underground collaborators in Madrid linked to the British secret services. Collaborators with no connection to political life, to the diplomatic service or the military. People who aren’t known, who under the appearance of a normal life can find out about things and then pass them on to the SOE.”

“What’s the SOE?” I murmured.

“The Special Operations Executive. A new organization within the secret services that has just been created by Churchill, for matters relating to the war, and on the fringes of what the regular agents are doing. They’re signing people up all over Europe. It’s like an espionage service, but not a very orthodox one. Not a very conventional one.”

“I don’t understand.” I was still whispering.

I really didn’t understand. Secret services. Underground collaborators. Agents. Espionage. Infiltrating. This was the first time I’d heard about any of this in my life.

“Well, you shouldn’t imagine I’m so used to all this terminology myself. It’s practically new to me, too; I’ve had to learn an awful lot terribly fast. As I told you in one of my letters, Juan Luis has become close to British ambassador Hoare lately. And now that his days at the ministry are numbered, the two of them have decided to work together. Hoare doesn’t directly control the secret services in Madrid himself, however. Let’s say he oversees it, he’s ultimately responsible for it, but he doesn’t coordinate it personally.”

“So who does, then?”

I was waiting for her to tell me she did it herself and reveal that it had all been no more than a joke. And we’d both laugh wildly about it
and then finally go out for dinner and dancing at Villa Harris as we’d done so many times before. But she didn’t.

“Alan Hillgarth, our embassy’s naval attaché; he’s the person in charge of the whole thing. He’s a very special fellow, a marine from a family with a long navy tradition, married to a lady from the high aristocracy who is also involved in his activities. He arrived in Madrid at the same time as Hoare, under the cover of his official position, to take covert charge of the activities of the SOE and the SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service.”

SOE: Special Operations Executive. SIS: Secret Intelligence Service. The whole thing sounded completely strange to me. I pressed her to clarify.

“The SIS is the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 6; the sixth section of Military Intelligence, an agency dedicated to the secret services’ operations outside Great Britain. Espionage activities in non-British territories, to be quite clear. It’s been in operation since before the Great War, and its staff, usually under some diplomatic or military cover, are involved in covert actions normally through existing power structures, through influential people or authorities in the countries in which they are operating. The SOE, in contrast, is new. It’s riskier, because they don’t depend just on professionals, but for the same reason it’s also much more flexible. It’s an emergency operation for the new wartime, if I can put it like that. They’re prepared to collaborate with anyone who might be of use to them. The organization has only just been established, and Hillgarth, the coordinator for Spain, needs to recruit agents. Urgently. And for this he’s sounding out people he trusts who can put him in contact with other people who in turn can be directly helpful. So you might say that Juan Luis and I are that kind of intermediary. Hoare hasn’t been around for long at all, he hardly knows anyone. Hillgarth spent the whole civil war as vice consul in Majorca, but he’s also new in Madrid and not yet in absolute control of his territory. We haven’t been asked, Juan Luis and I—he as an openly Anglophile minister and I as a British citizen—to be directly involved: they know that we’re too well known and we’ll always be suspected. But they have approached us to
supply them with contacts. So we’ve thought about a few of our friends. You, among others. And that’s why I’ve come to see you.”

I preferred not to ask what exactly it was that she wanted from me. Whether or not I did, she was going to tell me anyway, and it would provoke just the same panic in me, so I decided to focus my attention on filling the glasses again; all this was far too heavy to deal with without a drink. But the cocktail shaker was empty. So I got up and rummaged among the boxes stacked against the wall. I took out a bottle of something that turned out to be whiskey, removed the cap, and took a long swig. I passed it to Rosalinda. She did the same and handed it back, then continued talking. Meanwhile, I went back to my drinking.

“We thought that you could set up an atelier in Madrid and sew for the wives of the high-ranking Nazis.”

My throat closed up, and the shot of whiskey I had almost swallowed shot back out of my mouth in a loud spray. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. When I was finally able to speak, only four words came out.

“You’re both raving mad.”

She didn’t even seem to acknowledge that I was referring to her and went on.

“They all used to get their clothes in Paris, but since the German army invaded France in May most of the haute couture houses have shut down; not many people want to keep working in occupied Paris. La Maison Vionnet, La Maison Chanel on the Rue Cambon, the Schiaparelli shop on the Place Vendôme: almost all the major ones have gone.”

Rosalinda’s references to Parisian haute couture, perhaps coupled with my nerves, the cocktails, and the shots of whiskey, made me give a hoarse laugh.

“And you want me to replace all these designers in Madrid?”

I couldn’t get her to share my laughter, and she went on talking seriously.

“You could try it out in your own way, on a small scale. This is the perfect moment, because there aren’t that many choices. Paris is now
out of the question, and Berlin is too far. Either they get their wardrobes in Madrid or they don’t get to show off new designs for the season that’s just about to begin, which would be a tragedy for them because the essence of their lives these days is centered exclusively on an intense social life. I’ve been learning about it: a lot of Madrid’s ateliers are back in operation now, getting ready for the autumn. There was a rumor that Balenciaga was going to reopen his workshop this year, but he ended up not doing it. I’ve got the names here of the ones that are planning to open,” she said, removing a folded piece of paper from her jacket pocket. “Flora Villareal; Brígida at number thirty-seven, Carrera de San Jerónimo; Natalio at number eighteen Lagasca; Madame Raguette at number two, Bárbara de Braganza; Pedro Rodríguez at number sixty-two Alcalá; Cottret at number eight, Fernando Sixth.”