The Time in Between: A Novel (54 page)

He handed me two envelopes. The first, slimmer, contained my documentation to cross the skies to Madrid. The second, thicker, was filled with a big wad of banknotes. He kept talking as he deftly fastened the clasps of the briefcase.

“The money should cover your preliminary expenses. The stay at the Palace and your rent for the new atelier are being taken care of by us; that’s all been arranged already, as has the salary for the girls who’ll be working for you. Income for the work will be all yours. Just the same, if you do need any more cash, let us know right away: we have an open budget line for these operations, so there are no problems as far as financing is concerned.”

I was all ready now, too. I was holding the folders against my chest, sheltered in my arms as though they were the child I’d lost years earlier rather than an assortment of information about a swarm of undesirables. My heart was still in its place, obeying my internal orders not to rise up to my throat and choke me. Finally we got up from that table on which nothing was left but what looked like the innocent remains of a lengthy lunch: plates, empty coffee cups, a full ashtray, and two displaced chairs. As though nothing had happened there but a pleasant conversation between a couple of friends who—chatting away, relaxed, between one cigarette and the next—had been catching up on each other’s lives. Except that Captain Hillgarth and I weren’t friends. And neither of us was remotely interested in the other’s past, or our presents. All we were concerned about, the two of us, was the future.

“One last detail,” he warned.

We were about to leave; he already had his hand on the doorknob. He drew it back and looked at me fixedly from under his thick eyebrows. In spite of the long session we’d had together, he still looked exactly as he had in the morning: not a hair out of place, his tie still impeccably knotted, his shirt cuffs spotless. His face remained impassive, not particularly tense, nor particularly relaxed. The perfect image of a man capable of handling himself with perfect self-control in any situation. He lowered his voice till it was little more than a hoarse murmur.

“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. We’ve never met before. And as for your enrollment into the British Secret Intelligence Service, from this moment you’re no longer the Spanish citizen Sira Quiroga to us, nor the Moroccan Arish Agoriuq. You’re just the SOE special agent codenamed Sidi, with a base of operations in Spain. The least conventional of the recent conscripts, but just the same, one of our own.”

He held out his hand. Firm, cold, self-confident. The firmest, coldest, most self-confident hand I’d ever shaken in my life.

“Good luck, Agent Sidi. We’ll be in touch.”

___________

N
o one but my mother knew the real reasons for my unexpected departure. Not my clients, not even Félix and Candelaria: I deceived everyone with the excuse that I was going to Madrid to empty out our old house and settle a few matters. My mother would have to invent little lies to justify the length of my absence: business, some indisposition, perhaps a new boyfriend. We weren’t worried that anyone would suspect any intrigue or connect the dots: even though the channels of transport and communication were fully functional by now, contact between the Spanish capital and North Africa remained very limited.

I did, however, want to say good-bye to my friends and to ask them wordlessly to wish me luck, so we organized a lunch for my last Sunday. Candelaria came dressed like a fine lady in her own right, with her bun thick with hairspray, a necklace of fake pearls, and the new outfit we’d sewn for her a few weeks earlier. Félix came over with his mother, whom he hadn’t been able to get rid of. Jamila was with us, too—I was going to miss her like a little sister. We toasted with wine and soda water and said good-bye with noisy kisses and earnest wishes for a good journey. It wasn’t until I closed the door when they left that I realized how much I was going to feel their absence.

With Commissioner Vázquez I used the same strategy, but I immediately
realized that the lie would never stick. How would I be able to pull the wool over his eyes? He knew all about the outstanding debts in Madrid and the panic I felt at having to face up to them. He was the only person who sensed that there was something more complex behind my innocent departure, something I couldn’t talk about. Not to him, not to anybody. Perhaps that was why he preferred not to inquire. In fact he barely said a word: he just did what he always did, he looked at me with his explosive gaze and advised me to take care. Then he accompanied me to the exit to shield me from the dirty slobberings of his subordinates. At the police station door we said good-bye. Until when? Neither of us knew. Perhaps soon, or perhaps never.

Apart from the fabrics and sewing tools I carried to Spain, I also bought a decent number of magazines and a few pieces of Moroccan craftwork in the hope of giving my Madrid workshop an exotic air suited to my new name and my supposed past as a prestigious dressmaker in Tangiers. Embossed copper trays, lamps with pieces of glass in a thousand colors, silver jugs, a few ceramic pieces, and three large Berber rugs. A little bit of Africa right in the center of our exhausted Spain.

When I went into the grand apartment on Núñez de Balboa for the first time, everything was ready, waiting for me. The walls painted in glossy white, the oak floor recently polished. The layout, organization, and order were a replica on a larger scale of my Sidi Mandri house. The first section was a series of three adjoining rooms, three times the size of their equivalent in my old place. The ceilings infinitely higher, the balcony doors more stately. I opened one, but when I looked out I didn’t find Dersa Mountain, or the Ghorgiz, or the air fragrant with traces of orange blossom and jasmine, or lime wash on the neighboring walls, or the voice of the muezzin calling to prayer from the mosque. I closed it quickly, cutting off my melancholy. Then I walked on. In the last of the three main rooms were the rolls of material that had come over from Tangiers, a paradise of dupioni silk, guipure lace, muslin, and chiffon. Their shades ranged from the palest memory of sand
on the beach to fire red, pink, coral, and every possible blue between the sky of a summer morning and a turbulent sea on a stormy night. The fitting rooms—two of them—felt double their size thanks to the imposing three-way mirrors framed in gilt marquetry. The large cutting table, ironing boards, naked mannequins, tools, and threads, just the usual. Beyond that, my own space: immense, disproportionate, ten times more than I needed. I immediately sensed Rosalinda’s hand in the whole setup. Only she knew how I worked, how I’d organized my house, my things, my life.

In the silence of my new home I was visited once again by the question that had been drumming in my head for a couple of weeks. Why, why, why? Why had I agreed to this, why was I embarking on this uncertain, lonely adventure, why? I still had no answer. Or at least, no definitive answer. Perhaps I’d accepted out of loyalty to Rosalinda. Perhaps because I thought I owed it to my mother and my country. Perhaps I hadn’t done it for anyone else, but just for myself. What’s certain is that I’d said yes, let’s do it: fully aware of what I was doing, with a promise to myself that I’d take on the job with determination and without hesitation, fears, or insecurities. There I was, squeezed into the character of the nonexistent Arish Agoriuq, walking through her new habitat, heels clicking down the stairs, dressed with all the style in the world and ready to transform herself into the falsest dressmaker in Madrid. Was I afraid? Yes, intense fear was clinging to the pit of my stomach. But in check. Tamed. Under my control.

My first message reached me via the building’s porter: the girls who would be working for me would be turning up the following morning. They arrived together, Dora and Martina, with an age difference of two years. They looked alike, and yet different at the same time, as though complementing each other. Dora seemed to be in better shape, Martina won out on features. Dora seemed smarter, Martina sweeter. I liked them both. What I didn’t like, however, were the wretched clothes they were wearing, their faces of chronic hunger, and their shyness. Fortunately these things were quickly resolved. I took their measurements and soon I had a couple of uniforms ready for each of
them: the first people to make use of my arsenal of fabrics. With a few of the banknotes from Hillgarth’s envelope I sent them to the La Paz market in search of provisions.

“And what are we to buy, señorita?” Dora asked, eyes like saucers.

“Whatever you can find. They’re saying there isn’t much of anything right now. Whatever you see—didn’t you tell me you can cook? Well then, get to it.”

The timidity took some time to disappear, though it did dissolve bit by bit. What were they afraid of, what was it that made them so introverted? Everything. Working for the strange African lady they believed me to be, the imposing building that housed my new home, the fear of not knowing how to get by in a sophisticated dressmaker’s atelier. As the days went by, however, they adapted themselves to their new lives: to the house, to the daily routines, to me. Dora—the elder—turned out to have a knack for sewing and was soon able to start helping me. Martina, meanwhile, was more like Jamila, more like I’d been in my youth—she liked being out on the street, the errands, the constant coming and going. Between them they managed the household; they were efficient and discreet, good girls, as they said in those days. They mentioned Beigbeder once; I never told them that I knew him. Don Juan, they called him. They remembered him fondly: they associated him with Berlin, with a time in the past from which they still retained vague memories and the residuals of the language.

Everything progressed according to Hillgarth’s expectations. More or less. The first clients appeared; some of them were the ones he’d predicted, others weren’t. The season opened with Gloria von Fürstenberg, beautiful, majestic, her ebony-black hair combed into thick plaits that gathered at the back of her neck like the black crown of an Aztec goddess. Sparks flew from her large eyes when she saw the fabrics I had. She examined them, felt them, determined their caliber, asked about prices, discarded some of them immediately, tested the effect of others against her body. With her expert hand she chose the ones that best suited her out of the ones that weren’t excessively overpriced. She also ran her expert eye over the magazines, pausing on the designs that complemented her body and style. That Mexican woman with the German
name knew exactly what she wanted, so she didn’t ask me for any advice, nor did I bother to give her any. Finally she opted for a gown in chocolate-colored silk gazar and an Ottoman evening coat. The first time she came alone and we spoke Spanish. For the first fitting she brought a friend, Anka von Fries, who ordered a wide dress in georgette and a ruby-colored velvet cloak decorated with ostrich feathers. As I listened to them talking to each other in German, I asked Dora to come in and join us. Well dressed, well fed, well groomed, the girl retained no trace of the terrified little sparrow who’d arrived with her sister just a few weeks earlier: she’d been transformed into a slender, silent assistant who kept mental notes of everything she heard and discreetly left the room every few minutes to jot the details down in a notebook.

“I always like to keep exhaustive records of all my clients,” I’d warned Dora. “I want to understand what they say so I know where they’re going, who they’re going around with, and what plans they have. That way I may be able to get hold of new clients. I’ll be in charge of whatever they say in Spanish, but when they’re speaking German you’re responsible for that.”

If Dora thought there was anything strange about the close attention paid to our clients, she didn’t show it. She probably thought it was quite reasonable, that this was normal behavior in this business that was so new to her. But of course it wasn’t. Noting down every syllable of names, positions, places, and dates that came out of the mouths of one’s clients isn’t normal in the least, but we did it every day, devoted and methodical, like good students. Then at night I’d go through my notes and Dora’s, extract any information I thought might be of interest, synthesize it into brief phrases, and finally transcribe it into inverted Morse code, adapting the long and short dashes to the straight and curving lines of the patterns that would never be part of a complete piece of work. The bits of paper with the handwritten notes were transformed to ashes in the small hours of each morning with a simple match. By the following dawn not a word of what had been written down remained, only a handful of messages hidden in the outlines of a lapel, a waistband, or a camisole.

I acquired Baroness de Petrino as a client, too; wife to the powerful
press officer Lazar, she was less spectacular than the Mexican woman but had far more money to spend. She chose the most expensive fabrics and didn’t skimp on indulging her whims. She brought me more clients—two German women, as well as a Hungarian. Over the course of many mornings my atelier was transformed into their main social meeting place, buzzing with a jumble of languages. I taught Martina to prepare tea the Moorish way, with the mint we planted in clay pots on the kitchen windowsill. I instructed her how to handle the teapots, how to casually pour the boiling water into the little glasses with silver filigree; I even taught her to paint her eyes with kohl and sewed her a silky gardenia-patterned caftan to give her an exotic air. A stand-in for my Jamila, so that I would have her with me always.

Everything was going well, surprisingly well. I was moving ahead in my new life with complete confidence, entering the finest places with a sure step. When I was with my clients I acted with aplomb and decisiveness, protected by the armor of my fake exoticism. I brazenly muddled words from French and Arabic into my conversations; I might have been saying all kinds of nonsense in these languages, bearing in mind that I was only repeating simple expressions I’d heard on the streets of Tangiers and Tetouan whose precise meaning and usage I didn’t know. I made sure that in my polyglotism—as false as it was chaotic—I didn’t allow any bursts of the broken English I’d learned from Rosalinda to slip out. My position as a newly arrived foreigner allowed me a useful refuge for covering up my weak points and avoiding treacherous territory. No one seemed at all interested in my origins, however: they were more interested in my materials and what I was able to make from them. My clients would talk freely in the atelier; they seemed to feel comfortable there. They’d chat to one another and to me about what they’d done, what they were going to do, their common friends, their husbands and their lovers. And meanwhile Dora and I worked tirelessly—with materials, designs, and measurements out in the open; with secret notes in the back room. I didn’t know whether all those pieces of information I recorded every day had any value at all to Hillgarth and his people, but just in case, I tried to be minutely rigorous. On Wednesday afternoon, before my session at the
hairdresser’s, I’d leave the tube of patterns in the predetermined locker. On Saturdays I’d visit the Prado, marveling so much at the artwork that I’d sometimes forget that I had something important to do there besides being enraptured by the paintings. Nor did I have the slightest problem with the transfer of envelopes filled with coded patterns: everything progressed so smoothly that my nerves didn’t even get a chance to gnaw at my innards. My portfolio was always received by the same person, a thin, bald employee who was probably also the one responsible for extracting my messages, although he never gave me the slightest sign of complicity.