by Maria Duenas
“Did you see them?” she whispered. “I’ll close it back up. Give me the material to put on top, and turn the light out again.”
Candelaria’s voice, though quiet, was just as it always was; I never knew how mine sounded because the impact of what I’d just seen prevented me from formulating a single word for quite some time. We returned to the bed and she resumed her whispering.
“Some say this business with the uprising took people by surprise, but that’s a dirty lie. Absolutely everybody knew there was some powerful stuff brewing. Everyone was preparing for quite some time, and not only in the barracks and at the Llano Amarillo. They say that even in the Spanish Casino there was an arsenal hidden behind the bar; it’s anyone’s guess whether that’s true or not. In the first weeks of July, I had a customs agent lodged in this room awaiting his posting, or at least that’s what he said. Things smelled a bit fishy to me, why should I lie to you, because if you ask me that man wasn’t a customs agent or anything even close. But, well, since I never ask questions because I don’t like people getting involved in my dealings either, I made up his room, put a hot meal on the table for him, and that was that. After July eighteenth I never saw him again. Whether he joined the uprising, or he ran off through the Moorish villages to the French zone, or they took him off to Monte Hacho and had him shot the next morning, I haven’t the faintest idea. And I didn’t ask, either. The thing was, after four or five days, they sent this little lieutenant over to me to collect his belongings. Without a word I handed over what little there was in the wardrobe, made the sign of the cross, considered the matter closed. But when Jamila was cleaning the room for the next guest and sweeping under the bed I suddenly heard her scream as if she’d seen the devil himself holding his pitchfork, or whatever the Muslims take for the devil. Right there, in the corner, she’d run the broom into this pile of guns.”
“So then you kept them?” I asked in a whisper.
“What else was I going to do? Was I supposed to go out searching for the lieutenant at headquarters with everything that was going on?”
“You could have handed them over to the commissioner.”
“To Don Claudio? You’re crazy, girl!”
This time it was me who with a loud “sssshhhh” quieted her down. “Why would I give the pistols to Don Claudio? As it is, he’s got me on a leash, you want him to lock me up for life? I kept them because they were in my house, and what’s more, the customs agent still owed me for two weeks, so the guns were more or less payment. They’re worth a lot of money, girl, even more now, the way things are, so those pistols are mine and I can do whatever I please with them.”
“And you’re planning to sell them? That could be very dangerous.”
“Well, for crying out loud, of course it’s dangerous, but we need the cash to set up your business.”
“Candelaria, don’t tell me you’re going to get yourself mixed up in all this trouble just for me . . .”
“No, child, no,” she interrupted. “Let’s see if I can explain. I’m not getting mixed up in any trouble on my own, we’re doing it together. I’ll be responsible for finding someone who wants to buy the merchandise and with whatever I can get for it we’ll set up your workshop and split the profits fifty-fifty.”
“Why don’t you sell them yourself and get what you can for them without setting up a business for me?”
“Because that’s bread for today and hunger tomorrow, and I’m more interested in something that’ll give me a return in the long run. If I sell the goods and in two or three months everything I get for them goes straight into the cooking pot, what will I live on if the war goes on?”
“What if they catch you trying to sell the pistols?”
“Then I’ll tell Don Claudio it’s something we’re both in together, and we’ll end up going wherever he sends us.”
“To prison?”
“Or the civilian cemetery, depending on where the bastard decides.”
Although she had made this last grim prediction with a teasing wink, my feeling of panic was increasing by the second. Commissioner Vázquez’s steely stare and his severe warnings remained fresh in my memory. Stay away from any trouble, don’t mess around with me, behave respectably. His words had created a whole chain of undesirable associations: police station, women’s prison, robbery, fraud, debt, charge, trial. And now, as if that were not enough, arms dealing.
“Don’t get yourself mixed up in this trouble, Candelaria, it’s too dangerous,” I begged her, scared to death.
“Then what will we do?” she asked in a rushed whisper. “Live on air? Eat snot? You arrived without a cent, and I no longer have any means myself. As for the other guests, the only ones who pay me are the mother, the schoolteacher, and the telegraph man, and we’ll see just how long they manage to stretch out the little they have. The other three wretches and you have showed up with just the clothes on your backs, but I can’t throw you out on the street. Them out of charity and you because the last thing I need would be to have Don Claudio coming after me for explanations. So you tell me how I’m going to manage.”
“I can keep sewing for the same women; I’ll work more, I’ll stay awake all night if I have to. We’ll split what I earn between the two of us . . . ”
“And how much is that? How much do you think you can earn making tatty old clothes for the neighbors? A few coins here and there? Have you already forgotten how much you owe in Tangiers? Are you planning to live in this lousy little room for the rest of your life?” The words tumbled out of her mouth in a flustered, hissing torrent. “Look, honey, with those hands of yours you’ve got an enormous treasure, and it’s a terrible sin not to make the most of it as God wants you to. I know life has given you some harsh blows, that your fiancé behaved very badly toward you, that you’re in a city where you don’t want to be, far from your country and your family, but this is what there is, what’s happened has happened and time never goes backward. You’ve got to press ahead, Sira. You’ve got to be brave, take risks, fight for yourself. With the misadventures you’ve been through, no nice young gentleman is about to come knocking on your door to set you up in an apartment. What’s more, after your experience, I don’t think you’re going to want to depend on a man for quite some time, either. You’re very young, and at your age you can still hope to make a new life for yourself. Something better than letting your best years shrivel away sewing hems and sighing over what you’ve lost.”
“But this thing with the guns, Candelaria, selling the guns . . . ,” I murmured fearfully.
“That’s what there is, child; that’s what we’ve got, and I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I mean to get as much as I can from them. You think I wouldn’t prefer that it was something cleaner, that instead of pistols they’d left me a cargo of Swiss watches or silk stockings? Of course I would. But it just so happens that the only things we’ve got are weapons, and it just so happens that we’re at war, and it just so happens that there are people who might be interested in buying them.”
“But what if they catch you?” I asked again uneasily.
“And there she goes again! Well, if they pick me up, we pray to Christ of Medinaceli that Don Claudio has a little pity in him, we swallow a spell in the clink, and that’s all there is to it. I should remind you that you only have eleven months left to pay your debt, and at the rate you’re going you won’t be able to cover it in twenty years sewing for the women on the streets. So however honorable you may want to be, the way you’re insisting on going about things, not even a guardian angel will be able to keep you out of prison. Or from ending up spreading your legs in some run-of-the-mill brothel giving soldiers just back from the front a little release.”
“I don’t know, Candelaria, I don’t know. It scares me so much . . .”
“You know, I get the shits, too, thinking of death, even though you may think I’m made of stone. Doing my usual little deals isn’t the same thing as trying to put a dozen and a half revolvers on the marke
t during wartime. But we have no other way out, child.”
“How would you do it?”
“Don’t you worry about that, I’ll track down my contacts. I don’t think it’ll take more than a few days to shift the merchandise. And then we’ll find a place in the best part of Tetouan, we’ll set everything up, and you’ll get started.”
“What do you mean, ‘you’ll get started’? What about you? Aren’t you going to be in the workshop with me?”
She laughed silently and shook her head.
“No, child, no I won’t. I’ll be in charge of getting you the money to pay the first few months’ rent and buy what you need. Then, when everything’s ready, you’ll get to work and I’ll stay here, in my house, waiting for the end of the month when we divide up the profits. What’s more, it’s better if people don’t associate you with me: I’ve hardly got the best reputation, and I don’t belong to the same class as the ladies we need as customers. So I’ll take charge of providing the initial money, and you provide the hands. Then we share. That’s what’s called an investment.”
A slight scent of Pitman Academies and Ramiro’s plans suddenly invaded the darkness in the room, and I was about to travel back to an earlier phase in my life that I had no wish to relive. I banished the feeling with invisible slaps and returned to reality in search of more clarification.
“What if I don’t earn anything? If I can’t get the customers?”
“Well, then we’re in a mess. But don’t be too pessimistic. There’s no need to go expecting the worst: we’ve got to be positive and just face up to the matter. No one is going to come along and sort out your life or mine what with all the miseries we have behind us, so we either struggle for ourselves or we won’t be left with any choice but to fight hunger off with our fists.”
“But I gave the commissioner my word that I wouldn’t get into any trouble.”
Candelaria had to struggle not to laugh.
“And my Francisco promised me—in front of the village priest—that he’d respect me till the end of his days, and the son of a bitch beat me more than a rug, damn him. It’s hard to believe, girl, just how innocent you still are after all the blows luck has given you lately. Think about yourself, Sira, think about yourself and forget everything else, because in these bad times, it’s a case of eat or be eaten. What’s more, things aren’t really as serious as all that: we’re not going to shoot anyone, we’re just going to move some merchandise we have left over, and as they say, if it’s a gift from God, then Saint Peter should bless it. If everything works out well, Don Claudio will see your business all set up, nice and clean and shiny, and if he ever asks you where you got the cash, you tell him I lent it to you out of my savings, and if he doesn’t believe you or he doesn’t like the idea, he should have left you in the hospital in the care of the Sisters of Charity instead of bringing you to my place. He’s always tied up with a heap of problems and never wants any trouble, so if we give him everything without making any noise, he won’t bother with investigations. I’m telling you, I know him well; we’ve been butting heads for years now. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Despite her bravado and her peculiar philosophy of life, I knew that Candelaria was right. The more times we went around and around the subject, however much we turned it upside down and inside out, looked at it front and back, this pitiful plan was quite simply a reasonable solution to remedy the miseries of two poor women, alone and rootless, who in rough times were dragging heavy pasts behind them. Propriety and honor were lovely concepts, but they didn’t give you food to eat, or pay your debts, or take away your cold on winter nights. Moral principles and irreproachable behavior were for another kind of creature, not for an unhappy pair with battered souls.
Candelaria interpreted my silence as a proof of assent. “Well then? I start moving the goods tomorrow?”
I felt myself dancing blindly on the edge of a precipice. In the distance, the radio waves were still broadcasting General Queipo’s incendiary speech from Seville between bits of interference. I sighed deeply. My voice sounded, at last, low and sure. Or almost.
“Let’s do it.”
My partner-to-be, satisfied, smiled and gave me a tender pinch on the cheek. Then the wily old survivor got ready to leave, rearranging her housecoat and hoisting her large frame up over the shabby old cloth slippers that had probably been with her for half her lifetime. Candelaria the Matutera, the opportunist, quarrelsome, shameless, and charming, was already at the door on her way out to the hallway when, still speaking in a half whisper, I threw out my last question. In reality, it hardly had anything to do with what we’d been talking about that night, but I felt a certain curiosity to know what her reply would be.
“Candelaria, whose side are you on in this war?”
She turned, surprised, but didn’t hesitate a second before replying in a potent whisper.
“Me? I’m a diehard supporter of whichever side wins, my angel.”
Chapter Ten
___________
The days following that encounter with the pistols were terrible. Candelaria bustled about incessantly from her room to mine, from the dining room out to the street, from the street to the kitchen, always in a hurry, focused, muttering a muddled litany of grunts and growls whose meaning no one could decipher. I didn’t interfere in her comings and goings, nor did I ask how the negotiations were doing; I knew that when everything was ready she’d be sure to fill me in.
A week passed, until—at last—she had something to announce. She returned home after nine o’clock that night, when we were already sitting before our empty plates, awaiting her arrival. Dinner went ahead as usual, lively and confrontational. When it was over, as the guests scattered around the boardinghouse to get on with their final activities of the day, we began to clear the table together. As we were carrying away the dirty dishes and cutlery, she spilled out to me drop by drop the remainder of her plans. “Tonight the matter will all be set, honey; the deed will be done. Tomorrow morning we’ll start to get your thing moving; I can’t wait to be over with this damned mess, angel, once and for all.”
No sooner had we finished the chores than each of us shut herself in her room without exchanging another word. The rest of the troop, meanwhile, were finishing their nighttime routines: eucalyptus gargles, the radio, hair curlers in front of the mirror, going over to the café. Trying to feign normality I threw a good-night out into the air before going to bed. I remained awake awhile, until bit by bit all the activity died down. The last thing I heard was Candelaria leaving her room and then—barely making a sound—closing the front door.
I fell asleep a few minutes after she’d gone out. For the first time in days I didn’t toss and turn for hours, nor was I visited by the dark portents of the previous nights—prison, police station, arrests, death. It was as though my nerves had finally decided to give me a respite on learning that the grim business was nearly over. I submerged myself in sleep, curled up with the sweet premonition that the following morning we’d begin to plan our future without the dark shadow of the pistols over our heads.
But my rest didn’t last long. I don’t know what time it was—two, three perhaps—when a hand grabbed my shoulder and shook me vigorously.
“Wake up, girl, wake up.”
I partly sat up, disoriented, still asleep.
“What’s going on, Candelaria? What are you doing here? You’re back already?” I managed to say with some difficulty.
“A disaster, child, a huge catastrophe,” the Matutera replied in a whisper.
She was standing alongside my bed, and through the fog of my sleepiness her voluminous figure seemed rounder than ever. She was wearing an overcoat I didn’t recognize, big and broad, done up to the neck. She began to unbutton it quickly as she gave flustered explanations.
“The army has been watching all the roads into Tetouan and the men who were coming from Larache to collect the merchandise didn’t dare come this far. I waited till nearly three in the
morning without anyone showing up, and eventually they sent me some Berber kid to tell me that the access routes were much more heavily guarded than they’d thought, that they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get out alive if they were to come into town.”
“Where were you supposed to meet them?” I asked, forcing myself to put everything she had been saying into place.
“In the lower Suica, around the back of a coal yard.”
I didn’t know the place she was referring to but didn’t try to clarify it any further. In my still sleepy head our failure was already being sketched in thick dark strokes: good-bye to the business, good-bye to the dressmaker’s studio. Welcome back to the uneasiness of not knowing what would become of me.
“So it’s all over then,” I said, rubbing my eyes to remove the last vestiges of sleep.
“Nothing of the sort, honey,” Candelaria stopped me, finishing taking off her coat. “We may have been forced to change our plans, but by all that’s holy I swear to you those pistols will be flying out of this house tonight. So get moving, girl, get up, there’s no time to lose.”
It took me a moment to understand what she was saying to me; my attention was focused on another matter: the image of Candelaria undoing the large shapeless dress she was wearing under the coat, a sort of loose smock of coarse wool that barely allowed you to make out the generous shape of her body. I watched in amazement as she undressed, not understanding the meaning of what she was doing and unable to work out the reason for that hurried stripping at the foot of my bed. Until, having removed her skirt, she began to extract objects hidden among her dense flesh. And then I understood. She had four pistols carried in her garters, six in her belt, two in the straps of her brassiere, and another pair under her armpits. The remaining five were in her handbag, tied into a piece of cloth. Nineteen in total. Nineteen butts with their nineteen barrels ready to leave the warmth of that robust body to be transported to a destination that at that very moment I began to suspect.