by Maria Duenas
I tried to thank her for her efforts, between coughs and sneezes, but she played it all down and just pressed me to get myself ready. The trip was a whirlwind. The road, dry plains, areas covered in pines, goats. Women in big striped skirts with their walking slippers, laden down under their large straw hats. Sheep, prickly pears, more dry plains, barefoot children who smiled at us as we passed and raised their hand to wave good-bye. Dust, more dust, yellow plains to one side, yellow plains to the other, passport control, more road, more prickly pear cacti, more palm trees and sugarcane plantations, and in just an hour we’d arrived. Again we parked in the Place de France, again we were welcomed by the broad avenues and the magnificent buildings of the city’s modern quarter. In one of them the Bank of London and South America awaited us—a curious alloy of financial interests, almost as strange as the pair Rosalinda Fox and I made.
“Sira, allow me to introduce you to Leo Martin. Leo, this is my friend Miss Quiroga.”
Leo Martin could very easily have been Leoncio Martínez, had he been born just a couple of miles from where he actually was. Short and dark, if he hadn’t been shaved and wearing a tie he could have passed for a tough Spanish farmhand. But his face gleamed clean of any shadow of a beard, and a serious-looking striped tie rested on his belly. And he wasn’t Spanish, or a peasant, but an authentic subject of Great Britain: a man from Gibraltar capable of expressing himself in English and Andalusian with equal facility. He greeted us with a shake of his hairy hand, offered us a seat, and gave the old crow who served as his secretary an order not to disturb us. Then, as though we were the bank’s wealthiest clients, he proceeded to inform us eagerly about what he’d been able to find out. I’d never opened a bank account in my life, and Rosalinda probably didn’t have a single pound saved from the allowance that her husband sent her whenever he was in the mood, but the rumors about my friend’s amorous pursuits must have reached the ears of this little man with the curious linguistic abilities. And in these turbulent times the director of an international bank couldn’t miss an opportunity to do a favor for the lover of the man in charge next door.
“Well, ladies, I think I have some news. I’ve been able to speak to Eric Gordon, an old acquaintance of mine who was working at our branch in Madrid shortly after the uprising; now he’s been reposted to London. He told me he knows someone personally who lives in Madrid and who is involved in these sorts of activities, a British citizen who worked for a Spanish firm. The bad news is that he doesn’t know how to contact him; he’s lost track of him in the last few months. The good news is that he’s supplied me with the details of someone who is familiar with his whereabouts because he was living in the capital until recently. He’s a journalist who’s gone back to England because there was some problem; I think he was injured, but he didn’t give me the details. Well anyway, this person might be prepared to put you in touch with the man who is evacuating the refugees. But he wants something first.”
“What?” Rosalinda and I asked in unison.
“To speak to you personally, Mrs. Fox,” he said, turning to the Englishwoman. “The sooner the better. I hope you won’t consider it too forward, but, given the circumstances, I thought it appropriate to let him know who it was who wanted this information from him.”
Rosalinda didn’t reply; she just looked at him, alert, her eyebrows arched, waiting for him to continue talking. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, doubtless having expected a more enthusiastic response to what he had said.
“You know what these journalists are like, don’t you? Like carrion birds, always after something.”
Rosalinda took a few seconds to reply.
“They aren’t the only ones, Leo dear, they aren’t the only ones,” she said a little sourly. “But anyway, put me in contact with him. Let’s see what he wants.”
I shifted in my seat, trying to hide my nerves, and blew my nose again. Meanwhile, the British director with the body of an earthenware pot and the accent of a bullfighter gave the telephone operator an order to connect the call. We waited a long while. They brought us coffee; Rosalinda regained her good mood and Martin his composure. At last the moment arrived for the conversation with the journalist. It only lasted three minutes, and Rosalinda spoke so softly I didn’t catch a word of it. What I did sense, however, was the serious, sharp tone in my client’s voice.
“Done,” was all she said when it ended. We bade farewell to the director, thanking him for his help, and went back out past the intense scrutiny of the hawkeyed secretary.
“What did he want?” I asked anxiously as soon as we were out of the office.
“A bit of . . . I don’t know how you say it in Spanish. When someone says they’ll do something for you only if you do something in exchange.”
“Chantaje—blackmail,” I said.
“Chantaje,” she repeated.
“What form of blackmail?”
“A personal interview with Juan Luis and a few weeks of preferential access to official life in Tetouan. In exchange he would commit to putting us in contact with the person we need in Madrid.”
I swallowed before formulating my question. I was afraid she’d say that only over her dead body would anyone impose such extortionate conditions on the highest dignitary in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, much less an opportunistic journalist she didn’t know. All in exchange for a favor for a simple dressmaker.
“And what did you tell him?” I finally dared ask.
She shrugged, a gesture of resignation.
“To send me a cable with the date of his arrival in Tangiers.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
___________
Marcus Logan turned up dragging one leg, almost deaf in one ear and with his arm in a sling. All his injuries were on the same side of his body, the left-hand side, the one that had been closest to the exploding shell that had knocked him over and nearly killed him while he was covering the attacks of the Nationalist artillery on Madrid for his agency. Rosalinda had arranged for an official car to meet him at the port of Tangiers and bring him directly to the Hotel Nacional in Tetouan.
I had waited for them seated on one of the wicker chairs in the hotel’s covered courtyard, surrounded by flowerpots and tiles with Arab decorations. The walls were covered in trellises bearing climbing creepers, and large Moorish lanterns hung from the ceiling. The murmur of other people’s conversations and the burbling of the water in a little fountain kept me company as I waited.
The last bit of afternoon sun was filtering through the skylight when Rosalinda arrived; the journalist followed ten minutes later. Over the previous days I’d assembled in my mind an image of an impulsive, brusque man, someone sour, with enough nerve to try to intimidate anyone he came across in order to get what he wanted. But I was wrong, just as we are almost always wrong when we construct preconceptions on the fragile basis of a single act or a handful of words. I knew I was wrong the moment the blackmailing journalist came through the archway of the courtyard with his tie loose and his light linen suit full of creases.
He recognized us at once; he only had to sweep the room with his gaze to be sure that we were the only pair of young women sitting alone—a blonde who looked obviously foreign and a dark one with the classic look of a Spaniard. We readied ourselves to receive him without getting up, braced to defend ourselves against this most inconvenient of visitors. But the Marcus Logan who appeared on that early African evening could have awakened any feeling in us but fear. He was tall and seemed to be somewhere between thirty and forty. His brown hair was unkempt, and as he approached limping, supported by a bamboo walking stick, we saw that the left side of his face was covered with the fading marks of cuts and bruises. Even though it was possible to get a sense of the man he must have been before the incident that almost cost him his life, at that moment he was little more than a pained body. No sooner had he greeted us with all the courtesy his pitiful state would allow than he slumped into a chair, trying unsuccessfully to disguise the discomfort an
d fatigue that were building up in his body, punished by the long journey.
“Mrs. Fox and Miss Quiroga, I suppose,” were his first words, which he spoke in English.
“Yes, we are indeed,” said Rosalinda. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Logan. And now, if you don’t mind, I think we should proceed in Spanish; I’m afraid my friend won’t be able to join us otherwise.”
“Of course, I’m sorry,” he said, addressing me in excellent Spanish.
He didn’t look like an unscrupulous extortionist, just a professional who tried to get by as best he could and who grabbed opportunities that presented themselves to him. Like Rosalinda, like me. Like everyone in those days. Before going right into the matter that had brought him to Morocco and seeking confirmation from Rosalinda, he chose to show us his credentials. He worked for a British news agency, he had been accredited to cover the Spanish war on both sides, and although he was based in the capital he’d spent his days constantly on the move. Until the unexpected had happened. They admitted him to a hospital in Madrid, performed emergency surgery, and when they could they evacuated him to London. He’d spent several weeks in the Royal London Hospital, bearing his pain and his treatments—bedbound, immobilized, longing to return to active life.
When news reached him that someone related to the Spanish High Commission in Morocco needed some information he could provide, he saw the clouds part. He knew he wasn’t in a physical state to return to his constant comings-and-goings across the Peninsula, but a visit to the Protectorate might allow him to progress with his convalescence while also partially reviving his professional spirit. Before he’d been given permission to travel he’d had to fight with his doctors, his superiors, and everyone else who approached his bed to try to convince him not to move; the frustration combined with his physical state had driven him to the verge of pulling the trigger. So he apologized to Rosalinda for his brusqueness during their telephone call, he crossed and uncrossed his legs painfully several times, and then he finally got down to more pressing concerns.
“I haven’t eaten anything since this morning; would it be all right if I invited you for dinner and we talked then?”
We accepted; truth was, I’d have accepted anything to be able to talk to him. I could have eaten in a latrine or rolled in the mud with pigs; I’d have chewed on cockroaches and drunk rat poison to wash them down, anything to get the information I’d spent so many days waiting for. Logan gracefully called over one of the Arab waiters bustling around the courtyard serving drinks and collecting glasses and asked him for a table in the hotel restaurant.
“Just a moment, please, sir.” The waiter went off to speak to someone and moments later we were approached by the Spanish maître d’, unctuous and reverential. “Right away, sir, right away, do please come with me, ladies, come with me, sir. Not a minute’s wait for Mrs. Fox and her friends, naturally.”
Logan gestured us ahead of him into the dining room, while the maître d’ indicated a showy central table, a conspicuous bullring that would ensure that no one would be left without a prime view of Beigbeder’s beloved Englishwoman. The journalist politely turned that table down and pointed toward another more isolated table at the back. All the tables were impeccably set with spotless tablecloths, water and wineglasses, and white napkins folded on the porcelain plates. It was still early, though, and there were only a dozen or so people spread around the room.
We chose from the menu and were served some sherry to occupy us while we waited. It was Rosalinda who took on the role of hostess and got the conversation started. The earlier meeting in the courtyard had been mere formality, but it had helped to ease tension. The journalist had introduced himself and told us how he’d ended up in the condition he was in; we, meanwhile, had relaxed on discovering that he wasn’t threatening and had made a few trivial comments about life in Spanish Morocco. All three of us knew, however, that this wasn’t just a polite meeting for making new friends, chatting about infirmities, and drawing picturesque images of North Africa. What had brought us together that night was a negotiation, all cut and dried, in which two separate sides were implicated: two sides who had made their demands and their conditions perfectly clear. The time had come to lay everything on the table and find out how far each one could get.
“I want you to know that everything you asked me for on the phone the other day has been arranged,” Rosalinda began as the waiter moved off with our order.
“Perfect,” replied the journalist.
“You’ll have your interview with the high commissioner, in private and as extensively as you find useful. You’ll also be given a temporary residence permit for the Spanish Protectorate area,” Rosalinda went on, “and invitations will be issued in your name to all the official engagements in the next few weeks. Some of these will be extremely significant.”
He raised the eyebrow on the intact side of his face in a question.
“We’re shortly expecting a visit from Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law; I imagine you know who I’m talking about.”
“Yes, of course,” he confirmed.
“He’s coming to Morocco to commemorate the anniversary of the uprising; he’ll be staying three days. Various activities are being arranged to receive him—the general director of propaganda, Dionisio Ridruejo, arrived yesterday. He’s come over to coordinate the preparations with the secretariat of the High Commission. We expect you to attend any official events involving civilians.”
“Very many thanks—and do please extend my gratitude to the high commissioner.”
“It’ll be a pleasure having you here with us,” replied Rosalinda with the delicacy of a perfect hostess about to unsheathe a sword. “I hope you understand that we, too, have a number of conditions.”
“Of course,” said Logan after a sip of sherry.
“Any information you wish to send abroad will first have to be checked by the press office of the High Commission.”
“I have no problem with that.”
At that moment the waiters approached with our food, and I was overwhelmed by a great sense of relief. In spite of the elegance with which the two of them were managing the negotiations, I hadn’t been able to help feeling a little uncomfortable, as though I’d slipped into a party to which I hadn’t been invited. They were discussing things that had nothing to do with me, matters that might not have contained any great official secrets but that nonetheless were far from what I imagined a simple dressmaker ought to be hearing. Several times I repeated to myself that I wasn’t in the wrong place, that it was my place, too, because it had been my own mother’s evacuation that had prompted this dinner. All the same, it wasn’t easy convincing myself of that.
The arrival of the food interrupted the exchange of requirements and concessions for a few moments. Sole for the ladies, chicken with trimmings for the gentleman, the waiters announced. We made brief comments about the food, the freshness of the fish on the Mediterranean coast, how divine the vegetables from the Río Martín plain were. The moment the waiters had withdrawn, the conversation picked up exactly where it had left off just a few minutes earlier.
“Any other conditions?” asked the journalist before bringing the fork to his mouth.
“Yes, though I wouldn’t exactly call it a condition. Rather it’s something that will help you as much as us.”
“Then it will be easy for me to accept,” he said after swallowing his first mouthful.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Rosalinda agreed. “You see, Logan, we move in two quite different worlds, you and I, but we’re compatriots and we both know that on the whole the Nationalists tend to be sympathetic to the Germans and the Italians, and haven’t the least affection for the English.”
“Just so, absolutely,” he confirmed.
“Well then, that’s why I’d like you to pass yourself off as a friend of mine. Without disguising the fact that you’re a journalist, of course, but a journalist associated with me, and by extension the high commissioner. In this
way we believe you’ll be welcomed with somewhat more moderate feelings of suspicion.”
“By whom?”
“By everyone: the Spanish and Muslim local authorities, the foreign consular corps, the press . . . I don’t have many fervent admirers in any of those groups, I have to be honest, but at least formally they do maintain a certain respect for my closeness to the high commissioner. If we can introduce you as a friend of mine, perhaps we can get them to extend that respect to you.”
“What does Colonel Beigbeder think of that?”
“He agrees entirely.”
“Then there’s nothing more for us to discuss. It doesn’t seem a bad idea to me, and as you say, it could be good for all of us. Any more conditions?”
“None on our side,” said Rosalinda, raising her glass as though in a little toast.
“Perfect. That’s all clear, then. Well, I think it’s time for me to bring you up to date with the matter you’ve asked me about.”
My stomach leapt: the time had come. The food and wine seemed to have brought Marcus Logan a little bit of new vigor; he appeared rather livelier. Although he had maintained a cool serenity during the negotiations, it was possible to make out a positive attitude in him, and an evident desire not to trouble Rosalinda and Beigbeder any more than necessary. I guessed that this might have something to do with his profession, but I had no way of knowing for sure—he was, after all, the first journalist I’d ever met in my life.
“I want you to know first of all that my contact is already on the alert and expects your mother’s evacuation when they mobilize the next operation from Madrid to the coast.”
I had to grip the edge of the table hard to stop myself from getting up and throwing my arms around him. I did restrain myself, however: the dining room in the Hotel Nacional was now full of people and our table, thanks to Rosalinda, was the main attraction that night. An impulsive reaction like giving that foreigner an ecstatic hug would have focused every gaze and whisper on us instantly. So I contained my enthusiasm and suggested my amazement with just a smile and a quiet thank-you.