by Maria Duenas
I managed to bear the wait for three days, receiving the minutest details about all his movements and awaiting the arrival of any news regarding the progress of his arrangements. On the fourth, having not heard anything from him, I began to think ill of him, so much so that in my mind I constructed an elaborate story according to which Marcus Logan, having attained his aim of interviewing Beigbeder and gathering the information about the Protectorate that he needed for his work, had planned to leave, quite forgetting that he still had something to settle with me. And to prevent reality from bearing out my perverse assumptions, I decided that it might be best for me to take some steps myself. Which was why, the following morning, I had no sooner sensed the approaching dawn and heard the muezzin’s call to the first prayers of the day than I was out of the house. Smartly dressed in a new wine-colored suit, carrying one of my fashion magazines under my arm, I proceeded to the courtyard of the Hotel Nacional and installed myself in a corner, my back straight, legs crossed. On guard duty, just in case.
I knew that what I was doing was utter silliness. Rosalinda had talked about granting Logan a temporary residency permit for the Protectorate; he’d given me his word, promising to help me; these arrangements just took time. If I analyzed the situation coolly, I knew I had nothing to be afraid of: all my fears were groundless, and my sitting there waiting was no more than an absurd manifestation of my insecurities. Yes, I knew that, but all the same, I decided to stay put.
He came down at nine fifteen, when the morning sun was already blazing through the crystal ceiling. The courtyard had livened up with the presence of guests who had just woken up, the bustle of the waiters, and the incessant movement of young Moroccan bellhops carrying packages and suitcases. He was still limping slightly, and his arm was in a blue cloth sling, but the bruising on his face had improved. His overall appearance, reflected in his clean clothes, the hours of sleep he’d had, and his damp, just-combed hair, was significantly better than the way he’d looked the day of his arrival. I felt a flicker of anxiety on seeing him, but I hid it with a toss of my hair and another elegant crossing of my legs. He also saw me at once and came over to greet me.
“My word, I had no idea the women here were such early risers.”
“You know the saying—God helps the early risers.”
“And what is it you want God’s help for, if you don’t mind my asking?” he said, taking a seat beside me.
“To make sure you don’t leave Tetouan without telling me how everything is going, whether the business with my mother is under way.”
“I haven’t told you anything because I don’t know anything yet,” he said. Then he leaned forward, coming closer. “You still don’t completely trust me, do you?”
His voice was certain, and close. Almost complicit. It took me a few seconds to answer as I tried to make up some lie. But I couldn’t come up with any, so I opted for being frank.
“I’m sorry, lately I don’t trust anyone.”
“I understand, don’t worry about it,” he said, smiling, still with some effort. “These aren’t good times for loyalty and trust.”
I gave a shrug that spoke volumes.
“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” I lied. I hadn’t had breakfast, nor did I feel like having any. All I needed was to be sure that he wasn’t going to abandon me without keeping his word.
“Well, then perhaps we could . . .”
A whirlwind wrapped in a haik appeared between us, interrupting our conversation: Jamila, breathless.
“Frau Langenheim is waiting at home. She’s going to Tangiers, to buy materials. She needs Señorita Sira say how many yards to buy.”
“Tell her to wait a couple of minutes; I’ll be with her right away. Tell her to have a seat and have a look at the new pictures Candelaria brought over the other day.”
Jamila ran off again and I apologized to Logan.
“My maid; I have a client waiting for me, I’ll have to go.”
“In that case I shan’t keep you any longer. And don’t worry: everything’s already in progress and we’ll get confirmation sooner or later. But bear in mind that it might be a matter of days or weeks, it could take more than a month; it’s not possible to rush anything,” he said, getting up. He seemed more agile than he had been previously, and in much less pain.
“Really, I don’t know how to thank you,” I replied. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go: I have a lot of work waiting for me, I barely have a moment free. There are going to be a number of social functions in the next few days and my clients need new outfits.”
“And you?”
“What about me?” I asked, confused, not understanding the question.
“Are you planning to attend any of these functions? Serrano Suñer’s reception, perhaps?”
“Me?” I said with a little laugh, pushing my hair back from my face. “No, I don’t go to those things.”
“Why not?”
My first impulse was to laugh again, but I restrained myself when I realized he was being serious, that his curiosity was genuine. We were both standing now, side by side, close. I could see all the detail in the texture of the light-colored linen of his jacket and the stripes of his tie; he smelled good, the smell of good soap, of a clean man. I still had my magazine in my arms, he was resting a hand on his walking stick. I looked at him and half opened my mouth to answer. I had any number of replies to justify my absence from those alien celebrations: because no one had invited me, because it wasn’t my world, because I had nothing to do with all those people . . . At last, however, I decided not to give him any reply; I just shrugged and said again, “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait,” he said, gently taking hold of my arm. “Come with me to Serrano Suñer’s reception, be my date for the night.”
The invitation echoed like a whip crack and left me so overwhelmed that when I tried to find reasons to turn him down, none came to my mouth.
“You’ve just said you don’t know how to thank me for what I’ve done. Well, now there’s a way for you to do that: come to this event with me. You could help me to learn who’s who in this city, it would do me a lot of good in my work.”
“I . . . I hardly know anyone either, I haven’t really been here for long.”
“And besides, it’ll be an interesting night; we might enjoy ourselves,” he insisted.
That was a preposterous idea, absurd. What was I going to do at a party in honor of Franco’s brother-in-law, surrounded by the military top brass and the local powers that be, by people of means and representatives of foreign countries. The proposal was altogether ludicrous, and yet there was a man standing before me waiting for an answer. A man who was arranging the evacuation of the person who mattered most to me in the whole world, a foreigner I didn’t know who’d asked me to trust him. Quick bursts of conflicting thoughts rushed through my mind: some of them advised me to refuse, insisting that this was a pointless extravagance; others reminded me of the old saying I’d so often heard from my mother’s lips, about how being well bred is about knowing how to be thankful.
“Very well,” I said, swallowing hard. “I’ll go with you.”
The figure of Jamila reappeared in the hallway, waving her arms exaggeratedly, trying to move me along, not to keep the demanding Frau Langenheim waiting too long.
“Perfect. I’ll let you know the day and exact time as soon as I get my invitation.”
I shook his hand and walked back across the courtyard, my heels tapping along in haste. It wasn’t until I reached the door that I turned around and saw Marcus Logan still standing at the far end, watching me, leaning on his cane. He hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d left him, and his presence had been transformed into a silhouette set against the light. His voice, however, could be heard loud and clear.
“I’m glad you’re coming. And don’t worry, I’m in no hurry to leave Morocco.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
___________
Doubt assailed me the moment I set foot in the street. I realized that perhaps I’d been too hasty in accepting the journalist’s proposal without first consulting Rosalinda, who might have had quite different plans for her enforced guest. My second thoughts didn’t take long to disappear, however: as soon as she arrived that afternoon for a fitting, she was in a flurry of haste.
“I’ve only got half an hour,” she said, unbuttoning her silk blouse with nimble fingers. “Juan Luis is waiting for me, there are still a thousand details that need preparing for Serrano Suñer’s visit.”
I’d planned to put my question to her tactfully, choosing my words with care, but I decided to take advantage of the moment and broach the subject right away.
“Marcus Logan has asked me to go to the reception with him.”
I didn’t look at her as I spoke, pretending to concentrate on removing her outfit from the mannequin.
“You don’t say!”
I gathered from her tone that the news had come as a pleasant surprise to her.
“You think it’s all right for me to go with him?” I asked, still uncertain.
“Of course! It would be wonderful having you around. Juan Luis will have a very official role to play, so I expect to be able to spend a bit of time with the two of you. What are you going to wear?”
“I don’t know yet, I’ll have to think about it. I think I’ll make myself something with this material,” I said, pointing to a roll of raw silk leaning against the wall.
“Dios mío, you’re going to be stunning.”
“If I survive,” I muttered, my mouth full of pins.
After several weeks without too much work, the headaches and obligations were thronging around me all of a sudden, threatening to bury me at any moment. I had so many commissions to finish that I was up every day at dawn like a rooster, and it was rare for me to make it to bed before three in the morning. The doorbell didn’t stop ringing, and clients were endlessly coming in and out of the workshop. I wasn’t bothered about feeling so overwhelmed, however—I was almost grateful for it. This way I had less time to think about what the hell I was going to do at that reception, which was now just over a week away.
Having got past the obstacle of Rosalinda, the second person to hear about the unexpected invitation, inevitably, was Félix.
“My, my, you sneaky little thing, you’re so lucky! You’re making me green with envy!”
“I’d gladly swap places with you,” I said, quite truthfully. “The party doesn’t thrill me in the slightest; I know I’ll feel out of place, there with a man I barely know and surrounded by strangers, by soldiers and politicians whose fault it is that my city is under siege and I can’t go back home.”
“Come on, girl, don’t be silly. You’re going to be part of a spectacular event that’ll go down in the history of this little corner of the African map. And besides, you’ll be there with a man who’s not bad at all, really not bad at all.”
“How do you know, if you don’t know him?”
“What do you mean I don’t know him? Where do you think I took the old she-wolf for afternoon tea today?”
“The Nacional?” I asked, incredulous. “Exactly. It came out three times as expensive as the buns at La Campana, because the old tart filled herself up to the eyeballs with tea and scones, but it was worth it.”
“So you got to see him then?”
“And to talk to him. He even gave me a light.”
“You’re shameless!” I said, unable to hold back a smile. “And what did you make of him?”
“Pleasingly attractive when his wounds heal. In spite of the limp and the half of his face that’s massacred, he’s not bad looking and seems every inch the gentleman.”
“Do you think he’ll be trustworthy, Félix?” I asked with a trace of concern. Even though Logan had asked me to trust him, I still wasn’t sure I could. My neighbor responded to my question with a laugh.
“I wouldn’t have thought so, but you needn’t worry about that. Your new friend is just a simple journalist passing through, who’s involved in some deal with the woman who has mesmerized the high commissioner. So for his own sake, if he doesn’t want to leave this country in an even worse state than when he arrived, he’d be wise to behave himself with you.”
Félix’s perspective made me see things differently. The disastrous way my interlude with Ramiro had ended had made me distrustful and suspicious, but what was at stake with Marcus Logan wasn’t a question of personal loyalty but a straightforward exchange of interests. You give me, then I’ll give you; otherwise, no deal. Those were the rules; there was no need for me to go on obsessing about how trustworthy he was. He was the person with the greatest interest in maintaining good relations with the high commissioner, so he had no reason to let me down.
That same night Félix also told me who exactly Serrano Suñer was. I’d often heard him spoken about on the radio and I’d read his name in the newspapers, but I knew hardly anything about the person hidden behind those two names. Félix, as he so often did, supplied me with the most comprehensive information.
“As I imagine you already know, querida, Serrano is Franco’s brother-in-law, married to Zita, the younger sister of Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo. This woman is quite a bit younger, more beautiful, and less conceited than Franco’s wife, as far as I’ve been able to make out from a few photographs. They say he’s an extraordinarily brilliant guy, with an intellectual capacity a thousand times greater than the Generalísimo’s, something it would seem that Franco himself doesn’t appreciate all that much. Before the war he was a state attorney and member of parliament for Zaragoza.”
“From the right.”
“Naturally. The insurgency, however, trapped him in Madrid. He was detained because of his political affiliations, he was locked up in the Modelo Prison and finally managed to get himself transferred to a hospital. He has an ulcer or something like that. They say that then, thanks to the help of Dr. Marañón, he escaped from there dressed as a woman, with a wig, a hat, and his trousers rolled up under his coat: what a picture.”
We laughed as we imagined the scene.
“He then managed to get out of Madrid and reached Alicante. From there, disguised as an Argentine sailor, he left the Peninsula on a torpedo boat.”
“He left Spain for good?” I asked.
“No, he disembarked in France and came back into the Nationalist zone by land, with his wife and his string of little kids, I think he’s got four or five. From Irún they arranged to get themselves to Salamanca, which is where the Nationalist faction originally had their headquarters.”
“That would be easy, as a relative of Franco’s.”
He gave an evil smile.
“Oh, nothing of the sort, my dear. They say General Franco—El Caudillo, as they call him—didn’t lift a finger for them. He could have offered his brother-in-law in a trade, something that happened on both sides of the conflict, but he never did. And when they did manage to get to Salamanca, apparently the reception they received wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. Franco and his family were settled in the Episcopal Palace and they say that all of the Serrano Polo troops were lodged in an attic on rickety cots while Franco’s little girl had an enormous bedroom with a bathroom to herself. The truth is, apart from all these slanders that are being passed from mouth to mouth at the moment, I haven’t been able to learn much about Serrano Suñer’s private life; I’m sorry, love. What I do know is that in Madrid two of his brothers were killed who had nothing to do with his own political causes. This seems to have traumatized him and motivated him to get actively involved in the construction of what they’re calling the New Spain. And the thing is now he’s managed to transform himself into the general’s right-hand man. Which is why they’ve taken to calling him the In-law-ísimo—a joke on his brother, the Generalísimo. They also say that much of his current power is thanks to the influence of the powerful Doña Carmen, who was already fed up that her fly-by-night other brother-i
n-law, Nicolás Franco, had so much influence on her husband. So the moment Serrano appeared, she made herself absolutely clear: ‘From now on, Paco, more Ramón and less Nicolás.’ ”
His impression of the voice of Franco’s wife made us both laugh.
“Serrano’s a really smart guy, they say,” Félix went on. “Very wise, much more experienced than Franco on political, intellectual, and human matters. Besides that, he’s hugely ambitious and works tirelessly; they say he spends his days trying to construct a judicial basis for legitimizing the Nationalist faction and his relative’s ultimate power. That is to say, he’s working to provide a civil institutional order for a structure that is purely military, you see?”
“In case they win the war,” I said.
“In case they win the war, who knows?”
“And what do people think of Serrano? Do they like him?”
“So-so. The old arrastrasables—the high-ranking officers, that is—don’t like him all that much. They consider him an inconvenient intruder; they speak different languages, they don’t understand each other. They’d be happiest with an entirely military state, but Serrano, who’s smarter than all of them, is trying to make them see that this would be a crazy idea, that they’d never be able to get legitimacy or international recognition that way. And Franco, even though he hasn’t a clue about politics, does trust him in this. So even if they don’t like it, the others just have to swallow it. Nor has he quite managed to persuade all the long-standing Falangists. It seems he used to be close friends with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, with whom he studied at the university, but he never belonged to the Falange before the war. Now he does: he had no choice, he’s currently Falangist to the bone, but the people who were Falangists before, the old guard, see him as an arriviste, an opportunist who’s only just adopted their creed.”