by Maria Duenas
Finally he settled on the arm of a sofa. He kept one foot on the floor and crossed the other over it. His back straight, his glass still in his hand, his face set in determination.
“Very well,” he agreed after a few seconds. “I’m prepared to talk. In exchange for your being honest with me. About everything.”
“Afterward, I promise.”
“Tell me what you know about me, then.”
“That you’re a member of the British military secret service. The SIS, MI6, whatever you prefer to call it.”
The surprise didn’t show on his face: he’d probably been trained not to reveal his emotions. Not like me. I hadn’t been trained to do anything, I hadn’t been prepared, I hadn’t been protected: I’d just been thrown naked out into a world of ravenous wolves. But I’d learned, on my own, struggling, stumbling, falling, and getting back up; setting off again—one foot, then the other. My head held high, eyes fixed straight ahead of me.
“I don’t know how you got hold of that information,” was his only reply. “In any case, it doesn’t matter: I suppose your sources are reliable and there wouldn’t be any point in my denying what’s obvious.”
“But there are a few other things I still don’t know.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“You could start from the moment we met, for example. Start with the real reason you came to Morocco.”
“Very well. The main reason was that in London they knew very little about what was going on within the Protectorate, and they were hearing from a number of sources that the Germans were infiltrating it freely with the acquiescence of the Spanish authorities. Our intelligence service hardly had any information on High Commissioner Beigbeder: he wasn’t one of the better-known military men, we didn’t know how he behaved, or what plans or opinions he had, and above all we didn’t know what his position was on the Germans, who were apparently so free to do whatever they wanted in the territory he controlled.”
“And what did you learn?”
“That as expected the Germans were operating in whatever way took their fancy, sometimes with his consent and sometimes without it. You helped me get part of that information yourself.”
I ignored that comment.
“And about Beigbeder?”
“I found out the same things about him that you know, too. That he was—and I imagine still is—an intelligent man, distinguished and rather unusual.”
“And why did they send you to Morocco, given the dreadful state you were in?”
“We got word of the existence of Rosalinda Fox, a compatriot of ours who was in a relationship with the high commissioner: a precious jewel to us, the best possible opportunity. But approaching her directly was too risky: she was so valuable to us that we couldn’t risk losing her with an operation that had been clumsily planned. We had to wait for just the right moment. So when we learned that she was looking for someone to help evacuate the mother of a friend of hers, the machinery was set in motion. And it was decided that I was just the right person because while I was in Madrid I’d had contact with someone who handled those evacuations to the Mediterranean. I’d kept London informed about Lance’s movements myself, so they thought I’d have the perfect alibi to show up in Tetouan and approach Beigbeder with the excuse that I was carrying out a service for his lover. There was a small problem, however: at the time I was half dead in the Royal London Hospital, flat on my back in bed with my body all bashed up, semiconscious and pumped full of morphine.”
“But you risked it, you fooled us all and got what you wanted . . .”
“Much more than we’d ever expected,” he said. I could see the trace of a smile on his lips, the first I’d seen since we’d shut ourselves in the library. I felt the pinch of a confused emotion: the Marcus I’d so yearned for, the Marcus I wanted to keep by my side, had finally returned. “They were very special times,” he went on. “After more than a year living in the turmoil of war-stricken Spain, Morocco was the best thing that could have happened to me. I recovered, and I carried out my mission with exceptional results. And I met you. I couldn’t have asked for more than that.”
“How did you do it?”
“Almost every night I sent messages from my room at the Hotel Nacional. I had a small radio transmitter with me, hidden at the bottom of my suitcase. And I wrote an encrypted message daily about what I’d seen, what I’d heard. Then, whenever I could, I passed it on to a contact in Tangiers, a shop assistant at Saccone & Speed.”
“And no one ever suspected you?”
“Of course they did. Beigbeder was no fool, you know that as well as I do. My room was searched several times, but they probably sent someone who just wasn’t all that skillful: they never found anything. The Germans were suspicious, too, but they weren’t able to get hold of any information either. For my part, I did my best never to make a single false move. I didn’t contact anyone outside official circles and didn’t venture onto any hazardous terrain. Quite the reverse—my behavior remained irreproachable. I allowed myself to be seen with all the right people and always went around in the plain light of day. All apparently entirely clean. Any more questions?”
He already seemed less tense, closer. More the Marcus he used to be.
“Why did you leave so suddenly? You didn’t warn me: you just showed up one morning at my house, gave me the news that my mother was on her way, and I never saw you again.”
“Because I received urgent orders to get out of the Protectorate immediately. There were more and more Germans arriving every day, and word got out that someone suspected me. I still managed to delay my departure a few days, even though I was risking being uncovered.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to leave without confirming that your mother’s evacuation had gone ahead as we’d hoped. I’d promised you that. There was nothing I would have wanted more than to have been able to stay with you, but it wasn’t possible: that wasn’t my world, and my time had come. And besides, it wasn’t the best time for you, either. You were still recovering from a betrayal and you weren’t ready to put your trust entirely in another man, least of all someone who would have to abandon you suddenly without being able to be absolutely honest about why. That’s it, my dear Sira. The end. Is that the story you wanted to hear? Will this version do?”
“It will,” I said, getting up and walking toward him.
“So, have I earned my reward?”
I didn’t say anything. I just approached him, lowered myself onto his lap, and brought my mouth to his ear. My made-up face brushed against his freshly shaved skin; my lips, bright with lipstick, spilled out a whisper just half an inch from his earlobe. I noticed how he tensed when he felt my closeness.
“Yes, you’ve earned your reward. But you might find that this gift is poisoned.”
“Perhaps. If I’m to know that, I need to find out about you now. When I left you in Tetouan you were a young dressmaker filled with tenderness and innocence, and when I found you in Lisbon you’d been transformed into a grown woman who had become close to someone entirely inappropriate. I want to know what happened in between.”
“You’ll find out very soon. And so that you absolutely trust my story, you’re going to hear it from someone else, someone I believe you already know. Come with me.”
We walked arm in arm down the corridor. I heard my father’s powerful voice in the distance and once again couldn’t help remembering the day I’d met him. How many turns had my life taken since then? How many times had I been nearly drowned, unable to come up for air, and how many times had I managed to get my head back above the surface? But that was all in the past now, and the days for looking back were past. It was time to concentrate on the present alone, to face it head-on in order to attend to the future.
I guessed that the other two guests were already there and that everything had gone according to plan. When we arrived at our destination we unlocked our arms, though our fingers were still entwined. Until we both saw
who was waiting for us. And then I smiled. Marcus did not.
“Good evening, Mrs. Hillgarth; good evening, Captain. I’m glad to see you,” I said, interrupting their conversation.
The room filled with a dense silence. A dense, anxious silence—electrifying.
“Good evening, miss,” replied Hillgarth after a few everlasting seconds. His voice sounded as though it were coming out of a cave. A dark, cold cave, because the head of the British secret service in Spain, the man who knew everything or ought to know everything, was feeling his way blind. “Good evening, Logan,” he added after a pause. His wife, this time without the makeup from the beauty salon, was so stunned to see us together that she was unable to respond. “I thought you’d gone back to Lisbon,” continued the naval attaché, addressing Marcus. “And I wasn’t aware that you two knew each other.”
I noticed Marcus was on the verge of saying something, but I didn’t let him. His hand was still in mine and I gave it a hard squeeze and he understood. I didn’t look at him, either: I didn’t want to see whether he was as confused as the Hillgarths were, and I didn’t want to see his reaction to them sitting there in that unfamiliar living room. We’d talk about it later, when everything had calmed down. I was sure that we would have plenty of time for that.
Looking into the wife’s big, light-colored eyes, I saw only confusion. It was she who had given me the guidelines for my Portuguese mission; she was completely involved with her husband’s activities. They were probably both struggling to connect the same dots I’d finished connecting the last time the captain and I had met. Da Silva and Lisbon, Marcus’s untimely arrival in Madrid, the same information delivered by the two of us just a few hours apart. All that, quite clearly, wasn’t merely the product of chance. How could they have missed it?
“Agent Logan and I have known each other for years, Captain, but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and we’re just finishing catching up on what we’ve each been doing,” I explained. “I know all about his situation and his responsibilities now, and since you were extremely helpful to me not so long ago, I thought you might be so kind as to assist me again by informing him about mine. And that way my father can hear about it at the same time. Oh—sorry! I’d forgotten to tell you: Gonzalo Alvarado is my father. And don’t worry: we’ll try to be seen in public together as little as we can, but you can understand that breaking off my relations with him completely won’t be possible.”
Hillgarth didn’t reply: he looked at us both again with a granite stare from under his bushy eyebrows.
Imagine Gonzalo’s bewilderment: it was probably as extreme as Marcus’s, but neither of them spoke so much as a syllable. They just waited—as did I—for Hillgarth to digest my boldness. His wife, uneasy, resorted to a cigarette, opening the case with nervous fingers. A few uncomfortable seconds passed in which the only sound was the repeated click of her lighter. Until at last the naval attaché spoke.
“If I don’t reveal it, I presume you’d do it yourself anyway . . .”
“I fear you wouldn’t leave me any other choice,” I said, giving him my best smile. A new smile—full, confident, and slightly challenging.
The silence was only broken by the clink of the ice cubes against the glass as he brought the whiskey to his mouth. His wife hid her confusion behind a thick drag on her Craven A.
“I suppose this is the price we have to pay for what you brought us from Lisbon,” he said at last.
“For that, and for all the missions to come in which I’ll work myself to the bone, I give you my word on that. My word as a dressmaker, and my word as a spy.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
__________
What I received this time wasn’t the straightforward bunch of roses tied with a ribbon covered in coded dashes that Hillgarth used to send when he needed to get a message to me. Nor were they exotic flowers like the ones Manuel Da Silva had sent to me before deciding that having me killed would be better. What Marcus brought to my house that night was just a small, almost insignificant single bud that had been pulled off some rosebush that had grown up miraculously against an adobe wall that spring after a terrible winter. A tiny flower, almost scrawny. Dignified in its simplicity, without any subterfuge.
I wasn’t expecting him, and at the same time I was. He’d left my father’s house a few hours earlier, with Hillgarth; the naval attaché had invited him to accompany him, no doubt wanting to talk to him without me present. I returned home alone, not knowing when he would reappear. Or if he was going to come back at all.
“For you,” was his greeting.
I took the little rose and let him in. His tie was undone, as though he’d actively made the decision that he was going to relax. He walked slowly into the middle of the living room; it was as though with each step he was calculating the words he had to say to string together a thought. Finally he turned and waited for me to approach.
“You know what we’ve got ahead of us, don’t you?”
I did know. Of course I knew. Our lives moved in swamps of murky waters, in a jungle of lies and furtive creatures with teeth that could cut like glass. An undercover love in a time of hatred, privations, and betrayal, that’s what we were facing.
“Yes, I do know what we have ahead of us.”
“It won’t be easy,” he added.
“Nothing’s ever easy,” I added.
“It could be very hard.”
“Perhaps.”
“And dangerous.”
“That, too.”
Outwitting traps, overcoming risks and setbacks. Without any plans, in the shadows; that was how we’d have to live. Combining willingness and daring. With integrity, courage, and the realization that we were fighting for a common cause.
We looked hard at each other and my memory of the African land where it had all begun flooded back to me. His world and my world—so far away then, and now so close—had locked together at last. Then he embraced me, and in the tenderness and heat of our closeness I felt with absolute certainty that this was another mission at which we would not fail.
• • •
And that is my story, or at least that’s how I remember it, perhaps varnished over with the sheen that decades and nostalgia give to things. What happened in Spain after the European war, as well as the traces of many people who have passed through this account—Beigbeder, Rosalinda Fox, Serrano Suñer, and others—can be found in history books and archives, and in the memories of older generations. Their comings and goings, their glories and miseries were objective facts that in their day filled newspapers and fed the salons and the clusters of people gossiping on street corners.
What happened after the war to Marcus and me and to those in our immediate circle, however, was never recorded. Our destinies might have gone in any direction, as we succeeded in remaining unnoticed, forever on the reverse side of history, crisscrossed by stitches, invisible lives from the time in between.
Author’s Note
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The conventions of the academic life to which I have been bound for more than twenty years demand that writers recognize their sources in an ordered, rigorous way; this is why I’ve decided to include a list of the more significant bibliographic references I consulted. A large proportion of the resources I’ve depended on when re-creating settings, describing certain historical figures, and bringing some coherence to the plot, however, go beyond the margins of the printed page, so I want to mention them here.
In order to reconstruct the details of colonial Tetouan, I’ve made use of countless testimonials that have been gathered in the bulletins of the La Medina Association of Former Residents of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, and for these I would like to acknowledge the collaboration of its nostalgic members and the kindness of its directors Francisco Trujillo and Adolfo de Pablos. Equally useful and touching were the Moroccan recollections unearthed by my mother and my aunts Estrella Vinuesa and Paquita Moreno, as well as the countless documents provided by Luis Á
lvarez, who was almost as excited by this project as I was. The bibliographical reference supplied by translator Miguel Sáenz, about a curious book partly set in Tetouan, was also extremely useful; it provided the inspiration for two of the supporting characters in this story.
In my reconstruction of the complicated life journey of Juan Luis Beigbeder, I was greatly interested in the information supplied by the Moroccan historian Mohamed Ibn Azzuz, zealous custodian of his legacy. For my introduction to him, and for welcoming me into the headquarters of the Tetouan-Asmir Association—the beautiful old Indigenous Affairs Bureau—I’d like to thank Ahmed Mgara, Abdeslam Chaachoo, and Ricardo Barceló. I would like to extend my thanks, too, to José Carlos Canalda for biographical details about Beigbeder; to José María Martínez-Val for dealing with my queries about his novel Llegará tarde a Hendaya, in which the then-minister appears as a character; to Domingo del Pino, who through his article opened the door for me to the memoirs of Rosalinda Powell Fox, vital to the plotline of the novel; and to Michael Brufal de Melgarejo for offering to help me follow her unclear trail in Gibraltar.
For providing me with firsthand information about Alan Hillgarth, the British Secret Services in Spain, and the Embassy cover, I’d like to acknowledge the personal kindness of Patricia Martínez de Vicente, author of Embassy, or the Mambrú Intelligence, and the daughter of an active participant in those clandestine operations. I’d like to extend my thanks to Professor David A. Messenger of the University of Wyoming for his article on the SOE’s activities in Spain.
Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to all those who one way or another were close to me during the process of creating this story, reading the whole or parts, encouraging, correcting, supplying wolf whistles and applause, or simply stepping from one day to the next by my side. To my parents for their unconditional support. To Manolo Castellanos, my husband, and my children Bárbara and Jaime, whose unceasing vitality has been a daily reminder of what it is that really matters. To my many siblings and their many circumstances, to my extended family, to my in vino amicitia friends and my dear colleagues from the Anglophile crème.