The Time in Between: A Novel

by Maria Duenas

  I made my way along the streets with determination, prompting eager glances and impudent compliments. I forced myself not to think: I avoided calculating the significance of my actions and didn’t want to stop and guess whether that trajectory was taking me to the threshold of paradise or directly to the slaughterhouse. I went down the Costanilla de San Andrés, crossed the Plaza de los Carros, and down Cava Baja headed for the Plaza Mayor. In twenty minutes I was at the Puerta del Sol; in less than half an hour I reached my destination.

  Ramiro was waiting for me. He quickly sensed my silhouette at the door and broke off the conversation he was holding with another employee and headed toward me, collecting his hat and a raincoat on his way. When he was standing there beside me I wanted to tell him I had the money in my pocket, that Ignacio sent his regards, that I would perhaps start learning to type that very afternoon. He didn’t let me. He didn’t even greet me. He only smiled, holding a cigarette in his mouth, gently grazed his hand over the small of my back, and said, “Let’s go.” And with him I went.

  The chosen place could not have been more innocent: he took me to the Café Suizo. Having confirmed with relief that our surroundings were safe, I believed that I might still be able to effect my salvation. I even thought—as he looked for a table and invited me to sit down—that perhaps this meeting had no more duplicity to it than the simple display of attentiveness to a client. I even began to suspect that all that brazen flirtation might have been nothing more than an excess of fantasy on my part. But that was not how it was. In spite of the irreproachable surroundings, our second meeting brought me back to the edge of the abyss.

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a single minute since you left yesterday,” he whispered in my ear the moment we had settled.

  I felt unable to reply. The words couldn’t reach my lips: like sugar in water, they dissolved in some uncertain place in my brain. He took my hand again and caressed it just as he had done the previous afternoon, without taking his eyes off it.

  “You have calluses on your hands—tell me, what have these fingers been doing before they came to me?”

  His voice still sounded close and sensual, quite apart from the noises that surrounded us: the clink of the glass and crockery against the marble of the tabletops, the buzz of morning conversations, and the voices of waiters placing orders at the counter.

  “Sewing,” I whispered, not lifting my eyes from my lap.

  “So you’re a seamstress?”

  “I was. Not anymore.” I lifted my gaze, finally. “There hasn’t been much work lately,” I added.

  “Which is why you want to learn to use a typewriter.”

  He spoke with complicity, familiarly, as though he knew me: as though his soul and mine had been waiting for each other since the beginning of time.

  “My fiancé thought about enrolling me to take some examinations so that I could become a civil servant like him,” I said with a touch of shame.

  The arrival of the refreshments halted our conversation. For me, a cup of hot chocolate. For Ramiro, coffee, black as night. I took advantage of the pause to look at him while he exchanged a few phrases with the waiter. He was wearing a different suit than on the previous day, another impeccable shirt. He had elegant manners, and at the same time, within that refinement that was so alien to the men who surrounded me, he oozed masculinity from every pore of his body: as he smoked, as he adjusted the knot of his tie, as he took his wallet from his pocket or brought the cup to his lips.

  “And why would a woman like you want to spend her life in a ministry, if that’s not too forward a question?” he asked after taking his first sip of coffee.

  I shrugged. “So we can have a better life, I guess.”

  Again he came slowly closer to me, again his hot voice was in my ear: “Do you really want to start living better, Sira?”

  I took refuge in a sip of chocolate to avoid answering.

  “You’ve got a smudge; let me wipe it,” he said.

  And then he brought his hand to my face and opened it over the contour of my jaw, adjusting it to my bones as though this were the mold from which I had once been formed. Then he put his thumb in the place where the smudge supposedly was, close to where my lips met. He caressed me smoothly, slowly. I let him do it: a mixture of terror and pleasure prevented me from moving.

  “You’ve got some here, too,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, moving his finger.

  Its destination was one end of my lower lip. He repeated the caress. More slowly, more tenderly. A shiver ran up my spine; my fingers gripped the velvet of the seat.

  “And here, too,” he said again. Then he caressed my whole mouth, millimeter by millimeter, from one end to the other, rhythmically, slowly, more slowly. I was about to sink into a well of something soft that I could not define. I didn’t care if the whole thing was a lie and there was no trace of chocolate on my lips. I didn’t care that at the next table three venerable old men suspended their chatter to contemplate the scene, burning with desire, furiously wishing they were thirty years younger.

  Then a noisy group of students trooped into the café, and their racket and laughter destroyed the magic of the moment like someone bursting a soap bubble. And right away, as though awaking from a dream, I became aware of several things at once: that the ground hadn’t melted but was still solid beneath my feet, that the finger of a man I didn’t know was about to go into my mouth, that an eager hand was crawling along my left thigh, and that I was a heartbeat away from throwing myself headfirst off a precipice. My clarity of thought now recovered, I jumped to my feet. Rushing to take up my bag, I knocked over a glass of water that the waiter had brought with my chocolate.

  “Here’s the money for the typewriter. At the end of the afternoon my fiancé will come by to collect it,” I said, leaving the bundle of notes on the marble.

  He held me by the wrist.

  “Don’t go, Sira; don’t be angry with me.”

  I tugged myself free. I didn’t look at him or say good-bye; I just turned and with forced dignity began to make my way to the door. It was only then that I noticed I’d spilled the water on myself and that my left foot was soaked.

  He didn’t follow me; he probably sensed it wouldn’t do him any good. He just stayed sitting there, and as I moved away he launched his final dart at my back.

  “Come back another day. You know where to find me now.”

  I pretended not to hear him. I picked up my pace through the crowd of students and blended into the hubbub of the street.

  Eight times I went to bed hoping that when morning came things would be different, and the eight mornings that followed I awoke with the same obsession in my head: Ramiro Arribas. His memory assaulted me at every turn, and I couldn’t keep him from my thoughts for a single minute: making the bed, blowing my nose, as I peeled an orange or went down the stairs one by one with his face engraved on my retina.

  Meanwhile, Ignacio and my mother worked away at the plans for the wedding, but they were incapable of making me share their enthusiasm. Nothing pleased me, nothing could raise the slightest interest in me. It must be nerves, they thought. I struggled, meanwhile, to get Ramiro out of my head, not to recall his voice in my ear, his finger caressing my mouth, his hand running up my thigh, and the last words he fixed in my eardrums when I turned my back on him in the café, convinced that by walking away I’d be putting an end to the madness. Come back another day, Sira. Come back.

  I fought with all my strength to resist. I fought, and I lost. There was nothing I could do to impose the least rationality on the uncontrolled attraction that man had made me feel. However much I looked around me, I was unable to find the resources, the strength, anything to cling to in order to stop myself from being dragged away. Neither the husband-to-be whom I planned to marry in less than a month, nor the upright mother who had struggled so hard to bring me up to be a decent, responsible woman. I wasn’t even stopped by the uncertainty of barely knowing who that stranger
was and what destiny had in store for me at his side.

  Nine days after my first visit to the Casa Hispano-Olivetti, I returned. Like the previous times, I was once again greeted by the tinkling of the bell over the door. No fat salesman came to greet me, no shop boy, no other employee. Only Ramiro.

  I approached, trying to make my steps sound firm; I had my words ready. I wasn’t able to say them. He didn’t let me. As soon as he had me within his reach he put his hand to the back of my neck and planted on my mouth a kiss so intense, so carnal and prolonged that my body was startled by it, ready to melt and be transformed into a puddle of honey.

  Ramiro Arribas was thirty-four years old, had a past filled with comings and goings and a capacity for seduction so powerful that not even a concrete wall could have contained it. First came attraction, doubt, and anxiety. Then passion, and the abyss. I drank in the air he breathed and I walked beside him, floating six inches above the cobblestones. The rivers could burst their banks, the buildings could crumble, and the streets could be wiped off the maps; the heavens could meet the earth and the whole universe could collapse at my feet, and I could bear it if Ramiro were there.

  Ignacio and my mother began to suspect that something unusual was happening to me, something more than the simple tension brought about by the imminent marriage. They were not, however, able to figure out the reason for my excitement, nor did they find any cause to justify the excessive secrecy with which I moved at all hours, my erratic departures, and the hysterical laughter I occasionally found myself unable to contain. I managed to maintain the equilibrium of that double life for just a few days, just enough to see how the scales tipped with every passing minute, how Ignacio’s side fell and Ramiro’s rose. In less than a week I knew that I had to cut myself off from everything and launch myself into the void. The moment had come for me to take a scythe to my past. To level it to the ground.

  Ignacio arrived at our house in the evening.

  “Wait for me in the square,” I whispered, opening the door just a few inches.

  My mother had learned about my decision at lunchtime; I couldn’t let him go on any longer without knowing. I went down five minutes later, my lips painted, my new bag in one hand and the Lettera 35 in the other. He was waiting for me on the usual bench, on that bit of cold stone where we’d spent so many hours planning a common future that would never come.

  “You’re going off with someone else, aren’t you?” he asked when I sat down beside him. He didn’t look at me; he just kept his eyes fixed on the ground, on the dusty earth that the tip of his shoe was busy turning up.

  I just nodded. A round, wordless yes. Who is it? he asked. I told him. Around us the usual noises continued: children, dogs, and bicycle bells; the tolling of San Andrés calling to last Mass, the wheels of the carts over the cobbles, the tired mules heading for the end of the day. Ignacio took a while to speak again. He must have sensed such determination, such certainty in my decision that he didn’t even let me see his confusion. He didn’t make a scene, nor did he demand explanations. He only spoke one more sentence, slowly, as though allowing it to slip out.

  “He will never love you as much as I do.”

  And then he stood up, took up the typewriter, and began to walk with it toward the void. I watched his back moving away, walking beneath the murky light of the street lamps, perhaps suppressing an urge to dash the machine against the ground.

  I kept my eyes fixed on him, watched as he left the square until his body faded into the distance, until I could no longer make him out in the autumn evening. And I would have liked to remain there crying at his absence, regretting that farewell that was so brief and so sad, blaming myself for having put an end to our hopeful plan for the future. But I couldn’t. I didn’t shed a single tear, didn’t rain down a single reproach upon myself. Just a minute after his presence had faded, I, too, got up from the bench and walked away. I left behind my neighborhood, my people, my little world forever. My whole past remained there as I set out on a new stage of my life, a life that seemed luminous and whose immediate present could imagine no greater glory than that of Ramiro’s two arms giving me shelter.

  Chapter Three

  ___________

  With him I learned a new kind of life. I learned to be independent of my mother, to live with a man, and to keep a maid. To try to please him every moment and to have no other aim but to make him happy. And I also got to know another Madrid: the Madrid of sophisticated fashionable places; of shows, restaurants, and nightlife. Cocktails at Negresco, the Granja del Henar, Bakanik. Film premieres at the Real Cinema with organ accompaniment, Mary Pickford on the screen, Ramiro putting bonbons in my mouth, and me lightly grazing the tips of his fingers with my lips, almost melting with love. Carmen Amaya at the Teatro Fontalba, Raquel Meller at the Maravillas. Flamenco at Villa Rosa, the Palacio del Hielo cabaret. A lively, effervescent Madrid, through which Ramiro and I flitted as though there were no yesterday and no tomorrow. As though we had to consume the whole world every instant in case the future were never to arrive.

  What was it about Ramiro, what did he do to me that turned my life upside down in just a couple of weeks? Even today, so many years later, I can put together a catalog with my eyes closed of everything about him that seduced me, and I’m convinced that if I’d been born a hundred times, a hundred times over I’d have fallen in love with him as I did then. Ramiro Arribas, irresistible, worldly, handsome as the devil. With his brown hair combed back, his stunning bearing of pure manliness, radiating optimism and confidence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Witty and sensual, indifferent to the political asperity of the times, as though he were not quite of this world. A friend to everyone without taking anyone seriously, the constructor of grand plans, always knowing just the right word, just the right gesture for each moment. Now the manager of an Italian typewriter company, yesterday a German car rep, the day before yesterday what difference did it make, and next month God alone knew.

  What did Ramiro see in me, why did he become infatuated with a humble dressmaker about to marry an unambitious civil servant? True love for the first time in his life, he swore to me a thousand times. There had been other women before, of course. How many, I asked? Some, but none like you. And then he would kiss me and I thought I was dancing on the edge of a faint. Nor would it be hard for me today to assemble another list of his impressions of me: I remember them all. The explosive blend of an almost childish naïveté with the bearing of a goddess, he said. A diamond in the rough, he said. Sometimes he treated me like a little girl and then the ten years that separated us seemed centuries. He would anticipate my whims, fill my capacity for surprise with the most unexpectedly inspired ideas. He’d buy me stockings at the Lyon silk shop, creams and perfumes, ice creams in exotic flavors; custard apple, mango, and coconut. He would instruct me—teaching me to use my cutlery properly, to drive his Morris, to decipher restaurant menus, how to inhale when smoking. He would talk to me about figures from the past and artists he’d once met; he’d recollect old friends and anticipate the splendid opportunities that might be awaiting us in any remote corner of the globe. He’d draw maps of the world, and he made me grow. Sometimes, however, that little girl disappeared and I’d rise up as a woman fully formed, and he wasn’t at all bothered by my lack of knowledge and experience: he desired me, he revered me just as I was and clung to me as though my body were the only mooring in the turbulent oscillations of his existence.

  I installed myself with him from the start in his masculine apartment beside the Plaza de las Salesas. I brought hardly anything with me, as though my life were beginning anew, as though I were someone else and had been born again. My reckless heart and a few clothes were the only possessions I brought to his home. From time to time I’d go back and visit my mother; in those days she used to take on sewing work at home, but there was so little of it that she had barely enough to survive. She didn’t approve of Ramiro, disliking the way he behaved with me. She accused him of having
dragged me away impulsively, of having used his age and position to trick me, to force me to give up all my existing bonds. She didn’t like that I was living with him unmarried, that I’d left Ignacio, and that I was no longer the way I’d always been. However hard I tried, I was never able to convince her that Ramiro hadn’t been the one pressuring me to act like this, that it was simply unbounded love that had brought me to him. Our discussions got harsher every day: we exchanged terrible reproaches and clawed at each other’s entrails. To each challenge from her I would reply with some bit of insolence, to each reproach with an even fiercer contempt. It was unusual for a meeting not to end with tears, shouts, and slamming doors, and so my visits became increasingly short and infrequent. And my mother and I more distant every day.

  Until one day there was an approach on her part. She only did it in the role of an intermediary, certainly, but that gesture of hers—as we might have predicted—brought about a new turn in our separate paths. She showed up at Ramiro’s house in the middle of the morning. He was already out and I was still asleep. We had been out the previous night, first seeing Margarita Xirgu at the Teatro de la Comedia, then afterward going out to Le Cock bar. It must have been nearly four in the morning when we went to bed, and I was so exhausted that I didn’t even have the strength to wipe off the makeup that I’d recently begun using. Half asleep I heard Ramiro leaving at around ten; half asleep I heard the arrival of Prudencia, the maid who kept our domestic disarray in some order. Half asleep I heard her go out for the milk and bread and half asleep I heard a short while later that there was someone at the door. I thought that Prudencia had come back, having left her key behind, which she had done before. I got up, flustered, and in a foul mood approached the insistent knocking at the door, shouting, I’m coming! I didn’t even bother to put anything on: Prudencia’s stupidity didn’t deserve the effort. Sleepily I opened the door to find not Prudencia, but my mother. I didn’t know what to say. Nor did she. She just looked me up and down, her attention caught successively by my disheveled hair, the black mascara tracks running under my eyes, the remains of carmine around my mouth, and the indecent nightdress that allowed more naked flesh to be seen than her sense of decency would allow. I couldn’t bear her gaze, I couldn’t face her. Perhaps because I was still too bewildered by my late night, perhaps because the serene severity of her attitude disconcerted me.