by Maria Duenas
We both murmured a heartfelt “Yes, sir.”
“So the thing is, she’s to get better, and then, when she can, start work.”
He looked me in the eye, then seemed to hesitate a moment, debating whether to give me a handshake in farewell. Ultimately he chose not to and concluded the meeting with a recommendation and a prediction condensed into four concise words: “Be careful. We’ll talk.” Then he left, trotting nimbly down the stairs while adjusting his hat, his open hand holding it by the crown. We watched him in silence from the doorway until he had disappeared from view and were about to go back into the house when we heard his footsteps finish their descent and his voice thunder in the stairwell.
“I’ll take you both to jail, and once you’re there not even the Holy Child of the Remedio will get you out!”
“And screw you, too, you bastard,” was the first thing Candelaria said after shutting the door with a shove from her voluminous rear. Then she gave me a reluctant smile, trying to calm my confusion. “A devil of a man, he drives me raving mad; I don’t know how he does it, but he doesn’t miss a thing, and he’s constantly on my back.”
Then she sighed so deeply that her bulky bosom filled and emptied as though she had a couple of balloons inside her percale dress.
“Go on, my angel, in you go, I’ll be putting you in one of the rooms in the back. This damned uprising! It’s turned us all upside down and filled the street with arguments and the barracks with blood! Let’s see if all this ruckus ends soon and we can get back to normal life. I’m going out now, I have a few little matters to deal with; you stay here and get settled, and then, when I’m back at lunchtime, you can tell me all about it, nice and slowly.”
And with some shouting in Arabic she demanded the presence of a young Moorish girl, just fifteen years old, who came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a cloth. The two of them started to clear up some bits of junk and change sheets in the tiny, airless room that would be transformed into my bedroom. And there I settled, without the slightest idea of how long my stay would last or what course my future would take.
Candelaria Ballesteros, better known in Tetouan as Candelaria the Matutera—the Smuggler—was forty-seven years old. She passed herself off as a widow, but even she didn’t know whether her husband had in fact died on one of his many visits to Spain or whether the letter she’d received seven years earlier from Málaga announcing his demise from pneumonia was no more than the tall tale of a shameless scoundrel to extricate himself from his marriage and make sure no one came looking for him. Fleeing the miseries of the day laborers in the olive groves in the Andalusian countryside, the couple had installed themselves in the Protectorate in 1926, after the Rif War. After that, the two of them had devoted their efforts to various enterprises, whose meager returns he had conveniently invested in partying, brothels, and large glasses of Fundador brandy. They hadn’t had children, and when her Francisco vanished, leaving her alone without the contacts in Spain to continue dealing contraband, Candelaria decided to rent an apartment and establish a small boardinghouse. This did not, however, stop her from doing her best to buy, sell, rebuy, resell, sell on credit, exchange, and trade whatever she could lay her hands on. Coins, cigarette cases, stamps, fountain pens, socks, watches, lighters—all of them of shady origin, all with uncertain destinations.
In her house on La Luneta, between the Moorish medina and the newer Spanish ensanche, she indiscriminately lodged anyone who showed up at her door asking for a bed, usually people of little means and even fewer hopes. She treated them like anyone else she met: she tried to strike a bargain. I’ll buy from you, sell you, sort it out for you; you owe me, I owe you, you sort that out for me. But carefully—always with a certain caution—because Candelaria the Matutera, with her tough bearing, her stormy dealings, and that self-confidence seemingly capable of knocking over the very meanest sort, was no fool, and she knew that when it came to Commissioner Vázquez, she’d better not mess around too much. Perhaps a joke here, a sarcastic comment there, but without letting him get anything over her, never overstepping what was legally acceptable because, as she put it herself, “if he catches me up to something, he’ll whisk me off to the police station, and then God only knows.”
The sweet little Moorish girl helped me to settle in. Together we unpacked my few belongings and hung them on wire hangers in the closet that was really no more than a wooden crate with a little leftover bit of fabric hung over the front. That piece of furniture, a bare bulb, and an old bed with a coarse stuffed mattress made up all the fittings in the room. An out-of-date calendar with a picture of a nightingale on it, courtesy of El Siglo barbershop, brought the only touch of color to the whitewashed walls marked by the leftovers of a sea of leaks. In one corner, on a trunk, a number of household odds and ends had accumulated: a straw basket, a battered washbowl, two or three chipped chamber pots, and a couple of rusty wire cages. The room was austere, verging on poverty, but it was clean. As she helped me to organize that mess of rumpled clothes that made up the entirety of my belongings, the girl with the jet-black eyes kept repeating in a gentle voice, “Siñorita, you no worry; Jamila wash, Jamila iron Siñorita clothes.”
I did not have much strength, and the little extra I’d used to move the suitcase and empty out its contents brought on a sudden wave of dizziness. I sat down at the foot of the bed, closed my eyes, and covered my face with my hands, resting my elbows on my knees. My balance came back in a couple of minutes, then I returned to the present and found that young Jamila was still beside me, watching with concern. I looked around. It was still there, that poor dark mouse hole of a room, with my rumpled clothes on the hangers and my suitcase disemboweled on the floor. Despite the chasm of uncertainty I felt opening before me, I realized with a sense of relief that, however badly things were going, at least I already had my own little hole in which to take shelter.
Candelaria returned an hour later. The others arrived at more or less the same time, the wretched catalog of guests to whom the household offered room and board. The parish was made up of a hair products representative, an employee of the Telegraph and Mail Department, a retired schoolmaster, a couple of sisters advanced in years and shriveled as salted fish, and a rotund widow with her son, whom she called her little “Paquito” in spite of his deep voice and the thick down that he sported on his upper lip. They all greeted me politely when the hostess introduced me and then settled in silence around the table, each in their assigned place: Candelaria at the head, the others spread along the two sides. The women and Paquito on one side, the men opposite. “You at the other end,” she commanded. She began to serve the stew, speaking without respite about how much the price of meat had gone up and how well the melons were doing that year. She wasn’t aiming her comments at anyone in particular and yet seemed to have a great desire not to yield in her chatter, however trivial the subject and slight the attention of her fellow diners. Without a word, everyone set to their lunch, bringing the cutlery from their plates rhythmically to their mouths. No other sound could be heard than the voice of the hostess, the noise of the spoons against the crockery, and the sounds of chewing and swallowing. A moment of inattention on Candelaria’s part eventually allowed me to figure out the reason for her incessant chatter: at her first pause, calling for Jamila from the kitchen, one of the sisters took advantage to drive in her wedge.
“They say Badajoz has fallen.” The words of the younger of the two older sisters didn’t seem to be directed at anyone in particular either—to the water jug, perhaps, or the salt shaker, or the cruets or the picture of the Last Supper that presided, slightly askew, on the wall. Her tone was meant to seem indifferent, too, as though she were commenting on the temperature that day or the taste of the peas. I learned right away, however, that her comment was as innocent as a recently sharpened blade.
“What a shame; so many good lads who’ve given their lives to defend the legitimate government of the Republic; so many young, energetic lives wasted, with al
l that pleasure they could have given to a woman as appealing as you, Sagrario.”
The acid-charged reply had come courtesy of the traveling salesman and was met with a laugh from the rest of the men. As soon as Doña Herminia noticed that her little Paquito had also found the salesman’s comment funny, she gave the lad a good thwack that left the back of his neck red. Supposedly helping the boy out, the old schoolteacher intervened at this point with his sensible voice. Without lifting his head from his plate, he pronounced, “Don’t laugh, Paquito, they say that laughing shrivels the brain.”
The moment he’d finished the sentence the child’s mother weighed in.
“That’s why the army rose up, to put an end to all that laughing, all that joy, and all the licentiousness that’s driving Spain to ruin . . .”
Then it was as though hunting season had opened. The three men on one side and the three women on the other raised their voices almost as one, a chicken coop in which no one was listening to anyone and everyone started yelling, letting insults and outrages fly from their mouths. Vicious commie, sanctimonious old cow, son of Lucifer, bitter old hag, atheist, degenerate, and dozens of other epithets shot through the air in a crossfire of angry shouts. The only people who remained silent were Paquito and myself: me because I was new there and had no knowledge or opinion about the outcome of the fighting, and Paquito probably out of fear of another blow. At that moment his mother was accusing the schoolmaster of being a foul Freemason and Satan worshipper, her mouth filled with half-chewed potatoes and a thread of oil running down her chin. At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Candelaria was being transformed, second by second: rage increased her bulk, and her face, which just a moment before had been so agreeable, began to redden until, unable to contain herself any longer, she gave the table a thump with her fist, so hard that the wine jumped from the glasses, the plates clattered, and the stew splashed onto the tablecloth. Like a thunderclap, her voice rose above the other half dozen voices.
“If you talk about this damned war in this blessed house one more time, I’ll throw you all into the street and toss your suitcases off the balcony!”
Reluctantly, and exchanging murderous glances, they all furled sails and concentrated on finishing their first course, struggling to contain their fury. The mackerel of the second course was devoured in near silence; the watermelon for dessert threatened danger because of its crimson color, but the tension never exploded. Lunch ended without any further incident; for that, I would only need to wait till dinner. It would all come back then, the ironic comments as a starter, and the double entendres, then the poison-tipped darts and the exchange of blasphemies and people crossing themselves, and finally the untrammeled insults and flying crusts of bread aimed at the eyes of the person opposite. And as a coda, we again heard Candelaria’s warning of the imminent eviction of all the guests if they persisted in reenacting the two sides of the conflict. I learned then that it was normal for this ritual to play out at the three daily meals at the boardinghouse, day in and day out. Never once, however, did our hostess cut a single one of the guests loose, despite the fact that they all kept their war nerves on the alert, their tongues sharp, ready to assail the opposing side mercilessly. Those days of scant trade were no time for the Matutera to voluntarily give up what each of those poor homeless devils was paying for room, board, and the right to a weekly bath. So, in spite of all her threats, there were few days that didn’t see one side of the table hurling opprobrium at the other, as well as olive pits, political slogans, banana skins, and at the most heated moments an occasional gob of spit and more than one fork. The essence of life itself on the scale of a domestic battle.
Chapter Eight
___________
And so my stay at the La Luneta boardinghouse began in this way, surrounded by these people about whom I never learned much more than their given names and—very superficially—the reasons they were lodging there. The schoolmaster and the civil servant, both elderly bachelors, were longtime residents; the sisters had traveled from Soria to Morocco in mid-July to bury a relative and saw the Strait closed to marine traffic before they were able to return home; something similar had happened to the hair products salesman, kept in the Protectorate against his will as a result of the insurgency. The mother and son had other reasons that were less clear, though everyone assumed they had come in search of an elusive husband and father who one fine morning had gone out to buy tobacco on Toledo’s Plaza de Zocodover and decided never to return home. In time, amid the almost daily skirmishes at the boardinghouse, along with the actual war advancing relentlessly throughout the summer and followed minutely from afar by that gathering of displaced, irate, frightened creatures, I began to get used to this boardinghouse and its underworld. I became closer as well to the owner of the business, which, considering the nature of the clientele, I assumed could not bring her very much income.
I didn’t go out much in those days: I had nowhere to go, nor anyone to see. I was usually alone, or with Jamila, or with Candelaria when she was around, which was infrequently. Sometimes, when she wasn’t bustling off to do her wheeling and dealing, she would insist on taking me out with her, for us to find some work for me. “Otherwise you’ll end up with a face like old parchment, girl, if you don’t give yourself so much as a flicker of sunlight,” she would say. Sometimes I felt unable to accept the invitation, not feeling strong enough, but other times I’d agree, and then she’d take me here and there, through the fiendish maze of streets of the Moorish quarter and the modern, gridlike roads of the Spanish ensanche with its beautiful houses and well-turned-out residents. In every establishment whose owner she knew, she would ask if they could find a position for me, if they knew of anyone who had a job for this girl who was so dedicated and ready to work day and night, as I was supposed to be. But those were difficult times, and even though the sounds of gunfire were still far away, everyone seemed discouraged by the uncertain outcome of the fighting, worried about their people back home, about the whereabouts of this one or that one, the advancing of the troops at the front, who had lived and who had died, and what was still to come. In such circumstances almost nobody was interested in expanding a business or hiring new staff. And even though we usually concluded those outings with a glass of mint tea and a tray of savory morsels in some seedy café on the Plaza de España, every frustrated attempt was for me one more shovelful of anxiety dumped onto the pile, and for Candelaria—though she never said as much—a new gnawing worry.
My health improved at the same rate as my spirits, a snail’s pace. I was still all skin and bones, and the pallid tone of my complexion contrasted with the faces around me tanned by the summer sun. My emotions were still taut, my soul weary; I still felt as torn apart by Ramiro’s abandonment as I had on that first day. I was still pining for the child whose existence I had only been aware of for a few hours, and I was once again consumed with worry over what had become of my mother in Madrid. Still frightened by the charges against me and by Don Claudio’s warnings, terrorized at the thought of being unable to make restitution and the possibility of ending up in prison, I had panic as my constant companion.
One of the effects of being crazily, obsessively in love is that it dulls your senses, your capacity for perception, till you no longer notice what is happening around you. It causes you to focus your attention so much on a single person that it isolates you from the rest of the universe, imprisons you inside a shell, and keeps you at a distance from other realities, even those right in front of you. When everything was thrown to the wind, I realized that those eight months I’d spent alongside Ramiro had been so intense that I’d barely had close contact with anyone else. Only then did I become aware of the scale of my loneliness. In Tangiers I hadn’t bothered to form relationships with anyone: I wasn’t interested in anyone but Ramiro and things to do with him. In Tetouan, however, he was no longer there, and with him had gone my grip on things and my points of reference. So I had to learn to live alone, to think of mysel
f, and to struggle to make the weight of his absence gradually less devastating. As the Pitman Academies leaflet had said, long and steep is the path of life.
August came to an end, and September arrived with its shorter evenings and cooler mornings. The days passed slowly over the bustle of La Luneta. People went in and out of the shops, cafés, and bazaars, crossed streets, paused outside shop windows, and chatted to acquaintances on street corners. As I observed from my vantage point the changing light and all that unstoppable energy, I realized that I, too, urgently needed to get myself moving, to begin some sort of productive activity in order to stop living off Candelaria’s charity and to start gathering the money to pay off my debt. I hadn’t yet figured out how to do this, however, and to compensate for my inactivity and my nonexistent contribution to the economy of the household, I forced myself at least to participate in some of the domestic chores and not be just a lazy lump of furniture. I peeled potatoes, set the table, hung the clothes out to dry on the rooftop terrace. I helped Jamila do the dusting and clean the windows, I learned a few Arabic words from her and allowed her to lavish her endless smiles upon me. I watered the flowers, shook out the pillows, and anticipated little necessities that sooner or later someone would have to deal with. As the temperature changed, the boardinghouse in turn began to ready itself for the arrival of autumn and I helped with that. We stripped the beds in all the rooms—we changed sheets, took off the summer bedcovers, and brought the winter blankets down from the attic. I noticed then that a lot of the linens needed mending, so I took a big basket of bed linen out to the balcony and sat down to mend tears, strengthen hems, and tidy up frayed edges.
And that day something unexpected happened. I never could have imagined that the feeling of a needle between my fingers would be so pleasing. Those rough bedspreads and coarse linen sheets had nothing in common with the silks and muslins of Doña Manuela’s workshop, and the mending of their imperfections was a world away from the delicate backstitching that I had dedicated myself to in order to assemble clothes for the fine ladies of Madrid. Nor did Candelaria’s modest dining room resemble Doña Manuela’s workshop, nor did the presence of the Moorish girl and the incessant comings and goings of the rest of the quarrelsome guests correspond with the figures of my old working companions and the refinement of our customers. But the rhythm of my wrist was just the same, and the needle was once again moving quickly before my eyes as my fingers toiled away to get the stitches just right, just as they had done for years, day after day, in another place and for other ends. The satisfaction of sewing again was so pleasing that for a couple of hours I was taken back to happier times and managed temporarily to dissolve the leaden weight of my own miseries. It was like being back home.