The Time in Between: A Novel

by Maria Duenas

  Evening fell and there was barely any light left by the time Candelaria returned from one of her incessant outings. She found me surrounded by piles of recently mended clothes, with the last towel in my hands.

  “Girl, don’t tell me you know how to sew.”

  For the first time in a long while, I smiled, and my reply was an almost triumphant yes. And then the boardinghouse owner, relieved at having finally found some use for the burden that my presence had become, took me to her bedroom and proceeded to dump out the entire contents of her closet onto the bed.

  “You can lower the hem of this dress and turn out the collar of this coat. This shirt has seams that need fixing, and the skirt needs to be let out a little at the waist since I’ve put on a bit of weight lately and there’s no way I can get into it.”

  And so on, until there was a huge mountain of old clothes I could barely carry. It took me just one morning to fix the imperfections in her worn-out wardrobe. Satisfied with my efficiency, and resolved to gauge the full potential of my productivity, Candelaria came home that afternoon with a piece of cheviot wool for a three-quarter coat.

  “English wool, the very best. We used to bring it over from Gibraltar before all this fuss started; now it’s extremely difficult to get hold of. Do you dare?”

  “Get me a good pair of scissors, two yards of lining, half a dozen tortoiseshell buttons, and a spool of brown thread. I’ll take your measurements right now and tomorrow morning it’ll be ready for you.”

  With those frugal means and the dining table as my center of operations, by dinnertime I had the commission ready for trying on. It was all complete before breakfast. No sooner had she opened her eyes, still sticky with sleep, and her hair held in a net, than Candelaria had arranged the coat over her nightdress and incredulously considered the effect in the mirror. The shoulders sat impeccably on her frame, and the lapels opened out to the sides in perfect symmetry, masking the excessive size of her bosom. The fit was graceful with a generous waist and a skillful cut so that it disguised the bulk of her marelike hips. The broad, elegant cuffs put the finishing touch on my work and her arms. The result couldn’t have been more satisfactory. She looked at herself, facing forward and in profile, from the back and three-quarters on. Once, again; now buttoned, now open, collar up, collar down. Her talkativeness contained for the moment, she focused on making a precise evaluation of the product. Again from the front, again from the side. And at last, the verdict.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you ever tell me you had hands like that, my angel?”

  Two new skirts, three blouses, a shirtdress, a couple of suits, an overcoat, and a winter smock soon took their places on her hangers as she bargained for new pieces of fabric on the street, paying as little as she could.

  “Chinese silk, just feel that, touch it,” she chattered excitedly as she opened her parcel and laid before my eyes a couple of yards of flame-colored fabric. “The Indian from the lower bazaar got two American lighters out of me for this—damn him to hell and back—it’s just as well I had a couple of them left from last year, because the bastard only wants silver hassani coins now; everyone’s saying they’re going to withdraw the Republican money and replace it with Nationalist banknotes—girl, such madness . . .”

  On another outing she brought back a half roll of gabardine—“the good stuff, honey, the good stuff.” A pearly satin remnant arrived the following day, accompanied by the corresponding account of how she’d gotten hold of it, and none-too-honorable references to the mother of the Jew from whom she’d acquired it. A leftover piece of caramel-colored flannel, a bit of alpaca, seven yards of patterned satin, and so on, until between dealing and swapping we had reached almost a dozen fabrics, which I cut and sewed and she tried on and praised. Until one day, when her clever ways of getting hold of the material were exhausted, or she thought her new wardrobe was at last well stocked, or she had decided the time had come to focus her attention on other tasks.

  “With all the things you’ve made for me, your debt to me up to today is settled,” she announced. And without even giving me time to savor my relief, she went on: “Now we’re going to talk about the future. You’ve got a lot of talent, girl, and that shouldn’t be wasted, specially not at this moment when you’re just a little bit lacking in the cash to get yourself out of the mess you’re in. You’ve seen how complicated it is to find you a position, so it seems to me that the best thing for you to do is to concentrate on sewing for the people in Tetouan. But the way things are, I’m afraid you’ll find it hard to get people to open their doors to you. You’ll have to have your own place, set up your own workshop, and even then it’s not going to be easy for you to get customers. We’ve really got to think it through.”

  Candelaria the Matutera knew every living creature in Tetouan, but to be quite sure of the state of the sewing business and focus on finding just the right location, it was necessary to go out quite a few times, catch up with the odd contact here and there, and do a thorough study of the situation. A couple of days after the birth of the idea we had a one hundred percent reliable picture of the lay of the land. I learned then that there were two or three well-established prestigious designers who were frequented by the wives and daughters of the military commanders, a few respected doctors, and the businessmen who were still solvent. One level down, you’d find four or five decent dressmakers for street wear and Sunday coats for the women of the more well-to-do families of the administrative staff. And finally there were several handfuls of insignificant seamstresses who made their rounds from house to house, cutting percale smocks, altering hand-me-downs, taking up hems, and darning socks. The landscape was hardly ideal: there was considerable competition, but somehow I’d have to work things out and manage to find a niche for myself. And even though, according to Candelaria, none of those sewing professionals was by any means dazzling, and most of them were made up of a cast of characters who were domestic, almost family, that wasn’t any reason to underestimate them: when they worked well, dressmakers could earn their clients’ loyalties for life.

  The idea of going back to being active again raised conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand it managed to create a little flutter of hopefulness that I hadn’t felt for an eternity. Being able to earn money to support myself and settle my debts by doing something I liked and I knew I was good at was the best thing that could have happened to me just then. At the same time, anxiety and uncertainty plagued my soul. To open my own business, humble though it might be, required initial capital, contacts, and a whole lot more luck than life had been offering me lately. It wouldn’t be easy to carve out a space for myself as just one more dressmaker; to overcome loyalties and win customers I’d have to come up with something out of the ordinary, to set me apart.

  While Candelaria and I struggled to find a path for me to follow, a number of her friends and acquaintances began coming to the boardinghouse to place a few orders with me: just this blouse, girl, if you wouldn’t mind; just a few overcoats for the kiddies before the cold sets in. On the whole they were humble women, with spending power to match. They would arrive with many children and a few scraps of fabric, and they’d sit down to talk to Candelaria while I sewed. They sighed over the war and cried about the luck of their people in Spain, drying their tears with the end of the handkerchief they kept bundled up in their sleeve. They complained about the poverty of the times and wondered anxiously what they would do to help their offspring to get on in life if the conflict continued or an enemy bullet killed their husband. They paid little and late, or sometimes not at all, as best they could. And yet, in spite of the constraints of the clientele and the modest nature of their commissions, the mere fact of being back at my sewing managed to mitigate the harshness of my distress and open up a tiny chink through which a slim ray of light began to filter.

  Chapter Nine

  ___________

  At the end of the month it began to rain, one afternoon, then the next, and the next. In three da
ys the sun barely came out; there was thunder, lightning, and mad winds that scattered leaves onto the wet ground. I kept working on the garments that the neighborhood women commissioned from me: clothes with neither grace nor class, creations in coarse fabrics whose function was to protect bodies from the inclemencies of the weather with little attention to aesthetics. Until one afternoon, when I had just finished a jacket for a neighbor’s grandson and was about to start on a pleated skirt ordered by the janitor’s daughter, Candelaria came in, enveloped in one of her excitable moods.

  “I’ve got it, girl, it’s all set, it’s all arranged!”

  She’d come in from the street wearing her new woolen jacket tied tightly at the waist, a shawl over her head, and her old shoes with the twisted heels covered in mud. She continued to chatter rapidly as she removed her outer clothes, recounting the details of her great discovery. Her powerful bust rose and fell rhythmically with her labored breathing as she spelled out her news while peeling off layers like an onion.

  “I’ve just come from the hairdresser’s where my dear friend Remedios works. I had a few bits and pieces of business to sort out with her, and while Reme was doing a permanent wave on a gabacha—”

  “A what?” I interrupted.

  “A gabacha. A frog. A Frenchy,” she clarified hurriedly before going on. “The truth is, that’s how it looked to me, that she was a gabacha. I then discovered that she wasn’t French, she was a German I hadn’t met before, because all the others, the consul’s wife, and the wives of Gumpert and Bernhardt, and Langenheim’s, too, who isn’t German but Italian, those ones I do know all too well, as we’ve had some small dealings. Anyway, as I was saying, as Reme was combing away, she asked me where I got such a splendid jacket. And I, of course, told her that I’d had it made for me by a friend, and then the gabacha, who, as I said, turned out not to be a gabacha at all but a German, looked at me and did a double take. Then she got into the conversation, and with that accent of hers that sounds like she’s about to sink her teeth into your neck, well, she told me she needs someone to sew for her, and if I know any high-quality dressmaker’s establishment, really high end, because she hasn’t been long in Tetouan and she’ll be staying awhile, and basically that she needs someone. So I said to her—”

  “That she should come here for me to sew for her,” I concluded.

  “What are you saying, girl? I can’t have a dame like that here. These women go around with generals’ wives and colonels’ wives, and they’re used to other kinds of things and other kinds of places, you have no idea how stylish this German woman was, and the kind of money she must have.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t know what crazy things were happening in my head, but I told her straight out that I’d heard that there’s going to be a haute couture house opening.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “And I’m supposed to run it?”

  “Well, of course, my angel, who else?”

  I tried to swallow again but this time couldn’t manage it. My throat had suddenly gone dry as sandpaper.

  “How am I supposed to set up a haute couture house, Candelaria?” I asked, fearful.

  Her first response was to laugh. Her second, five words enunciated with such self-confidence that it left no room for the least doubt on my part.

  “With me, honey, with me.”

  I survived dinner with a battalion of nerves dancing through my guts. Before dinner Candelaria hadn’t been able to clarify anything more for me because no sooner had she made her announcement than the sisters arrived in the dining room with a triumphant commentary on the liberation of Alcázar de Toledo. Soon the rest of the guests joined us, one group overflowing with satisfaction and the other brooding in disgust. Then Jamila began to lay the table and Candelaria had no choice but to head for the kitchen to set about organizing dinner: sautéed cauliflower and one-egg omelet; everything economical, everything nice and soft so that the guests couldn’t re-create a battle at the front by hurling cutlet bones furiously at one another’s heads.

  The well-seasoned dinner came to an end with its customary strains, and each of the residents retired promptly from the dining room. The women and Paquito headed for the sisters’ room to listen to Queipo de Llano’s nightly harangue on Radio Seville. The men left for the Unión Mercantil to have their final coffee of the day and chat with one another about the progress of the war. Jamila cleared the table and I was about to help her with the dishes when Candelaria, with a solemn expression on her dark face, pointed me toward the corridor.

  “Go to your room and wait for me, I’ll be right there.”

  It didn’t take her two minutes to join me, which she spent speedily putting on her nightdress and housecoat, checking from the balcony that the three men were well on their way up Callejón de Intendencia and making sure that the women were conveniently enthralled by the crazy radiophonic torrent of words from the rebel general. “Good evening, gentlemen! Be of good cheer!” I was waiting for her with the lights out, barely settled on the edge of my bed, troubled and nervous. It was a relief hearing her arrive.

  “We’ve got to talk, girl. You and I have to have a very serious talk,” she said in a low voice as she sat down beside me. “So let’s see—are you all ready to set up a workshop? Are you ready to be the best dressmaker in Tetouan, to sew clothes no one has ever sewn before?”

  “I’m ready to, of course I am, Candelaria, but—”

  “I’m not interested in any ‘buts.’ Now you listen closely and don’t interrupt. After the meeting with the German woman at my friend the hairdresser’s, I’ve been asking around and it turns out that lately we’ve started to have people here in Tetouan we never had before. Like you, or the scrawny sisters, or Paquito and his fat mother, or Matías the hair products man. With the uprising you all ended up here, trapped like rats, unable to cross the Strait to return to your homes. Well, other people have had more or less the same thing happen to them, but instead of being a herd of starvelings like the lot of you, whom fortune has dropped on me, they’re people of means, do you understand what I’m telling you, girl? There’s a very famous actress who came over with her company and had to stay. There’s a handful of foreign ladies, especially Germans, whose husbands—according to what people are saying—helped Franco get his troops across the Peninsula. And others like that: not many, true, but enough to give you work for quite a while if you can get them as clients. They don’t have loyalty to any other dressmakers because they’re not from here. And what’s more—and this is most important of all—they’ve got good money. They’re foreign and this war doesn’t mean anything to them, so they feel like partying and they’re not going to spend however long this mess lasts dressing themselves in rags and torturing themselves over who’s won what battle, you understand me, my angel?”

  “Of course, I do, Candelaria, but—”

  “Sssshhhh! I’ve told you I don’t want to hear any ‘buts’ till I’ve finished talking. Now let’s see: what you need now, right now, right away, without delay, is a high-class place where you can offer your customers the best of the best. I swear on my mother’s grave I’ve never seen anyone sew like you in my life, so you’ve got to get to work immediately. And yes, I know you haven’t got a bean, but that’s what Candelaria is for.”

  “But you don’t have any money either; you spend all day complaining that you don’t have enough to feed us.”

  “You’re right, I’m broke. It’s been very hard to get hold of merchandise lately at the borders. They’ve posted soldiers armed up to the teeth, and it’s not humanly possible to get past them to Tangiers to find goods unless you have fifty thousand safe-conducts, which no one is going to give me. And getting to Gibraltar is even harder, with the Strait closed to traffic and the low-flying warplanes ready to bomb anything that moves. But I’ve got a way for us to get the rooms we need to set up the business; something that—for the first time in my whole damned life—has come to me without my seeking it out and for
which I haven’t even had to leave my house. Come over here and I’ll show you.”

  Then she went over to the corner of the room where all the useless odds and ends were heaped.

  “First just pop down the corridor and check if the sisters have still got their radio on,” she commanded in a whisper.

  By the time I returned with confirmation that that was indeed the case, she had moved away the cages, the basket, the chamber pots, and the basins. All that was left in front of her was the trunk.

  “Lock the door, turn on the light, and come over here,” she demanded imperiously without raising her voice any more than she had to.

  The bare bulb on the ceiling quickly filled the room with a dim glow. When I appeared at her side she had just lifted the lid. At the bottom of the trunk was a piece of rumpled, filthy blanket. She lifted it out carefully, almost delicately.

  “Take a good look in there.”

  What I saw rendered me speechless, nearly lifeless. A pile of dark pistols, ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen or twenty of them were scattered at the bottom in disarray, their barrels pointed every which way, like a platoon of sleeping assassins.