by Maria Duenas
It was also at Félix’s suggestion that I ordered a box of ivory-white cards from La Papelera Africana bearing the name and address of the business and had a gilt plaque made for the door, inscribed in ornate script: Chez Sirah—Grand Couturier. Couturier, he said, was what the best French fashion houses called themselves in those days. That final h was his touch, too, to give the workshop a more international flavor, he said. I played along with him—and why not? After all, I wasn’t hurting anyone with that little folie de grandeur. I heeded his advice on this matter and on a thousand other details, thanks to which I wasn’t just able to make my way into the future more securely, but I also managed—drumroll, please—to pull a past out of my top hat, too. I didn’t have to try too hard: with three or four poses, a handful of careful brushstrokes, and a few recommendations from my own personal Pygmalion, my small clientele set me up with a whole life in just a couple of months.
To the little colony of exclusive ladies who made up my clientele within that expatriate universe, I became a young haute couture dressmaker, daughter of a ruined millionaire, betrothed to an incredibly handsome aristocrat—both a seducer and an adventurer. It was also supposed that we had lived in several countries and found ourselves obliged by the political instability to shut up our homes and businesses in Madrid. At that moment my betrothed was off managing some prosperous firms in Argentina while I awaited his return in the capital of the Protectorate because I had been advised of the benefits of that climate for my delicate health. As my life had always been so active, so full of bustle, and so worldly, I felt incapable of just sitting around watching the time go by without devoting myself to some activity or other, and so I had decided to open a small atelier in Tetouan. Just for my own amusement, basically. Which explained why I didn’t charge astronomical prices, nor turn down any kind of commission.
I never denied a single iota of the image that had been constructed for me thanks to the picturesque suggestions of my friend Félix. Nor did I add to it. I just left it all hanging in the air, feeding the mystique and making myself less defined, more indistinct: a superb hook for bringing out people’s baser instincts and catching new clients. If only the other dressmaking girls from Doña Manuela’s workshop could have seen me then. Or the women who lived next door to us on the Plaza de la Paja, or my mother. My mother. I tried to think of her as little as possible, but her memory was constantly assailing me. I knew she was strong and determined; I realized that she would know how to get through the hard times. But all the same, how I yearned to hear from her, to learn how she was managing to get on day to day, how she was coping without any company or income. I so wanted to let her know I was well, alone again, and that I’d gone back to sewing. I kept myself informed by listening to the wireless, and every morning Jamila would go to the Alcaraz store to buy La Gaceta de África. A Second Triumphant Year under the Aegis of Franco, read the headlines. Even though all the news came to us sifted through the filter of the Nationalist side, I kept more or less up to date with the situation in Madrid and the Resistance. For all that, it was still proving impossible to get any direct word from my mother. How I missed her, how much I would have given to share everything in that strange and luminous city with her, to have set up the workshop together, to go back to eating her stews and hearing her pronouncements, always so sure. But Dolores wasn’t there and I was. Surrounded by strangers, unable to go anywhere, struggling to survive as I made up a fraudulent persona that I could step into each morning, I fought to ensure that no one discovered that an unscrupulous con man had battered my soul and a pile of pistols had enabled me to set up my business, thanks to which I had enough to feed myself each day.
I would often remember Ignacio, my first boyfriend, as well. I didn’t miss his physical presence, since Ramiro’s had been so brutally intense that his—so sweet, so mild—already seemed distant and vague to me, a nearly faded shadow. But I couldn’t prevent myself from nostalgically recalling his loyalty, his tenderness, and the certainty that nothing painful could happen to me by his side. And much, much more frequently than it should have, the memory of Ramiro assailed me abruptly, stabbing me sharply in the gut. It hurt, of course it hurt, horribly. Still, I managed to get used to living with it like someone carrying a heavy load: dragging it along though it slows your pace and demands great effort, but not allowing it to prevent you from making your way onward.
All those invisible presences—Ramiro, Ignacio, my mother, things lost, things past—began to transform themselves into companions that were more or less volatile, more or less intense, companions that I’d have to learn to live with. They invaded my mind when I was alone, in the silent evenings toiling away in the workshop between patterns and bastings, when I went to bed or in the gloom of the living room on the nights when Félix wasn’t there, when he was off on his clandestine wanderings. The rest of the day they usually left me alone, probably sensing that I was too busy to stop and pay them any attention. I had enough to think about with a business to run and an invented personality to continue fabricating.
Chapter Seventeen
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With the arrival of spring, the volume of work increased. The weather was changing, and my clients needed lighter outfits for the bright mornings and the imminent Moroccan summer nights. A few new faces appeared, a few more German women, some more Jews. Thanks to Félix I managed to get a more or less precise idea of them all. He used to pass the clients at the main entrance or on the stairs, the landing, or the street when they were entering or leaving the workshop. He amused himself by looking for snippets of information to create their profiles: who they were, their families, where they were going, where they’d come from. Then later, when he’d leave his mother slumped in her armchair, her half-closed eyes rolled up and boozy drool hanging from her mouth, he would reveal to me what he had learned.
That was how, for example, I discovered certain details concerning Frau Langenheim, one of the German ladies who had quickly become regulars. Her father had been the Italian ambassador to Tangiers and her mother was English; her husband, an older mining engineer, was tall, bald, and a respected member of the small but determined German colony in Spanish Morocco. He was one of the Nazis, Félix told me, who almost unexpectedly and to the astonishment of the Republicans had secured directly from Hitler the first outside assistance for Franco’s army, just a few days after the uprising. It would be a while before I’d be able to gauge to what extent the activities of my client’s stiff husband had proved crucial to the course of the civil war. However, thanks to Langenheim and Bernhardt, another German living in Tetouan—whose half-Argentine wife was an occasional client of mine—Franco’s troops, without having planned for it and in a tiny period of time, got hold of a fine arsenal of military assistance, which enabled them to transport their men to the Peninsula. Months later, as a sign of gratitude and recognition for her husband’s significant actions, my client would be granted the greatest honor in the Protectorate from the hands of the caliph, and I would dress her in silk and organza for the occasion.
Long before that official event, Frau Langenheim arrived at the atelier one April morning with someone I’d not seen before. She rang the bell, and Jamila opened the door; I was waiting in the living room, meanwhile, pretending to examine the weft of a fabric against the light that was streaming in through the balcony windows. In reality I wasn’t examining anything at all; I had simply adopted that pose to receive my clients in order to establish an air of professionalism.
“I’ve brought an English friend, for her to see the things you make,” said the German’s wife as she stepped confidently into the room.
A woman appeared beside her, blond and extremely thin. I calculated that she must have been more or less my own age, but because of the ease with which she behaved she could easily have lived a thousand lives by now, each the length of mine. My attention was drawn to the devastating confidence she radiated and the unaffected elegance with which she greeted me, lightly grazing my fing
ers with hers while with an airy gesture she pushed a wave of hair back from her face. Her name was Rosalinda Fox, and she had skin so light and fine that it seemed to be made of tissue paper, as well as a strange form of speaking in which words from different languages leapt about chaotically in an extravagant and sometimes incomprehensible torrent.
“I need wardrobe immediately; entonces creo que . . . , I believe you and I, vamos . . . er . . . a entendernos. We will understand each other, I mean,” she said, polishing off the sentence with a slight laugh.
Frau Langenheim refused the invitation to be seated with an I’m- in-a-rush-dear-I’ve-really-got-to-go. In spite of her surname and the jumble of her origins, she spoke Spanish fluently.
“Rosalinda, my dear, I’ll see you this evening at Consul Leonini’s cocktail party,” she said, bidding her friend good-bye. “Adiós, querida—bye, sweetie, bye.”
I sat down with the woman who had just arrived, and I began the routine I’d used on so many first visits. I displayed my catalog of poses and expressions as we leafed through magazines and examined fabrics; I gave her advice and she made choices; then she reconsidered her decisions, corrected herself, and chose again. The elegant naturalness with which she behaved made me feel comfortable with her right from the start. Sometimes I found the artificiality of my behavior tiring, especially when I was facing particularly demanding clients. That wasn’t the case here: everything flowed with no tension or unreasonable demands.
We moved into the fitting room and I took measurements, noting the catlike slenderness of her bones, the smallest I’d ever seen. We continued to talk about fabrics and patterns, about sleeves and necklines, then we went back over what she had chosen, confirming the details before I drew up the order. A morning dress in patterned silk, a suit in coral-pink laine glacée, and an evening gown inspired by the latest collection from Lanvin. I gave her a fitting date for ten days later and with that I thought we were done. But the new client decided it wasn’t yet time to leave, and, still comfortably settled on the sofa, she took out a tortoiseshell cigarette case and offered me one. We smoked awhile, commenting on designs in some of the magazines as she described her tastes to me in her foreigner’s half language. Pointing at various photos, she asked me how you said “embroidery” in Spanish, how you said “shoulder straps” and “buckle.” I clarified the things she was unsure about, we laughed at the delicate awkwardness of her pronunciation, and we had another cigarette before she decided to leave, calmly, as though she had nothing to do and no one waiting for her anywhere. First she touched up her makeup, looking without much interest at her reflection in the little compact mirror. Then she rearranged her waves of golden hair and retrieved her hat, her bag and gloves, all elegant and of the finest quality, but also brand-new. I said good-bye to her at the door, listened to her heels tapping down the stairs, and heard no word of her until many days later. I never bumped into her on my walks at dusk, never met up with her at any establishment; no one spoke to me of her, nor did I make any attempt to find out who this Englishwoman was who seemed to have so much time on her hands.
My activity those days didn’t stop: the growing number of clients meant that my work hours just kept getting longer, but I managed to arrive at a sensible rhythm, sewing till the early hours without a break and having every garment ready by its allotted time. Ten days after that first meeting, the three items that Rosalinda Fox had ordered were resting on their respective mannequins, ready for the first fitting. But she didn’t show up. Nor on the next day, nor the next. Nor did she take the trouble to send me a message explaining her absence, postponing the date, or justifying her lateness. It was the first time this had happened to me with an order. I thought that perhaps she had no intention of coming back, that she’d been a foreigner just passing through, one of those privileged souls able to leave the Protectorate on a whim and move freely beyond its borders: a woman who was truly cosmopolitan, not fake worldly like myself. Unable to find any reasonable explanation for such behavior, I chose to set the matter aside and focus on the rest of my commitments. Five days later than we’d agreed upon, she appeared, as though dropping from the sky, when I was still finishing my lunch. I’d been working in haste all morning and had finally managed to take a break at three in the afternoon. Someone rang the doorbell and Jamila answered it while I was finishing off a plate of plantains in the kitchen. As soon as I heard the Englishwoman’s voice at the other end of the corridor, I washed my hands and ran to put on my heels. I rushed out to greet her, cleaning my teeth with my tongue and retouching my hair with one hand while repositioning the seams of my skirt and the lapels of my jacket with the other. Her greeting was as protracted as her delay had been.
“I have to tell you how extremely sorry I am for not coming before and arriving now so unexpectedly. I’ve been away algunos días—a few days—I had things to sort out in Gibraltar, though I fear I wasn’t able to. Anyway, I hope I’m not arriving at a bad time.”
“Not at all,” I lied. “Please, do come in.”
I led her through to the fitting room and showed her the three designs. She praised them as she took off her clothes till she was down to her underwear. She was wearing a satin combination that in its day must have been a delight, but time and wear had partly stripped it of its former splendor. Her silk stockings didn’t exactly look like they were fresh from the shop either, but they exuded glamour and exquisitely fine quality. One by one I tried my three creations on her fragile, bony body. Her skin was so transparent that it was possible to see the bluish network of veins underneath. With my mouth filled with pins, I set about making minute corrections and adjusting little pinches of fabric to the delicate contours of her shape. She seemed pleased throughout the process, allowing me to get on with it, agreeing to the suggestions I offered and barely asking for any changes. When we finished the fitting, I assured her that it would all end up being très chic. I left her to put her clothes back on and waited in the living room. She only took a couple of minutes to come back in, and I guessed from her attitude that despite her untimely arrival she wasn’t particularly anxious to leave that day either. So I offered her some tea.
“I’m dying for a cup of Darjeeling with just a drop of leite—milk, but I’m guessing it will have to be green tea with mint, no?”
I hadn’t the least idea what this concoction was that she was talking about, but I hid it.
“Just so, Moorish tea,” I said without the slightest concern. I gestured to her to take a seat and called for Jamila.
“Even though I’m English,” she explained, “I’ve lived most of meu vida—my life—in India, and even though I’ll probably never go back there are a lot of things I still miss. Like our tea, for example.”
“I know what you mean. I also find it hard to get used to some things here and I do miss other things I’ve left behind.”
“Where did you live before here?” she wanted to know.
“In Madrid.”
“And before that?”
I was about to laugh at her question, to forget all the impostures I had invented for my supposed past and acknowledge that I’d never set foot outside the city where I was born until a scoundrel decided to drag me along with him only to abandon me like a cigarette butt. But I restrained myself and reverted to my feigned vagueness.
“Oh, different places, here and there, you know how it is, though Madrid is probably the place I’ve lived longest. And you?”
“A ver—let’s see,” she said with an amused expression. “I was born in England, but taken out to Calcutta immediately afterward. My parents sent me back to England when I was ten to study, umm . . . then at sixteen I returned to India and at twenty came back again to the West. Once I was here I spent some time in London. Then another long stretch in Switzerland. Then another year in Portugal—that’s why I sometimes confuse the two languages, Portuguese and Spanish. And now, at last, I’ve settled in Africa: first in Tangiers, and then, a short while back, here in Tetouan.”
“Sounds like an interesting life,” I said, unable to retain the order of that jumble of exotic destinations.
“Bueno, depends how you look at it,” she replied, shrugging, as she sipped at the cup of tea Jamila had just served us, careful to not burn her lips. “I wouldn’t have minded at all to have stayed in India, but I had some things that happened to me unexpectedly and I had to move. Sometimes luck decides to make our decisions for us, no? Así es la vida. That’s life, no?”
Despite the strange way she pronounced her words and the obvious distance that separated our worlds, I knew precisely what she meant. We finished our tea chatting about insignificant things: the little finishing touches I’d have to give the sleeves of the dress in patterned dupioni silk, the date for the next fitting. She looked at the time and immediately remembered something.