by Maria Duenas
I nodded, smiling, trying to inject a trace of optimism into her bewilderment. But she didn’t answer me right away; first she changed the direction of the conversation.
“And your mother? Why have you come to ask me instead of sewing with her?”
“I’ve told you, she’s still in Morocco. She went there during the war, I don’t know if you knew.”
“I knew, I knew,” she said softly, as though fearing that the walls would hear her and pass on the secret. “She showed up here one afternoon, just all of a sudden, unexpectedly, like you’ve done now. She told me everything was arranged for her to go to Africa, that you were there, and that somehow you’d managed to arrange for someone to get her out of Madrid. She didn’t know what to do; she was frightened. She came to ask my advice, to see what I thought of it all.”
My impeccable makeup didn’t allow her to see the distress that her words were causing: I’d never imagined that my mother would have had any hesitation between staying and going.
“I told her to go, to leave as soon as possible,” she went on. “Madrid was a hell. We all suffered so much, child, all of us. Those on the left, fighting day and night to stop the Nationalists getting in; those on the right, longing for just that, in hiding so as not to be found and taken in by the secret police. And those—like your mother and me—who weren’t of either faction, waiting for the horror to be over so that we could get on with our lives in peace. All this without a government in charge, without anyone imposing a bit of order in that chaos. So I advised her that yes, she should go, she should get out of this agony and not pass up the opportunity to be reunited with you.”
Despite feeling overwhelmed by emotion, I decided not to ask anything about that meeting, which was now so long ago. I’d gone to see my old boss with a plan for the immediate future, so I chose to steer the conversation in that direction.
“You were right to encourage her, you don’t know how grateful I am to you for that, Doña Manuela,” I said. “She’s doing terrifically well now, she’s happy and working again. I set up a workshop in Tetouan in thirty-six, just a few months after the war started. Things were calm there, and even though the Spanish women weren’t in the mood for parties and dresses, there were some foreigners for whom the war hardly mattered. So they became my clients. When my mother arrived, we went on sewing together. And now I’ve decided to come back to Madrid and start again with a new workshop.”
“And you’ve returned alone?”
“I’ve been alone a long time, Doña Manuela. If you’re asking me about Ramiro, that didn’t last long.”
“So Dolores has stayed behind there without you?” she asked, surprised. “But she left specifically to be with you . . .”
“She likes Morocco: the climate, the atmosphere, the quiet life. We had very good clients and she’s made friends, too. She preferred to stay. But I missed Madrid too much,” I lied. “So we decided that I’d come back, I’d start to work here, and once the second atelier was up and running then we’d decide what to do.”
She looked at me for a few endless seconds. Her eyelids were drooping, her face covered in wrinkles. She must have been sixty-something now, perhaps already approaching seventy. Her curved back and the calluses on her fingers showed traces of each and every one of those tough years she had spent slaving away with needles and scissors. First as a simple seamstress, then later as an employee in a workshop, then as the owner of a business, and finally as a sailor without a ship, inactive. But in no way was she done yet. Her eyes, full of life, small and dark like little black olives, reflected the sharpness of someone who still had a good head on her shoulders.
“You’re not telling me everything, child, right?” she said at last.
The sly fox, I thought admiringly. I’d forgotten how smart she was.
“No, Doña Manuela, I’m not telling you everything,” I acknowledged. “I’m not telling you everything because I can’t. But I can tell you a part of it. The thing is, in Tetouan I got to know some important people, people who are still very influential nowadays. They persuaded me to come to Madrid, to set up a studio and sew for certain high-class clients. Not for women close to the regime, but mainly for foreign ladies and for monarchist Spanish aristocrats, the ones who think Franco is usurping the king’s place.”
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do your friends want you to sew for these ladies?”
“I can’t tell you. But I need you to help me. I’ve brought some magnificent materials over from Morocco, and there’s a terrible shortage of fabrics here. The word has got around and my reputation has spread, but I have more clients than I’d expected and I can’t handle them all on my own.”
“But why, Sira?” she repeated slowly. “Why are you sewing for these women, what do you and your friends want from them?”
I pursed my lips resolutely shut, determined not to say a word. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. But an alien force seemed to be dragging the words up from the pit of my stomach. As though Doña Manuela were back in charge and I was no more than an adolescent apprentice, when she had every right to demand explanations from me because I’d skipped a whole morning’s work going to buy three dozen mother-of-pearl buttons in the Plaza de Pontejos. The words were spoken by my entrails, and by yesterday, not by me myself.
“I’m sewing for them in order to get information about what the Germans in Spain are doing. Then I pass the information on to the English.”
I bit my bottom lip the moment I’d spoken the final syllable, aware of how careless I’d been. I regretted having broken my promise to Hillgarth not to reveal my mission to anyone, but it had already been said and there was no going back. I thought about clarifying the situation—adding that it was the best thing for Spain to remain neutral, that we were in no state to face another war, all those things they’d been so insistent about to me. But there was no need, because before I had the chance to add anything I could see a strange gleam in Doña Manuela’s eyes and the trace of a smile on one side of her mouth.
“With the compatriots of the queen Doña Victoria Eugenie, child, whatever you need me to do. Just tell me when you want me to start.”
We went on talking all afternoon, planning out how we’d divide up the work, and at nine o’clock the next morning she was at my house. She was all too happy to take on a secondary role in the workshop. Not having to deal with the clients was almost a relief to her. We complemented each other perfectly: just as she and my mother had done for all those years, but the other way around. She took to her new position with total humility, accommodating herself to my life and rhythm, getting along with Dora and Martina, bringing to us her experience and an energy that would have been the envy of many women thirty years younger. She adapted easily to my being the one in charge, to my less conventional lines and ideas, and to taking on a thousand little tasks that so often before she would delegate to the simple sewing girls. Returning to the breach after long years of inactivity was a gift to her, and like a patch of poppies in the April rains she emerged from her dark days and was revived.
With Doña Manuela in charge of the back room, my working days became calmer. We both toiled long hours, but I was finally able to move without too much rush and enjoy a few spells of free time. I began to have more of a social life: my clients encouraged me to attend a thousand events, keen to show me off as their great discovery of the season. I accepted an invitation to a concert of German military bands at El Retiro park, a cocktail party at the Turkish embassy, a dinner at the Italian embassy, and the occasional lunch in fashionable places. Pests began to buzz around me: passing bachelors, potbellied married men with the means to keep a handful of sweethearts, attractive diplomats from the most exotic places. After a couple of drinks and a dance I was fighting them off. The last thing I needed at that moment was a man in my life.
But it wasn’t all parties and recreation, far from it. Although Doña Manuela made my day-to-day life less harried, absolute peace
and quiet didn’t follow. Not long after I’d unloaded the heavy burden of working alone, a new storm cloud appeared on the horizon. The simple fact that I was walking the streets with less haste, being able to pause at a shop window and slacken the rhythm of my comings and goings, made me notice something that I hadn’t seen till then, something that Hillgarth had warned me about during that long dessert in Tangiers. I realized I was being followed. Perhaps they’d been doing it for a while and my constant rush had stopped me from taking any notice. Or maybe it was something new, which happened by chance to coincide with Doña Manuela’s entry into Chez Arish. But the fact was, a new shadow seemed to have settled over my life. A shadow that was not even constant, not even total; perhaps this was why it wasn’t easy for me to become fully aware of its proximity. I thought at first that the things I was seeing were just my imagination playing tricks on me. In autumn, Madrid was full of men with hats and raincoats with the collars up; that look was actually very common in those postwar times, and thousands of replicas filled the streets, offices, and cafés. The figure who had stopped, turning away from me, as soon as I’d stopped to cross Castellana wasn’t necessarily the same one who a couple of days later pretended to stop to give alms to a ragged blind man while I was looking at some shoes in a store. Nor was there any good reason why his raincoat should be the same one that followed me that Saturday to the entrance of the Prado Museum. Or for it to be the same as the back that I saw hiding discreetly behind a column at the Ritz grill while I was having my lunch with my client Agatha Ratinborg, a supposed European princess with highly dubious roots. It was true, there was no definitive way of confirming that all those raincoats scattered along streets and days converged in a single individual, and yet somehow my gut told me that the owner of them all was one and the same man.
The tube of patterns that I prepared that evening to leave in the hairdresser’s salon contained seven conventional messages of average length and a personal one with just two words: “Being followed.” I finished them late—it had been a long day of fittings and sewing. Doña Manuela hadn’t gone home till after eight; following her departure I’d finished up a couple of invoices that needed to be ready first thing in the morning, I’d taken a bath, and then, still wrapped in my crimson velvet dressing gown, I had a couple of apples and a glass of milk for my dinner, standing up, leaning against the kitchen sink. I was so tired that I was barely hungry; no sooner had I finished than I sat down to encode the messages, and once these were done and the day’s notes sensibly burned I began turning out the lights to go to bed. Halfway down the corridor I stopped dead. I thought at first that I’d heard a single isolated knock, then it was two, three, four. Then silence. Till they started up again. It was clear where they were coming from—someone was at the door. He or she was knocking, knuckles against the wood, rather than ringing the bell. Dry knocks, getting less and less far apart, till they’d become a nonstop pounding. I stood stock still, gripped by fear, unable to go forward or back.
But the knocking didn’t stop, and its insistence forced me to react: whoever it was had no intention of going away without seeing me. I pulled the belt of my dressing gown tight, swallowed, and made my way slowly toward the door. Very slowly, without making the slightest sound, and still terrified, I lifted the cover of the peephole.
“Come in, for God’s sake, come in, come in,” was all I was able to whisper after opening the door.
He came in quickly, nervous. Unsettled.
“That’s it, that’s it, I’m out, it’s all over.”
He didn’t even look at me; he talked like a madman, as though speaking to himself, to the air, or to nothing. I led him quickly to the living room, almost pushing him, made fearful by the idea that someone in the building might have seen him. The apartment was dark, but before I’d even turned on a light I tried to get him to sit down, to relax a little. He refused. He kept walking from one end of the room to the other, looking around wildly and repeating the same thing over and over again.
“That’s it, that’s it, everything’s finished, it’s all over.”
I turned on a small corner lamp, and without asking I poured him a generous glass of cognac.
“Here,” I said, forcing him to take the glass in his right hand. “Drink,” I commanded. He obeyed, shaking. “And now sit down, relax, and tell me what’s going on.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea why he should have shown up at my house after midnight, and even though I was sure he would have been discreet in his movements his attitude was so changed that he might no longer have cared about such things. It had been more than a year and a half since I’d seen him, since the day of his official farewell from Tetouan. I preferred not to ask him anything, not to pressure him. Quite clearly this visit wasn’t a mere courtesy, but I decided it would be best to wait for him to calm down: perhaps then he’d tell me himself what it was he wanted from me. He sat down with the glass held in his fingers; he took another drink. He was dressed in civilian clothes, in a dark suit with a white shirt and striped tie; without his peaked cap, his stripes, and the sash across his chest that I’d seen him wear on so many formal occasions and that he wouldn’t remove until the event was over. He seemed to calm down a bit and lit a cigarette. He puffed on it, staring out into the void, surrounded by the smoke and his own thoughts. I didn’t say a word; I just sat down on a nearby chair, crossed my legs, and waited. When the cigarette came to an end he leaned forward slightly to put it out in the ashtray. And from that position he raised his eyes at last and spoke.
“They’ve dismissed me. It’s going public tomorrow. The press release has already been sent to the Official State Bulletin and the press; in seven or eight hours the news will be out there on the streets. Do you know how many words they’re going to eliminate me with? Eighteen. I’ve counted them. Look.”
He drew a handwritten note out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. It bore just a couple of lines that he recited from memory.
“ ‘Don Juan Beigbeder y Atienza leaves his role as minister for foreign affairs, with my gratitude for his services rendered.’ Eighteen if you don’t count the ‘Don’ before my name, which will probably be abbreviated. If not, it’ll be nineteen. It’ll be followed by the statement from El Caudillo, in which he thanks me for the services I’ve performed. That one’s a real joke.”
He drained the glass in a gulp and I poured him another.
“I knew I’d been walking a tightrope for months, but I didn’t expect the blow to be so sudden. Or so degrading.”
He lit another cigarette and went on talking through puffs of smoke.
“Yesterday afternoon I was with Franco in El Pardo; it was a long, relaxed meeting. At no point was he critical, nor did he make any speculations about my possible replacement. You know things have been tense lately, ever since I’ve been allowing myself to be seen openly with Ambassador Hoare. Actually I left the meeting quite satisfied, thinking that Franco was considering my ideas, that perhaps he’d finally decided to give some weight to my opinions. How could I have imagined that what he was about to do the moment I was out the door was sharpen the knife to plunge it into my back the following day. I had sought an audience with him to discuss some matters concerning his forthcoming interview with Hitler in Hendaya, knowing what a humiliation it was for me that he’d not planned for me to go with him. All the same, I wanted to talk to him, to pass on certain pieces of important information that I’d obtained through Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization—do you know who I’m talking about?”
“I’ve heard the name before, yes.”
“Although the position he occupies might appear rather unappealing, Canaris is a pleasant, charismatic man, and I have an extremely good relationship with him. We’re both part of a strange class of rather sentimental soldiers who don’t have much affection for uniforms, decorations, and barracks. In theory he’s under Hitler’s command, but he doesn’t bow to his plans and acts quite autono
mously. So much so that they say he has the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, too, just as I had these past months.”
He got up from his place, took a few steps, and approached one of the balcony doors. The curtains were open.
“Best not to get too close,” I warned him firmly. “You could be seen from the street.”
He turned abruptly and crossed the room several times from end to end as he continued talking.
“I call him my friend Guillermo, like that, in Spanish; he speaks our language very well, he lived in Chile for a bit. A few days ago we met for lunch at the Casa Botín—he loves roast pork. I noted that he was more alienated than ever from the influence of Hitler, so much so that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been plotting against the Führer with the English. We talked about the absolute advisability of Spain not getting involved in the war on the side of the Axis powers, and to that end we spent the meal working on a list of provisions that Franco should ask Hitler for in exchange for agreeing to join the conflict. I’m perfectly familiar with our strategic requirements, and Canaris knows all about Germany’s weaknesses, so between the two of us we compiled a roster of demands that Spain should make as nonnegotiable conditions of its participation and that Germany would be in no position to agree to, even in the medium term. The proposal included a long list of impossible requests, from territorial possessions in French Morocco and Oran to exorbitant quantities of grains and arms, and Gibraltar being taken over exclusively by Spanish soldiers; all of it, as I say, quite impossible. Canaris also advised me that he would not recommend that we begin the reconstruction of everything that had been destroyed by the war in Spain, that it would be better to leave the railways destroyed and the highways broken up so that the Germans were aware of the pitiful state of the country and how difficult it would be for their troops to get across it.”
He sat back down and took another sip of cognac. Fortunately the alcohol was relaxing him. I, meanwhile, remained utterly unsettled, unable to understand why Beigbeder had come to seek me out at this time of night and in such a state to talk about his meetings with Franco and his contact with German soldiers, which had so little to do with me.