by Maria Duenas
I read, I sewed, I passed on information. Passed on information, sewed, and read: that had been my day-to-day life during the final phase of that year that was drawing to a close. Perhaps that was why I agreed to celebrate its ending at the casino: some kind of entertainment would be good for me, to soothe all that tension.
Marita and Teté Álvarez-Vicuña approached their brother and me the moment they saw us enter the hall. We praised one another’s dresses and hairdos, we remarked on frivolous, silly matters, and as usual I dropped in a few words of Arabic and the occasional phony expression in French. Meanwhile I was casting sidelong glances at the room and saw a number of familiar faces, several uniforms, and a few swastikas. I wondered how many of the people walking about so apparently relaxed were in fact, like me, informers and stool pigeons. Several, I guessed, and decided to trust no one and keep my eyes peeled; perhaps I could pick up some information that would be of interest to Hillgarth and his people. While my mind was musing on these plans and I pretended to be listening to the conversation, my hostess Marita moved away from me and disappeared for a few moments. When she returned she had someone on her arm, and I knew at once that the course of the night had changed.
Chapter Forty-Five
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Arish, my dear, let me introduce you to my father-in-law-to-be, Gonzalo Alvarado. He’s very keen to talk to you about his travels to Tangiers and the friends he left there; you probably know some of them.”
And there indeed he was, Gonzalo Alvarado, my father. Dressed in tails and holding a crystal glass of whiskey that he had half drunk. The very first moment our eyes met I knew he was well aware of who I was. The second moment, I guessed that my invitation to that party had been his idea. But when he took my hand and brought it to his mouth to greet me with just the lightest trace of a kiss, no one in that hall could ever have imagined that the five fingers he was holding belonged to his own daughter. We’d only seen each other for a couple of hours in our lives, but they say that the call of blood is so powerful that sometimes recognitions like this are possible. Though, upon consideration, I wondered if perhaps it was his perceptiveness and good memory that outweighed any paternal instinct.
He was thinner and his hair whiter, but he still looked very fine. The orchestra struck up with “Aquellos ojos verdes,” and he asked me to dance.
“You can’t imagine how pleased I am to see you again,” he said. I could make out something like sincerity in his tone of voice.
“Me, too,” I lied. The truth was, I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or not; I was still too overwhelmed by the surprise to be able to formulate a reasonable judgment about it.
“So you’ve got a new name now, a new surname, and they say you’re Moroccan. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what’s behind all those changes.”
“No, I don’t think I will. Besides, Señor Alvarado, I don’t think it would be of much interest to you; it’s my own affair.”
“Please, don’t call me Señor Alvarado.”
“As you wish. And would you like me to call you papá, then?” I asked with a trace of sarcasm.
“No, thank you. Gonzalo is fine.”
“Very well. How are you, Gonzalo? I thought they’d killed you in the war.”
“I survived, as you can see. It’s a long story, too grim for a New Year’s Eve. How’s your mother?”
“Well. She’s living in Morocco now, we have an atelier in Tetouan.”
“So you listened to my advice after all and left Spain at the right moment?”
“More or less. Ours is a long story, too.”
“Perhaps you’d like to tell it to me one day. We could meet for a chat; let me invite you to lunch,” he suggested.
“I don’t think I can. I don’t have much of a social life, I have a lot of work. I came today at the behest of some clients. Naïve of me; at first I thought their insistence was completely disinterested. Turns out that behind an innocent, friendly invitation extended to the dressmaker of the moment there was something else. Because the idea came from you, didn’t it?”
He didn’t say yes or no, but the affirmative hovered in the air, hanging between the chords of the bolero.
“Marita, my son’s fiancée, is a good girl: affectionate and lively, more than most, though none too smart. In any case, I’m very grateful to have her: she’s the only girl who’s been able to tame your fly-by-night brother Carlos, and she’ll be walking him down the aisle within a couple of months.”
We both looked over toward my client. At just that moment she was whispering to her sister Teté, both of them keeping their eyes fixed on us, both of them in dresses from Chez Arish. With a false smile tightly on my lips, I solemnly promised myself never again to trust clients who with their siren songs lured solitary souls into danger on sad nights like this, marking the end of a year.
Gonzalo, my father, went on.
“I’ve seen you three times over the autumn. One time you were getting out of a taxi and going into Embassy; I was walking my dog just one hundred feet from the door, but you didn’t notice.”
“No, I didn’t notice, you’re right. I’m almost always in a hurry.”
“It looked like you, but I was only able to see you for a few seconds, and I thought it might have been no more than an illusion. The second time was a Saturday morning at the Prado Museum. I like to go from time to time, and I followed you from a distance as you walked through a number of rooms. I still wasn’t sure that you were who I thought you were. Then you headed for the cloakroom to pick up your portfolio and you sat down to draw opposite the portrait of Isabella of Portugal, the one by Titian. I positioned myself in the opposite corner of the same room and stayed there watching, till you started gathering up your things. I left convinced that I hadn’t made a mistake. It was you with a new style: more mature, more confident and elegant, but without a doubt the same daughter I met when she was scared as a mouse just before the war broke out.”
I didn’t want to allow the tiniest chink of melancholy in, so I interrupted at once.
“And the third?”
“Just a couple of weeks ago. You were walking along Velázquez, I was in the car with Marita; I was taking her home after a lunch at her friends’ house, Carlos had things to do. The two of us saw you at the same time, and she—to my great surprise—pointed to you and told me you were her new designer, that you were from Morocco, and that you were called Arish something-or-other.”
“Agoriuq. Actually it’s my usual surname, turned back to front. Quiroga, Agoriuq.”
“It sounds good. Shall we get a drink, Señorita Agoriuq?” he asked, with a teasing smile.
We made our way through, took two glasses of champagne from the silver tray that a waiter held out to us, and moved over to one side of the hall as the orchestra began playing a rumba and the dance floor filled up again with couples.
“I presume you’d rather I didn’t reveal your real name to Marita, or my relationship to you,” he said once we’d managed to withdraw from the hubbub. “As I’ve said, she’s a good girl, but she loves gossip, and discretion isn’t exactly her strong suit.”
“I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t say anything to anyone. I do want you to understand, in any case, that my new name is official and my Moroccan passport is real.”
“I imagine you have some serious reason for making the change.”
“Naturally. I gain an air of exoticism in the eyes of my clientele, and at the same time I avoid the pursuit of the police over the charges your son is pressing against me.”
“Carlos is pressing charges against you?” The hand holding his glass had stopped halfway to his mouth—his surprise seemed altogether genuine.
“Not Carlos; your other son, Enrique. Just before the war started. He accused me of having stolen the money and jewels that you gave me.”
He smiled with his lips closed, bitterly.
“Enrique was killed three days after the uprising. A week earlier we’d had a terribl
e argument. He was deeply involved in politics; he sensed that something serious was about to happen and was very keen that we should get all the money we had in cash out of Spain, as well as the jewels and other valuables. I had to tell him that I’d given you a part of my estate: truth is, I could have remained silent, but I chose not to. Which was why I told him about Dolores, and I talked about you . . .”
“. . . and he took it badly,” I finished the sentence for him. “He became like a man possessed and said all sorts of atrocious things. Then he called Servanda, the old servant—I imagine you remember her. He questioned her about you. She told him that you’d rushed out carrying a package and then he must have come up with this ridiculous story about the theft. After the argument he left, giving the door a slam that shook the walls of the building. The next time I saw him was eleven days later, in the morgue at the Metropolitan Stadium with a bullet in his head.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, a gesture of resignation. I could see a great sorrow in his eyes.
“He was foolish and wild, but he was my son. Our relationship toward the end was unpleasant and stormy; he was a member of the Falange, and I didn’t like it. Looking back now, however, that Falange seems almost a blessing. At least they shared some romantic ideals and some principles that were rather utopian but still moderately reasonable. Its members were a gang of spoiled brats, dreamers, mostly quite idle, but mercifully they didn’t have much to do with today’s opportunists, who chant out the ‘Cara al sol’ anthem with their arms raised in salute and the veins in their neck throbbing, invoking the name of Primo de Rivera as though he were the Sacred Host, when before the war began they’d never even heard of him. They’re no better than a gang of arrogant, grotesque good-for-nothings . . .”
Suddenly he returned to the blaze of the chandeliers, the sound of the maracas and the trumpets, the measured movement of the bodies to the time of “El manisero.” He was back to reality, and back with me; he touched my arm, caressed it gently.
“I’m sorry, sometimes I get more worked up than I realize. I’m boring you, this isn’t the time to be talking about such things. Do you want to dance?”
“No, I don’t, thank you. I’d rather keep talking to you.”
A waiter approached. We deposited our empty glasses on the tray and took full ones.
“We were talking about Enrique pressing charges against you,” he said.
I didn’t let him go on; first I wanted to clarify something that had been turning over in my mind since the beginning of our meeting.
“Before I tell you about that, tell me one thing—where’s your wife?”
“I’m a widower. Before the war, not long after seeing you and your mother, in the spring of thirty-six. María Luisa was in the south of France with her sisters. One of them had a Hispano-Suiza and a driver who was too fond of nighttime parties. One morning he picked them up to take them to Mass; he probably hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and in a moment of extreme recklessness he went off the road. Two of the sisters were killed, María Luisa and Concepción. The driver lost a leg, and the third of the sisters, Soledad, ended up escaping injury. One of life’s ironies, she was the eldest of the three.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Sometimes I think it was best for her. She was very fearful, by nature she was extremely easily alarmed. The tiniest domestic occurrence upset her terribly. I don’t think she could have borne the war, whether in Spain or outside it. And of course she never would have gotten over Enrique’s death. So perhaps it was divine Providence doing her a favor by taking her before her time. And now, tell me more: we were talking about Enrique’s accusation—do you know anything further, do you have any idea how the matter stands now?”
“No. In September, before I came over, the police commissioner in Tetouan tried to investigate.”
“To incriminate you?”
“No, to help me. Commissioner Vázquez isn’t exactly a friend, but he’s always been good to me. You have a daughter who’s been in some trouble, do you realize that?”
It must have been clear from my tone that I wasn’t joking.
“Will you tell me about it? I’d like to be able to help you.”
“I don’t think I need any help just now; at the moment everything’s more or less under control, but thank you for the offer. In any case, you might be right: we should see each other again and talk at more leisure. These problems of mine partly affect you, too.”
“Give me some idea first.”
“I no longer have your mother’s jewels.”
He seemed not to be too perturbed.
“You had to sell them?”
“They were stolen.”
“And the money?”
“That, too.”
“All of it?”
“Everything.”
“Where?”
“In a hotel in Tangiers.”
“Who?”
“Someone extremely undesirable.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yes. And now, if you don’t mind, let’s change the subject. Some other time I’ll tell you the details more calmly.”
It wasn’t long till midnight now, and all around the room there were more and more bodies in tails, dress uniforms, and evening gowns, and décolletages covered in jewels. There were Spaniards mostly, but also a good number of foreigners. German, English, American, Italian, Japanese—a whole potpourri of countries at war, in between a tangle of respectable, wealthy local citizens, all of them, for just a few hours, far away from the savage shredding of Europe and the squalor of a devastated people about to say good riddance to one of the most savage years in their history. Everywhere there was laughter and couples still sliding about to the infectious rhythm of the congas and guaracha folk songs that the orchestra of black musicians played without a break. The liveried lackeys who had received us, flanking the staircase, began to distribute small baskets of grapes and urged the guests to move out to the terrace to follow tradition and eat them in time with the chiming of the Puerta del Sol clock next door. My father offered me his arm and I took it; although we’d each arrived separately, we’d somehow silently agreed to see in the new year together. On the terrace we met up with a few friends, his son and my scheming clients. He introduced me to Carlos, my half brother, who looked like him and not in the least like me. How could he have guessed that the woman standing in front of him was a parvenue dressmaker of his own blood, whom his brother had accused of having done both of them out of a good slice of their inheritance?
No one seemed to mind the intense cold on the terrace: the number of guests had multiplied, and the waiters circulated tirelessly between them, emptying bottles of champagne wrapped in large white napkins. The animated conversations, the laughs and clinking of glasses seemed suspended in the air, about to touch the dark winter sky. From the street, meanwhile, like a hoarse roaring, rose the sound of the voices of the unfortunate masses, those whom bad luck had doomed to remain out on the streets, sharing some cheap wine or a bottle of harsh liquor.
The chimes began, first the quarters, then the hour chimes. I began to eat my grapes, concentrating hard. Dong—one—dong—two—dong—three—dong—four. On the fifth I noticed that Gonzalo had brought his arm down to rest on my shoulders and was pulling me toward him; on the sixth my eyes filled with tears. The seventh, eighth, and ninth I swallowed blindly, struggling to stop myself from crying. On the tenth I succeeded, with the eleventh I gathered myself together, and as the last one chimed I turned to embrace my father for the second time in my life.
Chapter Forty-Six
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In mid-January I met up with him again, to explain the details of the theft of my inheritance. I presumed that he believed the story; if he didn’t, he hid it well. We had lunch at Lhardy and he suggested that we go on seeing each other. I said no, without having any very solid reason. Perhaps I thought it was too late for us to try to recover all those things we’d never s
hared. He kept insisting and seemed unprepared to accept my refusal easily. And he succeeded in part: bit by bit the wall of my resistance began to give way. We had lunch again, we went to the theater, to a concert at El Real; we even spent a Sunday morning together walking through El Retiro just as thirty years earlier he had done with my mother. He had a lot of time on his hands, since he was no longer working; when the war came to an end he’d had the opportunity to recover his foundry but chose not to reopen it. Then he sold the land where it stood and began to live off the income from the sale. Why didn’t he want to go on, why didn’t he start his business back up after the conflict? Out of sheer disappointment, I think. He never told me in any detail about the vicissitudes of those years, but comments dropped in other conversations we shared in those days allowed me more or less to reconstruct his painful journey. He didn’t seem to be a resentful man, though: he was too rational to allow his emotions to take charge of his life. Although he belonged to the winning side, he was also extremely critical of the new regime. He was witty and a fine conversationalist, and between the two of us there grew a special relationship that we didn’t intend as a compensation for his absence over all those years of my childhood and youth, but as a starting from scratch by way of a friendship between adults. There were mutterings about us in his circle, people speculated about the nature of the connection that held us together, a thousand wild assumptions reached his ears, which he shared with me, amused, never bothering to put anyone right.