The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Five

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We left Madrid at the end of March 1936. I went out one morning to buy some stockings and when I returned I found the house in turmoil and Ramiro surrounded by suitcases and trunks.

“We’re leaving. This afternoon.”

“Did Pitman Academies answer?” I asked, my stomach in knots. He replied without looking at me, pulling out trousers and shirts from the wardrobe.

“Not directly, but I’ve learned that they’re considering our proposal very seriously. So I think this is the time to start spreading our wings.”

“And your job?”

“I quit. Today. I’d had more than enough of them, they knew it was only a matter of days before I’d go. So it’s good-bye, Hispano-Olivetti, we won’t be meeting again anytime soon. There’s another world waiting for us, my love; fortune favors the brave, so start getting things together, because we’re off.”

I didn’t reply, and my silence forced him to interrupt his frantic activity. He looked up at me, smiling briefly at my confusion. Then he came over, grabbed me by the waist, and with a kiss tore all my fears up by the roots and gave me a transfusion of energy that could have flown me directly to Morocco.

Our haste allowed me only a few minutes to say good-bye to my mother; little more than a quick hug practically at the door and a don’t-worry-I’ll-write. I was glad there was no time to prolong the good-bye—it would have been too painful. I didn’t even look back as I trotted down the stairs; in spite of her fortitude I knew she was about to burst into tears and that wasn’t the moment for sentimentality. In my state of utter unawareness, I felt that our separation wouldn’t last long, as though Africa were just a few blocks away and our trip wouldn’t be for more than a few weeks.

We disembarked in Tangiers on a windy afternoon in early spring. After leaving a harsh grey Madrid, we arrived in this strange, dazzling city, filled with color and contrast, where the dark faces of the Arabs with their djellabas and turbans mingled with those of European settlers and others fleeing their past, in transit to a thousand other destinations, their suitcases filled with uncertain dreams. Tangiers, with its sea, its twelve international flags, and its striking vegetation of palms and eucalyptus, with Moorish alleyways and new avenues driven by impressive motorcars with CD license plates: corps diplomatique. Tangiers, where minarets and the scent of spices lived comfortably side by side with consulates, banks, frivolous foreign women in convertible cars, and the aroma of Virginia tobacco and duty-free Parisian perfumes. The terraces of the harbor’s bathing resorts greeted us with awnings fluttering in the sea air, Cape Malabata and the Spanish coastline visible in the distance. The Europeans, dressed up in light-colored lightweight clothing, protected by sunglasses and soft hats, sat with their legs crossed indolently, sipping their aperitifs as they perused the international press. Some were devoted to business, others to administration, and many of them to a life that was idle and deceptively carefree: the prelude to something uncertain that had yet to arrive and that not even the most audacious were able to foresee.

While awaiting concrete news from the owners of Pitman Academies, we were lodged at the Hotel Continental, overlooking the port and just beside the old town. Ramiro cabled the Argentine firm to inform them of our change of address, and I took charge of making daily inquiries to the hotel management concerning the letter that would mark the beginning of our future. Once we had received our reply, we’d decide whether to remain in Tangiers or install ourselves in the Protectorate. In the meantime, while the communication took its time crossing the Atlantic, we began to move about the city among other expats like ourselves, part of that mass of beings with varied pasts and unpredictable futures who were dedicated body and soul to the exhausting chores of chatting, drinking, dancing, watching shows at the Teatro Cervantes, and gambling their futures on a hand of cards, unable to ascertain whether life had a sparkling destiny in store for them or a sinister end in some dark alleyway.

We began to be like them and entered a time that was anything but tranquil. There were vast hours of love in our bedroom in the Continental while the white curtains fluttered with sea breezes; furious passion beneath the monotonous sound of the fan blades mingling with the labored rhythm of our breaths; and the salty taste of sweat on our skin and the rumpled sheets overflowing the bed, spilling onto the floor. We went out constantly, enjoying the streets night and day. At first, not knowing anyone, we went around alone, just the two of us. On days when the east wind wasn’t blowing too hard, we’d go to the beach by the Diplomatic Forest; in the afternoons we’d walk along the recently constructed Boulevard Pasteur, or watch American movies at the Florida Kursaal or the Capitol, or we’d sit at some café in the Small Souq, the pulsing center of the city, where Arabs and Europeans intermingled congenially.

Our isolation, however, lasted only a few weeks: Tangiers was small, Ramiro sociable in the extreme, and in those days everyone seemed to have a great urgency to interact with one another. Soon we started greeting faces, learning names, and joining up with groups when we walked into places. We’d have lunch and dinner at the Bretagne, Roma Park, or the Brasserie de la Plage, and at night we’d go to the Bar Russo, or Chatham, or the Detroit on the Place de France. Or to the Central with its group of Hungarian dancers, or to watch the M’Sallah music-hall shows in their great glazed pavilion, filled to bursting with the French, the English, Spaniards, Jews of various nationalities, Moroccans, Germans, and Russians who danced, drank, and discussed politics, either local or international, in a jumble of languages against the backdrop of a spectacular orchestra. Sometimes we’d end up at the Café Hafa by the sea, sitting under the awnings till dawn, on mats laid over the ground, with people reclining as they smoked hashish and drank tea. Rich Arabs, Europeans of uncertain fortune who at some time in the past might perhaps have been rich, too, or perhaps not. It was unusual for us to go to bed before dawn in those bewildering days, between our anticipation of news from Argentina and the idleness imposed by its delay. We’d frequent the new European quarter of the city and wander through the Moorish one, living with the combined presence of exiles and locals, with waxy-complexioned ladies wearing sun hats and pearls as they walked their poodles and dark-skinned barbers working in the open air with their ancient tools. With the street vendors of creams and ointments, the diplomatic corps in their impeccable attire, the herds of goats, and the fleeting, almost faceless silhouettes of the Muslim women in their haiks and caftans.

News came daily from Madrid. Sometimes we’d read articles in the local Spanish-language newspapers, Democracia, El Diario de África, or the republican El Porvenir; other times we’d just hear them from the mouths of the newspaper vendors in the Small Souq shouting their headlines in a jumble of languages: La Vedetta di Tangeri in Italian, Le Journal de Tanger in French. Occasionally I’d receive letters from my mother—brief, simple, distant letters. That was how I learned that my grandfather had died, silent and peaceful in his rocking chair, and between the lines I gathered how hard it was becoming, day by day, for her just to survive.

It was a time of discoveries, too. I learned a few phrases in Arabic, but nothing very useful. My ears got used to the sound of other languages—French, English—and to other accents in my own language, such as Haketia, that dialect of the Moroccan Sephardic Jews with its roots in old Spanish that also incorporated words from Arabic and Hebrew. I discovered that there are substances you can smoke or inject or snort that will jumble your senses, that there are people capable of gambling away their mother at a baccarat table, and that there are passions of the flesh that allow for far more combinations than just those of a man and a woman horizontally on a mattress. I learned, too, that there are things that happen in the world that my dim education had never touched upon: I found out that years earlier there had been a great war in Europe, that Germany was being ruled by someone called Hitler who was admired by some and feared by others, and that someone who one day occupied a given place with a feeling of permanence could the following day vanish in order to save his skin, to avoid being beaten to death or ending up in a place worse than his darkest nightmare.

And I discovered to my utmost dismay that at any moment and with no apparent cause, everything we believe to be stable can be upset, derailed, twisted from its course. Unlike what I had learned about people’s political leanings, about European affairs and the history of the countries of the people who surrounded us, this wasn’t a piece of knowledge I acquired because anybody taught me, but because I happened to experience it myself. I don’t recall the exact moment, and what happened wasn’t absolutely concrete, but at some indeterminate point things between Ramiro and me began to change.

At first it was nothing more than a difference in our routines. Our involvement with other people grew, and he started to have a more focused interest in going to this or that place; we no longer wandered aimlessly, unhurried through the streets, no longer let ourselves be carried away by inertia as we had in the early days. I preferred our former state, alone, with no one but each other and the remote world around us. But I understood that Ramiro, with his larger-than-life personality, had begun to be liked by people all over the place. And since whatever he did seemed to me to be well done, I put up unquestioningly with the endless hours we spent surrounded by strangers, despite the fact that most times I barely understood what they were talking about, sometimes because they were speaking in languages that were not my own, sometimes because they were discussing places and subjects as yet unknown to me: concessions, Nazism, Poland, Bolsheviks, visas, extraditions. Ramiro could get by reasonably well in French and Italian, he had a bit of broken English and knew a few expressions in German. He had worked for international companies and developed contacts with foreigners, and what he wasn’t able to manage with exact words he filled in with gestures, roundabout expressions, and inferences. I transformed into his shadow, into a presence that was almost always mute, indifferent to anything but feeling him beside me and being an appendage of his, an always obliging extension of his person.

There was a while, a time that lasted the duration of the spring, more or less, when we managed to combine the two sides and find a balance. We retained our periods of intimacy, our hours just to ourselves. We kept alive the flame of the Madrid days and at the same time opened ourselves up to new friends and joined in the comings and goings of local life. At a certain moment, however, the balance began to shift. Slowly, ever so gradually, but irreversibly. Public hours began to filter into the space of our private moments. Familiar faces stopped being just sources of conversation and anecdotes and began to emerge as people with a past, with plans for the future and the capacity to interfere. Their personalities emerged from anonymity and began to take shape more roundly, to become interesting, attractive. I still remember some of their names; I can still recollect their faces, even though they are now long dead, and their distant origins, which at the time I was unable to locate on a map. Ivan, the elegant, silent Russian, slender as a reed, with a fleeting glance and a handkerchief always poking out of his jacket pocket like an out-of-season silk flower. That Polish baron whose name now escapes me, who boasted of his supposed fortune to the four winds and had only a walking stick with a silver handle and two shirts with collars that had gradually frayed over the passing years. Isaac Springer, the Austrian Jew with his gold cigarette case. The Croatian couple, the Jovovics, both of them so beautiful, so alike and so ambiguous that at times they passed for lovers and at others for siblings. The sweaty Italian who always watched me with cloudy eyes; Mario he was called, or perhaps Mauricio, I no longer know. And Ramiro began to get more intimate with them, to make himself a part of their desires and concerns, an active part of their plans. And I watched as, day by day, he very smoothly became closer to them and farther from me.

It seemed the news from the Pitman Academies would never arrive, and to my surprise the delay didn’t seem to be causing Ramiro the slightest concern. We spent less and less time alone in our room at the Continental. There were fewer and fewer whispers, fewer references to all the things that till that moment had captivated him about me. He barely mentioned what used to drive him wild and what he had never tired of naming—my glowing skin, my goddess hips, my silky hair. He no longer complimented the charm of my smile, the freshness of my youth. He almost never laughed at what he used to call my blessed innocence, and I could tell that increasingly I was provoking in him less and less interest, less complicity, less tenderness. It was then, in the middle of those sad days when uncertainty filled me with mental anguish, that I began to feel unwell. Not only in my spirit, but in body, too. I felt bad, then terrible, worse. Perhaps my stomach hadn’t become completely used to the new foods that were so different from my mother’s stews and the simple dishes of the restaurants in Madrid. Perhaps that heavy, humid heat of early summer had something to do with my growing fragility. Daylight made me too uncomfortable, the smells of the street disgusted me and made me want to vomit. I struggled to summon the strength to get out of bed, the retching reappearing at the least expected moments, and I was overwhelmed by sleepiness at all hours. On some occasions—the minority—Ramiro seemed to be concerned: he’d sit down beside me, put his hand on my forehead, and speak sweetly to me. On other occasions—the majority—he would be distracted, lost to me. He paid me no heed, drifted away from me.

I stopped accompanying him on his nighttime outings: I barely had the energy and spirit to stay on my feet. I started to spend time on my own in the hotel, long, thick, stifling hours; hours of sticky haze, without a breath of air, lifeless. I imagined that he was dedicating himself to the same things he had been doing lately and in the same company: drinks, billiards, conversation and more conversation; stories and maps sketched on any scrap of paper on the white marble of the café tables. I thought he was doing the same things he’d done with me, but without me, and I could not guess that he had moved on to a new phase, that there was more; that he had gone beyond the borders of mere social life among friends to enter a new territory that was not at all unfamiliar to him. Yes, there were more plans. And also hands of cards, fierce poker games, parties till dawn. Betting, boasting, shady transactions, and exorbitant plans. Lies, toasts to the sun, and the emergence of a side of his personality that for months had remained hidden. Ramiro Arribas, the man of a thousand faces, had up till that moment shown me only one of them. It wouldn’t be long before I’d see the rest.

Every night he would come home later, and the worse for wear. His shirttails half untucked over his trouser waistband, his tie knot almost down to his chest, overexcited, smelling of tobacco and whiskey, stammering excuses in a thick voice if he found me awake. Sometimes he didn’t even touch me, falling into bed like a dead weight and instantly asleep, snoring so loudly that it was impossible for me to reconcile myself to sleep in the few remaining hours before the morning truly began. Other times he would embrace me awkwardly, slobbering his breath on my neck, then move away the clothes that were getting in his way and empty himself into me. And I let him do it without reproach, with no understanding at all of what was happening to us, unable to give that indifference a name.

There were some nights he didn’t arrive at all. Those were the worst: spending the small hours awake watching the yellow lights of the docks reflected on the black water of the bay, dawns spent wiping away tears and the bitter suspicion that it might perhaps have been a mistake, a massive mistake from which there was no longer any going back.

The end wasn’t long in coming. Ready to confirm once and for all the cause of my malaise but without wanting to worry Ramiro, I set off early one morning to the doctor’s office on Calle Estatuto. Doctor Bevilacqua, General Practice, Disorders and Illnesses, read the golden plaque on his door. He listened to me, examined me, asked questions. And there was no need for a test or for any other procedure to confirm what I already suspected, and what Ramiro—as I later discovered—had suspected, too. I returned to the hotel in a jumble of bewildered feelings. Hope, anxiety, joy, dread. I expected to find him still in bed, to kiss him awake and tell him the news. But I never got the chance to tell him that we were going to have a child because when I arrived he wasn’t there. All I found was the room turned upside down, the closet doors wide open, the drawers pulled from their runners, and the suitcases scattered on the floor.

We’ve been robbed, was the first thing I thought.

I was struggling to breathe and had to sit down on the bed. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, another, a third. When I opened my eyes again, I ran them over the room. Just one thought repeated itself in my mind: Ramiro, where is Ramiro? And then my eyes lighted on an envelope on the little nightstand, leaning on the base of the lamp, with my name in capital letters in the vigorous strokes of that handwriting I could have recognized from the far end of the world.

Sira, my love:

Before you read on, I want you to know that I adore you, and that your memory will live on in me until the end of time. When you read these lines I already will no longer be near you, I will have set out on a new course, and though I wish it with all my soul, I fear that it is impossible for you and the baby that I sense you are expecting to have a place in it right now.

I would like to ask your forgiveness for the way I’ve treated you lately, for my lack of devotion to you; I trust you will understand that the uncertainty created by lack of news from Pitman Academies has led me to seek out other ways to undertake the move toward my future. A number of proposals were studied, and just one of them selected; it’s an adventure as fascinating as it is promising, but it demands my dedication body and soul, and so there is no way of contemplating your presence in it at this time.

I have no doubt that the project I am embarking on today will be a total success, but for now, in its initial stages, it requires a considerable investment that exceeds my own financial capacities, which is why I have taken the liberty of borrowing your father’s money and jewels to meet the initial costs. I hope one day to be able to return to you everything that I am today taking as a loan, so that in years to come you can pass it on to your descendants just as your father did to you. I also trust that the memory of your mother in her self-denial and fortitude will be an inspiration to you in the coming phases of your life.

Good-bye, my love. Yours always,

Ramiro

P.S. I would advise you to leave Tangiers as soon as possible; it is not a good place for a woman on her own, still less so one in your present condition. I fear there may be some people interested in finding me, and who failing to find me might seek you out. When you leave the hotel, try to do so discreetly and with little luggage: although I will seek to do it by all means possible, the urgency of my departure means I do not know if I will have the opportunity to settle the bill for the last months and I would never forgive myself if it should trouble you in any way.

I don’t remember what I thought. I retain intact the image of the scene in my memory—the bedroom turned upside down, the empty closet, the blinding light coming in at the open window, me on the unmade bed, holding the letter in one hand, clinging to the recently confirmed pregnancy with the other while thick drops of sweat slipped down my forehead. But the thoughts that went through my mind at that moment left no trace, because I have never been able to recall them. What I am sure of is that I got on with the task at hand like a machine that had just been activated, with movements full of haste but with no capacity for reflection or the expression of feeling. In spite of the contents of the letter and in spite of the distance, Ramiro was still determining the rhythm of my actions, and all that was left for me to do was, simply, to obey. I opened a suitcase and with both hands filled it with the first things I could grab hold of, without stopping to think about what would be necessary to take and what could be left behind. A number of dresses, some spare change on the nightstand, a hairbrush, a few blouses and a couple of old magazines, a handful of underwear, mismatched shoes, two jackets without their skirts and three skirts without their jackets, loose pieces of paper that had been left on the desk, some jars from the bathroom, a towel. When that chaos of clothes and objects reached the suitcase’s limit, I closed it, and, with a slam of the door, I left.

In the midday chaos, with customers coming in and out of the dining room and the noise of the waiters, all the people weaving back and forth and the voices in languages I didn’t understand, almost nobody seemed to notice my departure. Only Hamid, the little bellhop who looked like just a boy though he no longer was one, approached solicitously to help me carry my suitcase. I refused him wordlessly and went out. I began to walk at a pace that was neither firm nor unsteady, without the slightest idea of where I was headed and not worrying about it. I remember having gone up the slope of the Rue de Portugal; I still have a few scattered images of the Grand Souq: a mass of kiosks, animals, voices, and djellabas. I wandered aimlessly and occasionally had to move aside to stand against a wall when I heard a motorcar horn behind me or the cries of Balak, balak from some Moroccan hastily transporting his merchandise. In my confused ramblings I passed at some point by the English cemetery, the Catholic church, Rue Siaghine, Paseo de la Marina Española, and the Great Mosque. I walked for a time that was endless and imprecise, without noticing any tiredness or any sensation, moved by an alien force that propelled my legs as though they belonged to a body not my own. I could have gone on walking much longer: hours, nights, maybe weeks, years and years until the end of time. But I did not, because on the Cuesta de la Playa, as I passed like a ghost in front of the Escuelas Españolas, a taxi stopped beside me.

“Need me to take you anywhere, mademoiselle?” asked the driver in a mixture of Spanish and French.

I think I nodded. The suitcase must have made him assume I meant to travel.

“To the port, or the station, or will you be taking a bus?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes.”

“Yes the bus?”

I nodded again: it was all the same to me, bus or train, a boat or the bottom of an abyss. Ramiro had left me and I had nowhere to go, so any place was as bad as any other. Or worse.