The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Seven

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That second meeting with Don Claudio took place on a Friday in late August. The following Monday he returned to collect me. He had found lodgings for me and wished to accompany me there. In other circumstances, such apparently chivalrous behavior might have been interpreted differently, but at that time, neither he nor I doubted that his interest in me was strictly professional, that I was simply an object worth having in his safekeeping in order to avoid serious complications.

I was dressed when he arrived, perched on the edge of the already made bed in mismatched clothes that were now too big for me, my hair in an untidy bun. The suitcase at my feet was filled with the miserable remains of my calamity, and my bony fingers were clasped on my lap as I struggled unsuccessfully to gather my strength. When I saw him arrive I tried to get up, but he indicated with a gesture that I should remain seated.

Positioning himself on the edge of the bed opposite mine, he merely said, “Wait. We have to talk.”

He regarded me for a few seconds with those dark eyes capable of drilling through a wall. By now I realized that he was neither a grey-haired young man nor a youthful old man: he was a man somewhere between forty and fifty, schooled in manners and skilled in his police work, well built, with a soul somewhat battered from dealing with scum of every kind. A man, I thought, with whom I ought not to have any sort of problem.

“Look, this isn’t standard procedure. Due to current circumstances, I’m making an exception for you, but I want you to be absolutely clear about the real situation. Although I personally believe that you’re just the unsuspecting victim of a con man, the whole matter has to be settled by a judge, not me. But things being the way they are in these confused times, I fear a lawsuit is out of the question. And nothing will be gained by keeping you locked up in a cell till God knows when. So, just as I told you the other day, I’m going to allow you your freedom, but—pay attention—under supervision and with limited movement. And to remove any temptation I’m not going to return your passport to you. Also, you remain free on the condition that while you recover, you’ll find a decent way to earn a living and save enough to pay off your debt to the Continental. I asked them to give you one year to settle the outstanding bill and they accepted. So now you can start finding a way to scrape up this money, from under a rock if need be, but honestly and without getting into any trouble, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I murmured.

“And don’t fail me; don’t try any tricks with me, and don’t force me to come down hard on you, because if you cross me I’ll set the machinery in motion, and you’ll be shipped off to Spain at the earliest opportunity and get seven years in the Quiñones women’s prison before you know what hit you, understand?”

At such a grave threat I was unable to say anything coherent; I just nodded. Then he got up; a couple of seconds later I did the same. He moved quickly and nimbly; I had to make a tremendous effort just to keep up with him.

“So let’s be off,” he concluded. “Leave that, I’ll take the suitcase, you can’t even lift your own shadow. I’ve got the car at the door; say good-bye to the nuns, thank them for looking after you so well, and let’s go.”

We made our way through Tetouan in his car, and for the first time I was able to appreciate the city that would for an undetermined time become my own. The hospital was on the outskirts; bit by bit as we progressed farther in, the volume of people grew. At nearly midday, the streets were full. Although there were hardly any motorcars around, the commissioner was constantly having to sound his horn to open up a passageway between the bodies moving unhurriedly in a thousand directions. There were men in light-colored linen suits and panama hats, boys in shorts running races, Spanish women with their shopping baskets laden with vegetables, Muslim men in turbans and striped djellabas, Arab women covered in voluminous garments that allowed only their eyes and feet to be seen. There were uniformed soldiers and girls in flowery summer dresses, barefoot local children playing amid the chickens. And the constant din of voices, stray words and phrases in Arabic and Spanish, interminable greetings to the commissioner each time someone recognized his car. It was hard to imagine that in this very setting only weeks earlier there had emerged a movement that was now being considered a civil war.

We didn’t initiate any conversation over the course of the drive; our journey wasn’t supposed to be a pleasure trip, but a precise step in a procedure for moving me from one place to another. From time to time, however, when the commissioner sensed that something that appeared before our eyes might seem strange or new to me, he gestured to it with his jaw and, his eyes always fixed straight ahead, spoke some concise words to name it. “Riffians,” I remember him saying one such time as he indicated a group of Berber women dressed in striped full skirts and big straw hats with colored pom-poms. The ten or fifteen brief minutes of our journey were enough for me to absorb some of the shapes, smells, and names that I would become familiar with during that new phase of my life. The High Commission, the prickly pears, the caliph’s palace, the water carriers on their donkeys, the Moorish quarter, the Dersa and the Ghorgiz, the bakalitos, the mint.

We got out of the car at the Plaza de España; a couple of Moorish boys rushed over to carry my luggage and the commissioner allowed one of them to do so. Then we went into La Luneta, located next to the Jewish quarter, next to the medina. La Luneta, my first street in Tetouan: narrow, noisy, irregular, and rowdy, full of people, taverns, cafés, and chaotic bazaars where you could buy anything and everything. We reached a large door, went in, and ascended a staircase. The commissioner rang a bell on the first landing.

“Good morning, Candelaria. I’m here with the delivery you were expecting,” my companion said to the plump woman in red who had just opened the door, gesturing toward me with a brief movement of his head.

“But what kind of delivery is this, Commissioner?” she replied, placing her hands on her hips and giving a powerful guffaw. Then immediately she stepped aside and let us pass. Her place was sunny, gleaming in its modesty, and of somewhat questionable aesthetics. While she had a seemingly natural flippancy, beneath it you sensed that this visit from the police was making her extremely uneasy.

“A special delivery,” he explained, putting the suitcase down in the little foyer beneath a calendar with the image of the Sacred Heart. “You’ll have to put this young lady up for a while, and for the time being, without charging her anything; you’ll be able to settle accounts with her once she starts to earn her living.”

“But my place is filled to the brim, by Christ on the cross! And I get sent at least half a dozen bodies a day that I have to turn away!”

She was lying, of course. This olive-skinned woman was lying, and he knew it.

“I don’t want to hear about all your problems, Candelaria; I’ve told you you’re going to have to put her up somehow.”

“Since the uprising people haven’t stopped turning up in search of lodging, Don Claudio! I’ve even got mattresses on the floor!”

“That’s enough of your tales. The traffic in the Strait has been interrupted for weeks and these days not even seagulls are making the crossing. Like it or not, you’ll have to do what I ask; look at it as payment for all the things you owe me. And what’s more, you don’t just have to give her lodging, you have to help her. She doesn’t know anyone in Tetouan, and she’s got a pretty ugly story behind her, so make some space for her because this is where she’s going to be staying from now on, is that clear?”

“Like water, sir,” she replied, without the slightest enthusiasm. “Clear as water.”

“So I leave her in your safekeeping. If there’s any problem, you know where to find me. I’m not too pleased that this is where she’ll be staying; she’s already been corrupted, she’s not going to learn a lot of good from you, but anyway . . .”

“You don’t distrust me now, do you, Don Claudio?”

The commissioner didn’t allow himself to be fooled by the woman’s playful tone.

“I always distrust everybody, Candelaria; that’s what they pay me for.”

“And if you think I’m so bad, why in heaven’s name are you bringing this jewel to me, my dear commissioner?”

“Because as I’ve already told you, the way things are, I don’t have anywhere else to take her—don’t think I’m doing it because I want to. In any case, I’m leaving you responsible for her. Start dreaming up some way for her to make a living: I don’t think she’ll be able to return to Spain for quite some time, and she has to make some money because she’s got a bit of business to settle around here. Let’s see if you can’t get her hired as a saleswoman in some shop, or in a hairdresser’s; somewhere decent, mind you. And be so kind as to stop calling me your dear commissioner—I’ve told you a hundred times.”

She observed me then, paying attention for the first time. Top to bottom, quickly and without curiosity, as though she were simply assessing the amount of weight that had just been dumped on her. Then she returned her gaze to my companion and with mocking resignation accepted the assignment.

“You can be sure that Candelaria will take care of it, Don Claudio. I don’t know where I’ll put her, but you can rest assured knowing that she’ll be in heavenly bliss here with me.”

The celestial promises of the landlady apparently didn’t sound at all convincing to the policeman, as he still needed to tighten the screws a little more to conclude the negotiations. With modulated voice and index finger raised vertically to the level of his nose, he offered a final piece of advice that didn’t allow for any banter in response.

“Just watch out, Candelaria, watch out, be very careful—things are unsettled at the moment and I don’t want any more problems than are strictly necessary. So don’t think of getting her mixed up in any of your trouble. I don’t trust a hair on your head, or hers, so I’ll make sure you’re watched closely. And if I hear of any strange goings-on I’ll bring you before the commission, and not even a Sursum Corda will get you out of there again, clear?”

We both murmured a heartfelt “Yes, sir.”

“So the thing is, she’s to get better, and then, when she can, start work.”

He looked me in the eye, then seemed to hesitate a moment, debating whether to give me a handshake in farewell. Ultimately he chose not to and concluded the meeting with a recommendation and a prediction condensed into four concise words: “Be careful. We’ll talk.” Then he left, trotting nimbly down the stairs while adjusting his hat, his open hand holding it by the crown. We watched him in silence from the doorway until he had disappeared from view and were about to go back into the house when we heard his footsteps finish their descent and his voice thunder in the stairwell.

“I’ll take you both to jail, and once you’re there not even the Holy Child of the Remedio will get you out!”

“And screw you, too, you bastard,” was the first thing Candelaria said after shutting the door with a shove from her voluminous rear. Then she gave me a reluctant smile, trying to calm my confusion. “A devil of a man, he drives me raving mad; I don’t know how he does it, but he doesn’t miss a thing, and he’s constantly on my back.”

Then she sighed so deeply that her bulky bosom filled and emptied as though she had a couple of balloons inside her percale dress.

“Go on, my angel, in you go, I’ll be putting you in one of the rooms in the back. This damned uprising! It’s turned us all upside down and filled the street with arguments and the barracks with blood! Let’s see if all this ruckus ends soon and we can get back to normal life. I’m going out now, I have a few little matters to deal with; you stay here and get settled, and then, when I’m back at lunchtime, you can tell me all about it, nice and slowly.”

And with some shouting in Arabic she demanded the presence of a young Moorish girl, just fifteen years old, who came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a cloth. The two of them started to clear up some bits of junk and change sheets in the tiny, airless room that would be transformed into my bedroom. And there I settled, without the slightest idea of how long my stay would last or what course my future would take.

Candelaria Ballesteros, better known in Tetouan as Candelaria the Matutera—the Smuggler—was forty-seven years old. She passed herself off as a widow, but even she didn’t know whether her husband had in fact died on one of his many visits to Spain or whether the letter she’d received seven years earlier from Málaga announcing his demise from pneumonia was no more than the tall tale of a shameless scoundrel to extricate himself from his marriage and make sure no one came looking for him. Fleeing the miseries of the day laborers in the olive groves in the Andalusian countryside, the couple had installed themselves in the Protectorate in 1926, after the Rif War. After that, the two of them had devoted their efforts to various enterprises, whose meager returns he had conveniently invested in partying, brothels, and large glasses of Fundador brandy. They hadn’t had children, and when her Francisco vanished, leaving her alone without the contacts in Spain to continue dealing contraband, Candelaria decided to rent an apartment and establish a small boardinghouse. This did not, however, stop her from doing her best to buy, sell, rebuy, resell, sell on credit, exchange, and trade whatever she could lay her hands on. Coins, cigarette cases, stamps, fountain pens, socks, watches, lighters—all of them of shady origin, all with uncertain destinations.

In her house on La Luneta, between the Moorish medina and the newer Spanish ensanche, she indiscriminately lodged anyone who showed up at her door asking for a bed, usually people of little means and even fewer hopes. She treated them like anyone else she met: she tried to strike a bargain. I’ll buy from you, sell you, sort it out for you; you owe me, I owe you, you sort that out for me. But carefully—always with a certain caution—because Candelaria the Matutera, with her tough bearing, her stormy dealings, and that self-confidence seemingly capable of knocking over the very meanest sort, was no fool, and she knew that when it came to Commissioner Vázquez, she’d better not mess around too much. Perhaps a joke here, a sarcastic comment there, but without letting him get anything over her, never overstepping what was legally acceptable because, as she put it herself, “if he catches me up to something, he’ll whisk me off to the police station, and then God only knows.”


The sweet little Moorish girl helped me to settle in. Together we unpacked my few belongings and hung them on wire hangers in the closet that was really no more than a wooden crate with a little leftover bit of fabric hung over the front. That piece of furniture, a bare bulb, and an old bed with a coarse stuffed mattress made up all the fittings in the room. An out-of-date calendar with a picture of a nightingale on it, courtesy of El Siglo barbershop, brought the only touch of color to the whitewashed walls marked by the leftovers of a sea of leaks. In one corner, on a trunk, a number of household odds and ends had accumulated: a straw basket, a battered washbowl, two or three chipped chamber pots, and a couple of rusty wire cages. The room was austere, verging on poverty, but it was clean. As she helped me to organize that mess of rumpled clothes that made up the entirety of my belongings, the girl with the jet-black eyes kept repeating in a gentle voice, “Siñorita, you no worry; Jamila wash, Jamila iron Siñorita clothes.”

I did not have much strength, and the little extra I’d used to move the suitcase and empty out its contents brought on a sudden wave of dizziness. I sat down at the foot of the bed, closed my eyes, and covered my face with my hands, resting my elbows on my knees. My balance came back in a couple of minutes, then I returned to the present and found that young Jamila was still beside me, watching with concern. I looked around. It was still there, that poor dark mouse hole of a room, with my rumpled clothes on the hangers and my suitcase disemboweled on the floor. Despite the chasm of uncertainty I felt opening before me, I realized with a sense of relief that, however badly things were going, at least I already had my own little hole in which to take shelter.

Candelaria returned an hour later. The others arrived at more or less the same time, the wretched catalog of guests to whom the household offered room and board. The parish was made up of a hair products representative, an employee of the Telegraph and Mail Department, a retired schoolmaster, a couple of sisters advanced in years and shriveled as salted fish, and a rotund widow with her son, whom she called her little “Paquito” in spite of his deep voice and the thick down that he sported on his upper lip. They all greeted me politely when the hostess introduced me and then settled in silence around the table, each in their assigned place: Candelaria at the head, the others spread along the two sides. The women and Paquito on one side, the men opposite. “You at the other end,” she commanded. She began to serve the stew, speaking without respite about how much the price of meat had gone up and how well the melons were doing that year. She wasn’t aiming her comments at anyone in particular and yet seemed to have a great desire not to yield in her chatter, however trivial the subject and slight the attention of her fellow diners. Without a word, everyone set to their lunch, bringing the cutlery from their plates rhythmically to their mouths. No other sound could be heard than the voice of the hostess, the noise of the spoons against the crockery, and the sounds of chewing and swallowing. A moment of inattention on Candelaria’s part eventually allowed me to figure out the reason for her incessant chatter: at her first pause, calling for Jamila from the kitchen, one of the sisters took advantage to drive in her wedge.

“They say Badajoz has fallen.” The words of the younger of the two older sisters didn’t seem to be directed at anyone in particular either—to the water jug, perhaps, or the salt shaker, or the cruets or the picture of the Last Supper that presided, slightly askew, on the wall. Her tone was meant to seem indifferent, too, as though she were commenting on the temperature that day or the taste of the peas. I learned right away, however, that her comment was as innocent as a recently sharpened blade.

“What a shame; so many good lads who’ve given their lives to defend the legitimate government of the Republic; so many young, energetic lives wasted, with all that pleasure they could have given to a woman as appealing as you, Sagrario.”

The acid-charged reply had come courtesy of the traveling salesman and was met with a laugh from the rest of the men. As soon as Doña Herminia noticed that her little Paquito had also found the salesman’s comment funny, she gave the lad a good thwack that left the back of his neck red. Supposedly helping the boy out, the old schoolteacher intervened at this point with his sensible voice. Without lifting his head from his plate, he pronounced, “Don’t laugh, Paquito, they say that laughing shrivels the brain.”

The moment he’d finished the sentence the child’s mother weighed in.

“That’s why the army rose up, to put an end to all that laughing, all that joy, and all the licentiousness that’s driving Spain to ruin . . .”

Then it was as though hunting season had opened. The three men on one side and the three women on the other raised their voices almost as one, a chicken coop in which no one was listening to anyone and everyone started yelling, letting insults and outrages fly from their mouths. Vicious commie, sanctimonious old cow, son of Lucifer, bitter old hag, atheist, degenerate, and dozens of other epithets shot through the air in a crossfire of angry shouts. The only people who remained silent were Paquito and myself: me because I was new there and had no knowledge or opinion about the outcome of the fighting, and Paquito probably out of fear of another blow. At that moment his mother was accusing the schoolmaster of being a foul Freemason and Satan worshipper, her mouth filled with half-chewed potatoes and a thread of oil running down her chin. At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Candelaria was being transformed, second by second: rage increased her bulk, and her face, which just a moment before had been so agreeable, began to redden until, unable to contain herself any longer, she gave the table a thump with her fist, so hard that the wine jumped from the glasses, the plates clattered, and the stew splashed onto the tablecloth. Like a thunderclap, her voice rose above the other half dozen voices.

“If you talk about this damned war in this blessed house one more time, I’ll throw you all into the street and toss your suitcases off the balcony!”

Reluctantly, and exchanging murderous glances, they all furled sails and concentrated on finishing their first course, struggling to contain their fury. The mackerel of the second course was devoured in near silence; the watermelon for dessert threatened danger because of its crimson color, but the tension never exploded. Lunch ended without any further incident; for that, I would only need to wait till dinner. It would all come back then, the ironic comments as a starter, and the double entendres, then the poison-tipped darts and the exchange of blasphemies and people crossing themselves, and finally the untrammeled insults and flying crusts of bread aimed at the eyes of the person opposite. And as a coda, we again heard Candelaria’s warning of the imminent eviction of all the guests if they persisted in reenacting the two sides of the conflict. I learned then that it was normal for this ritual to play out at the three daily meals at the boardinghouse, day in and day out. Never once, however, did our hostess cut a single one of the guests loose, despite the fact that they all kept their war nerves on the alert, their tongues sharp, ready to assail the opposing side mercilessly. Those days of scant trade were no time for the Matutera to voluntarily give up what each of those poor homeless devils was paying for room, board, and the right to a weekly bath. So, in spite of all her threats, there were few days that didn’t see one side of the table hurling opprobrium at the other, as well as olive pits, political slogans, banana skins, and at the most heated moments an occasional gob of spit and more than one fork. The essence of life itself on the scale of a domestic battle.