The Time in Between: A Novel (44 page)

We found her still in bed, but with a bit more color in her cheeks. She’d had the room tidied, she’d bathed, the shutters were open, and the light was gushing in from the garden. On the day after our visit she moved from the bed to a sofa. On the next she changed her silk nightgown for a flowery dress, went to the hairdresser’s, and took up the reins of her life again.

Although her health was still unsettled, she decided to make as
much as she possibly could of the time she had left before her husband arrived, as though those weeks were the last she had left to live. She resumed the role of the great hostess, creating the perfect setting so that Beigbeder could devote himself to public relations in an atmosphere that was relaxed and discreet, trusting implicitly in his beloved’s efficiency. However, I never learned what many of their guests made of the fact that those gatherings were hosted by the young English lover, and that the high commissioner of the pro-German faction felt so at home at them. But Rosalinda was still active in her plans to bring Beigbeder closer to the British, and many of those less formal receptions were planned with that end in mind.

Over the course of that month, as she had done before and would do again, she invited her compatriots from Tangiers on several occasions, members of the diplomatic corps, military attachés well outside the Italo-German orbit, and representatives of important and wealthy multinational institutions. She also organized a party for the Gibraltarian authorities and for the officers of a British warship docked on “the Rock,” as they called it. And among all those guests Juan Luis Beigbeder and Rosalinda Fox circulated, a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, comfortable, relaxed, hospitable, and affectionate. As though there were nothing going on—as though in Spain brothers weren’t killing one another and Europe wasn’t heating up for the worst possible nightmare.

I got to be close to Beigbeder again several times, and again was able to witness his very unusual manner. He frequently put on Moorish dress, sometimes the slippers, sometimes a djellaba. He was friendly, uninhibited, a touch eccentric; above all he utterly adored Rosalinda and said as much to anyone without the slightest blush. Meanwhile, Marcus Logan and I continued to see each other regularly, increasing in friendship and building an affectionate closeness that I struggled daily to contain. If I hadn’t, that initial friendship probably wouldn’t have taken long to develop into something much more passionate and profound. But I fought not to let that happen and to remain firm, so that the thing that was beginning to draw us together wouldn’t go any further. The hurt I’d suffered from Ramiro still hadn’t completely
healed, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before Marcus would leave, and I didn’t want to suffer again. All the same, the two of us became regular presences at the parties in the villa on the Paseo de las Palmeras, sometimes even joined by Félix, who was delighted to enter into that alien world that so fascinated him. From time to time we would go out of Tetouan as a little gang: Beigbeder invited us to Tangiers for the launch of the
España de Tánger
newspaper, created on his own initiative to tell the world what those from his cause wanted to say. Another time we went off, the four of us—Marcus, Félix, Rosalinda, and I—in my friend’s Dodge, for the sheer
plaisir
of doing so: to go to Saccone & Speed in search of provisions of Irish beef, bacon, and gin; to dance at Villa Harris; to watch an American movie at the Capitol or order the most stunning hats from the studio of Mariquita the milliner.

During that time we also wandered Tetouan’s white medina, ate couscous,
jarira
, and
chuparquías
, climbed the Dersa and the Ghorgiz, and visited Río Martín beach and the Ketama inn, surrounded by pines. Until time ran out, and the unwelcome visitor appeared. It was only then that we discovered that reality can exceed even the bleakest expectations. That was what I heard from Rosalinda just a week after her husband’s arrival.

“It’s much worse than I’d imagined,” she said, collapsing into an armchair the moment she arrived at my atelier.

This time, however, she didn’t seem bewildered. She wasn’t angry in the way she had been when she first heard the news. This time she simply radiated sadness, exhaustion, profound disappointment: at Peter, at the situation they found themselves trapped in, at herself. After half a dozen years of roaming the world alone, she thought she’d be ready for anything; she thought that the experience she’d accumulated would have brought her the resources to face any kind of adversity. But Peter was much tougher than she’d anticipated. He once again took on the simultaneous role of father and husband, as though they hadn’t spent all those years living apart, as though nothing had happened in Rosalinda’s life since she married him when she was still a girl. He reproached her for the casual manner in which she was educating Johnny; it appalled him that his son wasn’t attending a good school,
that he would go out to play with the neighborhood children without a nanny close by, that his entire sporting prowess consisted of his ability to throw stones with the same excellent aim as all the Moorish boys in Tetouan. He complained, too, about the lack of radio programs to his taste, the absence of a club where he could meet up with his fellow countrymen, the fact that no one around him spoke English, and how hard it was to get a British paper in this city that was so cut off from the world.

Not everything appalled the demanding Peter, however. He turned out to be absolutely satisfied with the Tanqueray gin and the Johnnie Walker Black Label that in those days you could get hold of in Tangiers at ludicrous prices. He used to drink at least a bottle of whiskey a day, nicely punctuated by a couple of gin cocktails before every meal. His tolerance for alcohol was astonishing, almost as astonishing as the degree of cruelty he meted out to the domestic staff. He spoke to them reluctantly, in English, without bothering to take account of the fact that they didn’t understand a word of his language, and when it finally became clear that they didn’t understand what he was saying he shouted at them in Hindustani, the language of his former Indian servants, as though the condition of serving a master had a universal language. To his great surprise, one by one they stopped showing up at the house. And all of us, from his wife’s friends to the most humble of their servants, took no more than a few days to work out what sort of creature Peter Fox was. Egotistical, irrational, capricious, alcoholic, arrogant, and tyrannical: it was impossible to find fewer positive attributes in a single person.

Beigbeder naturally stopped spending so much time at Rosalinda’s house, but they still saw each other daily in other places: at the High Commission, on jaunts to the outskirts of town. To many people’s surprise—including my own—Beigbeder consistently treated his lover’s husband impeccably. He organized a day’s fishing for him at the mouth of the Smir River, and a wild boar hunt in Jemis de Anyera. He helped to arrange his travel to Gibraltar for him to drink English beer and talk polo and cricket with his countrymen. He did everything he could, in short, to behave toward him as his position demanded when dealing
with such a peculiar foreign guest. The two men’s characters could not have been more different, however; it was curious to witness the contrast between these two men who were both so important in the life of the same woman. Perhaps that was exactly why they never clashed.

“Peter considers Juan Luis a proud, backward Spaniard, like an old-fashioned Spanish caballero out of a Golden Age portrait,” Rosalinda explained to me. “And Juan Luis thinks Peter is a snob, a ridiculous, incomprehensible snob. So they are like two parallel lines: they can never come into conflict because they’ll never find a point where they meet. The only difference being—for me—that as a man Peter doesn’t even come up to Juan Luis’s heel.”

“And no one has told your husband about the two of you?”

“About our relationship?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and brushing her hair back from her eyes. “I imagine they have, some viper tongue must have come to his ear to spit poison, but he’s utterly indifferent.”

“I don’t understand how he could be.”

She shrugged.

“Nor do I, but as long as he doesn’t have to pay for a house and he’s surrounded by servants, copious amounts of alcohol, hot food, and blood sports, I don’t think anything else matters to him. It would be different if we lived in Calcutta; there I suppose he would probably make an effort to keep up appearances at the very least. But here no one knows him; this isn’t his world, so he isn’t the slightest bit bothered by anything people tell him about me.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“The one thing we know for sure, querida, is that he has no interest in me whatsoever,” she said with a mix of sarcasm and sadness. “Anything at all is worth more to him than I am: a morning’s fishing, a bottle of gin, or a hand of cards. I’ve never mattered to him. What would have been strange is if I’d started mattering now.”

And while Rosalinda was in hell battling with a monster, I also—at last—found my life overturned. It was a windy Tuesday and Marcus Logan showed up at my house before noon.

Our friendship had been getting stronger—a good friendship, no more than that. We were both aware that one day when we least
expected it he would have to leave, that his presence in my world was transitory. Marcus and I were of course very much attracted to each other, and we weren’t short on opportunities for that to transform itself into something more. There was a complicity, there were glances, and glancing touches, veiled comments, admiration, and desire. There was closeness, there was tenderness. But I forced myself to hold back my feelings; I refused to go any further, and he accepted it. Restraining myself took a huge effort on my part: doubt, uncertainty, nights lying awake. But rather than having to face the pain of being left by him, I preferred to remain with the recollection of those memorable moments we’d spent together in those agitated, intense times. Nights of laughter and drinking, of kif pipes and noisy rounds of cards. Trips to Tangiers, outings, chats; moments that I would never get back and that I treasured in my store of memories.

Marcus’s unexpected arrival at my Sidi Mandri house that morning brought with it the end of one time and the start of another. One door was closing, and another was beginning to open. And me, right there in the middle, unable to hold on to what was ending, longing to embrace what was to come.

“Your mother is on her way. Last night she boarded a British merchant vessel at Alicante headed for Oran. She arrives in Gibraltar in three days. Rosalinda will make sure she can come across the Strait without any trouble; she’ll tell you herself how the crossing will happen.”

I wanted to give him my deepest thank-you but was suddenly overtaken by a torrent of tears. So all I was able to do was hug him as hard as I could and soak the lapels of his jacket.

“I’ve also reached the moment when it’s time for me to be on my way,” he added a few moments later.

I looked at him, sniffing. He reached for his white handkerchief and held it out to me.

“My agency is recalling me. My job in Morocco is over, I’ve got to go back.”

“To Madrid?”

“To London, for now. Then to wherever they send me.”

I hugged him again, and I cried again. And when I was finally capable of containing the turmoil of emotions and starting to control that unruly assault of sentiments that mixed the greatest of joys with a terrible sadness, my broken voice finally came out.

“Don’t go, Marcus.”

“If only it were up to me. But I can’t stay, Sira, they need me somewhere else.”

I looked at his beloved face again. It still bore the leftovers of scars, but very little remained of the battered man who’d arrived at the Nacional one summer night. That day I was meeting a stranger and was filled with anxieties and fears; now I was facing the painful task of saying good-bye to someone very close to me, closer perhaps than I wanted to admit.

I sniffed again.

“Whenever you want to give an outfit to one of your girlfriends, you’ll know where to find me.”

“When I want a girlfriend, I’ll come and get you,” he said, holding his hand out to my face. He tried to dry my tears with his fingers, and I shivered at his caress, wishing violently that this day had never arrived.

“Liar,” I murmured.

“Lovely.”

His fingers ran over my face to the roots of my hair and through it down to the back of my neck. Our faces came closer, slowly, as though afraid to act on something that had been hovering in the air for so long.

The unexpected click of a key made us pull apart. Jamila came in, panting, bringing an urgent message.

“Siñora Fox say Siñorita Sira run to las Palmeras.”

Things were up and running, and we were approaching the end. Marcus took his hat, and I couldn’t resist hugging him one more time. There were no words, there was nothing more to say. A few seconds later, all that remained of his solid, close presence was the trace of a light kiss on my hair, the image of his back, and the painful noise of the door closing behind him.