The Time in Between: A Novel (63 page)

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.

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I
n 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 shared. 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.

My meetings with my father opened my eyes to a side of reality that I hitherto hadn’t known. It was thanks to him that I learned that even though the newspapers never reported it, the country was going through a constant governmental crisis, in which rumors of dismissals and resignations, ministerial changeovers, rivalries, and conspiracies multiplied like the loaves and fishes. Beigbeder’s fall, fourteen months after being sworn in in Burgos, had certainly been the most dramatic, but it was by no means the only one.

As Spain set slowly about its reconstruction, the various families that had contributed to winning the war, far from living together in harmony, began to squabble like cats and dogs. The army in confrontation with the Falange, the Falange at daggers with the monarchists, the monarchists furious because Franco wouldn’t commit to restoration, and he himself, in El Pardo, never expressing his position clearly, remaining distant, signing sentences with a firm hand and never coming down in anyone’s favor; Serrano Suñer above everyone, and everyone in turn against Serrano; some plotting on the side of the Axis, others for the Allies, each placing their bets blindly with no idea which side would eventually, as Candelaria had put it, driving the herd home.

In those days the British and the Germans were keeping up their constant tug-of-war both across the world and in the streets of the Spanish capital. Unfortunately for the cause in which fortune had positioned me, the Germans seemed to have a much more powerful and effective propaganda machine. As Hillgarth had told me in Tangiers, these efforts were managed from the embassy itself, with more than generous economic resources and a formidable team led by the
famous Lazar, who was also able to count on the indulgence of the regime. I knew firsthand that his social activities never stopped: his dinners and parties were mentioned constantly in my workshop by the Germans and certain of the Spaniards, and every night one of my creations would make an appearance in his drawing rooms. Campaigns to promote Germany’s reputation appeared with increasing frequency in the press, too. They used showy advertisements that displayed gas engines and fabric dyes with equal enthusiasm. The propaganda was incessant, merging ideas and products, persuading readers that the German ideology was capable of making advances that were unattainable to the world’s other countries. The apparently commercial pretext of the advertisements didn’t hide the real message: Germany was ready to dominate the planet, and they wanted to make this known to their good friends in Spain. And just so that there should be no doubt, they would often include in their propaganda some visually striking drawings, large lettering, and attractive maps of Europe in which Germany and the Iberian Peninsula were connected by means of bold arrows, while Great Britain appeared to have been swallowed up into the center of the earth.

In the pharmacies, cafés, and barbershops people passed around satirical magazines and books of crosswords that were gifts from the Germans; the jokes and stories were mixed up with accounts of victorious military operations, and the correct solution to all the puzzles was always politically inclined, and in favor of the Nazi cause. And there were also informational leaflets for professionals, adventure stories for young people and children, and even the parish newsletters of hundreds of churches. People also said that the streets were full of Spanish moles who’d been brought in by the Germans to disseminate propaganda directly to the people at tram stops and on lines in shops and cinemas. The messages were sometimes reasonably believable, at other times utter nonsense. There were malicious rumors flying back and forth that always spoke unfavorably of the British and those who supported them. That they were stealing the Spaniards’ olive oil and taking it in diplomatic cars to Gibraltar. That the flour donated by the American Red Cross was so bad that it was making the Spanish people sick. That
there was no fish to be had in the markets because our fishermen had been detained by ships from the British navy. That the quality of the bread was so terrible because His Majesty’s subjects were sinking the Argentine ships that were carrying the wheat. That the Americans, in collaboration with the Russians, were putting finishing touches on their plans for an imminent invasion of the Peninsula.

The British, meanwhile, didn’t fail to respond. Their reaction consisted mainly of finding every possible way to blame the Spanish regime for all the people’s calamities, in particular striking them where it hurt most: the scarcity of food; the ravenous hunger that led people to make themselves sick eating filth from the trash; whole families running along desperately behind charity trucks; mothers having to manage, God only knows how, to make fritters without oil, omelets without eggs, sweets without sugar, and a strange sausage without a shred of pork and tasting suspiciously of cod. In order to strengthen the Spaniards’ sympathy for the Allies’ cause, the English sharpened their wits, too. The embassy’s press office in Madrid drafted a homemade publication that the civil servants themselves worked diligently to hand out on the streets close to the legation, with the young press officer, Tom Burns, leading the way. The British Institute had been started up not long before, headed by one Walter Starkie, an Irish Catholic whom some people nicknamed Don Gitano. It had been opened, apparently, without any authorization from the Spanish authorities but with the genuine—albeit already weakened—support of Beigbeder, in the final throes of his time as a minister. It gave every appearance of being a cultural center that taught English and organized conferences, salons, and various other events, some of them more social than purely intellectual. But apparently it was at its core an undercover British propaganda operation that was much more sophisticated than the German one.

And so winter passed in this way, tense and full of hard work for almost everyone, countries and people alike. Then suddenly, without my even being aware of it, spring was upon us. With it came a new invitation from my father: the Zarzuela Hippodrome, the racecourse, was opening its doors—why didn’t I go along with him?

When I was just a young apprentice at Doña Manuela’s, we used
to hear constant references to the Hippodrome, which our clients frequented. I don’t suppose many of the ladies were interested in the racing itself, but just like the horses, they too were in competition. If not for speed, for elegance. In those days the old Hippodrome had been located at the end of the Paseo de la Castellana, and it was a social meeting place for the
haute bourgeoisie,
the aristocracy, and even royalty, with Alfonso XIII often to be seen in the royal box. Shortly before the war, work began on a new, more modern facility, but the conflict brought the project to an abrupt stop. After two years of peace, it was now—albeit still only half finished—opening its doors on the El Pardo hill.

For weeks, the opening was announced in the headlines and spread by word of mouth. My father came to fetch me in his car; he enjoyed driving. On the journey he explained to me just how the Hippodrome had been built with its innovative wavy roof and spoke about the enthusiasm of thousands of Madrileños to get back to the old races. I in turn described my recollections of the riding club in Tetouan, the imposing bearing of the caliph crossing the Plaza de España on horseback on Fridays, going from his palace to the mosque. We went on talking at such length that he didn’t have time to warn me that we would be meeting anyone else that afternoon. It wasn’t till we arrived at our seats that I realized that by attending that apparently innocent event, I’d just stepped of my own free will directly into the very jaws of the wolf.

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T
he crowd attending the races was immense: a mass of people thronging around the ticket desks and in long lines to place their bets. The stands and the area closest to the track were filled to bursting with nervous, noisy groups of spectators. The privileged few who occupied the reserved boxes floated about in an altogether different dimension: untroubled, removed from the shouting, sitting in proper chairs rather than on cement steps, and being attended to by waiters in spotless jackets ready to provide diligent service.

As we entered the box, I could feel, deep down, something like the bite of an iron jaw. It only took me a couple of seconds to recognize the absurdity of my situation there, with only a handful of Spaniards mixed in with a large number of English men and women, glasses in hand and armed with binoculars, smoking, drinking, and chatting in their language while they waited for the galloping to begin. And lest there was any doubt about their cause or their origins, a large British flag had been draped over the handrail.

I wanted the earth to swallow me up, but my time hadn’t come quite yet: my capacity for astonishment had not yet peaked. For that to happen, all I needed to do was take a few steps back and look over to my left. In the neighboring box, still nearly empty, three vertical banners
fluttered in the wind: on the red background of each one was a white circle with a black swastika in the middle. The Germans’ box, separated from ours by a low fence barely more than three feet high, awaited the arrival of its occupants. For now the only people in it were a couple of soldiers guarding the entrance and a handful of waiters setting up, but given the time and the haste with which they were making their preparations, I had no doubt at all that the Germans wouldn’t be long in arriving.

Before I was able to calm myself down sufficiently to decide the quickest way to escape from this nightmare, Gonzalo explained to me in a whisper who all those subjects of His Gracious Majesty were.

“I forgot to tell you we’d be meeting some old friends I’ve not seen in a while, English engineers from the Río Tinto mines. They’ve come over with some of their compatriots from Gibraltar, and I imagine there will be some embassy people coming, too. They’re all very excited about the reopening of the Hippodrome; you know they’re crazy about horses.”

I didn’t know, nor did I care: at that moment I had other urgent matters to deal with besides these people’s hobbies. How to fly from them like the plague, for example. Hillgarth’s words in the American legation in Tangiers were still echoing in my ears—absolutely no contact with the English. And still less, he should have said, right under the noses of the Germans. When my father’s friends became aware of our arrival, they started up with their greetings for “Gonzalo, old boy” and for his unexpected young companion. I returned the greetings with very few words, trying to mask my nerves behind a smile as weak as it was false, while at the same time secretly weighing up just how risky my situation was. As I clasped the hands that the anonymous faces held out to me, my eyes scanned my surroundings, looking for somewhere I might disappear without showing my father up. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Not at all. To the left was the Germans’ stand with its ostentatious banners; the right-hand side was occupied by a handful of individuals with generous bellies and thick gold rings, smoking cigars the size of torpedoes in the company of women with bleach-blond hair and lips as red as poppies, for whom I would never have sewn so much
as a handkerchief in my workshop. I looked away from them all: the black marketeers and their gorgeous darlings didn’t interest me in the least.