Chapter One

A typewriter shattered my destiny. The culprit was a Hispano-

Olivetti, and for weeks, a store window kept it from me. Looking

back now, from the vantage point of the years gone by, it’s hard to

believe a simple mechanical object could have the power to divert the

course of an entire life in just four short days, to pulverize the intricate

plans on which it was built. And yet that is how it was, and there was

nothing I could have done to stop it.

It wasn’t really that I was treasuring any great plans in those days.

My ambitions remained close to home, almost domestic, consistent

with the coordinates of the place and time in which I happened to

live, plans for a future that could be within my grasp if I reached out

my fingertips. At that time my world revolved slowly around a few

presences that seemed to me firm and eternal. My mother had always

been the most solid of them all. She was a dressmaker, working in a

shop with a distinguished clientele. She was experienced and had good

judgment, but she was never any more than a salaried seamstress, a

working woman like so many others who for ten hours a day sacrificed

her nails and pupils cutting and sewing, checking and adjusting garments

destined for bodies that were not her own and gazes that would

rarely be aimed at her. I knew little about my father in those days.

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4 Ma r Í a Du eÑa s

Nothing, to be exact. He had never been around, nor did his absence

affect me. I never felt much curiosity about him until my mother, when

I was eight or nine, ventured to offer me a few crumbs of information.

That he had another family, that it was impossible for him to live with

us. I swallowed up those details with the same haste and scant appetite

with which I polished off the last spoonfuls of the Lenten broth before

me: the life of that alien being interested me considerably less than

racing down to play in the square.

I had been born in the summer of 1911, the same year that the

dancer Pastora Imperio married El Gallo, when the Mexican singer

Jorge Negrete came into the world. When the star of that age they called

the Belle Époque was fading. In the distance the drums of what would

be the first great war were beginning to be heard, while in Madrid cafÉs

people read El Debate and El Heraldo, and on the stage La Chelito fired

men’s passions as she moved her hips brazenly to the tempo of popular

songs. During those summer months King Alfonso XIII managed to

arrange that, between one lover and the next, his fifth legitimate child,

a daughter, was conceived. Meanwhile, at the helm of the government

was Canalejas the liberal, who couldn’t predict that just a year later an

eccentric anarchist would put an end to his life, firing three bullets to

his head while he was browsing in the San MartÍn bookshop.

I grew up in reasonably happy surroundings, with more constraints

than excesses but nonetheless with no great deprivations or frustrations.

I was raised in a narrow street in a fusty old neighborhood in

Madrid, right beside the Plaza de la Paja, just a couple of steps from the

Palacio Real. A stone’s throw from the ceaseless hubbub of the heart

of the city, a world of clothes hung out to dry, the smell of bleach, the

voices of neighboring women, and cats lying out in the sun. I attended

a makeshift school on the mezzanine of a nearby building: on its

benches, meant to be used by two people, we kids arranged ourselves in

fours, with no sense of order, pushing and shoving, shouting our renditions

of “The Pirate’s Song” or our times tables. It was there I learned to

read and write, to master the four functions of basic arithmetic as well

as the names of the rivers crisscrossing the yellowed map that hung from

the wall. At the age of twelve I completed my schooling and became

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The Time In Between 5

an apprentice in the workshop where my mother worked. My logical

fate.

The business of DoÑa Manuela Godina—the owner—had for years

produced fine garments, very skillfully cut and sewn, highly regarded

all over Madrid. Day dresses, cocktail dresses, coats, and cloaks that

would later be shown off by distinguished ladies as they walked along

La Castellana, around the Hippodrome, and the Puerta de Hierro

polo club, as they took their tea at Sakuska or entered the ostentatious

churches. Some time passed, however, before I began to find my way

into the secrets of sewing. At first I was the whole workshop’s girl: the

one who took the charcoal from the braziers and swept the cuttings

from the floor, who heated the irons in the fire and ran breathless to

buy thread and buttons from the Plaza de Pontejos. The one who was

in charge of getting the just-finished garments, wrapped in big brown

linen bags, to the exclusive residences: my favorite job, the greatest

joy of my budding career. That was how I came to know the porters

and chauffeurs from the best buildings, the maids, housekeepers,

and butlers of the wealthiest families. I watched—unseen—the most

refined of ladies, daughters, and husbands. And like a mute witness

I made my way into their bourgeois houses, into aristocratic mansions

and the sumptuous apartments of charming old buildings. Sometimes

I wouldn’t get past the servants’ area, and someone from the household

would accept delivery of the dress; at other times, I was directed to go to

the dressing room, so I would make my way down corridors and catch

glimpses of drawing rooms, where my eyes would feast on the carpets,

chandeliers, velvet curtains, and grand pianos that sometimes were

being played and sometimes not, thinking all the while how strange it

would be to live in such a universe.

My days shifted effortlessly between these two worlds, and I became

less and less aware of the incongruity that existed between them.

I would walk down those broad roads rutted with carriage tracks and

lined with large imposing doorways just as naturally as I would pass

through the crazy network of winding streets that formed my neighborhood,

streets filled with puddles, rubbish, the cries of vendors, and the

sharp barks of hungry dogs. Where everyone always went in a hurry,

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6 Ma r Í a Du eÑa s

and at the cry of “Agua va! ” you had better take cover to avoid being

splattered with urine. Craftsmen, minor businessmen, employees, and

newspaper vendors lately arrived in the capital filled the rental houses

and gave my neighborhood its villagey feel. Many of them only left its

bounds when obliged to; my mother and I, on the other hand, did so

early each morning, to get over to Calle Zurbano and quickly buckle

down to our day-to-day tasks in DoÑa Manuela’s workshop.

After my first two years as an apprentice, the two of them decided

that the time had come for me to learn how to sew. At fourteen,

I started with the simplest things: fasteners, overcasting, loose tacking.

Then came buttonholes, backstitches, and hems. We worked seated on

little rush chairs, hunched over wooden boards supported on our knees,

where we placed the fabric we were sewing. DoÑa Manuela dealt with

the customers, cutting, checking, and correcting. My mother took the

measurements and dealt with all the rest: she did the most delicate

needlework and assigned the remainder of the jobs, supervising their

execution and imposing rhythm and discipline on a small battalion

consisting of half a dozen older dressmakers, four or five young women,

and a number of chatterbox apprentice girls, always keener on laughing

and gossiping than on doing their work. Some of them ended up good

seamstresses, and the ones who couldn’t sew well ended up doing the

less desirable tasks. When one girl left, another would replace her in

that noisy room, so incongruous compared to the serene opulence of

the shop’s faÇade and the sobriety of its luminous front room to which

only the customers had access. The two of them—DoÑa Manuela and

my mother—were the only ones who could enjoy its saffron-colored

drapery, its mahogany furniture, its luminous oak floor, which we

younger girls were responsible for waxing with cotton rags. Only they,

from time to time, would receive the rays of sunlight that came in

through the four high balcony windows facing the street. The rest of

us remained always in the rear guard: in the gynaeceum, freezing in

winter and hellish in summer. That was our workshop, that grey space

around the back whose only openings were two little windows onto an

interior courtyard, where the hours passed like breaths of air between

the humming of ballads and the noise of scissors.

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The Time In Between 7

I learned fast. I had agile fingers that adapted quickly to the shape

of the needles and the touch of the fabrics. To measurements, draping,

and volumes. Neck, bust, outside leg. Under bust, full back, cuff. At

sixteen I learned to tell fabrics apart, at seventeen to appreciate their

qualities and calibrate their possibilities. CrÊpe de chine, silk muslin,

georgette, Chantilly lace. Months passed as if turning on a Ferris

wheel: autumns spent making coats in fine fabrics and between-season

dresses, springs sewing flighty dresses destined for long, faraway Cantabrian

holidays, the beaches at La Concha or El Sardinero. I turned

eighteen, nineteen. Bit by bit I was initiated into handling the cutting

work and tailoring the more delicate components. I learned to attach

collars and lapels, to predict how things would end up. I liked my work,

actually enjoyed it. DoÑa Manuela and my mother sometimes asked

me for my opinion; they began to trust me. “The girl has a fine hand

and a fine eye, Dolores,” DoÑa Manuela used to say. “She’s good, and

she’ll get better if she stays on track. Better than you, you needn’t worry

about that.” And my mother would just carry on with what she was

doing, as if she hadn’t heard a thing. I didn’t look up from my working

board either. But secretly I watched her out the corner of my eye, and

in her mouth—studded with pins—saw the tiniest trace of a smile.

The years went by, life went by. Fashion changed, too, and at its

command the activities of the workshop adjusted. After the war in

Europe straight lines had arrived, corsets had been cast aside, and legs

began to be shown without so much as the slightest blush. When the

Roaring Twenties came to an end, however, the waistlines of dresses returned

to their natural place, skirts got longer, and modesty once again

imposed itself on sleeves, necklines, and desires. Then we launched

ourselves into a new decade and there were more changes. All of them

together, unforeseen, almost one on top of another. I turned twenty,

the Republic arrived in Spain, and I met Ignacio. It was one September

Sunday in Parque de la Bombilla, at a riotous dance that was crammed

full with workshop girls, bad students, and soldiers on leave. He asked

me to dance, he made me laugh. Two weeks later we began to sketch

out plans to marry.

Who was Ignacio, and what was he to me? The man of my life,

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8 Ma r Í a Du eÑa s

that’s what I thought then. The calm lad who I sensed would be a good

father to my children. I had already reached the age when girls like

me—girls with no professional expectations—had few options other

than marriage. The example of my mother, who had raised me alone

and in order to do so had worked from sunrise to sunset, had never

seemed to me a very appealing fate. In Ignacio I found someone with

whom to pass the rest of my adult life without having to wake up every

morning to the taste of loneliness. I was not stirred to the heights of

passion, but rather an intense affection and the certainty that my days

by his side would pass without sorrows or stridency, sweetly gentle as

a pillow.

Ignacio Montes, I thought, would come to be the owner of that arm

of mine that he would take on a thousand and one walks, the nearby

presence that would offer me security and shelter forever. Two years

older than I, thin, genial, as straightforward as he was tender. He was

tall, with a skinny build, good manners, and a heart whose capacity

to love me seemed to multiply with the hours. The son of a Castilian

widow who kept her well-counted money under the mattress, he lived

intermittently in insignificant boardinghouses and was an eager applicant

for bureaucratic jobs as well as a perpetual candidate for any

ministry that might offer him a salary for life—War, Governance,

the Treasury. The dream of nearly three thousand pesetas a year, two

hundred and forty-one a month—a salary that is set forever, never

to be changed, dedicating the rest of his days to the tame world of

departmental

offices and secretarial offices, of blotters, untrimmed

paper, seals, and inkwells. It was on this that we based our plans for the

future: on the back of a perfectly calm civil service that, one round of

exams after another, refused stubbornly to include my Ignacio on its list

of names. And he persisted, undiscouraged. In February he tried out for

Justice and in June for Agriculture, and then it started all over again.

In the meantime, unable to allow himself costly diversions, and

yet utterly devoted to making me happy, Ignacio feted me with the

humble possibilities that his extremely meager pocket would allow:

a cardboard box filled with silkworms and mulberry leaves, cones of

roasted chestnuts, and promises of eternal love on the grass under the

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The Time In Between 9

viaduct. Together we listened to the band from the pavilion in the

Parque del Oeste and rowed boats in El Retiro on Sunday mornings

when the weather was pleasant. There wasn’t a fair with swings and barrel

organ that we didn’t turn up at, nor any chotis that we didn’t dance

with watchlike precision. How many evenings we spent in the Vistillas

gardens, how many movies we saw in cheap local cinemas. Drinking a

Valencian horchata was a luxury to us, taking a taxi a dream. Ignacio’s

tenderness, while not overly bold, was nevertheless boundless. I was his

sky and his stars, the most beautiful, the best. My skin, my face, my

eyes. My hands, my mouth, my voice. Everything that was me made up

the unsurpassable for him, the source of his happiness. And I listened

to him, told him he was being silly, and let him love me.

Life in the workshop in those days, however, followed a different

rhythm. Things were becoming difficult, uncertain. The Second

Republic had instilled a sense of apprehension in the comfortable

prosperity

surrounding our customers. Madrid was turbulent and

frantic, the political tension permeating every street corner. The good

families extended their northern summer holidays indefinitely, seeking

to remain on the fringes of the unsettled, rebellious capital where the

Mundo Obrero was declaimed loudly in the squares while the shirtless

proletariat from the outskirts made their way, without retreat, into the

Puerta del Sol. Big private motorcars began to be seen less and less on

the streets, opulent parties dwindled. Old ladies in mourning prayed

novenas for AzaÑa to fall soon, and the noise of bullets became routine

at the hour when the gas street lamps were lit. The anarchists set fire to

churches, the Falangists brandished pistols like bullies. With increasing

frequency the aristocrats and hautes bourgeoises covered their furniture

up with sheets, dismissed the staff, bolted the shutters, and set out hastily

for foreign parts, taking jewels galore, fears, and banknotes across

the borders, yearning for the exiled king and an obliging Spain, which

would still be some time in coming.

Fewer and fewer ladies visited DoÑa Manuela’s workshop, fewer

orders came in, and there was less and less to do. Drip by painful drip,

first the apprentice girls and then the rest of the seamstresses were dismissed,

till all that were left were the owner, my mother, and me. And

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10 Ma r Í a Du eÑa s

when we finished the last dress for the Marchioness of Entrelagos and

spent the next six days listening to the radio, twiddling our thumbs,

without a single soul appearing at the door, DoÑa Manuela announced,

sighing, that she had no choice but to shut up shop.

Amid the turbulence of those days in which the political fighting

made theater audiences quake and governments lasted three paternosters,

we barely had the chance to cry over what we’d lost. Three weeks

after the advent of our enforced inactivity, Ignacio appeared with a

bouquet of violets and the news that he had at last passed his civil

service exam. The plans for our little wedding stifled any feelings of uncertainty,

and on a little table we planned the event. Although the new

breezes that swept in with the Republic carried on them the fashion for

civil weddings, my mother—whose soul housed simultaneously, and

with no contradiction, her condition as single mother, an iron Catholic

spirit, and a nostalgic loyalty to the deposed monarchy—encouraged

us to celebrate a religious wedding in the neighboring church of San

AndrÉs. Ignacio and I agreed; how could we not, without toppling

that hierarchy of order in which he submitted to all my desires and

I deferred to my mother’s without argument. Nor did I have any good

reason to refuse: the dreams I had about celebrating that marriage

were modest ones, and it made no difference to me whether it was at

an altar with a priest and cassock or in a large room presided over by a

Republican tricolor flag.

So we prepared to set the date with the same parish priest who

twenty-four years earlier, on June eighth, as dictated by the calendar

of saints’ days, had given me the name Sira. Sabiniana, Victorina,

Gaudencia, Heraclia, and Fortunata had been other possibilities that

went with the saints of the day.

“Sira, Father, just put Sira—it’s short, at least.” That was my mother’s

decision, in her single motherhood. And so I was Sira.

We would celebrate the marriage with family and a few friends.

With my grandfather, who had neither his legs nor his wits, mutilated

in body and spirit during the war of the Philippines, a permanent

mute presence in his rocking chair next to our dining room balcony

windows. With Ignacio’s mother and sisters who’d come in from the

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The Time In Between 11

village. With our next-door socialist neighbors Engracia and Norberto

and their three sons, as dear to us as if the same blood flowed right

across the landing. With DoÑa Manuela, who took up the threads

again to give me the gift of her final piece of work, in the form of a

bridal dress. We would treat our guests to sugar-plum pastries, sweet

MÁlagan wine and vermouth. Perhaps we would be able to hire a musician

from the neighborhood to come up and play a paso doble, and

some street photographer would take a dry-plate picture for us, which

would adorn our home, something we did not yet have and for now

would be my mother’s.

It was then, amid this jumble of plans and preparations, that it

occurred to Ignacio to prepare me to take the test to make me a civil

servant like him. His brand-new post in administration had opened his

eyes to a new world: that of the administration of the Republic, an area

where there existed professional destinies for women that lay beyond

the stove, the wash house, and drudgery; through which the female sex

could beat a path, elbow to elbow with men, in the same conditions and

with their sights set on the same dreams. The first women were already

sitting as deputies in the parliament; the equality of the sexes in public

life was proclaimed. There had been recognition of our legal status,

our right to work, and universal suffrage. All the same, I would have

infinitely preferred to return to sewing, but it took Ignacio just three

evenings to convince me. The old world of fabrics and backstitches had

been toppled and a new universe was opening its doors to us: we had

to adapt to it. Ignacio himself could take charge of my preparation; he

had all the study topics and more than enough experience in the art of

putting himself forward and failing countless times without ever giving

in to despair. As for me, I would do my share to help the little platoon

that we two would make up with my mother, my grandfather, and the

progeny to come. And so I agreed. Once we were all set, there was only

one thing we lacked: a typewriter on which I could learn to type in

preparation for the unavoidable typing test. Ignacio had spent months

practicing on other people’s machines, passing through a via dolorosa

of sad academies smelling of grease, ink, and concentrated sweat. He

didn’t want me to have to go through the same unpleasantness, hence

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12 Ma r Í a Du eÑa s

his determination that we should obtain our own equipment. In the

weeks that followed we launched ourselves on our search, as though it

would turn our lives totally around.

We studied all the options and did endless calculations. I didn’t

understand about detailed performance features, but it seemed to me

that something small and light would be most suitable for us. Ignacio

was indifferent to the size, but he did take extraordinary care over

prices, installment payments, and terms. We located all the sellers in

Madrid, spent hours standing at their window displays, and learned to

pronounce exotic names that evoked distant geographies and movie

stars: Remington, Royal, Underwood. We could just as easily have

chosen one brand as another; we could just as well have ended up

buying from an American establishment as a German one, but our

choice settled finally on the Italian Hispano-Olivetti on Calle de Pi y

Margall. How could we have known that with that simple act, with the

mere fact of having taken two or three steps and crossed a threshold, we

were signing the death sentence on our time together and irreparably

twisting apart the strands of our future.