The Time In Between (Sira Quiroga, #1)

by María Dueñas

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.

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.

Palacio Real.

At the age of twelve I completed my schooling and became an apprentice in the workshop where my mother worked. My logical fate.

the whole workshop’s girl:

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.

Water goes

At fourteen, I started with the simplest things: fasteners, overcasting, loose tacking. Then came buttonholes, backstitches, and hems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mundo Obrero

Mundo Obrero (English: Workers World) is the periodical of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE).[1] The paper is based in Madrid, Spain. History and profile Edit Mundo Obrero was first published on 14 November 1931.[2][3] During its initial phase the paper was edited by Peruvian journalist César Falcón and was financed by the Soviet Union.[3] Its headquarters is in Madrid.[4] One of its notable contributors was Dolores Ibárruri.[5] Its editor-in-chief was Jesus Hernández on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.[6] The paper was illegally published during the rule of Franco.[2] The paper is published fortnightly[1] and contains articles related to the Spanish and international political situations, the opinions of the different bodies of the party as well as relevant party members, and on the activities of the Party and the Communist Youth Union of Spain (UJCE).

Falange /fəˈlanj, ˈfāˌlanj/ I. the Spanish Fascist movement that merged with traditional right-wing elements in 1937 to form the ruling party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista, under General Franco. It was formally abolished in 1977. II. derivatives 1. Falangism /-izəm / noun 2. Falangist /-jist / noun, adjective – origin Spanish, from Latin phalanx, phalang- (see phalanx).

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.

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 stat...

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.

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.

“Ramiro Arribas,”

“I am the manager of the establishment. I’m sorry not to have attended to you earlier; I was trying to place a call.” And watching you through the blinds that separate the office from the showroom, he should have added. He didn’t say it, but he let it be guessed at.

just as animals scent food or danger, with the same primal instinct I knew that Ramiro Arribas, like a wolf, had decided to come for me.

He was like a conjuror combed with brilliantine, the features of his face marked with angular lines, a broad smile, a powerful neck, and a bearing so imposing, so manly and decisive, that beside him my poor

Ignacio looked like he was a century away from reaching manhood.

“We’ll come and collect it ourselves,” I interrupted. I could sense that the man was capable of anything, and a

wave of terror made me shudder to think that he might show up before my mother, asking for me.

I avoided calculating the significance of my actions and didn’t want to stop and guess whether that trajectory was taking me to the threshold of paradise or directly to the slaughterhouse.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a single minute since you left yesterday,” he whispered in my ear the moment we had settled.

He was wearing a different suit than on the previous day, another impeccable shirt.

Ramiro Arribas was thirty-four years old, had a past filled with comings and goings and a capacity for seduction so powerful that not even a concrete wall could have contained it.

He only spoke one more sentence, slowly, as though allowing it to slip out. “He will never love you as much as I do.”

didn’t shed a single tear, didn’t rain down a single reproach upon myself. Just a minute after his presence had faded, I, too, got up from the bench and walked away. I left behind my neighborhood, my people, my little world forever. My whole past remained there as I set out on a new stage of my life, a life that seemed luminous and whose immediate present could imagine no greater glory than that of Ramiro’s two arms giving me shelter.

to live with a man, and

Not married

Sometimes, however, that little girl disappeared and I’d rise up as a woman fully formed, and he wasn’t at all bothered by my lack of knowledge and experience:

oscillation /ˌäsəˈlāSH(ə)n/ noun 1. movement back and forth at a regular speed • the natural oscillation of a spring • the oscillations of a pendulum. 2. variation or fluctuation between two extremes of opinion, action, or quality • the plot's oscillation between bleak and comic elements. 3. [Physics] regular variation in magnitude or position around a central point.

And my mother and I more distant every day.

A vivid crimson color

“I’ve come to bring you a message. A request that isn’t mine. You can accept it or not, you’ll see. But I think you should say yes. You think about it; better late than never.”

To meet my father.

had chosen a blue woollen dress, a matching coat, and a small hat with three feathers tipped gracefully over my left ear. It had all been paid for by Ramiro, naturally: they were the first pieces of clothing to touch my body that hadn’t been sewn by my mother or myself.

was pretty, it’s true; pretty and special looking,

unknown place? Mezzanine. What would the man we were coming to see be like, why this sudden insistence on meeting me after so many years?

“You’re just like your mother was twenty-five years ago.”

“Well, Sira, so this is your father, you meet him at last. His name is Gonzalo Alvarado, he’s an engineer, the owner of a foundry, and he has lived in this house forever. He used to be the son and now he’s the master of the house, that’s how it goes. A long time ago I used to come here to sew for his mother. We met then, and well, anyway, you were born three years later.

It was a relationship that ended because it couldn’t go anywhere, because it never should have begun.

The gentlemen I saw in my comings and goings along Madrid streets delivering orders from Doña Manuela’s workshop were to me like beings from another world, another species who in no way fit the mold I had mentally cast as paternal. And yet before me was just such a specimen. A man who was still good looking despite his somewhat excessive corpulence, with hair already greying

that in its day must have been fair, and honey-colored eyes now a little red, dressed in dark grey, the owner of a grand home and patriarch of an absent family. A

“I’ve found you because I’m afraid that one of these days they’re going to kill me. Or I’ll end up killing someone and they’ll put me in prison, which would be like a death in life, it comes to the same thing. The political situation is about to explode, and when that happens only God knows what will become of all of us.”