The Time In Between (Sira Quiroga, #1)

by María Dueñas

he catches me up to something, he’ll whisk me off to the police station, and then God only knows.”

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.

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.

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.

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

opprobrium /əˈprōbrēəm/ I. noun 1. harsh criticism or censure • his films and the critical opprobrium they have generated. 2. the public disgrace arising from someone's shameful conduct • the opprobrium of being closely associated with thugs and gangsters. 3. ‹archaic› an occasion or cause of reproach or disgrace. – origin mid 17th cent.: from Latin, literally ‘infamy,’ from opprobrum, from ob- ‘against’ + probrum ‘disgraceful act.’

The essence of life itself on the scale of a domestic battle.

The schoolmaster and the civil servant, both elderly bachelors, were longtime residents; the sisters had traveled from Soria to Morocco in mid-July to bury a relative and saw the Strait closed to marine traffic before they were able to return home; something similar had happened to the hair products salesman, kept in the Protectorate against his will as a result of the insurgency. The mother and son had other reasons that were less clear, though everyone assumed they had come in search of an elusive husband and father who one fine morning had gone out to buy tobacco on Toledo’s Plaza de Zocodover and decided never to return home.

realized that those eight months I’d spent alongside Ramiro had been so intense that I’d barely had close contact with anyone else. Only then did I become aware of the scale of my loneliness.

As the Pitman Academies leaflet had said, long and steep is the path of life.

But the rhythm of my wrist was just the same, and the needle was once again moving quickly before my eyes as my fingers toiled away to get the stitches just right, just as they had done for years, day after day, in another place and for other ends.

Why didn’t you ever tell me you had hands like that, my angel?”

You’ve seen how complicated it is to find you a position, so it seems to me that the best thing for you to do is to concentrate on sewing for the people in Tetouan.

I’d

have to come up with something out of the ordinary, to set me apart.

the mere fact of being back at my sewing managed to mitigate the harshness of my distress and open up a tiny chink through which a slim ray of light began to filter.

Are you ready to be the best dressmaker in Tetouan, to sew clothes no one has ever sewn before?”

They’re foreign and this war doesn’t mean anything to them, so they feel like partying and they’re not going to spend however long this mess lasts dressing themselves in rags and torturing themselves over who’s won what battle, you understand me, my angel?”

their barrels pointed every which way, like a platoon of sleeping assassins.

You’ve got to press ahead, Sira. You’ve got to be brave, take risks, fight for yourself. With the misadventures you’ve been through, no nice young gentleman is about to come knocking on your door to set you up in an apartment. What’s more, after your experience, I don’t think you’re going to want to depend on a man for quite some time, either.

What’s more, it’s better if people don’t associate you with me: I’ve hardly got the best reputation, and I don’t belong to the same class as the ladies we need as customers. So I’ll take charge of providing the initial money, and you provide the hands. Then we share. That’s what’s called an investment.”

“Me? I’m a diehard supporter of whichever side wins, my angel.”

decided to confront the future from behind a mask of security and courage, preventing people from seeing my fear, my miseries, and the dagger that was still piercing my soul.

decided to transform myself, and my choice was to adopt the appearance of a woman who was solid, solvent, experienced. I’d have to fight hard to get my ignorance mistaken for haughtiness, my uncertainty for sweet apathy, for no one even to suspect my fears, hidden in the firm tread of a pair of high heels and a look of confident determination. For no one to guess at the immense effort I was still making every day to overcome my sadness, one bit at a time.

Over the years there have been many times when my destiny has delivered me unexpected moments, unforeseen twists and turns that I’ve had to handle on the fly as they appeared. Occasionally I was ready for them; very often I wasn’t. Never, however, was I so aware of entering a new stage as I was that afternoon in October when I finally dared to cross the threshold and my steps sounded hollowly in the unfurnished apartment.

It was a special day for the Matutera, too, the start of something new and unexpected.

As I regarded her in silence, unexpectedly I saw the shadow of my mother pass in front of her face.

Each, in her way and in her own world, belonged to a stock of brave women who fight their way through life with the little that luck gives them. For myself and for them, for all of us, I, too, had to fight to make that business stay afloat.

But we both knew that until the end of time we would be joined by something that no one else would ever hear us speak

of.

Wrapped in my new image as a woman of the world radiating glamour and ease, I supervised the whole process from beginning to end with an expression of resolve, my eyelashes thick with mascara, my new hairstyle perpetually groomed, my feet shod in stylish high heels.

When I started at Doña Manuela’s workshop in the mid-twenties, loose lines were predominant; low waists and wide cuts for daytime, cleanly cut straight gowns of exquisite simplicity for the night.

The thirties brought with them longer garments, fitted waists, bias cuts, prominent shoulders, and voluptuous outlines.

I would have liked to be able to handle my own life with the same ease that I could accommodate myself to the whims of the fashion trends dictated from Paris.

An extensive feature showed a woman tennis player in a light-colored sweater and a sort of split skirt, halfway between a normal skirt and a pair of broad trousers: something I’d never seen before, and probably neither had any of the magazine’s readers, judging by the detailed attention the photographs seemed to be paying to this piece of gear.

turned, with no idea who could possibly have uttered those words, and saw the young man who lived opposite me. There he was, this time on his own.

Courtesy seasoned with a touch of skepticism that he didn’t try to hide.

Salvation on one side, total collapse on the other, and me in the middle. That’s how I saw myself in front of Commissioner Vázquez on that autumn morning.

was tired of having been stabbed in the back by an unscrupulous bastard, of the months I’d been living in fear, feeling constantly under threat.

Sephardi /səˈfärdē/ I. noun 1. a Jew of Spanish or Portuguese descent. They retain their own distinctive customs and rituals, preserving Babylonian Jewish traditions rather than the Palestinian ones of the Ashkenazim. Compare with Ashkenazi. 2. any Jew of the Middle East or North Africa. II. derivatives Sephardic /səˈfärdik / adjective – origin modern Hebrew, from sĕp̄āraḏ, a country mentioned in Obad. 20 and taken to be Spain.

“Just sticking to what’s reliable, honey, because if you ask me the English are the smartest of the lot.

The sure knowledge of what was happening in Spain was so dark and heavy that no one seemed in the mood to celebrate.

We hugged, we cried, and for one night there was only one faction, the one made up of our sorry troupe.

His somewhat peculiar behavior and my repeated need for assistance helped to establish a friendship between us at late hours of the night that would last for decades, through many phases of our lives.

I found nothing that would serve as a reference point for how to create an invoice.

A completely different skill set

had also given my business a name. Chez Sirah had been born.

The solicitous chick and the clucking hen were transformed, however, into a couple of monsters when they entered their most private territory.

pyorrhea /ˌpīəˈrēə / pyorrhea alveolaris, ‹Brit.› pyorrhoea I. noun another term for periodontitis. – origin early 19th cent.: from Greek puo- (from puon ‘pus’) + rhoia ‘flux’ (from rhein ‘to flow’). periodontitis /ˌperēədänˈtīdəs/ noun [Medicine] inflammation of the tissue around the teeth, often causing shrinkage of the gums and loosening of the teeth.

working out his confused sexuality and meeting other people like him, beings with unconventional spirits yearning to fly free.