“I need refuge. I don’t like thunderstorms.”
I could have asked him if he was crazy. I could have informed him that he’d given me a terrible fright, shouted at him that he was an idiot, and closed the window without another word. But I did none of these things, because at that very moment a little light came on in my brain: perhaps this bizarre request could now be turned to my favor.
“I’ll let you come over if you help me out,” I said, addressing him informally without even thinking about it.
“Open the door, I’ll be right over.”
Needless to say, my neighbor knew that the exchange for two hundred and seventy-five pesetas was twelve Reichsmarks fifty. Just as he knew very well that a presentable invoice couldn’t be drawn up on a cheap little sheet of paper with a worn old pencil, so he went back over to his house and returned at once with several pieces of marble-colored English paper and a Waterman fountain pen from which purple ink flowed out to create exquisite calligraphy. And he displayed all his ingenuity (which was considerable) and all his artistic talent (likewise considerable) and in just half an hour, between thunderclaps, and in his pajamas, he had not only drawn up the most elegant invoice that any European dressmaker in North Africa could ever have imagined, but he had also given my business a name. Chez Sirah had been born.
Félix Aranda was an unusual man. Amusing, imaginative, and cultured, yes. And also curious, and a busybody. And a bit eccentric and somewhat intrusive, too. The nighttime transit between his apartment and mine became a familiar ritual. Not exactly daily, but frequently. Sometimes we’d go three or four days without seeing each other, sometimes he’d come over five nights in a week. Or six. Or even seven. The regularity of our meetings just depended on something quite apart from us: on how drunk his mother was. What a strange relationship, what a dismal familial existence was being lived out behind the door opposite. Since the death of their father and husband years earlier, Félix and Doña Encarna had traveled through life together, to all appearances utterly harmonious. Every evening between six and seven they would take a walk together; they would attend masses and novenas together, stock up on medicine at the Benatar pharmacy, greet their acquaintances courteously, and have tea and pastries at La Campana. He, always offering her his arm, protecting her affectionately, walking at her pace: careful there, Mama, don’t trip, this way, Mama, careful, careful. She—proud of her child—boasting of his talents left and right: my Félix says, my Félix does, my Félix thinks, oh, my Félix, what would I do without him?
The solicitous chick and the clucking hen were transformed, however, into a couple of monsters when they entered their most private territory. No sooner had they crossed the threshold of their home than the old lady wrapped herself in the uniform of a tyrant and took out her invisible whip to inflict the utmost humiliation on her son. Scratch my leg, Félix, my calf itches; not there, higher; you’re so useless, child, how could I have given birth to an offspring like you? Put the tablecloth on properly, I can see it’s not straight; not like that, that’s even worse; put it back the way it was, you ruin everything you touch, little piece of shit, why couldn’t I have left you in the foundling hospital when you were born? Look in my mouth and see if my pyorrhea has gotten any worse, get out the Agua de Carmen that relieves my flatulence, rub my back with camphorated alcohol, file down this callus, cut my toenails, be careful, you fat lump of lard, you’ll have my toe off; bring over the handkerchief so I can cough up some phlegm, bring me a Sor Virginia patch for my lumbago; wash my hair and put my curlers in, more carefully, idiot, you’re going to make me bald . . .
That was how Félix grew up, with a double life whose two sides were as disparate as they were pitiful. No sooner had his father died than the beloved son stopped being that overnight: while he was still growing, and without anyone outside suspecting a thing, he became the focus of affection and treats in public and the object of all his mother’s furies and frustrations in private. As though with the slash of a scythe, all his dreams were hacked down to the ground: leaving Tetouan to study fine art in Seville or Madrid, working out his confused sexuality and meeting other people like him, beings with unconventional spirits yearning to fly free. Instead he found himself facing the prospect of living permanently under the black wing of Doña Encarna. He completed his bachelor’s with the Marianists at the Colegio del Pilar with brilliant qualifications that were of no use to him because his mother had taken advantage of her position as a suffering widow to get him an administrative position that was colored rat grey. Stamping forms in the General Supplies Office of the Municipal Services Division: the perfect job to beat down the most brilliant kind of creativity and keep it chained like a dog—now I’m offering you a slice of succulent meat, now I’m kicking you hard enough to burst your belly.
He bore the blows with a monklike patience. And so, over the years, they maintained their imbalance unchanged, her tyrannizing him, and him docile, bearing up, tolerating. It was hard to know what it was that Félix’s mother was looking for in him, why she treated him like that, what she wanted from her son apart from what he would always have been ready to give. Love, respect, compassion? No, she had these without having to make the least effort. He wasn’t stingy with his affections—far from it, dear old Félix. Doña Encarna wanted something more. Devotion, unconditional availability, attention to her most ludicrous whims. Submissiveness, submission. Precisely what her husband had demanded of her in life. I assumed this was why she had gotten rid of him. Félix never told me openly, but like the boy in the fairy tale leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him, he left me clues along the way. All I did was follow them to reach my conclusion. The late Don Nicasio had probably been killed by his wife just as one dark night Félix would perhaps end up disposing of his mother.
It would be hard to say how long he would have been able to bear that wretched daily life had a solution not come to him in the most unexpected way. Somebody grateful for a well-done piece of work; a sausage and a couple of bottles of El Mono anisette as a gift; let’s try it, Mama, go on, just a little glass, just wet your whistle. But it wasn’t only Doña Encarna’s lips that enjoyed the sickly sweet taste of the liqueur, but also her tongue, and her palate, and her throat, and her intestinal tract, and from there the fumes went to her head, and that same alcoholic night Félix found himself faced with a way out. From then on, the bottle of anisette was his great ally, his one salvation and escape route out to the third dimension of his life. And never again was he just a model son when out in the public eye and a disgusting little rag in private; from then on he also became an uninhibited night walker, a fugitive in search of the oxygen he was lacking at home.
“A little bit more of the El Mono, Mama?” he would ask after dinner, without fail.
“Oh, go on then, give me just a drop. To clear my throat a bit better, I think I caught a chill in church this afternoon.”
The four fingers of thick liquid went down Doña Encarna’s gullet at vertiginous speed.
“It’s what I’ve told you before, Mama, you don’t wrap yourself up enough,” Félix went on affectionately as he refilled the glass to the same level. “Come on, drink it up quickly, you’ll see how fast you’ll warm up.” Ten minutes and three drinks of anisette later, Doña Encarna was snoring, half conscious, and her son was fleeing like a just-freed sparrow on the way to seedy dives, to meet up with people whom in daylight and in the presence of his mother he wouldn’t have dared even to greet.
Following my arrival on Sidi Mandri and the night of the storm, my home became a permanent refuge for him. He would come over to leaf through magazines, to bring me ideas, to draw sketches and tell me funny things about the world, about my clients and all those people I used to pass every day with, but whom I didn’t know. And so, night by night, I learned about Tetouan and its people: where they had come from and for what reasons. All those families in this alien land; who those ladies were that I sewed for; who had power, who had money; who did what, and why, and whe
n and how.
But Doña Encarna’s devotion to the bottle didn’t always have soothing effects, and then, regrettably, things would turn upside down. When the anisette wasn’t enough to calm her, with the drunkenness would come hell. Those nights were the worst, because the mother didn’t get into a state of harmless catatonia, she was transformed into a thundering Zeus capable of demolishing the dignity of the strongest person with her bellowing. And Félix, knowing that the morning hangover would erase any trace of her memory, would match her with other equally indecorous insults with the perfect knack of a knife thrower. Foul witch, evil bitch, crooked whore. God, what a scandal it would have been if their acquaintances from the pastry shop, pharmacy, and church pew had heard them! The following day, however, it seemed that forgetfulness had settled on them and cordiality would reign once more on their evening walk as though there had never been the slightest tension between them. Would you like a sugared bun with your tea today, Mama, or would you rather a meat pie? Whatever you prefer, Félix, you’re always so good at choosing for me—go ahead, come on then, let’s go now, we’ve got to pay our condolences to María Angustias, I’ve heard that her nephew has fallen at the battle of Jarama; oh, such a shame, my angel, just as well that being the son of a widow spared you from being called up; what would I have done—Holy Mother of God—if I’d been left alone here with my son at the front?
Félix was smart enough to know that there was some unhealthy abnormality hanging over that relationship but not brave enough to put a stop to it once and for all. Perhaps that was why he tried to dodge his pitiful reality by turning his mother gradually into a drunk, escaping like a vampire in the small hours or laughing at his own miseries while searching for blame in a thousand ridiculous symptoms and contemplating the most outlandish remedies. One of his diversions was finding odd cures among the advertisements in the newspapers, lying on the sofa in my living room while I finished off a cuff or backstitched the final buttonhole of the day.
And then he’d say things like this to me:
“Do you think my mother’s Hydra behavior has something to do with her nerves? Most likely this will take care of it. Listen, listen—‘Nervional. Awakens the appetite, aids digestion, normalizes the stomach. Eliminates changeable moods and dejection. Take Nervional—count on it.’ ”
Or this:
“If you ask me, the thing with Mama is a hernia. I’d already thought about giving her an orthopedic corset, to see if her bad tempers might pass, but listen to this: ‘If you’ve got a hernia, you can avoid risks and discomforts with the unbeatable, innovative automatic compressor, a mechanical-scientific wonder that—without nuisances, straps, or encumbrances—will completely defeat your affliction.’ It might just work—what do you think, girl, should I get her one?”
Or perhaps:
“What if it turns out it’s something to do with her blood? Look what it says here. ‘Richelet Blood Tonic. Vascular complaints. Varicose veins and ulcers. Remedy for tainted blood. Effective at eliminating uric toxins.’ ”
Or some other nonsense:
“What if it’s piles? Or she has something wrong with her eye? How about if I find a witch doctor in the Moorish quarter to cast a spell on her? Truthfully, I don’t think I ought to worry so much, because I trust that her Darwinian tendency will end up eroding her liver and will put an end to her soon enough, now that a bottle doesn’t even last the old lady two days and she’s burning a hole in my pocket.” He stopped his speech, perhaps awaiting a reply, but he received none. Or at least not in words. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me with that face, girl,” he added after a pause.
“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about, Félix.”
“You don’t know what I’m referring to when I talk about a Darwinian tendency? Do you not know who I mean by Darwin either? The one with the monkeys, the one with the theory that we humans are all descended from primates. If I say my mother has a Darwinian tendency it’s because she’s crazy about El Mono anisette, you see? Girl, you have a divine sense of style and you sew like the very angels, but on matters of general culture you really are rather in the dark, aren’t you?”
I was, in fact. I knew I had a facility for learning new things and retaining information, but I was also aware of my educational deficiencies. I’d accumulated very little of the kind of knowledge one found in encyclopedias: little more than the names of a handful of kings recited by rote, and that Spain’s northern limit is bounded by the Cantabrian Sea and the Pyrenees Mountains separating it from France. I could rattle off my times tables and was quick at using numbers in daily situations, but I’d never read a book in my life, and as far as history, geography, art, or politics was concerned, all I knew was what I’d picked up during my months of living with Ramiro and in the constant free-for-all in Candelaria’s boardinghouse. I apparently could get away with passing myself off as a young woman with style and an exclusive dressmaker, but I was aware that as soon as anyone scratched beneath my outer shell they would have no trouble finding the fragility on which it was supported. Which was why, that first winter in Tetouan, Félix gave me an odd gift: he began to educate me.
It was worth it. For both of us. On my part, for what I learned and how I refined myself. On his part, because thanks to our meetings he filled his solitary hours with affection and company. In spite of his laudable intentions, however, my neighbor turned out to be a far from conventional teacher. Félix Aranda was a creature with aspirations to a free spirit who spent four-fifths of his time constrained between the despotic outbursts of his mother and the relentless tedium of the most bureaucratic of jobs, which meant that in his free hours the last thing one could expect of him was order, measure, and patience. To find that, I would have had to go back to La Luneta, for Don Anselmo to draw up a didactic plan to suit my ignorance. In any case, while Félix was never a methodical or organized sort of teacher, he did instruct me in many other matters as incoherent as they were disordered, which in the long run, one way or another, would be of quite some use to me in making my way through the world. And so, thanks to him, I became familiar with characters like Modigliani, Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker, learned to tell cubism from Dadaism, discovered what jazz was, managed to locate the European capitals on a map, memorized the names of their best hotels and cabarets, and got as far as counting to a hundred in English, French, and German.
Also thanks to Félix I learned what my Spanish compatriots were doing in that distant land. I discovered that Spain had been exercising its protectorate over Morocco since 1912, a year after signing the Treaty of Algeciras with France, according to which—as often happens with poor relations—the Spanish nation had been left with the worst part of the country. The less prosperous part, the least desirable. The African cutlet, they called it. There were a number of things Spain was hoping to achieve there: revive the imperial dream; partake in the African colonial banquet being enjoyed by the nations of Europe, albeit dining only on the crumbs that the great powers conceded to them; and aspire to reach the ankle of France and England, now that Cuba and the Philippines had slipped out of our hands and our old Spain was as poor as a cockroach.
It wasn’t easy to secure control over Morocco, even though the area allocated by the Treaty of Algeciras was small, the local population scant, and the land harsh and poor. It came at the cost of rebuffs and internal revolts in Spain, and thousands of Spanish and African deaths in the bloody madness of the brutal Rif War. They did manage it, however: they took control and almost twenty-five years after the official establishment of the Protectorate, with any internal resistance now having yielded, there my compatriots still were, with their capital firmly established and continuing to grow. Military men of every rank; civil servants from the postal service, customs, and public works; auditors, bank employees, businessmen and midwives, schoolteachers and nuns, bootblacks, barmen. Whole families who attracted other families in search of good salaries and a future there for the making, living alongside other
cultures and religions. And me among them, just one person more. In exchange for its enforced presence over a quarter of a century, Spain had offered Morocco technical advances, developments in sanitation and infrastructure, the first steps toward a moderate improvement in agricultural yields, a school of the arts, and support for traditional crafts. And the native population obtained additional benefits as a result of satisfying the demands of the colonizers: electrification, better drinking water, schools and academies, businesses, public transport, dispensaries, and hospitals; a train linking Tetouan and Ceuta, as well as the one that still took passengers to the Río Martín beach. Spain had in material terms benefited very little from Morocco: there were barely any resources to be exploited. In human terms, however, they had obtained something important for one of the two sides in their civil strife: thousands of soldiers from the local Moroccan forces who were now fighting like wild beasts on the other side of the Strait for the distant cause of the rebel army under Franco.
Apart from learning about these matters and more besides, I enjoyed other things from Félix: company, friendship, and ideas for my business. Some of them turned out to be excellent and others altogether eccentric, but at least they gave us two solitary souls something to laugh about at the end of the day. He never managed to persuade me to transform my workshop into a studio for experimenting in surrealism in which the hats would be shaped like shoes and telephones. Nor did he get me to use sea snails for the beading or bits of esparto grass on the belts, or convince me that I should refuse to take any client lacking in glamour. I did pay attention to him on other matters, however.
Following his recommendation, for example, I changed the way I spoke. I eliminated any slang and all colloquial expressions from my speech and created a new manner to allow me a greater air of sophistication. I started using certain French words and phrases that I’d heard repeatedly in Tangiers and had picked up from nearby conversations in which I’d almost never participated or from unexpected meetings with people with whom I’d never exchanged more than three lines. It was only a handful of expressions, just half a dozen of them, but he helped me to polish up my pronunciation and calculate just the right moments to use them. They were all aimed at my clients, those now and those to come. I’d ask permission to fix pins with a vous permettez?, finalize things with voilà tout, and praise results with a très chic. I’d talk of maisons de haute couture whose owners one might have assumed had once been my friends, and of gens du monde whom I had perhaps met in my supposed wanderings here and there. Whenever I proposed a style, pattern, or accessory, I’d hang from it the verbal tag à la française; all ladies were addressed as Madame. To highlight the patriotic dimension of the moment, we decided that whenever I had Spanish clients I would make appropriate reference to people and places I’d known in the old days when I’d been hobnobbing around the best houses in Madrid. I’d drop names and titles as easily as one might drop a handkerchief: lightly, without clamor or ostentation. That such-and-such a suit was inspired by the one I’d made a couple of years before for my friend the Marquise of Puga to debut at the Puerta de Hierro polo festival; how such-and-such a fabric was identical to the one that the eldest daughter of the Count and Countess of Encina used for her coming-out party in their palace on the Calle Velázquez.