Free The Time in Between: A Novel by María Dueñas, Daniel Hahn Page B

wasn’t blowing too hard, we’d go to the beach by the Diplomatic Forest; in the afternoons we’d walk along the recently constructed Boulevard Pasteur, or watch American movies at the Florida Kursaal or the Capitol, or we’d sit at some café in the Small Souq, the pulsing center of the city, where Arabs and Europeans intermingled congenially.
    Our isolation, however, lasted only a few weeks: Tangiers was small, Ramiro sociable in the extreme, and in those days everyone seemed to have a great urgency to interact with one another. Soon we started greeting faces, learning names, and joining up with groups when we walked into places. We’d have lunch and dinner at the Bretagne, Roma Park, or the Brasserie de la Plage, and at night we’d go to the Bar Russo, or Chatham, or the Detroit on the Place de France. Or to the Central with its group of Hungarian dancers, or to watch the M’Sallah music-hall shows in their great glazed pavilion, filled to bursting with the French,the English, Spaniards, Jews of various nationalities, Moroccans, Germans, and Russians who danced, drank, and discussed politics, either local or international, in a jumble of languages against the backdrop of a spectacular orchestra. Sometimes we’d end up at the Café Hafa by the sea, sitting under the awnings till dawn, on mats laid over the ground, with people reclining as they smoked hashish and drank tea. Rich Arabs, Europeans of uncertain fortune who at some time in the past might perhaps have been rich, too, or perhaps not. It was unusual for us to go to bed before dawn in those bewildering days, between our anticipation of news from Argentina and the idleness imposed by its delay. We’d frequent the new European quarter of the city and wander through the Moorish one, living with the combined presence of exiles and locals, with waxy-complexioned ladies wearing sun hats and pearls as they walked their poodles and dark-skinned barbers working in the open air with their ancient tools. With the street vendors of creams and ointments, the diplomatic corps in their impeccable attire, the herds of goats, and the fleeting, almost faceless silhouettes of the Muslim women in their haiks and caftans.
    News came daily from Madrid. Sometimes we’d read articles in the local Spanish-language newspapers,
Democracia, El Diario de África
, or the republican
El Porvenir
; other times we’d just hear them from the mouths of the newspaper vendors in the Small Souq shouting their headlines in a jumble of languages:
La Vedetta di Tangeri
in Italian,
Le Journal de Tanger
in French. Occasionally I’d receive letters from my mother—brief, simple, distant letters. That was how I learned that my grandfather had died, silent and peaceful in his rocking chair, and between the lines I gathered how hard it was becoming, day by day, for her just to survive.
    It was a time of discoveries, too. I learned a few phrases in Arabic, but nothing very useful. My ears got used to the sound of other languages—French, English—and to other accents in my own language, such as Haketia, that dialect of the Moroccan Sephardic Jews with its roots in old Spanish that also incorporated words from Arabic and Hebrew. I discovered that there are substances you can smokeor inject or snort that will jumble your senses, that there are people capable of gambling away their mother at a baccarat table, and that there are passions of the flesh that allow for far more combinations than just those of a man and a woman horizontally on a mattress. I learned, too, that there are things that happen in the world that my dim education had never touched upon: I found out that years earlier there had been a great war in Europe, that Germany was being ruled by someone called Hitler who was admired by some and feared by others, and that someone who one day occupied a given place with a feeling of permanence could the following day vanish in order to save his skin, to avoid being beaten to death or ending up