Sira, page 32
My curiosity didn’t appear to bother him. Or even to surprise him.
“I came close, but the war broke out. She had to leave because she was a diplomat’s daughter and . . . well, a reunion wasn’t in the cards. After that, I was posted outside of Spain, I was in Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, and later, when I returned to Madrid . . .”
He suddenly stopped talking and laughed bitterly through his teeth.
“Lies, Livia. Everything I just told you was lies. Excuses I make for myself. The real truth is that I haven’t considered marrying again because I haven’t found anyone who has captivated me enough.”
Still parked outside the press club, we could see nothing but weak lights in the doorways of the nearby villas, the star-speckled sky, and in the distance, a pair of yellowish streetlamps. The only sound was crickets and cicadas, the occasional bark of a dog.
“I haven’t found anyone . . . ,” he repeated, “yet.”
At that moment I knew I had to go. I had to get out of that car at once. But he stopped me. His hand covered my hand. His voice sounded assured, a husky whisper.
“Wait.”
The rest happened by itself—his fingers on the back of my head, his mouth on my mouth. I couldn’t refuse. A sudden weakness overcame me, as if the world were vanishing around me. As if my body were disintegrating and I had no more substance than a mass of foam.
Afterward, I tiptoed up the stairs, trying to collect my thoughts. Once I was in my room, I found an envelope that had been slid under the door. Written in innocuous terms, under the guise of an innocent meeting, was an invitation to breakfast at Embassy, the tearoom on the Paseo de la Castellana, at ten o’clock. Something crackled inside me. Embassy. It had been a long time.
I slept badly that night, dreaming a lot of strange dreams. Ignacio’s hands on my back and me about to fall into an abyss. Foxá’s bloated face bellowing with laughter. His wife sitting on the lid of a toilet smoking an interminable cigarette. Diego Tovar’s kiss transforming into a long whistle. I woke early, and with my head still in a muddle, I gathered my belongings.
The last thing I did before setting off for Embassy was extract the reports hidden in the bottom of my suitcase. I decided to walk—it wasn’t hot yet—so I could think to the rhythm of my steps. They hadn’t specified who would be waiting for me, whether a stranger or someone I already knew. This didn’t worry me, I’d become accustomed to this practice in the past, and it was how we’d proceeded many times. I recalled the person I’d been back then: younger and more fragile, more vulnerable, and more zealous about my own glamour, in keeping with the demands of my customers. Now I was walking in light trousers. Few women in Franco’s puritanical Spain dared wear such a thing, but I could take the liberty, disguised as I was as a foreigner. I wore them with a linen jacket, my big sunglasses, and my hair gathered in a silk handkerchief. It had been a little over two years since my operations in Madrid, and a new world order had emerged since then. Both in form and content, I too was a different woman.
There was nothing juicy in the information I was going to pass on to the British secret service, but for the time being, I was obediently carrying out my duties. I had described my conversations, what I’d seen with my own eyes, and my general impressions of the Argentine first lady and the visit’s progress. The rest of the tour of the Iberian Peninsula awaited me, and at the end of it, on my return to London, I would deliver another quantity of reports. With that, this unexpected chapter of my life would end, and I would return to the present. A present still undefined that would lead to a hazy future I didn’t want to think about for now.
Embassy’s entrance was on the corner of Paseo de la Castellana and Calle de Ayala. On one side, a bootblack was talking with a lottery ticket vendor; on the other, an old woman in a black woolen headscarf was begging with a filthy hand stretched out. A young uniformed employee opened the glass door of the tearoom for me, and without taking off my dark glasses, I saw that there were already customers inside. A handful of early risers drawn from the few foreigners who remained in Madrid at that time, some Spaniards who’d dutifully attended mass first thing and wanted to take home a tray of pastries for the family’s breakfast or a lemon tart for dessert. Well-dressed ladies with cups of hot chocolate in front of them, gentlemen sitting down to drink a café con leche while they read the ABC or El Alcázar, one or two young men who hadn’t been to bed yet, on their way home from carousing.
Just a few years before, when the Germans were still strutting around Madrid, this small premises had been the epicenter of intrigue, tension, conspiracies, and the transfer of refugees. I’d operated in the middle of all that, passing coded messages to Captain Alan Hillgarth or one of his men, sharing innocent teas with my customers, and conveying clandestine words of warning to various contacts.
The delicious smells reached me at once: trays of freshly baked Swiss buns, pastries, plum cakes, and croissants made with white flour and fresh butter. No, in this distinguished establishment they weren’t in desperate need of the wheat that Perón’s generous Argentina was promising to send to ease the hunger of so many. Rather, its owner, the admirable Margaret Taylor, used her skills to coax consignments of essential goods from various sources, with the help of her contacts. And so while most ordinary Spaniards started their Sunday with a glass of watered-down milk, an ersatz coffee made from chicory, or just a chunk of hard bread—while millions of families had barely enough to eat—at Embassy, hardship was an alien concept.
As soon as I took off my sunglasses, I saw him from the entrance, and my heart skipped a beat. It was a familiar face. Reading an out-of-date copy of the Times, smoking his pipe, waiting for me at the counter was Tom Burns, the former press attaché at the British embassy. We’d never had the opportunity to become close, but I knew that Marcus had worked shoulder to shoulder with him in the fight against the Nazi threat. I knew that he had been aware of our marriage, and that the two of them had held each other in high esteem. Remembering all of this, I was struck by a heavy wave of melancholy. I managed to compose myself and hide my feelings as best I could, drawing on the skills of deception I’d once used in other situations in this very place. With feigned coolness, before I burst into tears or hugged him, I held out a languid hand. He looked me in the eyes.
“Delighted to see you again, my dear.”
My dear, he’d said. Not Livia, or Arish, let alone Sira. There were no Germans at Embassy anymore, nor informers or collaborators, it was presumed. Even so, it was wise to be prudent.
We sat at a table beside a pillar and ordered tea. Once the waiter was gone, Tom Burns extended his condolences for Marcus’s death while a knot formed in my throat. He offered some words of praise for my husband but was tactful enough to stop just before I fell to pieces. He no longer worked for the British legation; like Sir Samuel Hoare and so many others from that time, he’d returned to London. In fact, very few people remained at the embassy now that, following the United Nations’ decision to deny Spain membership, most of the ambassadors had been withdrawn from Franco’s Madrid, and diplomatic missions were operating at minimum capacity. But Tom Burns’s wife was Spanish, daughter of the celebrated physician Dr. Marañón, so the couple frequently returned. And on these occasions, for old times’ sake, his friends in the secret service occasionally asked him for a favor. A favor like meeting me that morning, for example.
We made small talk, neither of us mentioning anything to do with Germany’s surrender, the Nazi legacy in Spain, or the bloody King David bombing. We spoke only about the rising heat of the day that was already making itself felt, his profession as an editor in England, the Martínez restaurant in London, and the dreadful cold of the previous winter. No one noticed that, as we talked, I took the reports from my handbag while I pretended to look for a handkerchief. Nobody saw me inserting them between the pages of the Times that he’d left on top of the spotless tablecloth beside the sugar bowl. The procedure completed, we said goodbye with no further delay. I watched him leave with the newspaper under his arm and his pipe in his mouth. Through the glass I saw him rummage in his pocket and bend to give money to the black-clad old woman with the dirty hand.
I waited a couple of minutes after his departure, my tea now cold, and felt overcome by immense loneliness. Tom Burns, of the same age as Marcus and with a similar sense of duty, was going back to his life, his family, and the prospect of building a future and was looking ahead. Meanwhile, thanks to one of those sinister twists of fate, his friend Marcus Logan—Mark Bonnard—was no longer in the land of the living.
I managed to pull myself together and slowly stand up. I would’ve liked to buy a tray of cakes to take to Hermosilla, some sweets to delight Víctor with, some chocolates with which to thank Philippa and Miguela for their devotion to my son. But I didn’t have the strength. I started to head up Paseo de la Castellana, seeking out the shade of the acacias. Behind my dark glasses—my being neither able nor willing to stop them—a few tears welled from my eyes.
47
“There’s someone waiting for you in the garden. A gentleman, an old friend. He didn’t give his name.”
I clenched my fists. For days I had sensed this moment would arrive. I hadn’t known when or where, but I’d been certain that, sooner or later, I would have to face him.
I was tempted to go back onto the street and run. Or go up to my room, barricade the door, lower the shutters, and hide there until he left. I didn’t want him back in my life. I didn’t want to speak to him or see him. I didn’t even want to know that Ramiro Arribas still existed.
“Thank you, Señora Cortés,” I replied in a quiet voice. “Would you be so kind as to request a car to collect me in half an hour?”
He was sitting under the patio awning, on one of the cast-iron chairs, his legs crossed, with the arrogant posture of someone who was capable of feeling comfortable anywhere. He’d been served something on ice, and the glass was half-full. He was perhaps less slender than he had been, but he remained an extremely attractive man in his white shirt and seersucker summer jacket. Like me, he was wearing dark sunglasses, which he took off when he stood up to greet me. I, on the other hand, kept mine on as protection, as a shield of sorts, or a shelter.
I had once turned my life upside down for my love of this man. He had stirred up an obsessive passion in me, irrepressible, deaf, blind. I had left my world behind for him, ended my relationship with my boyfriend Ignacio, distanced myself physically and emotionally from my mother. I’d left my neighborhood and my future, my support, and my country. I had put on a blindfold and taken his hand, diminished my free will, and allowed him to sweep me along. I’d trusted him, I’d allowed myself to be dazzled by his intentions, I hadn’t questioned his actions or decisions, and I’d never resisted his foolish dreams. I had given myself to him completely: my body, my mind, and my recently inherited wealth. And he had let me down on every count.
“What do you want?”
“To know how you are, Sira, is what I want first and foremost,” he said in response to my abrupt question. “Although maybe I should ask how you both are.”
He’d lost the Argentine accent I had heard at the restaurant with Dodero.
“I’m fine, as you can see,” I replied sourly. “And if you’re asking me about the child I had inside me when you left, it doesn’t exist. The pregnancy miscarried and it was never born.”
I blinked behind my sunglasses, containing myself. I’d never spoken out loud about the baby that never came into the world. I’d thought a lot about it over the years, an awful lot—I still did. But since those distant days when I’d fled Tangier and arrived in Tétouan, when the blood had started dripping down my thighs on the La Valenciana bus, and Commissioner Vázquez had admitted me to the civilian hospital to recover from the loss, I’d never mentioned it again to anyone.
We were both standing, away from the sun of the approaching midday, under the black and white stripes of the awning. There was nobody else in the garden, for the time being.
“Please, Sira, let’s sit down. Just give me five minutes, ten at most.”
I hesitated but ended up agreeing. The press club wasn’t the best place for me to make a scene. For my own benefit, I would be wise not to react, though it took all my effort.
“I want you to know first of all how much I regret the way I behaved in Tangier,” he continued once we’d sat. “There are things I preferred not to tell you at the time, but I made mistakes. I was forced, pressured—”
I raised a firm hand to stop him. At this stage, explanations were superfluous.
But with apparent seriousness, he added, “The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
Son of a bitch, I thought. But it was in the past. Now wasn’t the time to get into a fight. I just wanted the conversation to end, for him to go and leave me in peace.
“I’m glad to know that life has treated you well,” he added, easing back onto the cushion behind him. “To see that you’ve become a . . .” He gestured, taking in all of me. “A formidable woman.”
A waiter arrived, the same one who’d served dinner on the first evening. I told him I didn’t want anything. I refused to drink so much as a simple glass of water with Ramiro.
“I always thought you were special. Unique,” he went on as soon as the waiter had turned away. “I’ve wondered many times what became of you, how you had—”
I didn’t let him finish.
“From Tangier I went to London, while the war was still going on in Spain. I was offered a job, I settled, I progressed, and I’ve done well for myself, thanks.”
The lie came to me on the spur of the moment. I needed a wall between us, even if it was one built of falsehoods. I was reluctant for him to know what had really become of me. He had no right to invade my past, as he was trying to do now with my present. Tétouan, Marcus, Madrid and my covert activities, Jerusalem, and Víctor—Ramiro had to stay away from all of it. There was no question in my mind about that.
“To say you’ve done well is an understatement. You’ve done very, very well,” he insisted. “It’s obvious. You’re still beautiful, but now you also have an air of sophistication and confidence, style, and . . .”
He reacted quickly to the displeasure on my face and stopped the flattery about my appearance, but he carried on complimenting other qualities.
“But most of all I’m amazed at how well you handle yourself.”
“It’s necessary in my line of work,” I stated.
“Well, being in the service of the BBC isn’t just any old job . . .”
It was obvious: he’d been checking up on me. How and through whom I couldn’t say. Nor could I know how much he’d learned about me, how far he’d gotten with his inquiries. Still protected by the bulwark of my dark glasses, I observed him closely. He had gray hairs at his temples, more than a few, but he wore them well. I already knew that from when I’d seen him at Villa Romana on my second night in Madrid. His clothes were impeccable, and he had a barbershop shave. A fine watch with a snakeskin strap was poking out from under his immaculate shirt cuff, though I couldn’t make out the brand. He’d gained a few pounds, perhaps, but apart from that, he’d barely changed. He was still handsome in his mature years, the lowlife. Handsome and dangerous.
“My work is none of your business,” I said sharply.
He made an apologetic gesture.
“It’s not. You’re right. But the truth is, I am interested in the company you keep.” He leaned forward. “I know you’re busy, and I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll come straight to the point. I need a favor, Sira,” he announced seriously. “One, just one, a single favor is all, and then I won’t bother you anymore. I’ll disappear from your life again, forever.”
He held his right hand to his heart as if to seal his pledge. I almost told him to shove his promise where it hurt most and stop talking nonsense. I wasn’t going to do any favors for the wretch. Whatever it was he wanted, no. Never, not anything. But before I could refuse, he laid his cards on the table.
“Dodero. I need a private meeting, on your recommendation, with Alberto Dodero.” He paused, then as if the statement required clarification, added, “The Argentine shipowner. Your friend.”
I held back a bitter burst of laughter. Here he was, living up to expectations—exceeding them, even, the same old crook. He’d seen me first dancing with Diego Tovar at Villa Romana, then sharing a paella with Dodero outside the Riscal restaurant. Perhaps, without me realizing it, he’d also seen me going in and out of other events. Who knew what he hoped to gain from all of this?
“I came with a group of businessmen from Buenos Aires. In recent years I’ve been working on investments and projects in Argentina, I’m a . . .”
If there was any trace of truth in these supposed affairs of his, it would undoubtedly have been thanks to the money and jewelry that my father had passed on to me and that I, with huge naivety, had left in Ramiro’s care. Those wads of notes and valuable jewels that he’d taken when he fled Tangier, leaving me pregnant, penniless, and with a big bill to pay at the Hotel Continental.
“I’m a serious businessman, Sira. I have partners and companies. And to be able to extend the reach of these enterprises all the way to Dodero would be a singular opportunity that would enable me to expand exponentially. I won’t bore you with the details, I just want you to know . . .”
Detached from his words, I was retrieving memories. It had been eleven years since he filled my head with nonsense about yet another entrepreneurial fantasy: the Pitman academies. We had planned to introduce them to colonial Morocco together. It was to have been a resounding success, one that would make us rich in no time. More than a decade later, Ramiro Arribas—or Román Altares or whatever he called himself now—was still around, no less shameless, fanciful, and sure of himself. He’d simply changed the size of his ambition. He used to be content with typewriters and typing methods, but now he wanted to do business with one of the most powerful shipping magnates in South America. Other than that detail, his desire for easy and immediate gain seemed unchanged.
