The Time in Between: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

nor did he demand explanations. He only spoke one more sentence, slowly, as though allowing it to slip out.
    “He will never love you as much as I do.”
    And then he stood up, took up the typewriter, and began to walk with it toward the void. I watched his back moving away, walking beneath the murky light of the street lamps, perhaps suppressing an urge to dash the machine against the ground.
    I kept my eyes fixed on him, watched as he left the square until his body faded into the distance, until I could no longer make him out in the autumn evening. And I would have liked to remain there crying at his absence, regretting that farewell that was so brief and so sad, blaming myself for having put an end to our hopeful plan for the future. But I couldn’t. I didn’t shed a single tear, didn’t rain down a single reproachupon 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.

Chapter Three
    ___________
    W ith him I learned a new kind of life. I learned to be independent of my mother, to live with a man, and to keep a maid. To try to please him every moment and to have no other aim but to make him happy. And I also got to know another Madrid: the Madrid of sophisticated fashionable places; of shows, restaurants, and nightlife. Cocktails at Negresco, the Granja del Henar, Bakanik. Film premieres at the Real Cinema with organ accompaniment, Mary Pickford on the screen, Ramiro putting bonbons in my mouth, and me lightly grazing the tips of his fingers with my lips, almost melting with love. Carmen Amaya at the Teatro Fontalba, Raquel Meller at the Maravillas. Flamenco at Villa Rosa, the Palacio del Hielo cabaret. A lively, effervescent Madrid, through which Ramiro and I flitted as though there were no yesterday and no tomorrow. As though we had to consume the whole world every instant in case the future were never to arrive.
    What was it about Ramiro, what did he do to me that turned my life upside down in just a couple of weeks? Even today, so many years later, I can put together a catalog with my eyes closed of everything about him that seduced me, and I’m convinced that if I’d been born a hundred times, a hundred times over I’d have fallen in love with him as I did then. Ramiro Arribas, irresistible, worldly, handsome asthe devil. With his brown hair combed back, his stunning bearing of pure manliness, radiating optimism and confidence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Witty and sensual, indifferent to the political asperity of the times, as though he were not quite of this world. A friend to everyone without taking anyone seriously, the constructor of grand plans, always knowing just the right word, just the right gesture for each moment. Now the manager of an Italian typewriter company, yesterday a German car rep, the day before yesterday what difference did it make, and next month God alone knew.
    What did Ramiro see in me, why did he become infatuated with a humble dressmaker about to marry an unambitious civil servant? True love for the first time in his life, he swore to me a thousand times. There had been other women before, of course. How many, I asked? Some, but none like you. And then he would kiss me and I thought I was dancing on the edge of a faint. Nor would it be hard for me today to assemble another list of his impressions of me: I remember them all. The explosive blend of an almost childish naïveté with the bearing of a goddess, he said. A diamond in the rough, he said. Sometimes he treated me like a little girl and then the ten years that separated us seemed centuries. He would anticipate my whims, fill my capacity for surprise with the most unexpectedly inspired ideas.