The Time in Between: A Novel by María Dueñas, Daniel Hahn Read Free Book Online

remained on him. Her voice forced me at last to lift my gaze to the two of them.
    “Well, Sira, so this is your father, you meet him at last. His name is Gonzalo Alvarado, he’s an engineer, the owner of a foundry, and hehas lived in this house forever. He used to be the son and now he’s the master of the house, that’s how it goes. A long time ago I used to come here to sew for his mother. We met then, and well, anyway, you were born three years later. Don’t think it was some cheap soap opera in which the unscrupulous young master tricks the poor little dressmaker or anything of the sort. When our relationship began, I was twenty-two years old, he was twenty-four: we both knew perfectly well who we were, where we were, and what we were up against. There was no deception on his part, nor any more than the appropriate illusions on mine. It was a relationship that ended because it couldn’t go anywhere, because it never should have begun. I was the one who decided to end it, it wasn’t him deciding to abandon you and me. And it has always been me who has insisted that you should have no contact. Your father tried not to lose us, insistently at first; then, bit by bit, he began to get used to the situation. He married and had other children, two boys. For a long time I heard nothing of him, until the day before yesterday when I received a message from him. He didn’t tell me why he wanted to meet you at this point; that we will learn now.”
    As she talked, he watched her attentively, with serious appreciation. When she fell silent, he waited a few moments before speaking. He seemed to be thinking, measuring his words so that they might express precisely what he wanted to say. I made the most of those moments to observe him, and the first thing that occurred to me was that I never would have been able to imagine a father like this for myself. I was dark, my mother was dark, and in the very rare imaginary evocations I’d had of my progenitor, I’d always painted him like us, just another man, with a tanned complexion, dark hair and slim build. Also, I had always associated the image of a father with the appearance of those around me: our neighbor Norberto, the fathers of my friends, the men who filled the taverns and the streets of my neighborhood. Normal fathers of normal people: postal workers, salespeople, clerks, café waiters, or at most owners of a tobacconist’s, a grocer’s, or a vegetable stand in the Cebada market. The gentlemen I saw in my comings and goings along Madrid streets delivering orders from Doña Manuela’s workshopwere to me like beings from another world, another species who in no way fit the mold I had mentally cast as paternal. And yet before me was just such a specimen. A man who was still good looking despite his somewhat excessive corpulence, with hair already greying that in its day must have been fair, and honey-colored eyes now a little red, dressed in dark grey, the owner of a grand home and patriarch of an absent family. A father unlike all the other fathers, who finally began to speak, addressing my mother and me alternately, sometimes both of us at once, sometimes neither.
    “Well now, let’s see, this isn’t easy,” he said by way of beginning.
    A deep breath, a drag on the cigar, smoke out. Eyes raised to meet mine at last. Then right to my mother’s. Then to mine again. And then he spoke again, and barely paused, for such a long and intense time that when I finally noticed we were almost in darkness, our bodies had been transformed into shadows, and the only light we had was the weak, distant reflection from a green tulip lamp on the desk.
    “I’ve found you because I’m afraid that one of these days they’re going to kill me. Or I’ll end up killing someone and they’ll put me in prison, which would be like a death in life, it comes to the same thing. The political situation is about to explode, and when that happens only God knows what will become of all of