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

are changing, and it’s not easy to adjust to them. I’ve spent more than thirty years working like a beast, losing sleep for my business and trying to do my duty. But either the times aren’t on my side or I’m very wrong about something because in the end it’s all turned its back on me, and life seems to be suddenly spitting its vengeance at me. My sons have left me, my wife has abandoned me, and the day-to-day life in my company has turned into a hell. I’ve been left alone, I have no one’s support, and I’m convinced the situation can only get worse. Which is why I am preparing myself, putting my affairs in order, my papers, my accounts, arranging my final wishes, and trying to leave everything organized in case one day I don’t come back. And just as in my business, I’m also trying to put some order in my memories and my feelings, some of which I still have, though not many. The blacker everything around me becomes, the more I rummage among my feelings and retrieve the memory of the good things life has given me. And now that my days are running out, I’ve recognized one of the few things that was really worthwhile. Do you know what that was, Dolores? You. You and this daughter of ours who’s the spitting image of you in the years we were together. That was why I wanted to see you.”
    Gonzalo Alvarado, this father of mine who at last had a face and a name, was speaking more calmly now. Halfway through his speech he began to look more like the man he must have been on any other day: sure of himself, forceful in his gestures and his words, used to giving orders and to being right. It had been hard for him to start; it couldn’t be pleasant to face a lost love and an unknown daughter after a quartercentury of absence. But he had now regained his composure, the owner and master of the situation. Firm in his speech, sincere and raw as only someone with nothing left to lose can be.
    “You know something, Sira? I really loved your mother; I loved her very much, very much indeed. If only everything had been different, so that I could have kept her with me forever. But regrettably that’s not the way it was.”
    He looked away from me and turned back to her. Toward her big hazel-colored eyes tired from sewing. Toward her beautiful maturity with neither cosmetics nor embellishments.
    “I didn’t fight for you much, Dolores, did I? I was unable to confront my family, and I wasn’t worthy of you. Then, as you know, I adjusted to the life that was expected of me, I got used to another woman and another family.”
    My mother listened in silence, apparently impassive. I couldn’t have said whether she was hiding her emotions or whether those words didn’t provoke either cold or heat in her at all. She remained, quite simply, stern in her posture, her thoughts inscrutable, sitting upright in the beautifully tailored suit I’d never seen her in before, doubtless made from the fabric remnants of some woman with more material and more luck in life than she.
    Rather than stopping in the face of her impassivity, my father kept on talking. “I don’t know whether you’ll believe me or not, but the truth is that now I find myself coming toward the end, my heart grieves that I’ve let so many years go past without taking care of you both, and without even having gotten to know you, Sira. I should have insisted more, I shouldn’t have given up trying to keep you close, but things were the way they were. And Dolores, you were too dignified, you wouldn’t allow me to devote only the leftover scraps of my life to you. If it couldn’t be everything, then it would be nothing. Your mother is very tough, girl, very tough and very firm. And I, I was probably weak and a fool, but, well, this isn’t the time for regrets.”
    He remained silent a few seconds, thinking, not looking at us. Then he breathed in slowly through his nose, breathed out again hard, andshifted position, leaning forward in his armchair as though