The Time in Between: A Novel Read Free Page A

progeny to come. And so I agreed. Once we were all set, there was only one thing we lacked: a typewriter on which I could learn to type in preparation for the unavoidable typing test. Ignacio had spent months practicing on other people’s machines, passing through a
via dolorosa
of sad academies smelling of grease, ink, and concentrated sweat. He didn’t want me to have to go through the same unpleasantness, hencehis determination that we should obtain our own equipment. In the weeks that followed we launched ourselves on our search, as though it would turn our lives totally around.
    We studied all the options and did endless calculations. I didn’t understand about detailed performance features, but it seemed to me that something small and light would be most suitable for us. Ignacio was indifferent to the size, but he did take extraordinary care over prices, installment payments, and terms. We located all the sellers in Madrid, spent hours standing at their window displays, and learned to pronounce exotic names that evoked distant geographies and movie stars: Remington, Royal, Underwood. We could just as easily have chosen one brand as another; we could just as well have ended up buying from an American establishment as a German one, but our choice settled finally on the Italian Hispano-Olivetti on Calle de Pi y Margall. How could we have known that with that simple act, with the mere fact of having taken two or three steps and crossed a threshold, we were signing the death sentence on our time together and irreparably twisting apart the strands of our future.

Chapter Two
    ___________
    I ’m not going to marry Ignacio, Mother.”
    She was trying to thread a needle and my words made her freeze, the thread held between her fingers.
    “What are you saying, girl?” she whispered. Her voice seemed to emerge broken from her throat, laden with confusion and disbelief.
    “That I’m leaving him, Mother. That I’ve fallen in love with another man.”
    She scolded me with the bluntest reproaches she could bring herself to utter, cried out to heaven, begging God to intercede, appealing to the whole calendar of saints, summoning dozens of arguments to persuade me to retract my intentions. When it became clear that none of it was doing any good, she sat down in the rocking chair next to my grandfather’s, covered her face, and began to cry.
    I bore the moment with a feigned fortitude, trying to hide the nerves that lay behind the bluntness of my words. I was afraid of my mother’s reaction: Ignacio had come to be the son she’d never had, the presence that filled the masculine gap in our little family. They talked to each other, they understood each other, they got along. My mother made the stews he liked, shined his shoes, and turned his jackets inside out when the attrition of time had begun to rob them of theirluster. He, in turn, complimented her when he saw her in her finery for Sunday Mass, brought her egg-yolk sweets, and—half in jest and half seriously—sometimes told her that she was more beautiful than I.
    I was aware that my daring would bring down all that comfortable domesticity. I knew that it would topple the scaffolding of more lives than just my own, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. My decision was firm as a post: there would be no wedding and no civil service exams; I wouldn’t learn to type on the little table and never would I share children, bed, or joys with Ignacio. I was going to leave him, and the strength of a gale would not be enough to curtail my resolve.
    The Hispano-Olivetti storefront had two large display windows that showed their products off to passersby with proud splendor. Between the two of them was a glass door, with a bar of burnished bronze crossing it diagonally. Ignacio pushed it and we went in. The tinkling of a little bell announced our arrival, but no one came out to meet us right away. We stopped there, inhibited for a couple of minutes, looking at everything