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

was dressing and perfuming myself, for him to see me, for him to smell me, for him to touch me lightly once again andonce again lose himself in my eyes. It was for him that I decided to leave my hair loose, falling lustrous halfway down my back. For him I tightened my waist, squeezing the belt hard over my skirt till I could scarcely breathe. For him: all just for him.
    I made my way along the streets with determination, prompting eager glances and impudent compliments. I forced myself not to think: I avoided calculating the significance of my actions and didn’t want to stop and guess whether that trajectory was taking me to the threshold of paradise or directly to the slaughterhouse. I went down the Costanilla de San Andrés, crossed the Plaza de los Carros, and down Cava Baja headed for the Plaza Mayor. In twenty minutes I was at the Puerta del Sol; in less than half an hour I reached my destination.
    Ramiro was waiting for me. He quickly sensed my silhouette at the door and broke off the conversation he was holding with another employee and headed toward me, collecting his hat and a raincoat on his way. When he was standing there beside me I wanted to tell him I had the money in my pocket, that Ignacio sent his regards, that I would perhaps start learning to type that very afternoon. He didn’t let me. He didn’t even greet me. He only smiled, holding a cigarette in his mouth, gently grazed his hand over the small of my back, and said, “Let’s go.” And with him I went.
    The chosen place could not have been more innocent: he took me to the Café Suizo. Having confirmed with relief that our surroundings were safe, I believed that I might still be able to effect my salvation. I even thought—as he looked for a table and invited me to sit down—that perhaps this meeting had no more duplicity to it than the simple display of attentiveness to a client. I even began to suspect that all that brazen flirtation might have been nothing more than an excess of fantasy on my part. But that was not how it was. In spite of the irreproachable surroundings, our second meeting brought me back to the edge of the abyss.
    “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a single minute since you left yesterday,” he whispered in my ear the moment we had settled.
    I felt unable to reply. The words couldn’t reach my lips: like sugar in water, they dissolved in some uncertain place in my brain. He took my hand again and caressed it just as he had done the previous afternoon, without taking his eyes off it.
    “You have calluses on your hands—tell me, what have these fingers been doing before they came to me?”
    His voice still sounded close and sensual, quite apart from the noises that surrounded us: the clink of the glass and crockery against the marble of the tabletops, the buzz of morning conversations, and the voices of waiters placing orders at the counter.
    “Sewing,” I whispered, not lifting my eyes from my lap.
    “So you’re a seamstress?”
    “I was. Not anymore.” I lifted my gaze, finally. “There hasn’t been much work lately,” I added.
    “Which is why you want to learn to use a typewriter.”
    He spoke with complicity, familiarly, as though he knew me: as though his soul and mine had been waiting for each other since the beginning of time.
    “My fiancé thought about enrolling me to take some examinations so that I could become a civil servant like him,” I said with a touch of shame.
    The arrival of the refreshments halted our conversation. For me, a cup of hot chocolate. For Ramiro, coffee, black as night. I took advantage of the pause to look at him while he exchanged a few phrases with the waiter. He was wearing a different suit than on the previous day, another impeccable shirt. He had elegant manners, and at the same time, within that refinement that was so alien to the men who surrounded me, he oozed masculinity from every pore of his body: as he smoked, as he adjusted the knot of his tie,