In Her Absence

Ten

THAT LUNCH WAS the end of everything, Mario remembered later when he tried to establish all the details in his mind, pursuing even the slightest tangible clue to Blanca’s escape and the appearance of this strange woman in his home. The lunch was held in honor of the closing of the exhibit or installation or whatever it was that had made the cultural center of the Savings and Loan look like a construction site for a month, and was attended by artists, literary people, local journalists, and the director of the bank’s Cultural Division, who, perhaps the better to represent the institution that was paying for the meal, felt entitled to order a monstrous lobster which he proceeded to make short work of at almost the same velocity and sound volume at which Lluís Onésimo was ingesting his own lunch.

Alone and quiet, sitting across from Blanca, who was drinking far too much wine and paying rapt attention to Onésimo’s words but none at all to his loud mastication, Mario had to fight back a desire to burst into tears or stand up and leave, telling himself that his self-respect was still intact, or at least his patience, and that the following day, after Onésimo was gone, he could embark once more on the task, now so habitual and beloved, of winning Blanca back through the simple, unconditional force of his love. But he also vaguely, painfully intuited that he might no longer have the energy to go on loving her and go on enduring lunches like this one, listening to all the intellectual terminology he didn’t understand, all the complicated names of foreign dishes and varieties of wines that now aroused a raging secret hostility in him that only with considerable effort could he keep from extending to Blanca, as well.

The next day, after an extremely unpleasant misunderstanding that cost him almost an hour in Personnel, he got home at about 3:30, still annoyed and also worried that Blanca might have been sitting there waiting for him all that time with the food growing cold. He opened the door and didn’t hear Blanca’s footsteps in the hallway or music from the TV, and when he reached the living room the evidence that she wasn’t there, that she hadn’t left him any food, and hadn’t even bothered to put the cloth on the table as she always did, fell on him like a blow to the back of the neck. In the small living room of his middle-income housing apartment, surrounded by his own familiar furniture, in front of the blank TV screen where he saw his silhouette reflected, Mario López felt that his world was coming to an end. The definitive, silent cataclysm he had so often imagined and foreseen had arrived, nevertheless, with the horrible force of something absolutely novel. To have been left by Blanca was to sit there staring like an idiot at the crocheted doily that she hated, listening for no reason to someone’s footsteps or voice in the apartment upstairs, and feeling that all these things together constituted the devastating totality of his misfortune.

He discovered that some of Blanca’s clothes and her small black suitcase were missing from the bedroom’s built-in closet. He wanted to believe she’d had to go away for some urgent reason: her mother had suddenly fallen ill or she’d been summoned to an interview for one of the jobs she was always trying to get and then quitting.

Mario went to the kitchen and poured himself a beer. As he cut a slice of mortadella, he noticed he was leaning lower over the edge of the table than he normally did and an instant later he was sobbing violently. To live not only the rest of his life but even that whole afternoon or just the next five or ten minutes seemed an impossible feat he would never be able to achieve. He managed to get hold of himself and went into the studio, seeking further evidence of Blanca’s flight. The little radio Blanca spent many afternoons listening to classical music on was no longer in its place on the shelf. In a fit of rage that brought him some fleeting relief, a childish sense of revenge, Mario ripped the poster for Lluís Onésimo’s exhibit from the wall. A crumpled sheet of paper in the wastebasket made his heart leap. When he smoothed it out, he saw that Blanca had written “Dear Mario” on it, but hadn’t gone on, perhaps, he thought, out of fear of being distracted from her goal, or fear that he would walk in on her just as she was leaving him.

He summoned the courage to call the Savings and Loan gallery and ask for Onésimo. The receptionist, who knew Mario, told him Onésimo had gone back to Madrid on the 2:30 Talgo train, the same hateful express train Blanca was always wanting to take: it was her connection to the exhibits at the Reina Sofia museum, the round tables at the residencia de estudiantes, the French movies at Alphaville, and all the other things she was so enthusiastic about, all the other things that excluded Mario.

He hung up the phone without daring to ask the receptionist whether she happened to have seen Blanca that day. Then he collapsed onto the sofa, his face buried in a pillow, and lay there crying and groping for a box of Kleenex to blow his nose with. He noticed, vaguely, that the light was changing; night was falling.

He awoke in darkness, hearing a key in the door and seeing the hallway light come on. The woman he did not yet know was not Blanca came toward the dining room with footsteps so like Blanca’s that at first Mario thought it really was Blanca. Moreover, in the dim light of the dining room, her hair seemed the same, the shape of her face, the brief rosy smile on her sensual lips that still, to Mario’s delight, retained a slightly swollen look, like a child’s. She looked a bit tired as she walked toward him, though she was smiling as if nothing had happened. She asked what on earth he was doing lying there in the dark, and it took him a while to react, partly because crying and sleeping had had an anesthetic effect on his mind. He got up and took her in his arms, and as he clung tightly to her long, supple body (she was taller than he was, even when she wore flat shoes), his eyes filled with tears again and he thought, with profound emotion and involuntary literary allusion, that he forgave her everything and wouldn’t ask her a single question or voice a single reproach.

Then out of the corner of his eye he noticed the first clue: he wasn’t sure the bag Blanca had brought home was the same one that was missing from their closet. But it isn’t easy to tell one piece of luggage from another; everyone is always mistaking their bag for someone else’s at airport luggage claims. Blanca kissed him on the mouth, leaning down a little and separating her lips a millimeter more than usual, and Mario noticed, or later remembered having noticed, that there was no trace of nicotine or red wine on her breath and her hair didn’t smell exactly the same.

But he couldn’t always be alert and on guard, scrutinizing the woman who little by little was not Blanca, who grew more unfamiliar to the precise degree that she achieved a more perfect likeness, while the other Blanca, the real Blanca, his Blanca, must be living the life she’d always wanted to live, in Madrid or in Valencia, the life that Mario, according to her, had kept her from.

He was giving in. He knew that he was letting himself be swept along by circumstances; the inert, accommodating side of himself that Blanca had never accepted was gently, almost tenderly pushing him to accept the impostor’s presence. He washed the dishes in the kitchen after dinner and heard her coming down the hall, her way of walking identical to Blanca’s, and when the footsteps stopped he didn’t turn around or raise his head from the sink; he knew that the woman who was not Blanca was standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe in a posture of laziness or relaxed camaraderie that the real Blanca would never have adopted.

He looked long into her eyes before kissing her and she burst out laughing and told him not to look at her like that: the force of Mario’s gaze scared her, and this constituted further and definitive proof of her imposture, because Blanca, his wife, the woman he had loved, the woman who had undoubtedly left him for someone else, had never given any indication that his eyes made a strong impression on her.

He tried to catch her out. He’d call from the office and then stay very silent and listen to her voice, trying to detect an inflection or accent that didn’t sound like Blanca. The radio was back in its usual spot on a bookshelf in the room Blanca no longer called the studio, but Mario could have sworn that the radio, too, though very similar, was not the same, and he despaired retrospectively over the scant attention he’d paid to such things, in the provincial haze, the lover’s daze he’d lived in until then. In any case, Blanca hardly ever listened to classical music anymore and never locked herself in the studio.

And yet, despite all his snooping around and fits of obsession, and without really noticing it, Mario was less and less unhappy. A night came when he accepted that Blanca wasn’t coming back and that it didn’t really bother him so much anymore to live with this other woman who looked so much like her. He was lying in his bedroom, doing a little reading, or trying to anyway, because he never relaxed his vigilance, and the door opened and the woman who was not Blanca came in, closing it slowly behind her, and lay down next to him, looking at him with those eyes that were not Blanca’s eyes, and unlike Blanca she didn’t ask him to turn off the light, and he could take full pleasure in every detail of Blanca’s naked body, those he knew by heart and those that surprised or disconcerted him, he wasn’t sure whether it was because they belonged to another woman or because he’d never noticed them before.

Then, turning on his side to bring her closer, so close that he breathed in her breath and saw his own anxious, masculine face in her pupils, he closed his eyes and squeezed them tightly shut, afraid that if he opened them the illusion would dissolve, because now he was sure, his eyes shut and wet with tears, that the woman who was holding him was not Blanca: Blanca would never have breathed heavily and moaned like that, Blanca, the other one, the real one, the almost identical one, the one it no longer bothered him to have lost, the one he was not going to see if he opened his eyes, would never have burst out laughing in his arms or murmured in his ear the sweet, shameless words this unknown woman was whispering to him.