In Her Absence

Seven

HE SPENT THE weekend wondering what to do next and trying to figure out the best way to get in touch with Blanca again. At the age of 28, Mario’s sentimental education was extremely limited. Until he was 25, he’d had a girlfriend he planned to marry. She left him a few months before the wedding, undoubtedly out of sheer boredom though she claimed she’d fallen in love with someone else. Everyone likes to attribute noble motives to their actions, and Juli, Mario’s girlfriend, who’d been going out with him for seven years at that point, must have thought an illicit love affair was a more solid and prestigious justification for breakup than mere tedium. They’d shared one of those eternal provincial relationships that begin at the end of adolescence and end a decade later in a marriage that is lethargic from before the start, so inevitable and immutable that it’s closer to the realm of nature than to the feelings and actions of human beings, one of those relationships whose future is even more unvarying than its past: not only the white dress at the door of the church, the apartment with the brand-new imitation-oak furniture, the honeymoon in Mallorca or the Canary Islands immediately followed by a pregnancy, but also the deeply buried mutual suspicion of having been swindled, the bored bitterness of Sunday strolls with or without a baby carriage, the sweet, familial stupor, so much like the dull, heavy feeling that follows a big meal.

For Juli to have had the uncommon fortitude to break up with Mario and invent a nonexistent infidelity as justification were both strong indicators of the degree of boredom and disillusionment they’d sunk into over the years. Mario took the humiliation of being dumped rather badly at first and tended to confuse his displeasure with the sufferings of love. He wrote several supplicating or insulting letters, amply stocked with literary clichés; he pondered the inconstancy of women and spent a few afternoons wandering around the building where his ex-girlfriend worked, with the rather melodramatic notion of surprising her with his rival — a word much in vogue then on the popular Latin American soap operas. He also feared the vague rural opprobrium attached to bachelors—“old boys,” as his mother used to say.

Then, after summer vacation, he began realizing he could spend whole days without thinking of her once, and shortly thereafter he privately acknowledged that he’d never really missed her. The apartment he’d bought to share with her now struck him as a very pleasant place to live alone. Raised in a large, unmodernized house in a country village, a house that smelled like a stable and was glacially cold in winter, Mario was gratefully appreciative of hot water, clean bathrooms, the luxury of central heating. He chose furniture to please himself alone, though the suspicious looks he got from the salespeople made him uncomfortable; it must have been unusual for a single man to be furnishing a house with such care. He practiced a painless austerity in order to keep up with his monthly mortgage payments without anxiety; he got a membership at a video rental place, and joined a book-of-the-month club. It was then that he remembered his schoolboy affinity for history and bought Menéndez Pidal’s History of Spain on the installment plan. He embarked on a plan to read it from the first volume to the last, and would always remember that he had made it to the obscure and tedious reign of the Visigoths when he met Blanca. At the Council they thanked him for his first three years on the job. He started working some afternoons in the architectural studio a few former boardingschool classmates of his had started, and he’d sometimes venture forth at night with one of them to drink wine in one or another of the city’s bars, with some vague idea of getting drunk and picking up girls. But they never managed to do either of those things, and after a while, bored and disappointed with each other, they stopped going out together. Shortly thereafter Mario’s old friend “got to be boyfriends” as they say in Jaén, with the studio’s secretary, a rather heavyset young woman who was so unappealing that Mario secretly felt some pity for his former friend. Better to be alone than to resign yourself so halfheartedly to a woman like that.

He watched his expenses so carefully that of the two paychecks he received per month, he could put the entire second one away in savings. His parents, now retired, lived alone back in the village, and his only brother, eight years older, was a first sergeant in the Guardia Civil stationed in Irún. Mario felt a strong obligation to bring his parents to live with him in Jaén, but though he had a great deal of affection for them, especially for his mother, he was also aware that they were fast approaching the infirmities of old age and within a few short years their company would become a kind of slavery. One day, in an unprecedented gesture, his father called him at the office and solemnly announced that he and his mother were going to be moving into a Social Security residence in Linares the following month.

The news made Mario so happy that he felt like a loathsome ingrate. He said sincerely, on the point of tears and with a tightness in his chest, that as long as he could take care of them that was not going to happen. When she got on the line, his mother was crying: it’s best for everyone this way, she repeated, in the same words as his father; this way neither of them would ever become a burden. That weekend, Mario drove back to his village and took his parents to the residence, which was a spacious establishment, clean and melancholy, with a modern chapel, bedrooms that seemed to belong in a youth hostel, and a surprising degree of liveliness in the cafeteria and common rooms.

Night fell as he was driving back to Jaén on Sunday, sadly listening to the radio, the results of the day’s sports events, ads for cognac and cigars. But it was the weightless and fundamentally healthful sadness of freedom that he was feeling. When he stepped into his apartment that night, it seemed to belong to him entirely for the first time, as did his future, in which he would no longer be tied down by attachments to his early youth, his parents, his girlfriend, and his oppressive memories of Cabra de Santocristo, to which he would certainly never return since there was no longer anyone there for him to visit. With serene approval of his own practical decisions, he looked over the still scant furnishings, the spotless kitchen, the row of volumes of Menéndez Pidal’s History of Spain, the bedroom once intended for a couple but where now he slept alone, the few light fixtures he had installed. He had dinner at the kitchen table without falling into the lax habits of those who eat any old way when they’re alone. He cleared off the table after dinner and washed and dried the plates, glass, and silverware. He started watching a movie on TV and fell asleep on the sofa before it was over. At midnight the phone woke him up. Only when he discovered it was a wrong number did he realize how much he’d wanted to talk to someone that Sunday night. He switched off the TV and straightened up the dining room a little, though almost nothing was out of place, brushed his teeth, rinsed the brush and carefully recapped the toothpaste, chose a clean pair of pajamas out of the closet that was far too big for him alone, and slipped with anticipated pleasure between the sheets, which he’d changed on Friday afternoon before going back to his village. He switched off the light still thinking he was overcome with drowsiness, but as he lay in the dark he realized that for some reason he was no longer sleepy at all. He turned the light back on: he’d forgotten to plug in the alarm clock, an unnecessary precaution he was always careful to take, though he woke up automatically every morning around 7:15.

A few weeks later, standing in line at the bank, he ran into Juli. Neither of them knew what to say at first; she turned red and nervous, and Mario was stunned to realize that he had lost all interest in her in so little time. He thought she looked older than she was, a bit old-fashioned and tacky in her checked skirt and high burgundy boots, carrying a black plastic file with the logo of the Nuestra Señora de la Cabeza Driving School and Agency in gold letters. They talked for a few minutes while Mario waited for his turn at the window. Juli — suddenly her name struck him as ridiculous — told him she’d thought about him a lot and didn’t want to lose touch: they could call each other sometimes and chat like old friends. Mario made a display of going along with this, but was quick-witted enough to put off the meeting she was proposing to some indefinite future moment. It was a relief to leave the bank and not see her. If Juli hadn’t broken up with him, they would have gotten married a month earlier. How strange, he thought, as he want back to the office; I was on the verge of marrying a total stranger. I suffered over a woman I didn’t actually like much; I spent seven years with her without getting to know a thing about her.

They didn’t see each other again. She may have moved to another city or gone back to the village; she always used to say that big noisy places like Jaén wore her out. Mario believed for years that Juli had vanished from his memory without a trace and had played no role at all in the destiny that took him to Blanca. Only much later, in the choking fullness of his misery, did he think again of his first girlfriend and the future with her that had not come about, and he was afraid that out of some colossal misunderstanding, some fundamental error in the laws governing the world, someone had assigned him a biography that wasn’t really his, a marriage to a woman who was obviously far better suited to another man, perhaps neither the painter Naranjo nor the scoundrel Onésimo, but in any case another man who was not Mario, a man who was taller, blonder, better educated, better traveled, more imaginative, more like her, not a draftsman at the Jaén Provincial Council whose expectations of life were compatible not with Blanca’s — however hard both of them tried to make them compatible and believe that they were — but with those of the secretary of a driving school, the type of woman Juli precisely personified: a woman who would never suffer because she couldn’t attend the Bienniale di Venezia or the premiere of Madame Butterfly in Covent Garden in London, a woman who wouldn’t have known a thing about modern art or opera or Covent Garden, but without therefore being an idiot or a mental bureaucrat, as Blanca so often said, as if there were dishonor in being a bureaucrat.…

On his worst days, during his blackest diatribes against himself, through the many sleepless nights when he lay in the dark next to the inviolate distance that separated him from Blanca, Mario would torment himself with the thought that he should have married Juli, should have arranged a time to get together with her as she’d suggested when they ran into each other in the bank. He accused himself of senseless arrogance, masculine vanity and ambition, of aspiring to things that were out of his reach; he imagined himself coldly leaving Blanca and going off in search of Juli, calculating that if he hadn’t broken up with her they’d have a child or two by now, and in his embittered delirium he imagined the life he would have had with another woman so vividly that he couldn’t help starting to feel as if he were betraying Blanca. Then he was frightened by the danger of never having met Blanca at all, and to make up for these thoughts and console himself he’d plunge deep into the unlimited memory of all the things he’d enjoyed thanks to her and with her, comparing those years of enthusiasm and passion with the years of conjugal stability and paternity he would have been living out with Juli as routinely as he served out the years of his employment at the Council.

It wasn’t only that he was crazy about Blanca, that he liked her better than any other woman he saw in any part of reality, including movies and advertisements, and that his desire could be aroused by nothing more than the memory of her naked body or by brushing against her in the kitchen as they were washing the dishes. It was that in all the years of his life he had only ever been in love with her, so that his idea of love was inseparable from Blanca’s existence, and since he had now known love and no longer knew how to do without it and didn’t imagine that other women could offer it to him, there was nothing for him to do but go on living with her, under whatever conditions — he understood this almost at the end, vanquished, perhaps unworthy, more in love than ever — whatever conditions Blanca, or the stranger or shadow who had supplanted her, wanted to dictate.

What he most bitterly reproached himself for was his lack of vigilance and cunning, his excessive confidence not in the love or fidelity of Blanca, whom he would never reproach for anything, but in male nature, or the abject version of it represented by the individual whose name Mario had heard and read several times without paying attention to it, without realizing that the only real danger emanated from him. Did he first see the name Lluís Onésimo in one of the cultural supplements that Blanca went through so avidly on Saturday mornings over breakfast, did he hear it on television, in that program Metrópolis that he always fell asleep halfway through, or was it Blanca’s own sacred lips that had formed its syllables for the first time, with the same reverent and entirely unmerited generosity with which she pronounced so many names that awoke no echo but ignorance and hostility in Mario, names of artists, directors, choreographers, or vile, conceited writers whom she approached after their readings, asking them in her warm and admiring voice to sign a copy of their book for her or talk for a few minutes, men just in from Madrid with the smell of tobacco and whisky on their breath and eyes that would invariably move toward Blanca’s neckline or give her a sidelong glance as she held out the book for them to sign as if she were offering up her whole life on a platter.

Animosity sharpened his memory: the first time he heard the name Lluís Onésimo was an ordinary Tuesday in June, a day like all the other sweet monotonous days of his vanished happiness, and he even remembered the first course of the meal Blanca had made, a vichyssoise, and that the TV news was going on about Frida Kahlo, which alarmed him because he didn’t yet know that Blanca, in one of her impetuous aesthetic shifts, had ceased, from one day to the next, to be interested in Frida Kahlo, and that very soon, fatally drawn by the gravitational pull of Onésimo’s intellectualism, she would abjure what the villainous multimedia artist from Valencia disdainfully called the “traditional supports.” The era of classic formats, canvas, oil, even acrylic, had come to an end, the era of the Painter with a capital P, elitist and exclusive, was over, and had never been more than a holdover from the nineteenth century, a parody whose pathetic extreme was now embodied by the obsolete Jimmy N.

Those were the things Mario heard Lluís Onésimo say during the first meal they shared on the day Blanca introduced them to each other, and though he understood none of it and disliked the artist’s looks and even his exaggerated accent, Mario took base satisfaction in the belittlement of his former rival Naranjo, and observed with tenderness, pity, and almost remorse that when she heard those words Blanca lowered her head and pressed her lips together, and didn’t dare defend the man she had so recently admired.

With painful lucidity, with the retrospective bitterness of not having guessed in time, Mario realized far too late that Blanca’s sudden lack of interest in Frida Kahlo, which had come as such a relief, was a clue to the fact that she had just developed a gigantic new admiration: she’d learned everything about Onésimo in the art magazines and the El País Sunday supplement, she’d read the articles about what she called his installations and performances, and with all the fervor of a recent convert she’d admired his public statements, which were often scandalous, his shaved head, his perennial three-day stubble, his black clothing, the vaguely Asiatic tattoo on the back of his right hand, his rings. She had thought, with an intolerable sense of having been treated unfairly and passed over, that she would never have the chance to see one of Lluís Onésimo’s installations in person or attend one of his performances, and she had imagined the impossible gift of the wonder of a conversation with him, a very long conversation, lasting all night, with cigarettes and drinks, about art, and movies no one in Jaén had seen, and books no one in the whole city but her had read. And suddenly one day, one of those smoothly monotonous days that Mario so cherished, Blanca read in the local paper that Lluís Onésimo was preparing an exhibit and lecture for the Cultural Center of the Savings and Loan, and so she could go talk to him, could even offer to help him install his work, willing and enthusiastic, rapturous, uncontainable. The minute he saw them standing together, after enduring Onésimo’s nonstop verbiage and nauseating table manners for two hours — strange that Blanca who was generally such a stickler hadn’t seemed to notice — Mario López thought with clairvoyant dread that this ill-favored individual was going to seduce Blanca away from him.