In Her Absence

Nine

NOW THE WOMAN who was not Blanca was walking down the hall toward him in Blanca’s green silk blouse and tight jeans, moving with a rhythm that wasn’t exactly the rhythm of Blanca’s footsteps, though she was wearing Blanca’s high-heeled shoes, or a pair of identical high-heeled shoes that revealed the delicate arch of her instep. Now when Mario heard her walking through the house, her footsteps resonated differently, in a silence that was denser than even Blanca’s worst and most agonized silences, the ones that all Mario’s most devoted and submissive tenderness hadn’t been able to break through. But now the silence was different. He’d gotten into the habit of differentiating it with the same mental and sensory acuity that had enabled him to perceive that the woman who lived with him and dressed and spoke like Blanca was not Blanca, however perfectly she was trying to impersonate her, and that Blanca had left him, just as he’d always feared.

He wasn’t crazy, but there was no one he could talk to about his very serious suspicion that the woman he lived with was no longer Blanca, and this plunged him into the morbid solitude of someone who possesses an unconfessable secret. Any friend he might mention it to would undoubtedly find the suspicion completely outlandish, and he also came to realize, only now, that during the years he’d spent with Blanca he’d lost all his friends, who had generally struck Blanca as boring or lowbrow, and whom he, with cowardly submissiveness, hadn’t had the courage to keep up with, just as he hadn’t preserved his former habits or personal tastes — and all so he could pretend to be someone he wasn’t, pretend to be on the same level as a woman who could never love him, even if she’d once tried to with a certain degree of conviction. A few days before she left, when Mario saw it all before him as clearly and irreparably as if it had already happened, he went to see her at the Savings and Loan and in a perfectly calm and natural tone of voice asked Blanca what on earth she saw in Onésimo, that obvious phony who had undoubtedly spotted her as easy prey and who described the heaps of bricks and piles of cables that under his tyrannical direction had been strewn here and there across the gallery, accompanied by explanatory wall texts in Valenciano and English, as “works of art.”

“My poor little darling, I can’t expect you to be able to understand,” Blanca said, standing there in front of Mario, and she gave him a quick caress that was undeniably condescending, even pitying, but that paralyzed him with tenderness. “Being with Lluís is like standing at the edge of a cliff with Laurence Olivier in Rebecca.… You’re like my home. It’s as if you and I were sitting on a park bench together, like a couple in an old photograph. That’s the difference.”

During the good times, she’d been thankful for the steadiness of his character, the serene stability she herself lacked and that had helped her so much to emerge from the deep pit she was in when they met. “You hold me up,” she used to say. “You’re my foundation in the earth.”

Now the calm strength she’d once valued had been turned against him. She no longer wanted the home he had given her or the peaceful life he had woven around and for her, to defend her, as she herself used to say, from the worst part of her soul. Now she was making comparisons to movies and citing passages from works of literature. She wanted to peer down into the abyss, as if she knew what that word really meant, as if she hadn’t always been able to count, ultimately, on the protection of her family’s money and the solidity of her class.

Standing there in the gallery facing Blanca — Onésimo had granted her the greatest joy of her life by choosing her to be the show’s guard, for he claimed that the border between art and life had ruptured and in his installations there was no distance between the guard and the artist or between the guide and the public — Mario understood that he had lost everything, although at that moment he couldn’t quite remember the movie Blanca had alluded to; from its name he knew it had to be one of those subtitled black-and-white movies that played on TV late at night. So often, when he told her it was time to go to bed, Blanca would say no, she wanted to watch some Japanese or French movie with subtitles, and he’d go to bed and calculate in the darkness the number of days it had been since they went to bed at the same time, and he’d fall asleep hearing as if from very far away, from the other side of the stucco partition that separated the bedroom from the living room, the soundtrack of the movie she was watching with a fervor she almost never manifested toward real things, the words spoken in a language he didn’t understand but in which she could repeat long citations for her friends.

He survived successive phases of fatalism and resolve, faked courage and irremediable desolation. Very often now when he got home at 3:05 or 3:10, Blanca wasn’t waiting for him; according to her she was held up at the gallery by her work that wasn’t simply, she stressed, in words borrowed from Onésimo, the work of a passive guard or mere repressive delegate of the authoritarian eye. Still, when she wasn’t going to be home in time for lunch, she would leave Mario a note, written in the private-school handwriting he liked so much, and she always tried to leave some food for him that he only needed to heat up. At those moments, Mario’s guilt would diminish or sweep away his fear, and he’d spend all afternoon waiting for Blanca, or screw up his courage and go to meet her at the Savings and Loan cultural center, overcoming not only his repugnance at the thought of running into Onésimo but also something else he had a very hard time confessing to himself: the shooting stab of shame he felt for her when he heard the ridiculous pedantry of the things Blanca would say as she repeated expressions in French or English that Onésimo had once used or cited in some interview.

She was a different Blanca, and only he, her husband, was aware of her charade, the agitated state of her nerves, the imperceptible flush that rose into her face whenever Onésimo praised her. One day as he watched her in silence from across a table full of people talking loudly and smoking, all presided over by the artist from Valencia, he thought, “If you loved me, I’d make sure you never lost your self-respect.”