In Her Absence (2 page)

Their years of marriage hadn’t diminished his amazement at having her regularly there beside him, for hours and days and weeks and months, a greater wealth of time than he’d ever dreamed of possessing and that might have lasted so long because it could turn out to be inexhaustible. Sometimes
all he needed to do was open the door of their apartment to be welcomed by the familiar signs of their domestic life and Blanca’s habitual and ever-desirable presence: the smell of something cooking in the kitchen, the sound of Blanca putting plates and silverware on the table, maybe even the theme song that accompanied the opening credits of the afternoon soap opera—but that was only on days when he was exceptionally quick and got home at three o’clock sharp, days when there were no last-minute snags at the office or annoying encounters in the street. Other days, he would open the door and hear nothing, smell nothing, and for a fraction of a second, standing just inside the front door with his keys in his hand, he’d be overwhelmed by a devastating, entirely unfounded panic: Blanca had been obliged to leave very suddenly without having time to let him know, to be with her mother in some health emergency; Blanca had been in an accident; Blanca had left him. But this would last only a second or two: he’d call out to her and hear her voice responding from the far side of the apartment
or from behind the closed door of the bathroom, or else the explanation was simply that she was so distracted in her studio, so immersed in a book or classical radio program, that she hadn’t heard his key in the lock. He would hear her footsteps, then see her coming down the hall toward him, and he would feel as if Blanca were coming back from somewhere very far away, from a secret cellar or crypt whose existence he was unaware of and where he would never be allowed to follow her. He felt the same way sometimes when he phoned her from work in the morning. After only three or four rings Mario would already be jittery with fear that she wasn’t there; then he’d hear her voice and it was the voice of someone who is alone, lost in thoughts or rooms that no one else knows anything about. When she read a book, listened to music, or watched a movie, Blanca had a marvelous ability to sink deep into herself and disappear entirely from the external world. This absolute concentration was something Mario had learned not to interfere with, the proof of a sensibility that was a constant wonder
to him but made him feel dull by comparison. Sometimes he felt intimately deserted, wanting to tell Blanca something or ask her a question but knowing it wasn’t worth trying, not because she’d pay no attention but because she literally was not there; she’d taken leave of her senses, as people used to say, in the most literal meaning of the words, taken leave of the reality that so often bored or disgusted her.

His fellow workers poked fun at Mario for his big hurry to get home. Either Blanca had him on a very tight leash indeed, they speculated, or else the two of them absolutely couldn’t be apart from each other and were still behaving like newlyweds even after several years of marriage. The latter theory secretly made Mario very proud, for he considered it to be true; however, out of an almost religious compunction and sense of reserve, he didn’t join in the jokes and sexual allusions the suggestion inspired in his colleagues. His life with Blanca was too precious to be intruded on by anyone’s humorous comments, not even a close
friend’s—though in point of fact he did not have any close friends. The crude sexual innuendo heard around the office when no women were present or, worse still, in his male colleagues’ bar conversations after work, reminded Mario of barracks talk. Its brutality was always directed against women, especially against the one who mattered most to him, his wife.

This was another of the reasons he rarely went along for a beer after work. He’d sit there in silence, unable to take any interest in the other men’s tales of adultery, and this was sometimes rather awkward. He didn’t join in the ritual complaints about married life, he was no good at telling jokes, cigarette smoke bothered him, beer and political arguments made him sick to his stomach, he was bored. At times when he had no choice but to participate in the group’s celebrations—before Christmas, or when one of the higher-ups had a birthday and invited everyone out for drinks and tapas—he’d spend the whole time glancing surreptitiously at his watch and trying to laugh almost as boisterously
as the others; he strained to hear stories he had absolutely no interest in and off-color jokes that were already stale when he was a teenager, and when he decided that a prudent amount of time had passed and he’d drunk a couple of beers or glasses of wine, he’d invent an urgent pretext and leave, but never without some office wit making the customary jocular comment about his rush to get home—to punch in his time card, they’d tell him, even more punctually than he did at the office.

Mario didn’t care. He breathed the outside air in relief and walked home with light and happy footsteps, even though he was exhausted and felt as if he’d expended all his energy fighting off some sticky, clinging organism. What a waste of time it was not to be always with her, to have her nearby and be able to look at her, even if she was immersed in her own tasks; what an unbearable desert the job and the Council and life in the city of Jaén would be if she didn’t exist, or if she hadn’t fallen in love with Mario and, against all expectation, decided to marry him, in one of those sudden impulses that
were the most attractive aspect of her character and also, at times, the most fearsome.

Blanca would often say they led a life from which great experiences were absent. He conceded that she was right, but also thought, on his best days when he’d get home a few minutes before three after a workday devoid of annoyances, that for him there could be no greater experience than simply walking home along the same route as always in the knowledge that unlike all the other men he went by in the street—men drinking in bars and talking about soccer with cigarettes in their mouths, men with hungering faces pivoting to watch a woman walk past—he alone had the privilege of desiring beyond all other women the precise woman he had married, and the absolute certainty that when he opened the door of his house, he would find her there.

It was true that they did live in Jaén—not exactly the center of the universe where cultural activities were concerned—and that neither of them had a particularly exciting job and Blanca
quite often had no job at all. But these limitations mattered less to Mario than he himself said they did, and in any case they were more than made up for by a set of fortunate circumstances that, as he saw things, it would be idiotic to disdain. They had a good apartment, on the eighth floor with a balcony overlooking one of the city’s main boulevards, purchased by Mario at an excellent price before the real estate fever of the 1980s. During a time of financial uncertainty and economic crisis, Mario had secured a permanent position with the civil service, with a salary that, while not exactly substantial, always saw them through the end of the month, and a work schedule, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., that allowed him to do other jobs in the afternoon, though he didn’t much like having to leave the house. He sometimes considered enrolling in the university: he was a draftsman but hadn’t given up on the idea of becoming an architect—or rather Blanca hadn’t given up on it. Actually, the career that most appealed to him was being a quantity surveyor or, as they’re called nowadays in Spain,
a technical architect—the term Blanca preferred. Sometimes when they were with her friends, Blanca was a little vague about her husband’s line of work. She skirted around the word draftsman, but the term she absolutely could not bear to utter was bureaucrat. When talking about the sort of people she most detested, people who were ruled by habit, monotonous people devoid of all imagination, she’d say “They’re mental bureaucrats.”

It didn’t take much of this kind of talk before Mario López began to wonder sadly whether he himself had been categorized as a vile mental bureaucrat, and whether Blanca might not be including him in the crowd of people who were vulgar, bourgeois, and as tedious as the routines of their workdays and marriages.

Days before one such comment, on a Monday in June, he got home at two minutes after three, precisely twelve minutes after clocking out of the office. During his habitual walk home he’d been enjoying the day’s salty, almost maritime breeze, with a whiff of coming rain that was exceptional
for that dry city at that time of year, a breeze that rattled the canvas awnings and made you feel like living life to the full. As he opened the front door, he took in the ordinary household smells with elation and gratitude: cleanliness, freshly waxed furniture, the food Blanca had just finished cooking for him.

Six years after meeting her he was still moved each time he reentered her presence. As he was calling to her for the second time he saw her coming toward him from the back of the apartment. He knew immediately that she was in a good mood and would offer him her mouth when they kissed, which wasn’t always the case. He set his briefcase down on the ground to give her a hug, and looking at her lovely face, now so near, he remembered one of their rare fights. Blanca, unthinkingly, in the heat of an argument he, too, had done his share to provoke, an argument that cost him weeks of regret and stubborn resentment, had accused him of settling for too little, of lacking, she’d said, “the slightest ambition.” Whereupon Mario had
suddenly grown very calm and answered that she, Blanca, was his greatest ambition, and that when he was with her he wouldn’t and couldn’t feel the slightest ambition for anything more. She looked at him very seriously, tilting her head to one side. Then her eyes filled up with tears and they fell into each other’s arms and onto the sofa, kissing and gasping for breath as they groped for skin beneath clothing, trying not to hear the television trumpeting the theme song of the nightly news.

NOW AGAIN THE
news was on as they started their lunch. Mario had come home so early that the news wasn’t over yet. He was savoring the vichyssoise, one of Blanca’s best dishes, and as he did so she stopped and looked at him, her spoon suspended next to her mouth in a gesture of condescension or censure, he wasn’t sure which. He was afraid he might have slurped and ate the next spoonful with great care, pressing his lips together
in silence, swallowing discreetly, and immediately wiping his mouth with the edge of the napkin.

Blanca had impeccable table manners. She always sat up very straight, taking the napkin from her lap and laying it on the table before she stood up. There was a perfection in her way of peeling an orange or persimmon with a knife and fork that to Mario, a former altar boy, had an almost liturgical quality and reawakened his old social inferiority complex. Mario peeled oranges with his hand, sinking his thumbnail into the peel, and when he really liked a sauce or a salad dressing he had to make an effort not to sop it up with a bit of bread.

He remembered perfectly the first time in his life he’d ever tried to eat with a knife and fork, which was also the first time he learned that the two were used together. (In his parents’ house they always ate with a spoon, and they picked up the pieces of rabbit that accompanied their rice on Sundays with their hands.) It was in the cafeteria of the old Jaén bus station, on a trip he and his father
had taken from their village for some medical or bureaucratic reason. To the child who was Mario, Jaén was terrifying; it stank of danger and sickness and the dank office where hostile officials made him and his father wait—and when his father, normally such a forceful man, spoke to the officials, he lowered his voice and bent his head toward the floor. He and his father were sitting on stools at the cafeteria’s counter and were served a combination platter that struck Mario as the height of luxury: two fried eggs with potatoes and a pork chop on the side. He tore off a piece of bread with his hands and dipped it in the egg, then set about eating the meat the same way he always ate strips of bacon for lunch in the country: laying it out on the bread and then cutting it with the knife. But his father told him that they were in a fine restaurant in the province’s capital city; he should take a look around and watch how everyone else was eating their meal—with a knife and fork. If Mario insisted on staying in school, his father added with a note of sarcasm, he might well want to start behaving
in a more refined way and imitating the table manners of the gentry. Mario, who’d always been quick to blush, felt his own ludicrousness burning in his face as, beneath his father’s mocking eyes and the sidelong scrutiny of the customer sitting next to them, he tried to figure out which hand was supposed to hold the fork and which the knife. He didn’t succeed in cutting off a single bite of the pork chop, and when he finally managed to spear a bit of egg with the fork and tried to lift it to his mouth he ended up staining the good pants his mother dressed him in on Sundays and the holy days of obligation, and for trips.

What a meager life I’d lived, he thought, if the cafeteria of the Jaén bus station struck me as a luxurious dining establishment. He’d tell Blanca about these things and she would laugh, but he didn’t know if she was touched by the thought of Mario’s primitive past, so different from her own childhood, or simply astounded by the existence of this picturesque way of life that was fundamentally absurd to any civilized person who took an interest
in its peculiarities. The odd part of it, given her class background and the little she knew about the real life of people who were poor and working-class, was that Blanca’s political leanings were much farther to the left than his own. In 1986, the referendum on Spain’s entry into NATO had triggered one of the few truly bitter fights they’d ever had. Mario thought that a yes vote was both prudent and reasonable, while Blanca wore a pin bearing a large NO, collected signatures, attended meetings, and participated in demonstrations alongside people whose politics Mario considered loathsome: leftist extremists who were simultaneously in favor of pacifist disarmament and the terrorist attacks in northern Spain. When he saw how sad and dejected she was on the night of the vote, Mario couldn’t rejoice at the fact that his side had won. He felt guilty and even a little reactionary.