In Her Absence (4 page)

OF COURSE ONÉSIMO
was neither the first moth drawn to the flame of Blanca’s intellectual charms nor the first parasite to feed off her unconditional reverence for any form of talent or skill. Blanca tended to squander her admiration like a foolishly generous heiress frittering away her fortune among swindlers and freeloaders. Except for Mario, whose only remotely artistic skill was line drawing, all her former boyfriends and almost all
her current friends were practitioners of one art form or another and were voraciously interested in all forms of artistic expression without exception, including bullfighting, hairdressing, and Spanish pop music. It was the 1980s, and in the mysterious hierarchies of the day, tailors, hairstylists, and flamenco-ish singers were worshiped with the same reverence as painters and sculptors. At first this surprised Mario, who’d been raised with the almost fearful respect that the poor have for art and knowledge, but he gradually came to find it natural, and not only because a person can always get used to anything. As it turned out, after he’d taken a closer look at the works of the painters and sculptors Blanca frequented, he couldn’t find much more merit in them than in a haircut.

His instinctive caution and lacerating inferiority complex kept him from expressing opinions such as this one. What often happened as well was that he had absolutely no opinion at all but was forced to improvise one for fear of looking stupid. He was afraid of saying something wrong or
offensive, but more than anything else he was afraid of demonstrating that he wasn’t at the intellectual level of Blanca’s friends.

Her first boyfriend when she was a teenager had been a fledgling singer-songwriter almost as young as she was. She ran into him again many years later, well after marrying Mario, during a Week of Singers and Their Songs that the government of the region of Andalucía was sponsoring in Jaén. When they went backstage to say hello after a performance he’d secretly found pitiful, Mario was initially a little jealous of the way Blanca hugged her former love, but he started calming down when he saw that the teenage hero she often reminisced about was now a guy with a receding hairline that his anachronistic ponytail did nothing to conceal. The popping buttons of his tight shirt, its shoulders liberally sprinkled with dandruff, further enhanced his general air of bewilderment and poor hygiene. The singer told them about a record with lyrics by Jaén poets that the Provincial Council’s cultural department was going to produce for him,
and about a possible tour through Nicaragua and Cuba. Blanca never mentioned him again, and Mario struck his name from the imaginary list of potential enemies.

The next few chapters of Blanca’s sentimental biography involved a photographer, a would-be film director, and a professor ten years her senior with a passion for Puccini. Like the successive strata of an archeological excavation, the cultural enthusiasms she clung to long after leaving the lovers who first instilled them in her were what remained to bear witness to the history of her heart: Cartier-Bresson,
Turandot
, Eric Rohmer. The arts of painting and sculpture had come into her life relatively late in the day. When she met Mario, she was still suffering from the final repercussions of an all-consuming and disastrous relationship with the painter Jaime Naranjo, also known among the more up-to-the-minute or obnoxious of his unconditional adherents as Jimmy N.: the
enfant terrible
of the local avant-garde who routinely carried off all the province’s official prizes.

Mario had noticed that the previous decade of Blanca’s love life was a lot like the lives of the women whose biographies she collected: Misia Sert, Alma Mahler, Lou Andreas von Salomé. She was even thinking of writing a very long essay about Salomé, and early drafts of it filled some of the notebooks that were carefully aligned on her desk. First in Málaga and Granada, then in Jaén, Blanca had had passionate relationships—though some of them on a purely intellectual level—with men whose erudition and intelligence gave Mario a secret inferiority complex when he heard her talk about them. She’d inspired their desire, but not only that: also songs, poems, paintings, and even, people said, a certain novel that had met with considerable success. She owned its manuscript, personally dedicated to her by the author, and kept it among her own books in a special corner over her work table alongside other manuscripts, volumes of poetry, screenplays, short story collections, and even sheet music, all with inscriptions to her by their authors.

On the living room walls were drawings and engravings signed and dedicated to her, and a poem handwritten in red, green, and yellow ink by the legendary Rafael Alberti—to whom Blanca, who’d spoken to him half a dozen times, referred simply as “Rafael.” In the bedroom, over the headboard, hung a large semiabstract canvas by Naranjo, painted shortly before his breakup with Blanca, and on the opposite wall was a nebulous, yellowing engraving by Fernando Zóbel that had the considerable virtue of putting Mario to sleep. His response to art was often physical, sometimes almost to the point of an allergic reaction: Frida Kahlo, for example, made the roof of his mouth feel as if it were coated with grease, and Antoni Tàpies (fortunately not an object of Blanca’s devotion) inspired a mixture of weary sorrow and heartburn. He forced himself to feign interest nevertheless, and reproached himself bitterly for his lack of sensibility, the random paucity of his reading, the private lethargy and pent-up resistance he often harbored when accompanying her to a concert, a movie, the premiere of a
new play, or an art opening where everyone knew everyone else and greeted Blanca effusively and the paintings looked like doodles or tiny insects and all the young people of both genders were uniformly dressed in black and afflicted with a ghostly pallor. Often on such occasions Mario would get the terrifying feeling that he was caught in a trap he would never break out of, a situation that would never end: experimental jazz concerts where the musicians seemed to be wringing out their instruments and the notes lasted for hours that were eternities; art openings with endless rounds of greetings, kisses on both cheeks (between men, even), glasses of lukewarm champagne, ecstatic congratulations, and meaningless gossip; dance performances in which a single musical phrase or given electronic rhythm was repeated ad infinitum and without the slightest variation.

There was never any opera in Jaén, to Mario’s great relief, but once, during one of their exhausting cultural pilgrimages to Madrid (they had to see everything, make the most of every minute of the
weekend), Blanca took him to a contemporary opera in a theater that had once been a local cinema, on a beautiful, lively plaza in Lavapiés where Mario would have liked to sit, have a beer, and watch the people go by. But he didn’t dare say so to Blanca, and of course he didn’t like the idea of letting her go into the theater by herself at all. The composer of the opera in question was an individual she’d met in Granada who had introduced her to electronic music and the twelve-tone scale and who had phoned her personally to invite her to the premiere, catapulting her into transports of joy and impatience. When he said hello to her in the lobby of the theater (which was called—to Mario’s greater anxiety—the Center for New Theatrical Tendencies), the composer leaned forward and shamelessly planted a kiss on her mouth while giving her ass a squeeze with his big hairy hands. Even so, what he most resembled, Mario thought, was a Quaker preacher, dressed all in black and not wearing a tie, with a heavy beard but no moustache. But the worst of the ordeal was the opera itself: seemingly devoid
of beginning, end, plot, or order, it went on and on, mercilessly, eternally, and just when it seemed about to conclude it would start up again. When it was finally over, Mario—defeated, demolished, and with a throbbing headache—cast a surreptitious glance at his watch while hypocritically joining in the audience’s applause and saw to his amazement that this infinite torture had lasted a mere two hours.

Luckily, Jaén was not known for the dynamism of its cultural life. Whole weeks could go by, especially during the summer, without any special event that absolutely couldn’t be missed. But it was during those periods that Blanca’s melancholy longing to travel grew most acute; she’d study the cultural pages of all the newspapers and want to go to Madrid, Salzburg, or even nearby, privileged, almost mythical Granada, where it seemed that the life of the mind never took a rest, where all movies came out right away, some of them in the original, undubbed version, and where there were perpetual international festivals of every variety, including classical music, jazz, theater, even tango.

Around that time, Blanca had developed a taste for the boleros and tangos that were starting to be played in some of the bars they went to on weekends, granting Mario the relief of a midpoint between the symphonic boredom of the concert halls and the industrial-strength heart-monitor noise of the nightclubs, where the music, if it can really be called that, was even more unbearable than the shouted conversations, cheap liquor, and cigarette smoke.

For Blanca’s twenty-ninth birthday, Mario had prepared a modest surprise: two cassettes of boleros by Moncho that were so rare they didn’t seem to figure in any catalog of the singer’s work. He’d spotted them by chance on the counter of a gas station. As he listened to a particularly sentimental bolero in the car on the way home, he felt, from his stomach to his chest and throat and then up into his tear ducts, a dense wave of inexplicable anguish and irrevocable happiness, a happiness that was like a memory of happiness, reaffirmed and exalted by the passage of time. Alone in the car, waiting for
the light to change at a fountain commemorating battles long past, his heart melted and his eyes filled with tears, and his pleasure was not only in his love for Blanca, but also in this absolute proof that he could enjoy, without the slightest uncertainty, an aesthetic emotion previously enjoyed by her, certified by her.

How many times in his life had he tortured himself over a painting, a movie, a piece of chamber music, wondering whether he really liked it, whether he’d look stupid if he moved his head in time to the music or tapped his foot on the floor, and whether the next break in the music would be the end, requiring immediate applause, or only a short pause, one of those moments of silence during which people coughed and cleared their throats but occasionally some idiot would start clapping all by himself and then several dozen heads would turn toward him as if to strike him with lightning. But now, in the car, there was no denying it: he was delighting in the music, moved to the very marrow of his bones as the trees and buildings along
the avenue sparkled through the windshield, and this emotion was not only real but also the correct response.

In a burst of inspiration, he stopped at the stationery store where he usually bought his drafting materials and picked out some wrapping paper and ribbon. When he got home, Blanca wasn’t there: a note on the dining-room table told him she’d gone to a job interview and would be back soon. If only he’d been paying attention, if only he’d noticed the chance repetition of certain names, coincidences that were already conspiring to wreak disaster upon him, while he, vigilant and inept, dazed, blind to what was irremediable, had seen nothing.

He was touched by Blanca’s meticulous handwriting and the last word: “Kisses.” For once he was glad she wasn’t there. He cut the gleaming black wrapping paper down to size, wrapped up the two cassettes, folded the paper’s corners with the skill and precision of an origami artist, calculated the exact length of gold ribbon required so the bow on the package wouldn’t be tacky or ostentatious.
Absorbed in the task, he busied his hands within a circle of lamplight in the small room that was her domain and which they both called the studio, smoothing down the paper, sharpening its folds with a fingernail, sliding the tips of his index fingers and thumbs along the golden ribbon to make a knot that could be undone with a single tug.

He put the package away in a high cupboard with a certain exotic feeling of clandestinity, and that very night, at one minute past midnight, the first minute of Blanca’s birthday, he couldn’t stand the wait any longer and gave her the gift. This time he wasn’t tortured by fear of having chosen the wrong thing, fear that Blanca wouldn’t like it and would politely feign gratitude without fully concealing her disappointment. How clumsily she struggled to untie the package’s golden knot, how nervously she tried to open the folds and edges of the paper! She ended up simply ripping it, and what a privilege to be standing in front of her and receive the full force of her eyes an instant after she saw the two cassettes. “Moncho, Twenty Classic
Boleros,” she said, in the tone of voice she used only for unqualified rapture, for marveling gratitude, and that was one of the best reasons for loving her, because she intensely ennobled anything that she admired.

Blanca put one of the cassettes on immediately and turned to Mario as the first song began in an invitation to dance. But they didn’t dance. They just stood in each other’s arms in the middle of the room, slowly swaying without moving their feet, while Moncho sang
Llévatela—Take Her Away
. But no one would ever take her away, Mario thought in pride and desire, steering her gently toward the bedroom, letting her lead him there.

THERE WOULD PROBABLY
never be a respite: he would have to spend every hour, every day of the rest of his life winning her over, seducing her, permanently on the lookout, astute and untiring, for the appearance of any danger, any enemy. That didn’t bother him, of course; he’d known it practically from the first moment he met her, and when he stopped to think about it he had to admit he hadn’t done too badly since then. It had taken
him no more than two days to fall in love with Blanca, and the fact that she had begun, little by little, to have feelings for him, that she’d slowly slipped, without realizing it, from friendship and gratitude into love, was not the work of chance or the blind mechanism of passion, but the slow, hard-won result of Mario’s tenacity, his constant, tender solicitude, as unconditional as a nurse’s. In fact, that was what he’d been for a while, in the beginning: an assiduous nurse who cared for her with patience and skill, changed her sheets when they were soaked from long nights of delirium and fever, and little by little gave her back her strength and will to live. “You rebuilt me,” Blanca once told him, “as if you’d found a porcelain vase that was smashed into a thousand pieces and you had the skill and patience to reconstruct the whole thing, down to the tiniest shard.”