He pushed her hair back and wiped the glistening sweat from her face. Lots of people were standing around the bar’s doorway but no one seemed to have noticed them. He led her over to some front steps a short distance away and helped her sit down. For a moment she thought it was Naranjo who was helping her and threw her arms around his neck and held him, trembling, as she repeated a name that was completely unknown to Mario. He gently maneuvered her away from him, not only because he felt awkward about receiving caresses intended for someone else but also because Blanca’s breath was an acid stench of alcohol, nicotine, and vomit.
A few minutes later she leaned back with her eyes closed, somewhat calmer but still clutching Mario’s hand. Her own hands, whose softness was delicious to him, were unusually cold. Suddenly her nails dug into his palm and she went rigid: she’d just started to look for something, her pack of cigarettes, undoubtedly, and realized that she’d lost her purse. She became frantic, as in those situations of panic and powerlessness that happen in dreams, wildly enumerating the things she thought she’d lost, though without doing anything more to try and find them than grope blindly around her: her house keys, her ID card, her ATM card, the silver lighter that someone, another male name, had given her.…
It didn’t take Mario long to find the purse. It had been dropped next to the sidewalk, back where he’d first spotted her between the two cars, and it was still there, splattered with vomit. The drinkers milling around the entrance to the bar had passed by without noticing it, stepping in vomit as indifferently, thought Mario, as they’d have stepped on her if she hadn’t been able to get up. He’d always felt a vague but aggressive hostility toward the denizens of nightclubs, and not just toward their way of dressing, speaking, and holding glasses and cigarettes. It was the hatred of the earlybird for the night owl, deeply rooted in him from the beginning, perhaps inherited from his father, who had risen before dawn his whole life to go out and work in the fields, and who was now languishing in an old people’s home in Linares.
Another thing he’d inherited from his father was his immaculate neatness: he wiped the purse clean with a tissue before handing it back to Blanca. Her hands were shaking so badly as she opened it that everything spilled out and she couldn’t find what she was looking for: her cigarettes and the lighter. She repeated that it was a silver Zippo and was once again overcome with remorse at having lost it. Kneeling on the sidewalk, she searched around with long, clumsy, nervous fingers, oblivious to the feet of the people who were going by, blindly rummaging, without seeing even Mario. She looked for it just as she would always look for everything, the most valuable objects and the most trivial, even after she had been living with Mario for a long time: very nervous and irritated—as if, in the anarchy of the insides of drawers, the objects had conspired among themselves to mock her—and fearing that she’d lost forever just the thing she needed most, the book she had to read, the first pages of something she was at last beginning to write that, once she’d lost them, left her back at the same point of departure as always, a dispirited tangle of projects, none of them entirely anchored in reality. She finally found a cigarette, a single, bent cigarette, and put it between her lips while still searching for the lighter, but it was Mario who spotted it and offered her a light.
“If you smoke you’ll feel even worse,” he said.
“I couldn’t possibly feel worse.”
“Come on, calm down. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“Don’t go.” Blanca gripped him. “Don’t leave me alone.”
Both of them would have been surprised to learn that before much more time had passed he would be promising never to leave her alone again. That night he took her back to her house in a taxi—she couldn’t remember the address but he found an envelope in her purse that was printed with it—and at the entrance to the building Blanca asked him to come up, clinging to him with the same anguish as a while earlier when she was afraid he was going to go for a glass of water. The apartment, part of which was also the former studio of Jimmy N., looked catastrophic to Mario: a perverse mixture of filth and disorder, sordid domesticity and vaguely bohemian set design, like a movie showing how artists used to suffer in the olden days. Blanca walked across the whole apartment turning on all the lights as if she were afraid someone were there or as if she were still hoping Naranjo had come back. In the bedroom where, as in all the rooms, canvases leaned against the wall and newspapers and posters were strewn everywhere, the very large bed was unmade and the sheets were visibly dirty, thought Mario. On the night table was an overflowing ashtray, a glass half-full of water and a small bottle of capsules whose label Mario examined with some concern. On the wall over the bed, a large unframed canvas, carelessly held in place with thumb tacks and staples, bore a muddled shape that it took Mario some time to recognize as a body, and then as a naked female body, and a face that, despite the brush strokes that disfigured it as if it were reflected in murky and turbulent waters, was Blanca’s face. For some reason it intimidated him to find himself simultaneously in the presence of a woman and a painting that showed her naked, even though her nakedness was rendered almost unrecognizable by the painting’s style, which Mario dared to conjecture was expressionist—or perhaps by the painter’s inability to correctly reproduce an image.
Blanca sat down on the bed, rummaged through the drawer of the night table, slammed it shut, then poked through the ashtray until she located a cigarette that was almost intact—she must have put it out only seconds after lighting it the night before. The reek of old cigarette smoke and sheets long unchanged was sickening. Mario, who didn’t like visiting other people’s houses, had an unpleasant feeling that he was invading someone’s intimate privacy. What right did he have to be there, with a woman who was a complete stranger, at two in the morning, in a bedroom in which there were ostensible signs of the presence of another male? What was he doing there when the woman, Blanca, whom he was already beginning to like, seemed to have forgotten his presence entirely? Not daring to step inside, he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched her bury her head between her knees, perched on the edge of the bed with a trail of smoke still ascending on one side. He noticed that she was shaking and was afraid she was about to vomit again. But this time she was shaking because she was crying, silently, in hard, dry sobs that were as alien to Mario as was the cigarette she was holding between her fingers. Afraid she’d set the sheets on fire, Mario approached her, timid and cautious, took the cigarette away, and put it out with disgust in the ashtray. Blanca lifted her eyes and seemed not to remember who he was. At moments, Mario’s compassion was already turning to tenderness. By now he found her much, much prettier than he had a few hours earlier when they were introduced.
“What do you think, shall I make some coffee?” he said, trying to make his voice sound natural and relaxed, the voice of a man who’s used to going out at night and spending lots of time with women and artists. Blanca managed to focus her eyes on him and moved her head in a gesture that looked like nodding.
There wasn’t a plate, spoon, or cup that wasn’t dirty in that kitchen, and that hadn’t been dirty for at least a week. The sink was hard to find beneath the pile of filthy dishes. When he managed to rescue the coffeepot and began trying to wash it out, Mario discovered that the water had been cut off. And of course there were no bottles of water in the refrigerator stored up in case of the usual restrictions. All that was there were a container of rancid margarine and an unopened bottle of mayonnaise, along with a moldy tomato. Mario, like all very orderly people, was not only appalled by this disaster but felt reaffirmed and almost smug in his own habits. He went back to the bedroom to tell Blanca he couldn’t make coffee and found her asleep, on her side, facing the light on the night table, her two hands holding the pillow, her legs pulled up against her stomach, breathing through her mouth, with sweat gleaming on her upper lip. She hadn’t even taken off her shoes. Very carefully, Mario removed them and then slowly pulled the blanket up to her chin, try
ing not to wake her, watching her sleep with a delight all the more intense for being furtive. He thought about leaving her a note on the nightstand or even on the bathroom mirror as he’d seen in the movies, but he wasn’t carrying paper or pen, and in any case had no idea what to write. He was tempted to leave her one of his cards but decided against it just in time; that would have been, he later considered, far too commercial and impertinent a gesture. He stood there for a minute or two more, watching Blanca sleep, without knowing what to do, what strategy to come up with so the night’s accidental connection wouldn’t be lost. But he lacked experience as well as shrewdness and was suddenly afraid that the man she’d called out to once or twice in her delirium, the owner of the three or four masculine articles strewn about the house, would unexpectedly appear and place him in an ambiguous and even dangerous situation.…
His heart jumped at the sound of an elevator. When he went closer to Blanca so as to switch off the lamp on the nightstand, he felt like kissing her on the lips. She opened her eyes, still asleep, shivered, repeated the other man’s name. Mario turned off the bedroom light and then went around the apartment switching off all the other lights with his incorrigible instinct for thrift. It was three in the morning when he got back out to the street. He walked home, a little dazed by the strangeness of being awake and out in the street at that hour, and with a feeling of novelty and gratification, as if he were living out the first draft of an as yet indeterminate adventure. Then he realized he hadn’t even taken the precaution of jotting down Blanca’s phone number.
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.
In Her Absence Page 5
