In Her Absence

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  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.

  Three

  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.

  As he ate his vichyssoise, Blanca had begun explaining something to Mario about a cultural project in which she might be offered some sort of minor role—as a translator, perhaps, or a costume designer—but he wasn’t paying much attention, though he pretended to be absorbed in what she was sayi
ng. What really interested him, what was keeping him absorbed, weren’t Blanca’s vague hopes for employment, which so often came to nothing, but her daily, miraculous presence, the slightly nasal sound of her voice, the way she moved her lips, the focused and serious attention with which her eyes rested on him as she told him about someone apparently very famous who had just arrived in the city and whom they would both very soon have the chance to meet in person. The name, Lluís Onésimo, seemed familiar to Mario but he didn’t want to ask anything more about the man for fear of seeming ignorant. Also, he’d just heard something from the television that had completely distracted him, or rather put him on guard.

  The anchorman was talking about a Frida Kahlo exhibition that had just opened in Madrid. When she’d seen the show advertised in the newspaper the day before, Blanca had fervently resolved that they must go: this was a unique retrospective, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. With sorrow and remorse, he’d reminded her that it was nearly the end of the month and there wasn’t enough left in their budget to cover the cost of the trip, the hotel, and the restaurants in Madrid. The show would undoubtedly stay up for several months, he told her by way of appeasement, though he knew it was futile. Anyway, they’d do better to wait until summer vacation; this was the busiest time of year at his office and what he really felt like doing when he got home Friday afternoon was staying home and relaxing, not setting off on an exhausting trip to Madrid and coming back on Sunday night by the express train that got into Jaén at 7:00 Monday morning, which meant, as he knew from past experience, that he’d have to go directly from the station to the office without even time for a shower.

  Blanca said nothing, lowered her head, and went to her room and shut the door as soon as they’d finished eating and cleared off the table. Nevertheless, her face didn’t look terribly serious; she had only a faraway air of disappointment that Mario had learned to recognize in a slight fold that formed at one side of her mouth when she gave him a perfunctory smile, out of politeness or as a gesture of kindness, or not even that, as a sign to him to leave her alone: it wasn’t something worth arguing over or even talking about.

  Guilty, ashamed, afraid of losing her, Mario knocked softly on the door. When he heard only music from the radio, he opened it cautiously and saw that Blanca was stretched out on the sofa in the dark, in the small, warm room that was her place of refuge, even though it looked out on an airshaft crisscrossed with clotheslines and the neighbors’ voices, noisy television sets and shouting children that were always audible in there and kept her from concentrating. She had an old writing desk, a gift from her mother, with little drawers that she kept locked but that he often wished he could open. Blanca’s pens and pencils were always lined up on top of it, inkwells with sepia-colored inks, the notebooks where she jotted down thoughts, copied down poems and phrases, pasted clippings from magazines and newspapers, the lilac-tinted stationery and envelopes with her name printed on them, her name, which made Mario happy just to see it written out.

  He sat down next to her on the edge of the sofa and ran his hand over her smooth, straight hair, over her cheeks that were wet with silent weeping. He begged her pardon, blamed himself for being such an egotist, and told her that if she wanted, they’d go to Madrid that very weekend. Blanca asked him in a low voice to please leave her alone, and she begged his forgiveness as well, blaming herself for being depressed and frazzled: it was the terrible heat that was already starting to set in, the ever-problematic first day of her period. She stood up, her hair disheveled, and Mario thought in sorrow and fear that she had the same empty, drawn look on her face as during the early days, when he was already in love with her without being able to imagine that Blanca might some day pay him sufficient attention even to take full note of his presence, much less reciprocate his feelings.

  Twenty-four hours later, when he thought the crisis had passed, Mario, his back to the television, silently savoring a spoonful of exquisite vichyssoise, watched Blanca’s face, waiting for the signs of enthusiasm and subsequent glumness that the name Frida Kahlo would inspire there. She’d see one of Kahlo’s paintings on the screen, one of the self-portraits Mario secretly considered abominable, and she’d regret not living in Madrid and not having the time or money to travel wherever she wanted. She’d probably even stop eating, or stop speaking to him, withdrawing into silence as if into a room that would forever be inaccessible to him, writing for hours on end in one of the notebooks she kept under lock and key.

  The name Frida Kahlo was repeated two or three times more, and each time Mario feared Blanca’s inevitable reaction, like someone who sees a flash of lightning and waits, counting the seconds, for the thunder to come. But the announcer moved on to developments in the world of sports and Blanca was still talking to him about a possible job; he couldn’t really understand what it involved but encouraged her warmly to pursue it. If only he’d paid a bit more attention, if only his obsessive vigilance hadn’t betrayed him by keeping him from observing this new danger, the new name that was beginning to crop up in her conversation.

  He thought, without being able to acknowledge the thought to himself, that what Blanca really needed was to spend some time studying and then take a civil service exam that would lead to a steady job. If she could devote herself to an ongoing, tangible enterprise, it would take her out of her daydreams or at least offer her a solid anchorage in reality. Maybe the fact that she’d paid no attention to the news about the Frida Kahlo exhibit was a good sign; perhaps she was about to change, but not too much, only a little, just enough to stop withdrawing so frequently into silence, and stop rejecting the idea of having a child with such cutting hostility. “I don’t think we have the right to bring anyone else into this horrible world,” she’d say.

  Another man might have thought she was flighty, but for Mario Blanca’s endless sequence of new and different jobs and widely disparate enthusiasms was proof of her vitality, her audacity, her innate rebelliousness, qualities he found particularly admirable because he was largely devoid of them. By means of bitter struggle and scholarships that were always meager, he’d come to Jaén from his village, Cabra de Santocristo, to complete high school, surviving the sad winters of the end of childhood in boardinghouses, and graduating with excellent grades in days when there were still tough exams to pass in order to qualify for graduation. Then, frightened by the length and difficulty of the training period for a technical architect—the career he would have chosen—he’d become a draftsman. Six years younger than he, born into another social class and raised during the days of color television, yogurt, and annual vacations at the beach, Blanca had a far less punitive idea of the world. No one had ever inculcated into her the two principles that loomed over the childhood of every male of Mario’s generation and peasant class: that he was born into a vale of tears and that he had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

  Blanca came from an opulent Málaga family of lawyers, notaries, and land registrars, but she’d never wanted to benefit from these social advantages. Mario thought this was heroic, although he disapproved of her frequent and vehement mockery of all her relatives, beginning with her mother, a menacing widow who wore false eyelashes, smoked Winston Super Longs, and never paid the slightest attention to anything except herself—but who had, more than once, helped them out of a tight spot with an overnight bank transfer or a check made out to cash.

  Penury makes people fearful and conformist; it’s the secure possession of money, Mario suspected, that awakens and nourishes audacity. He enjoyed reading works of contemporary history and had noticed that most if not all revolutionary leaders were not of working-class origin. The occasional financial help from her mother aside—and between those occasions whole years could go by—Blanca lived off Mario’s salary and her sporadic earnings as a hostess at conventions, a translator of catalogs, and, eventually, an exhibition guard, but she’d grown up in such great economic security, her sense of entitlement was so innate, that she never felt any fear about the f
uture, and never bothered to behave prudently in view of future benefits, to the extent that both times she’d had a formal contract for a full-time job, she quit after only a few months: the daily routine exhausted her or she couldn’t stand dealing with a boss who was making passes at her. For a person with a temperament like hers, Mario told himself, a day job was worse than a prison sentence.

  Her nonconformity and impatience had also propelled her into enrolling for and subsequently abandoning two different university degrees, one in fine arts and the other in English philology. Unlike most people her age, Blanca, who was about to turn thirty, had renounced nothing: she wanted to paint, she wanted to write, she wanted to know everything there was to know about Italian opera or Kabuki theater or classic Hollywood movies, she wanted to travel to the most exotic cities, the most imaginary countries, her eyes would grow moist watching Lady of Shanghai or listening to Jessye Norman, and she’d read aloud in tones of throbbing excitement the reviews in the El País Sunday supplement that extolled the gastronomic delights on offer in the great restaurants of Madrid and San Sebastián, delights that, since they had Italian or French, if not Basque names, Mario was unable to imagine. Each time they ate in a restaurant, he would turn out to have forgotten the names of the different varieties of pasta and the French culinary vocabulary she’d tried to teach him, and it was now a classic joke between them that he’d never be able to remember what gnocchi meant, or pesto or carpaccio or magret de canard, not to mention the even more inaccessible terminology of the Asian cuisines, for which Blanca developed such enthusiasm during a certain period that she learned to use chopsticks with the same ease and precision as she handled a fish knife, until finally the lack of any good Chinese, Japanese, or Indian restaurant in Jaén discouraged her.