In Her Absence

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  At the time Mario met her, Blanca drank six or seven vodkas per day, smoked two packs of Camels, and carried a purse stuffed with a confusion of dirty tissues, shreds of tobacco, loose rolling papers, and pills, both uppers and downers. Her life with the painter Naranjo, who’d initially dazzled her with his pretensions to genius and the visual force of his work, had quickly and foreseeably collapsed into a torturous hell of abandonments, reconciliations, disloyal acts, and abrupt departures that could have gone on for years had it not been for Mario’s appearance.

  People said, and Mario was sure it was true, that Blanca had played an important role in creating Naranjo’s success. (Mario would have committed suicide before calling him “Jimmy.”) Not only had she encouraged him, not only had she made him a better man, ennobling him with the beneficial influence of her admiration, she’d also used the very family influences she refused to resort to on her own behalf to find buyers for his paintings and convince galleries to show them. She’d marshaled her friends at newspapers and radio stations to interview him and write about his work, and had done so with a grace and tenacity that Naranjo himself lacked, or at least lacked then, when he was still pretending to be an antisocial artiste maudit, years before winning the Jaén Biennial and being converted to what he himself called, with the brazenly cynical mercantilism that passed for state-of-the-art modernity in the 1980s, el bisnes.

  The energy Blanca would expend on behalf of other people’s talents could be inexhaustible, even miraculous. And perhaps it was because she poured herself so generously into these external causes, Mario thought, that she lacked the drive to make herself into something, to carry through with any project of her own that would have required a concentrated effort of her will to complete. She had a very rare gift, the gift of admiration, and she knew how to explain what she admired and why she admired it with such conviction that her enthusiasm became contagious.

  When she first met Naranjo in 1982 or ’83, no one believed in his work, not even Naranjo. Blanca was the one who somehow convinced him that he truly was a painter and that the general indifference to his work wasn’t due to the mediocrity of his paintings, as Naranjo himself had begun to think, but to the mediocrity of the audience, the incurable Spanish ignorance, the cultural wretchedness of the provinces. It was Blanca who dissuaded him from the grim temptation to take a government exam that could lead to a post as a professor of drawing. It was because of her that his work was entered into the competition for the Jaén City Council Biennial, in which Naranjo was refusing to participate, not only because it disgusted him to play along with power, as he was always saying, but also because he feared the humiliation of not being chosen. Without his knowledge—at that period he was generally lost in a haze of hashish and gin—Blanca chose one of his paintings and sent it to the Biennial, and she may also have spoken to one of the members of the jury about him, perhaps the very professor to whom she owed her lasting passion for Puccini. That last rumor was one she hotly denied, for even long after marrying Mario it infuriated her to hear anyone question Naranjo’s talent. In any case it was clear that she did everything she could to promote her artist boyfriend’s career, and in her own way she succeeded.

  She was also the one who didn’t let him be lulled into settling for local, provincial accolades. After the Jaén Biennial, he won the Zabaleta Prize, given by the municipal authorities of Quesada, and a few months later he was chosen to do the poster for the Baeza festival, which was a scandal in that very conservative city, a shocking rupture with the conventions that had governed that type of poster until then. In the province of Jaén, Naranjo became the radical personification of the avant-garde, but he would very likely have squandered this success if it hadn’t been for Blanca’s impassioned demands: he couldn’t settle for what he’d already achieved, he had to make the definitive leap and become known in Granada, Madrid, across the wide world.

  Without realizing it, she was working toward her own downfall. It was the contact with Madrid that finally sent Naranjo over the edge and transformed him into his abominable caricature Jimmy N., which sounded more like a disc jockey’s name than a painter’s. It wasn’t always possible for Blanca to go with him on his trips to the nation’s capital city, and though she was far too generous to be jealous on principle, as so many women are, she soon noticed that Naranjo was transforming at a dizzying rate, or perhaps showing his true colors.

  News of his great triumph in Madrid spread all over Jaén, though it later became clear that word of said triumph had never actually reached Madrid. People were also talking about what they started to call his “Nuevo look.” The crew-necked sweaters, work pants, and solid work boots of a proletarian realist or American abstract expressionist had been replaced by a wardrobe abundant in tight black leather garments and leopard- or zebra-print fabrics. He got rid of his beard and shaved his sideburns all the way up to the temples, for those were times in which the audacities of modernity seemed inseparable from a certain extravagance of hairstyle, and the selection of that hairstyle was as decisive in a person’s life as the choice of a political ideology had been ten years earlier. Startled, then dumbfounded, and finally shattered by bitterness and a sense of betrayal, Blanca still couldn’t bring herself to break up with him, and she attributed the most benign meaning she could to the new things she heard him say and saw him do, while trying not to pay too much attention to the pointy-toed shoes and newly acquired passion for disco music, parties, and cocaine. Even so, where he was concerned she was already starting to lose her habit of passionately adopting as her own the enthusiasms of a man she admired.

  The Naranjo she’d fallen in love with was a gruff, taciturn artist, reserved to the point of claustrophobia and misanthropy, a steadfast communist, a user of hashish, but especially of alcohol, alien to all social conventions including employment, monogamy, paternity, scheduling, and the latest styles in painting, fond of finishing off his nights of bohemian revelry drinking pastis in the brothels, for in certain provincial intellectual circles of the time such inveterately masculine debauchery was celebrated as a statement of liberating marginality and dynamic dissidence. The Jimmy N. who began to emerge after the first trips to Madrid, the one who years later would shine forth in all his glory in the fashionable bars of Jaén, was an eccentric and rather effeminate diva, shamelessly addicted to the blandishments of power and money, dressed like a fashion model, but with the hard, ancient features of a man of the countryside, the faint shadow of a rural beard contrasting with the languid pallor that at the time was de rigueur. He began assembling an entourage of young disciples who constituted a vague art or design movement they called La Factory. They gave each other female nicknames and celebrated and repeated anything he said as if they were a kind of brainwashed sect, and indeed more than once they reminded Blanca of a band of Hare Krishnas. They were the ones who started calling him Jimmy N. and imitating his mannerisms and way of dressing, though it sometimes seemed as if he were imitating them which, given his age, was ridiculous in a way that was painfully visible even to Blanca’s not always wide-open eyes. Now he declared himself a fan of cartoons and the most banal pop music hits, he who, only a little while before, would shut himself in his studio every morning to paint to the sound of blaring jazz, just like his hero, Jackson Pollock. During his black hours of discouragement, he’d often told Blanca that he’d rather burn his paintings or throw them on a garbage dump than humiliate himself by giving in to the demands of commercial art galleries, but now he liked to repeat a line that was very quickly copied and popularized by his disciples although, as Blanca discovered some time later, it hadn’t even originated with him: “Time to wise up, Blanquita: the avant-garde is the marketplace.”

  On one of his first visits back from Madrid after setting up a studio there, Blanca overcame the cowardice of her love to ask him straight out whether he had another girlfriend. Naranjo, or rather Jimmy N., swore he didn’t and seemed so hurt by her suspicions that he made her feel unfair, guilty, and cont
emptible. Without noticing how, she went from accuser to accused; instead of asking him for explanations she was begging his forgiveness. They managed to patch things up, and spent one more night of passion together that was almost like old times, except now they needed some help from cocaine, which was beginning to replace hashish on the cultural scale of prestige. It was a stimulant, not a relaxant; it promoted a speediness that was in keeping with the era; it was clean, smoke-free, residue-free, and instantaneous; it was said to arouse prodigious sexual desire; and furthermore, it did not create addiction, and had nothing to do with the laid-back hippy aura of hashish or the sordid manginess of heroin.…

  They spent that weekend together and Naranjo left on Sunday night aboard the express train to Madrid. A few minutes before the train left, as they were saying good-bye, he winked at her and suggested in a low voice that they visit the train’s restroom together. For a moment Blanca was flattered and surprised, thinking he might want to have a quick, wild fuck—a daring and almost impossible plan in that tiny space. But instead Naranjo asked her for the mirror she carried in her purse and made a couple of lines of cocaine on it with a recently acquired credit card. “If it were a Visa Gold card, the coke would taste even better,” he said, passing his index finger along the edge of the card, then bringing it greedily to his mouth and extracting every last trace of pleasure out of the cocaine by rubbing it into his gums, his wide country-boy gums, as hard to conceal as the dark shadow of his beard or the Jaén accent that rose unchecked through the string of fashionable words, feminine diminutives, and pseudo-English terminology that threaded across his campy monologues.

  When Blanca told him these stories, Mario felt as if they had happened in a different world from the one he knew, in some other city that couldn’t be the same one where he lived. Before meeting her, he’d never heard of Jimmy Naranjo’s fame or even his existence—which Blanca found very strange—and he’d never imagined that there were people in Jaén who used cocaine and lived such disorderly, bohemian lives.

  Blanca had agreed to join Naranjo in Madrid a few days later to help him prepare for a long-awaited exhibit, his first solo show in the capital city. They’d agreed she would come up Friday night, but she couldn’t wait that long. She caught the express twenty-four hours early, and at 7:30 Friday morning, one of those freezing Madrid winter mornings, she emerged from a taxi and opened the door of the studio, a former pharmaceutical warehouse on Calle Augusto Figueroa that Naranjo had immediately started calling el loft, and that he could never have rented to begin with had it not been for a providential check from Blanca’s mother.

  By the dawn glow that came in through a vast skylight, Blanca saw Naranjo naked and on his knees next to the bed, around which unframed canvases and paint-stained drop cloths hung like curtains in a theater. When he heard the key in the lock, Naranjo had raised his head from between the open knees of someone who was lying back on the bed, a very young boy whose face Blanca didn’t glimpse because she turned and ran outside without even slamming the door, afraid that if she looked back her eyes would see again something she’d never wanted to see, something she’d never forget.

  Six

  SHORTLY AFTER THAT she met Mario. In an inscription written in a book she gave him for their first anniversary, Blanca alluded to the sad state she’d been in and her gratitude to Mario by citing these lines from Rafael Alberti:

  Cuando tú apareciste

  Penaba yo en la entraña más profunda

  De una cueva sin aire y sin salida.

  When you appeared

  I was agonizing in the deepest cavern

  Of a cave with no air and no exit.

  They met, she sometimes said, against all odds, on one of the rare occasions when their separate worlds happened to coincide, for even in small cities and state capitals as provincial as Jaén the people who brush past each other in the street live at interplanetary distances from one another: even when their paths cross it’s very difficult for them to actually see each other.

  In order for it to happen, Mario had to turn up one night in the kind of place he never went, a newly opened club called Chinatown, housed in a former convent, with laser beams, stacks of video screens, and monolithic black speakers blasting pounding rhythms. One of the department heads had to have a bachelor party, in order for Mario—so befuddled by the music, the lights, and the crowd that he couldn’t locate his co-workers, for they were the ones who’d gotten him into this pickle, as always, practically dragging him to this hellish spot after a dinner that had already been unbearable in and of itself—to be standing at the fluorescent bar of that discothèque holding a lukewarm gin and tonic and trying to hear or say something to a girl he’d been introduced to a while before, whose name (because of the noise and the gin) he wasn’t sure he remembered.

  Blanca told him later, when they compared notes in an attempt to reorganize the initial muddled episodes of their shared past, that she couldn’t remember his name either. In her case it wasn’t only the loud music, but also the abuse of alcohol, cocaine, and pills that, combined with perpetual sleep deprivation, had weakened her memory, especially her verbal memory, to the point that she’d be talking and suddenly find herself unable to think of a word, or be on the point of saying someone’s name to find that she’d forgotten it. Words were missing, hours of her life were missing, sometimes a step was missing when she was going down a staircase and suddenly she’d be overcome with vertigo and know that she couldn’t go on living like that.

  Mario didn’t know it at the time, but the monitors were playing a video clip about Jimmy N.’s latest show, which had opened in triumph a few days earlier in the galleries of the Savings and Loan, from where, the rumor went, it would be traveling a few weeks later to New York (and indeed, with an eye to the indispensable American market, the clip was narrated in English). The bank’s Office of Cultural Programs had spared no expense in producing the video, which was cofinanced by the Cultural Council of Andalucía. The music hadn’t actually been composed by Santiago Auserón, as was claimed in the opening credits, but was indeed by a very close collaborator of his, and the footage had been commissioned from a director of TV advertisements who’d won prizes at several international festivals.

  By then Blanca had broken up with Naranjo two or three times, but that night she couldn’t muster the willpower to keep from going to Chinatown in the hope of seeing him. She was almost trembling when she got there, already regretting that she’d come, and then all her fear of running into him, which she hadn’t lost even after drinking a vodka straight up, turned to disappointment when she learned that Naranjo had just left. The presentation of the video had been a huge success, one of his disciples who’d stayed behind to keep on eye on subsequent showings told her with effeminate rapture. Everyone had been there, the most high, he said in English, the Municipal Cultural Councillor, the Provincial Representative of the regional government, the Vice President of the Savings and Loan, it was overflowing with VIPs in here, chortled the pale, shaven-headed Hare Krishna acolyte in his heavy black clothes and heavy black shoes with thick rubber soles, his temples so closely shaven that they were blue.

  Blanca tried hard to keep from nursing a growing resentment, a petty bitterness about being left out of the picture just when Naranjo was beginning to enjoy a success that wouldn’t have been possible without her. But she knew that success tends to separate artists from the people who supported them during their early obscurity. She still felt a reluctant but obsessive love for Naranjo, in which her memories of pleasure and of their former intellectual alliance played no role whatsoever: it was nothing but the pure inertia of love, its indestructible tendency to outlast everything else, beyond comfort, beyond reason, even beyond Blanca’s own desires, for after the scene in the Madrid studio she was sure she could never go to bed with Naranjo again. Steeling up her courage, fully prepared to understand and accept, she’d asked him if he’d fallen in love with that boy. She wasn’t at all ready for his reaction. Na
ranjo burst out laughing, looked at her as if she were an idiot he was continually having to reproach for the naive vulgarity of her middle-class upbringing, and said, “What do you mean ‘in love’? He was a rent boy from Calle Almirante.”

  She knew she was never going to be able to trust him again, but if Naranjo had come to her and made promises or tearfully proffered some improbable declaration—“It wasn’t what you were imagining,” as if it were something she’d merely imagined and not seen with her own eyes—Blanca would have gone against the dictates of her dignity and intelligence in order to believe or try to believe him, successfully sustaining the illusion until the next betrayal. She took tranquilizers to fall asleep and stimulants to wake up; she made it through the days on endless cigarettes, vodkas, and coffees, in a stupefied haze of lassitude, bodily malaise, and desolation. She would wake up at 5:00 a.m. to find the television still on, and sometimes when she bumped into doorframes or hallway corners she’d realize that her walk was as lurching and unsteady as a drunk’s.

  Standing at the bar in Chinatown that night, she’d barely noticed Mario’s face and would never have had any further recollection of his existence if not for the fact that after a disjointed and practically shouted conversation—during which she never stopped looking around in case Naranjo reappeared—she started feeling sick. Thinking this was caused by the dense heat in the crowded room, she asked Mario to please excuse her, she was going outside to get a little fresh air and would be right back. A few minutes later, tired of waiting and exhausted by the noise and people, Mario went outside himself, on his way home. He found her on the sidewalk, doubled over between two cars with one hand pressed against her stomach while the other held onto her hair, vomiting and moaning, her body convulsed at regular intervals by violent shudders.