They didn’t see each other again. She may have moved to another city or gone back to the village; she always used to say that big noisy places like Jaén wore her out. Mario believed for years that Juli had vanished from his memory without a trace and had played no role at all in the destiny that took him to Blanca. Only much later, in the choking fullness of his misery, did he think again of his first girlfriend and the future with her that had not come about, and he was afraid that out of some colossal misunderstanding, some fundamental error in the laws governing the world, someone had assigned him a biography that wasn’t really his, a marriage to a woman who was obviously far better suited to another man, perhaps neither the painter Naranjo nor the scoundrel Onésimo, but in any case another man who was not Mario, a man who was taller, blonder, better educated, better traveled, more imaginative, more like her, not a draftsman at the Jaén Provincial Council whose expectations of life were compatible not with Blanca’s—however hard both of them tried to make them compatible and believe that they were—but with those of the secretary of a driving school, the type of woman Juli precisely personified: a woman who would never suffer because she couldn’t attend the Bienniale di Venezia or the premiere of Madame Butterfly in Covent Garden in London, a woman who wouldn’t have known a thing about modern art or opera or Covent Garden, but without therefore being an idiot or a mental bureaucrat, as Blanca so often said, as if there were dishonor in being a bureaucrat.…
On his worst days, during his blackest diatribes against himself, through the many sleepless nights when he lay in the dark next to the inviolate distance that separated him from Blanca, Mario would torment himself with the thought that he should have married Juli, should have arranged a time to get together with her as she’d suggested when they ran into each other in the bank. He accused himself of senseless arrogance, masculine vanity and ambition, of aspiring to things that were out of his reach; he imagined himself coldly leaving Blanca and going off in search of Juli, calculating that if he hadn’t broken up with her they’d have a child or two by now, and in his embittered delirium he imagined the life he would have had with another woman so vividly that he couldn’t help starting to feel as if he were betraying Blanca. Then he was frightened by the danger of never having met Blanca at all, and to make up for these thoughts and console himself he’d plunge deep into the unlimited memory of all the things he’d enjoyed thanks to her and with her, comparing those years of enthusiasm and passion with the years of conjugal stability and paternity he would have been living out with Juli as routinely as he served out the years of his employment at the Council.
It wasn’t only that he was crazy about Blanca, that he liked her better than any other woman he saw in any part of reality, including movies and advertisements, and that his desire could be aroused by nothing more than the memory of her naked body or by brushing against her in the kitchen as they were washing the dishes. It was that in all the years of his life he had only ever been in love with her, so that his idea of love was inseparable from Blanca’s existence, and since he had now known love and no longer knew how to do without it and didn’t imagine that other women could offer it to him, there was nothing for him to do but go on living with her, under whatever conditions—he understood this almost at the end, vanquished, perhaps unworthy, more in love than ever—whatever conditions Blanca, or the stranger or shadow who had supplanted her, wanted to dictate.
What he most bitterly reproached himself for was his lack of vigilance and cunning, his excessive confidence not in the love or fidelity of Blanca, whom he would never reproach for anything, but in male nature, or the abject version of it represented by the individual whose name Mario had heard and read several times without paying attention to it, without realizing that the only real danger emanated from him. Did he first see the name Lluís Onésimo in one of the cultural supplements that Blanca went through so avidly on Saturday mornings over breakfast, did he hear it on television, in that program Metrópolis that he always fell asleep halfway through, or was it Blanca’s own sacred lips that had formed its syllables for the first time, with the same reverent and entirely unmerited generosity with which she pronounced so many names that awoke no echo but ignorance and hostility in Mario, names of artists, directors, choreographers, or vile, conceited writers whom she approached after their readings, asking them in her warm and admiring voice to sign a copy of their book for her or talk for a few minutes, men just in from Madrid with the smell of tobacco and whisky on their breath and eyes that would invariably move toward Blanca’s neckline or give her a sidelong glance as she held out the book for them to sign as if she were offering up her whole life on a platter.
Animosity sharpened his memory: the first time he heard the name Lluís Onésimo was an ordinary Tuesday in June, a day like all the other sweet monotonous days of his vanished happiness, and he even remembered the first course of the meal Blanca had made, a vichyssoise, and that the TV news was going on about Frida Kahlo, which alarmed him because he didn’t yet know that Blanca, in one of her impetuous aesthetic shifts, had ceased, from one day to the next, to be interested in Frida Kahlo, and that very soon, fatally drawn by the gravitational pull of Onésimo’s intellectualism, she would abjure what the villainous multimedia artist from Valencia disdainfully called the “traditional supports.” The era of classic formats, canvas, oil, even acrylic, had come to an end, the era of the Painter with a capital P, elitist and exclusive, was over, and had never been more than a holdover from the nineteenth century, a parody whose pathetic extreme was now embodied by the obsolete Jimmy N.
Those were the things Mario heard Lluís Onésimo say during the first meal they shared on the day Blanca introduced them to each other, and though he understood none of it and disliked the artist’s looks and even his exaggerated accent, Mario took base satisfaction in the belittlement of his former rival Naranjo, and observed with tenderness, pity, and almost remorse that when she heard those words Blanca lowered her head and pressed her lips together, and didn’t dare defend the man she had so recently admired.
With painful lucidity, with the retrospective bitterness of not having guessed in time, Mario realized far too late that Blanca’s sudden lack of interest in Frida Kahlo, which had come as such a relief, was a clue to the fact that she had just developed a gigantic new admiration: she’d learned everything about Onésimo in the art magazines and the El País Sunday supplement, she’d read the articles about what she called his installations and performances, and with all the fervor of a recent convert she’d admired his public statements, which were often scandalous, his shaved head, his perennial three-day stubble, his black clothing, the vaguely Asiatic tattoo on the back of his right hand, his rings. She had thought, with an intolerable sense of having been treated unfairly and passed over, that she would never have the chance to see one of Lluís Onésimo’s installations in person or attend one of his performances, and she had imagined the impossible gift of the wonder of a conversation with him, a very long conversation, lasting all night, with cigarettes and drinks, about art, and movies no one in Jaén had seen, and books no one in the whole city but her had read. And suddenly one day, one of those smoothly monotonous days that Mario so cherished, Blanca read in the local paper that Lluís Onésimo was preparing an exhibit and lecture for the Cultural Center of the Savings and Loan, and so she could go talk to him, could even offer to help him install his work, willing and enthusiastic, rapturous, uncontainable. The minute he saw them standing together, after enduring Onésimo’s nonstop verbiage and nauseating table manners for two hours—strange that Blanca who was generally such a stickler hadn’t seemed to notice—Mario López thought with clairvoyant dread that this ill-favored individual was going to seduce Blanca away from him.
Eight
WHAT VANITY COULD have made him take Blanca’s love for granted? What mindless blindness could have led him to believe he was out of danger and their life together would go serenely on forever, the way a job does once the civil service entra
nce exam has been passed? Perhaps Blanca’s indirect accusation was right: he, Mario, had become a mental bureaucrat; he’d thought getting married was like getting a permanent government position, like his job as draftsman at the Council, where he gradually accumulated experience, routine, and three-year review periods. Blanca never stopped by the office to see him or showed any interest in meeting any of his fellow workers. Mario had learned to resist the temptation to tell her about the little things that happened at work, disagreements with superiors or the petty intrigues of co-workers looking to advance another rung up the ladder. He’d start in with a story and notice that Blanca was distracted or, even worse, was smiling and nodding without paying much attention, and then he was afraid of boring her or seeming banal and he’d try to think of another topic of conversation or ask her what she’d done all morning and whom she’d seen.
But Blanca never gave a very precise account of her daily life. In almost everything she did say about herself and her feelings and desires, and in everything she told him about her past, there was a vagueness, an area of mystery she never clarified and that Mario didn’t always dare question her about.
It had been that way from the start, from their very first encounters, and Mario was not unaware that the aura of uncertainty that surrounded Blanca’s life and actions was as powerful an allure as physical desire in the rapid crystallization of his love. The more he wanted her the more he also wanted to know about her, but neither form of desire was ever fully satisfied, which made them all the more urgent to Mario who, for the first time in his life, at a late age and without prior experience, was discovering the upheavals and hypnotic effects of love.
He’d go looking for Blanca and not find her, wander around her building for a while and then give up, trail disconsolately back home, and find her there waiting for him in the entryway. He didn’t know what it was that drove him to look for her, and he didn’t understand what other reasons she had for trying to avoid him. She fell sick from depression and anemia, from the fearsome disarray of her daily life, and Mario, still no more than an obliging friend, keeping his love a secret, took care of her, used his administrative skills to help her sort through the disaster of her Social Security paperwork, managed to get the electric company to reconnect her after her power was cut off for nonpayment—without prior notification, she claimed. Under a mountain of assorted papers, old newspapers, and more than one pair of dirty underwear, Mario found the electric company’s warning notices, all unopened.
Little by little, almost furtively, he was making himself indispensable. When she was at her lowest point, so depressed and weakened she could barely get out of bed, Mario took three personal days off and spent them taking care of her and cleaning up her house, which was a more exhausting task than he could have foreseen but which left him, when he’d finished, with a very pleasant feeling of personal satisfaction, though he wasn’t sure whether Blanca had noticed any of the effort he had gone to. He bought detergents, sponges, window cleaners, polishes, disinfectants, mops, replacement mop heads, scouring pads, dish towels. He went to the home and kitchen section of the local Pryca and came back with the car fully loaded. He understood that Blanca had grown up in a household staffed with servants, raised in the belief that other people would take care of the housework, and he imagined, as well, with some degree of jealous spite, that Naranjo had been an incorrigible slob, taking the same approach to his own personal hygiene as to his canvases.
Blanca probably hadn’t had a proper meal for months before they met, “una comida como Dios manda,” as Mario would say, repeating one of his mother’s favorite expressions: a meal as God ordains. He talked to his mother over the phone two or three times a week, hearing her voice gradually turn into an old lady’s voice that seemed to come from very far away and that overwhelmed him with guilt and tenderness. It was his mother’s specialties that Mario knew best how to make, and he began preparing them for Blanca; cooking for her gave him a satisfying sense of himself as a skilled and diligent man that turned into something close to euphoria when she, at first so listless and uninterested, willingly ate up a plateful of lentil stew or chicken with rice and told him she’d never tasted anything so good.
He got used to living for Blanca, adapting his schedule to her needs, her sudden whims and outbursts. He enjoyed a kind of furtive and half-clandestine happiness, a happiness sustained by Blanca’s mere presence but continually assailed by crises of dejection and fear. The phone would ring and he’d be afraid the call was from Naranjo; someone would knock at the door and he’d go to answer, drying his hands on his apron and thinking he might see the painter’s hated face in front of him for the first time, afraid Naranjo’s arrival would expel him from the delicate, ambiguous situation he’d grown so accustomed to. He was more than a friend but not a lover, simply a kind of helpful figure, and he was afraid Blanca’s only feeling toward him was gratitude. Sometimes she’d look at him and seem to see not him but someone else.
He was ashamed of desiring her so much, ashamed of spying on her with primal hunger. She had moments of carelessness that plunged him into secret torments of an asphyxiating lust as strong as what he’d felt during his shadowy rural adolescence. Blanca would step out of the shower without having closed the bathroom door and he’d see her naked and white in the steam, tall and slim yet shapely, as elegant and exciting, he thought, as the models pictured in magazines, and so different from Juli, whose small, compact body he remembered only very dimly. Every morning he took a glass of fresh orange juice to her in bed, and when she sat up, still half-dozing, her face deliciously puffy after her first nights of deep, unbroken sleep in a very long time, the sheet would slip off her shoulders and reveal her small round breasts, which he barely glimpsed before averting his eyes in embarrassment, and Blanca would cover herself up unconcernedly as she drank the juice, then fall back to sleep.
The stronger his desire, the more excessive his love, the stiffer he grew. He became more and more timid with her, ever clumsier and more obliging, trying to make up with efficiency and practical assistance for what he felt to be his lack of attractiveness, the mediocre stature of everything he felt himself to be and to have in comparison to what Blanca deserved, what Blanca expected. Sometimes he thought she was aware of his anguished desire and was not flattered by it, only compassionate and detached. One night when he was about to leave, after they’d stayed up talking and drinking gin and tonic until very late—nowadays she allowed herself only a single gin and tonic every once in a while, and had Mario pour the gin—Blanca asked him to stay a little longer, and he was shaken with thrilled panic, imagining that now, at last, something that never happened was finally going to happen. After an instant’s hesitation, he sat down next to her on the sofa, not across from her as he’d been until then, and even that modest audacity almost made him dizzy.
“I’ll never be able to thank you for all you’re doing for me,” said Blanca with a serious smile and a confiding, intimate look that he thought perhaps he should bemoan, for he suspected that this was the lukewarm intimacy of someone who was not in love. “I’ll never be able to make it up to you.”
“But you’ve already made it up to me.” Mario was unexpectedly carried away by a torrent of eloquence. “No one has ever given me as much as you have; you’ve made me discover life. I feel as if I’ve been sleeping until now and you’ve finally woken me up. What was I doing when I met you? Working and meeting my monthly payments and reading the History of Spain every night. I was asleep and didn’t know it, and if it weren’t for you I could have grown old and never woken up at all, ever.”
“When I’m falling asleep at night,” she said, “I often hope I’ll never wake up.”
“I thought you were feeling better lately.” Mario was suddenly crushed by the thought that all his effort to care for Blanca had been in vain, that he hadn’t even managed to alleviate the sense of disaster and despair that had shocked him about her the night they met. Maybe she still missed Naranjo; she m
ight even be trying to call him when Mario wasn’t there, when he went back to his own apartment at night after washing the dishes like some eunuch butler.
Sitting so close to her on the sofa, exalted by the two gin and tonics he’d drunk, he thought that instead of paying so much attention to what she was saying he ought to take her in his arms and kiss her, really kiss her, on the mouth, not just the two polite little pecks dictated by protocol that he always gave her. But he didn’t do it, and went home as he always did, more depressed and disgusted with himself each time.
Back home, he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t sleep at all that whole night, didn’t have a second’s relief in the darkness or when he switched on the light. He masturbated anxiously and without pleasure, trying to concentrate on Blanca’s half-glimpsed nakedness, and ended up feeling the same shame as when he was a teenager. He was frightened by the reality of a pain he’d never experienced before, and that he couldn’t find a way to ward it off. Why was he so determined to go on seeing Blanca? Why did he imagine that being with her was the only possible way to achieve not even happiness, but simple calm, when in fact what he felt in her presence was a permanent state of insecurity, anguish, and regret for not daring to say and do what he wanted, or for having said or done something that might strike her as ridiculous or trivial?
In Her Absence Page 6