Antonio Molina - In Her Absence

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.

WHAT VANITY COULDhave 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 entrance 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.