Antonio Molina - In Her Absence

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 contemptible. 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.

SHORTLY AFTER THATshe 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.