In Her Absence (9 page)

He pushed open the door and Blanca was there, standing next to his drawing table. She looked up at him and came to him as she never had before, as if they were lovers already. She came to him and took his face between her hands to keep him from giving her two little kisses on the cheeks, and she kissed him on the lips, and the taste of her mouth was made all the more delicious to Mario by the pride he felt at being kissed that way in front of his colleagues.

NOW THE WOMAN
who was not Blanca was walking down the hall toward him in Blanca’s green silk blouse and tight jeans, moving with a rhythm that wasn’t exactly the rhythm of Blanca’s footsteps, though she was wearing Blanca’s high-heeled shoes, or a pair of identical high-heeled shoes that revealed the delicate arch of her instep. Now when Mario heard her walking through the house, her footsteps resonated differently, in a silence that was
denser than even Blanca’s worst and most agonized silences, the ones that all Mario’s most devoted and submissive tenderness hadn’t been able to break through. But now the silence was different. He’d gotten into the habit of differentiating it with the same mental and sensory acuity that had enabled him to perceive that the woman who lived with him and dressed and spoke like Blanca was not Blanca, however perfectly she was trying to impersonate her, and that Blanca had left him, just as he’d always feared.

He wasn’t crazy, but there was no one he could talk to about his very serious suspicion that the woman he lived with was no longer Blanca, and this plunged him into the morbid solitude of someone who possesses an unconfessable secret. Any friend he might mention it to would undoubtedly find the suspicion completely outlandish, and he also came to realize, only now, that during the years he’d spent with Blanca he’d lost all his friends, who had generally struck Blanca as boring or lowbrow, and whom he, with cowardly submissiveness, hadn’t
had the courage to keep up with, just as he hadn’t preserved his former habits or personal tastes—and all so he could pretend to be someone he wasn’t, pretend to be on the same level as a woman who could never love him, even if she’d once tried to with a certain degree of conviction. A few days before she left, when Mario saw it all before him as clearly and irreparably as if it had already happened, he went to see her at the Savings and Loan and in a perfectly calm and natural tone of voice asked Blanca what on earth she saw in Onésimo, that obvious phony who had undoubtedly spotted her as easy prey and who described the heaps of bricks and piles of cables that under his tyrannical direction had been strewn here and there across the gallery, accompanied by explanatory wall texts in Valenciano and English, as “works of art.”

“My poor little darling, I can’t expect you to be able to understand,” Blanca said, standing there in front of Mario, and she gave him a quick caress that was undeniably condescending, even pitying, but that paralyzed him with tenderness. “Being
with Lluís is like standing at the edge of a cliff with Laurence Olivier in
Rebecca
.… You’re like my home. It’s as if you and I were sitting on a park bench together, like a couple in an old photograph. That’s the difference.”

During the good times, she’d been thankful for the steadiness of his character, the serene stability she herself lacked and that had helped her so much to emerge from the deep pit she was in when they met. “You hold me up,” she used to say. “You’re my foundation in the earth.”

Now the calm strength she’d once valued had been turned against him. She no longer wanted the home he had given her or the peaceful life he had woven around and for her, to defend her, as she herself used to say, from the worst part of her soul. Now she was making comparisons to movies and citing passages from works of literature. She wanted to peer down into the abyss, as if she knew what that word really meant, as if she hadn’t always been able to count, ultimately, on the protection of her family’s money and the solidity of her class.

Standing there in the gallery facing Blanca—Onésimo had granted her the greatest joy of her life by choosing her to be the show’s guard, for he claimed that the border between art and life had ruptured and in his installations there was no distance between the guard and the artist or between the guide and the public—Mario understood that he had lost everything, although at that moment he couldn’t quite remember the movie Blanca had alluded to; from its name he knew it had to be one of those subtitled black-and-white movies that played on TV late at night. So often, when he told her it was time to go to bed, Blanca would say no, she wanted to watch some Japanese or French movie with subtitles, and he’d go to bed and calculate in the darkness the number of days it had been since they went to bed at the same time, and he’d fall asleep hearing as if from very far away, from the other side of the stucco partition that separated the bedroom from the living room, the soundtrack of the movie she was watching with a fervor she almost never manifested toward real things, the
words spoken in a language he didn’t understand but in which she could repeat long citations for her friends.

He survived successive phases of fatalism and resolve, faked courage and irremediable desolation. Very often now when he got home at 3:05 or 3:10, Blanca wasn’t waiting for him; according to her she was held up at the gallery by her work that wasn’t simply, she stressed, in words borrowed from Onésimo, the work of a passive guard or mere repressive delegate of the authoritarian eye. Still, when she wasn’t going to be home in time for lunch, she would leave Mario a note, written in the private-school handwriting he liked so much, and she always tried to leave some food for him that he only needed to heat up. At those moments, Mario’s guilt would diminish or sweep away his fear, and he’d spend all afternoon waiting for Blanca, or screw up his courage and go to meet her at the Savings and Loan cultural center, overcoming not only his repugnance at the thought of running into Onésimo but also something else
he had a very hard time confessing to himself: the shooting stab of shame he felt for her when he heard the ridiculous pedantry of the things Blanca would say as she repeated expressions in French or English that Onésimo had once used or cited in some interview.

She was a different Blanca, and only he, her husband, was aware of her charade, the agitated state of her nerves, the imperceptible flush that rose into her face whenever Onésimo praised her. One day as he watched her in silence from across a table full of people talking loudly and smoking, all presided over by the artist from Valencia, he thought, “If you loved me, I’d make sure you never lost your self-respect.”

THAT LUNCH WAS
the end of everything, Mario remembered later when he tried to establish all the details in his mind, pursuing even the slightest tangible clue to Blanca’s escape and the appearance of this strange woman in his home. The lunch was held in honor of the closing of the exhibit or installation or whatever it was that had made the cultural center of the Savings and Loan look like a construction site for a month, and was
attended by artists, literary people, local journalists, and the director of the bank’s Cultural Division, who, perhaps the better to represent the institution that was paying for the meal, felt entitled to order a monstrous lobster which he proceeded to make short work of at almost the same velocity and sound volume at which Lluís Onésimo was ingesting his own lunch.

Alone and quiet, sitting across from Blanca, who was drinking far too much wine and paying rapt attention to Onésimo’s words but none at all to his loud mastication, Mario had to fight back a desire to burst into tears or stand up and leave, telling himself that his self-respect was still intact, or at least his patience, and that the following day, after Onésimo was gone, he could embark once more on the task, now so habitual and beloved, of winning Blanca back through the simple, unconditional force of his love. But he also vaguely, painfully intuited that he might no longer have the energy to go on loving her and go on enduring lunches like this one, listening to all the intellectual
terminology he didn’t understand, all the complicated names of foreign dishes and varieties of wines that now aroused a raging secret hostility in him that only with considerable effort could he keep from extending to Blanca, as well.

The next day, after an extremely unpleasant misunderstanding that cost him almost an hour in Personnel, he got home at about 3:30, still annoyed and also worried that Blanca might have been sitting there waiting for him all that time with the food growing cold. He opened the door and didn’t hear Blanca’s footsteps in the hallway or music from the TV, and when he reached the living room the evidence that she wasn’t there, that she hadn’t left him any food, and hadn’t even bothered to put the cloth on the table as she always did, fell on him like a blow to the back of the neck. In the small living room of his middle-income housing apartment, surrounded by his own familiar furniture, in front of the blank TV screen where he saw his silhouette reflected, Mario López felt that his world was coming to an end. The definitive, silent
cataclysm he had so often imagined and foreseen had arrived, nevertheless, with the horrible force of something absolutely novel. To have been left by Blanca was to sit there staring like an idiot at the crocheted doily that she hated, listening for no reason to someone’s footsteps or voice in the apartment upstairs, and feeling that all these things together constituted the devastating totality of his misfortune.

He discovered that some of Blanca’s clothes and her small black suitcase were missing from the bedroom’s built-in closet. He wanted to believe she’d had to go away for some urgent reason: her mother had suddenly fallen ill or she’d been summoned to an interview for one of the jobs she was always trying to get and then quitting.

Mario went to the kitchen and poured himself a beer. As he cut a slice of mortadella, he noticed he was leaning lower over the edge of the table than he normally did and an instant later he was sobbing violently. To live not only the rest of his life but even that whole afternoon or just the next five or
ten minutes seemed an impossible feat he would never be able to achieve. He managed to get hold of himself and went into the studio, seeking further evidence of Blanca’s flight. The little radio Blanca spent many afternoons listening to classical music on was no longer in its place on the shelf. In a fit of rage that brought him some fleeting relief, a childish sense of revenge, Mario ripped the poster for Lluís Onésimo’s exhibit from the wall. A crumpled sheet of paper in the wastebasket made his heart leap. When he smoothed it out, he saw that Blanca had written “Dear Mario” on it, but hadn’t gone on, perhaps, he thought, out of fear of being distracted from her goal, or fear that he would walk in on her just as she was leaving him.

He summoned the courage to call the Savings and Loan gallery and ask for Onésimo. The receptionist, who knew Mario, told him Onésimo had gone back to Madrid on the 2:30 Talgo train, the same hateful express train Blanca was always wanting to take: it was her connection to the exhibits at the Reina Sofia museum, the round tables
at the residencia de estudiantes, the French movies at Alphaville, and all the other things she was so enthusiastic about, all the other things that excluded Mario.

He hung up the phone without daring to ask the receptionist whether she happened to have seen Blanca that day. Then he collapsed onto the sofa, his face buried in a pillow, and lay there crying and groping for a box of Kleenex to blow his nose with. He noticed, vaguely, that the light was changing; night was falling.

He awoke in darkness, hearing a key in the door and seeing the hallway light come on. The woman he did not yet know was not Blanca came toward the dining room with footsteps so like Blanca’s that at first Mario thought it really was Blanca. Moreover, in the dim light of the dining room, her hair seemed the same, the shape of her face, the brief rosy smile on her sensual lips that still, to Mario’s delight, retained a slightly swollen look, like a child’s. She looked a bit tired as she walked toward him, though she was smiling as if nothing
had happened. She asked what on earth he was doing lying there in the dark, and it took him a while to react, partly because crying and sleeping had had an anesthetic effect on his mind. He got up and took her in his arms, and as he clung tightly to her long, supple body (she was taller than he was, even when she wore flat shoes), his eyes filled with tears again and he thought, with profound emotion and involuntary literary allusion, that he forgave her everything and wouldn’t ask her a single question or voice a single reproach.

Then out of the corner of his eye he noticed the first clue: he wasn’t sure the bag Blanca had brought home was the same one that was missing from their closet. But it isn’t easy to tell one piece of luggage from another; everyone is always mistaking their bag for someone else’s at airport luggage claims. Blanca kissed him on the mouth, leaning down a little and separating her lips a millimeter more than usual, and Mario noticed, or later remembered having noticed, that there was no trace of nicotine or red wine on her breath and her hair didn’t smell exactly the same.

But he couldn’t always be alert and on guard, scrutinizing the woman who little by little was not Blanca, who grew more unfamiliar to the precise degree that she achieved a more perfect likeness, while the other Blanca, the real Blanca, his Blanca, must be living the life she’d always wanted to live, in Madrid or in Valencia, the life that Mario, according to her, had kept her from.

He was giving in. He knew that he was letting himself be swept along by circumstances; the inert, accommodating side of himself that Blanca had never accepted was gently, almost tenderly pushing him to accept the impostor’s presence. He washed the dishes in the kitchen after dinner and heard her coming down the hall, her way of walking identical to Blanca’s, and when the footsteps stopped he didn’t turn around or raise his head from the sink; he knew that the woman who was not Blanca was standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe in a posture of laziness or relaxed camaraderie that the real Blanca would never have adopted.