In Her Absence Read Online Free PDF Page A

friends, especially the gay men from whom he had nothing to fear. The one he didn’t like in the slightest from the very beginning, even before meeting him, from the ill-fated moment when he heard hisname spoken for the first time, was the individual called Lluís Onésimo, dramaturge or dramatist or something like that, multimedia artist, hypnotizer, con man,
metteur en scène
, as Onésimo would say, gazing at Blanca as if Mario didn’t exist, speaking French in a thick Catalán accent and sprinkling his conversation with terms that very soon echoed through Blanca’s and her friends’ vocabulary:
stage, Mediterranean, virtual, installation, performance, mestizaje, multimedia
. Words like these instantly aroused an instinctive hatred in Mario; they were as virulent as a gob of poison spit or the quick, lethal sting of a scorpion—and what made it even worse was that only he, Mario, had been hit with the gob of spit; the sting was lethal only to him.

Four
    OF COURSE ONÉSIMO was neither the first moth drawn to the flame of Blanca’s intellectual charms nor the first parasite to feed off her unconditional reverence for any form of talent or skill. Blanca tended to squander her admiration like a foolishly generous heiress frittering away her fortune among swindlers and freeloaders. Except for Mario, whose only remotely artistic skill was line drawing, all her former boyfriends and almost allher current friends were practitioners of one art form or another and were voraciously interested in all forms of artistic expression without exception, including bullfighting, hairdressing, and Spanish pop music. It was the 1980s, and in the mysterious hierarchies of the day, tailors, hairstylists, and flamenco-ish singers were worshiped with the same reverence as painters and sculptors. At first this surprised Mario, who’d been raised with the almost fearful respect that the poor have for art and knowledge, but he gradually came to find it natural, and not only because a person can always get used to anything. As it turned out, after he’d taken a closer look at the works of the painters and sculptors Blanca frequented, he couldn’t find much more merit in them than in a haircut.
    His instinctive caution and lacerating inferiority complex kept him from expressing opinions such as this one. What often happened as well was that he had absolutely no opinion at all but was forced to improvise one for fear of looking stupid. He was afraid of saying something wrong oroffensive, but more than anything else he was afraid of demonstrating that he wasn’t at the intellectual level of Blanca’s friends.
    Her first boyfriend when she was a teenager had been a fledgling singer-songwriter almost as young as she was. She ran into him again many years later, well after marrying Mario, during a Week of Singers and Their Songs that the government of the region of Andalucía was sponsoring in Jaén. When they went backstage to say hello after a performance he’d secretly found pitiful, Mario was initially a little jealous of the way Blanca hugged her former love, but he started calming down when he saw that the teenage hero she often reminisced about was now a guy with a receding hairline that his anachronistic ponytail did nothing to conceal. The popping buttons of his tight shirt, its shoulders liberally sprinkled with dandruff, further enhanced his general air of bewilderment and poor hygiene. The singer told them about a record with lyrics by Jaén poets that the Provincial Council’s cultural department was going to produce for him,and about a possible tour through Nicaragua and Cuba. Blanca never mentioned him again, and Mario struck his name from the imaginary list of potential enemies.
    The next few chapters of Blanca’s sentimental biography involved a photographer, a would-be film director, and a professor ten years her senior with a passion for Puccini. Like the successive strata of an archeological excavation, the cultural