In Her Absence Read Online Free PDF

enthusiasms she clung to long after leaving the lovers who first instilled them in her were what remained to bear witness to the history of her heart: Cartier-Bresson,
Turandot
, Eric Rohmer. The arts of painting and sculpture had come into her life relatively late in the day. When she met Mario, she was still suffering from the final repercussions of an all-consuming and disastrous relationship with the painter Jaime Naranjo, also known among the more up-to-the-minute or obnoxious of his unconditional adherents as Jimmy N.: the
enfant terrible
of the local avant-garde who routinely carried off all the province’s official prizes.
    Mario had noticed that the previous decade of Blanca’s love life was a lot like the lives of the women whose biographies she collected: Misia Sert, Alma Mahler, Lou Andreas von Salomé. She was even thinking of writing a very long essay about Salomé, and early drafts of it filled some of the notebooks that were carefully aligned on her desk. First in Málaga and Granada, then in Jaén, Blanca had had passionate relationships—though some of them on a purely intellectual level—with men whose erudition and intelligence gave Mario a secret inferiority complex when he heard her talk about them. She’d inspired their desire, but not only that: also songs, poems, paintings, and even, people said, a certain novel that had met with considerable success. She owned its manuscript, personally dedicated to her by the author, and kept it among her own books in a special corner over her work table alongside other manuscripts, volumes of poetry, screenplays, short story collections, and even sheet music, all with inscriptions to her by their authors.
    On the living room walls were drawings and engravings signed and dedicated to her, and a poem handwritten in red, green, and yellow ink by the legendary Rafael Alberti—to whom Blanca, who’d spoken to him half a dozen times, referred simply as “Rafael.” In the bedroom, over the headboard, hung a large semiabstract canvas by Naranjo, painted shortly before his breakup with Blanca, and on the opposite wall was a nebulous, yellowing engraving by Fernando Zóbel that had the considerable virtue of putting Mario to sleep. His response to art was often physical, sometimes almost to the point of an allergic reaction: Frida Kahlo, for example, made the roof of his mouth feel as if it were coated with grease, and Antoni Tàpies (fortunately not an object of Blanca’s devotion) inspired a mixture of weary sorrow and heartburn. He forced himself to feign interest nevertheless, and reproached himself bitterly for his lack of sensibility, the random paucity of his reading, the private lethargy and pent-up resistance he often harbored when accompanying her to a concert, a movie, the premiere of anew play, or an art opening where everyone knew everyone else and greeted Blanca effusively and the paintings looked like doodles or tiny insects and all the young people of both genders were uniformly dressed in black and afflicted with a ghostly pallor. Often on such occasions Mario would get the terrifying feeling that he was caught in a trap he would never break out of, a situation that would never end: experimental jazz concerts where the musicians seemed to be wringing out their instruments and the notes lasted for hours that were eternities; art openings with endless rounds of greetings, kisses on both cheeks (between men, even), glasses of lukewarm champagne, ecstatic congratulations, and meaningless gossip; dance performances in which a single musical phrase or given electronic rhythm was repeated ad infinitum and without the slightest variation.
    There was never any opera in Jaén, to Mario’s great relief, but once, during one of their exhausting cultural pilgrimages to Madrid (they had to see everything, make the most of every minute of theweekend), Blanca took him to a contemporary opera in a theater that had once been a local cinema, on a beautiful, lively