In Her Absence Read Free

office.
    Mario didn’t care. He breathed the outside air in relief and walked home with light and happy footsteps, even though he was exhausted and felt as if he’d expended all his energy fighting off some sticky, clinging organism. What a waste of time it was not to be always with her, to have her nearby and be able to look at her, even if she was immersed in her own tasks; what an unbearable desert the job and the Council and life in the city of Jaén would be if she didn’t exist, or if she hadn’t fallen in love with Mario and, against all expectation, decided to marry him, in one of those sudden impulses thatwere the most attractive aspect of her character and also, at times, the most fearsome.
    Blanca would often say they led a life from which great experiences were absent. He conceded that she was right, but also thought, on his best days when he’d get home a few minutes before three after a workday devoid of annoyances, that for him there could be no greater experience than simply walking home along the same route as always in the knowledge that unlike all the other men he went by in the street—men drinking in bars and talking about soccer with cigarettes in their mouths, men with hungering faces pivoting to watch a woman walk past—he alone had the privilege of desiring beyond all other women the precise woman he had married, and the absolute certainty that when he opened the door of his house, he would find her there.
    It was true that they did live in Jaén—not exactly the center of the universe where cultural activities were concerned—and that neither of them had a particularly exciting job and Blancaquite often had no job at all. But these limitations mattered less to Mario than he himself said they did, and in any case they were more than made up for by a set of fortunate circumstances that, as he saw things, it would be idiotic to disdain. They had a good apartment, on the eighth floor with a balcony overlooking one of the city’s main boulevards, purchased by Mario at an excellent price before the real estate fever of the 1980s. During a time of financial uncertainty and economic crisis, Mario had secured a permanent position with the civil service, with a salary that, while not exactly substantial, always saw them through the end of the month, and a work schedule, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., that allowed him to do other jobs in the afternoon, though he didn’t much like having to leave the house. He sometimes considered enrolling in the university: he was a draftsman but hadn’t given up on the idea of becoming an architect—or rather Blanca hadn’t given up on it. Actually, the career that most appealed to him was being a quantity surveyor or, as they’re called nowadays in Spain,a technical architect—the term Blanca preferred. Sometimes when they were with her friends, Blanca was a little vague about her husband’s line of work. She skirted around the word draftsman, but the term she absolutely could not bear to utter was bureaucrat. When talking about the sort of people she most detested, people who were ruled by habit, monotonous people devoid of all imagination, she’d say “They’re mental bureaucrats.”
    It didn’t take much of this kind of talk before Mario López began to wonder sadly whether he himself had been categorized as a vile mental bureaucrat, and whether Blanca might not be including him in the crowd of people who were vulgar, bourgeois, and as tedious as the routines of their workdays and marriages.
    Days before one such comment, on a Monday in June, he got home at two minutes after three, precisely twelve minutes after clocking out of the office. During his habitual walk home he’d been enjoying the day’s salty, almost maritime breeze, with a whiff of coming rain that was exceptionalfor that dry city at that time of year, a breeze that rattled the canvas awnings and made you feel like living life to the full. As he opened the front door, he took in the ordinary