In Her Absence Read Free Page A

household smells with elation and gratitude: cleanliness, freshly waxed furniture, the food Blanca had just finished cooking for him.
    Six years after meeting her he was still moved each time he reentered her presence. As he was calling to her for the second time he saw her coming toward him from the back of the apartment. He knew immediately that she was in a good mood and would offer him her mouth when they kissed, which wasn’t always the case. He set his briefcase down on the ground to give her a hug, and looking at her lovely face, now so near, he remembered one of their rare fights. Blanca, unthinkingly, in the heat of an argument he, too, had done his share to provoke, an argument that cost him weeks of regret and stubborn resentment, had accused him of settling for too little, of lacking, she’d said, “the slightest ambition.” Whereupon Mario hadsuddenly grown very calm and answered that she, Blanca, was his greatest ambition, and that when he was with her he wouldn’t and couldn’t feel the slightest ambition for anything more. She looked at him very seriously, tilting her head to one side. Then her eyes filled up with tears and they fell into each other’s arms and onto the sofa, kissing and gasping for breath as they groped for skin beneath clothing, trying not to hear the television trumpeting the theme song of the nightly news.

Three
    NOW AGAIN THE news was on as they started their lunch. Mario had come home so early that the news wasn’t over yet. He was savoring the vichyssoise, one of Blanca’s best dishes, and as he did so she stopped and looked at him, her spoon suspended next to her mouth in a gesture of condescension or censure, he wasn’t sure which. He was afraid he might have slurped and ate the next spoonful with great care, pressing his lips togetherin silence, swallowing discreetly, and immediately wiping his mouth with the edge of the napkin.
    Blanca had impeccable table manners. She always sat up very straight, taking the napkin from her lap and laying it on the table before she stood up. There was a perfection in her way of peeling an orange or persimmon with a knife and fork that to Mario, a former altar boy, had an almost liturgical quality and reawakened his old social inferiority complex. Mario peeled oranges with his hand, sinking his thumbnail into the peel, and when he really liked a sauce or a salad dressing he had to make an effort not to sop it up with a bit of bread.
    He remembered perfectly the first time in his life he’d ever tried to eat with a knife and fork, which was also the first time he learned that the two were used together. (In his parents’ house they always ate with a spoon, and they picked up the pieces of rabbit that accompanied their rice on Sundays with their hands.) It was in the cafeteria of the old Jaén bus station, on a trip he and his fatherhad taken from their village for some medical or bureaucratic reason. To the child who was Mario, Jaén was terrifying; it stank of danger and sickness and the dank office where hostile officials made him and his father wait—and when his father, normally such a forceful man, spoke to the officials, he lowered his voice and bent his head toward the floor. He and his father were sitting on stools at the cafeteria’s counter and were served a combination platter that struck Mario as the height of luxury: two fried eggs with potatoes and a pork chop on the side. He tore off a piece of bread with his hands and dipped it in the egg, then set about eating the meat the same way he always ate strips of bacon for lunch in the country: laying it out on the bread and then cutting it with the knife. But his father told him that they were in a fine restaurant in the province’s capital city; he should take a look around and watch how everyone else was eating their meal—with a knife and fork. If Mario insisted on staying in school, his father added with a note of sarcasm, he might well want to start behavingin a more