In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online Page A

other city that couldn’t be the same one where he lived. Before meeting her, he’d never heard of Jimmy Naranjo’s fame or even his existence—which Blanca found very strange—and he’d never imagined that there were people in Jaén who used cocaine and lived such disorderly, bohemian lives.
    Blanca had agreed to join Naranjo in Madrid a few days later to help him prepare for a long-awaited exhibit, his first solo show in the capitalcity. They’d agreed she would come up Friday night, but she couldn’t wait that long. She caught the express twenty-four hours early, and at 7:30 Friday morning, one of those freezing Madrid winter mornings, she emerged from a taxi and opened the door of the studio, a former pharmaceutical warehouse on Calle Augusto Figueroa that Naranjo had immediately started calling
el loft
, and that he could never have rented to begin with had it not been for a providential check from Blanca’s mother.
    By the dawn glow that came in through a vast skylight, Blanca saw Naranjo naked and on his knees next to the bed, around which unframed canvases and paint-stained drop cloths hung like curtains in a theater. When he heard the key in the lock, Naranjo had raised his head from between the open knees of someone who was lying back on the bed, a very young boy whose face Blanca didn’t glimpse because she turned and ran outside without even slamming the door, afraid that if she looked back her eyes would see again something she’d never wanted to see, something she’d never forget.

Six
    SHORTLY AFTER THAT she met Mario. In an inscription written in a book she gave him for their first anniversary, Blanca alluded to the sad state she’d been in and her gratitude to Mario by citing these lines from Rafael Alberti:
    Cuando tú apareciste
    Penaba yo en la entraña más profunda
    De una cueva sin aire y sin salida
.
    When you appeared
    I was agonizing in the deepest cavern
    Of a cave with no air and no exit.
    They met, she sometimes said, against all odds, on one of the rare occasions when their separate worlds happened to coincide, for even in small cities and state capitals as provincial as Jaén the people who brush past each other in the street live at interplanetary distances from one another: even when their paths cross it’s very difficult for them to actually see each other.
    In order for it to happen, Mario had to turn up one night in the kind of place he never went, a newly opened club called Chinatown, housed in a former convent, with laser beams, stacks of video screens, and monolithic black speakers blasting pounding rhythms. One of the department heads had to have a bachelor party, in order for Mario—so befuddled by the music, the lights, and the crowd that he couldn’t locate his co-workers, for they were the ones who’d gotten him into thispickle, as always, practically dragging him to this hellish spot after a dinner that had already been unbearable in and of itself—to be standing at the fluorescent bar of that discothèque holding a lukewarm gin and tonic and trying to hear or say something to a girl he’d been introduced to a while before, whose name (because of the noise and the gin) he wasn’t sure he remembered.
    Blanca told him later, when they compared notes in an attempt to reorganize the initial muddled episodes of their shared past, that she couldn’t remember his name either. In her case it wasn’t only the loud music, but also the abuse of alcohol, cocaine, and pills that, combined with perpetual sleep deprivation, had weakened her memory, especially her verbal memory, to the point that she’d be talking and suddenly find herself unable to think of a word, or be on the point of saying someone’s name to find that she’d forgotten it. Words were missing, hours of her life were missing, sometimes a step was missing when she was going down a staircase and suddenly she’d be overcome withvertigo and know that she couldn’t go on living like that.
    Mario didn’t