Blanca sat down on the bed, rummaged through the drawer of the night table, slammed it shut, then poked through the ashtray until she located a cigarette that was almost intact — she must have put it out only seconds after lighting it the night before. The reek of old cigarette smoke and sheets long unchanged was sickening. Mario, who didn’t like visiting other people’s houses, had an unpleasant feeling that he was invading someone’s intimate privacy. What right did he have to be there, with a woman who was a complete stranger, at two in the morning, in a bedroom in which there were ostensible signs of the presence of another male? What was he doing there when the woman, Blanca, whom he was already beginning to like, seemed to have forgotten his presence entirely? Not daring to step inside, he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched her bury her head between her knees, perched on the edge of the bed with a trail of smoke still ascending on one side. He noticed that she was shaking and was afraid she was about to vomit again. But this time she was shaking because she was crying, silently, in hard, dry sobs that were as alien to Mario as was the cigarette she was holding between her fingers. Afraid she’d set the sheets on fire, Mario approached her, timid and cautious, took the cigarette away, and put it out with disgust in the ashtray. Blanca lifted her eyes and seemed not to remember who he was. At moments, Mario’s compassion was already turning to tenderness. By now he found her much, much prettier than he had a few hours earlier when they were introduced.
“What do you think, shall I make some coffee?” he said, trying to make his voice sound natural and relaxed, the voice of a man who’s used to going out at night and spending lots of time with women and artists. Blanca managed to focus her eyes on him and moved her head in a gesture that looked like nodding.
There wasn’t a plate, spoon, or cup that wasn’t dirty in that kitchen, and that hadn’t been dirty for at least a week. The sink was hard to find beneath the pile of filthy dishes. When he managed to rescue the coffeepot and began trying to wash it out, Mario discovered that the water had been cut off. And of course there were no bottles of water in the refrigerator stored up in case of the usual restrictions. All that was there were a container of rancid margarine and an unopened bottle of mayonnaise, along with a moldy tomato. Mario, like all very orderly people, was not only appalled by this disaster but felt reaffirmed and almost smug in his own habits. He went back to the bedroom to tell Blanca he couldn’t make coffee and found her asleep, on her side, facing the light on the night table, her two hands holding the pillow, her legs pulled up against her stomach, breathing through her mouth, with sweat gleaming on her upper lip. She hadn’t even taken off her shoes. Very carefully, Mario removed them and then slowly pulled the blanket up to her chin, trying not to wake her, watching her sleep with a delight all the more intense for being furtive. He thought about leaving her a note on the nightstand or even on the bathroom mirror as he’d seen in the movies, but he wasn’t carrying paper or pen, and in any case had no idea what to write. He was tempted to leave her one of his cards but decided against it just in time; that would have been, he later considered, far too commercial and impertinent a gesture. He stood there for a minute or two more, watching Blanca sleep, without knowing what to do, what strategy to come up with so the night’s accidental connection wouldn’t be lost. But he lacked experience as well as shrewdness and was suddenly afraid that the man she’d called out to once or twice in her delirium, the owner of the three or four masculine articles strewn about the house, would unexpectedly appear and place him in an ambiguous and even dangerous situation.…
His heart jumped at the sound of an elevator. When he went closer to Blanca so as to switch off the lamp on the nightstand, he felt like kissing her on the lips. She opened her eyes, still asleep, shivered, repeated the other man’s name. Mario turned off the bedroom light and then went around the apartment switching off all the other lights with his incorrigible instinct for thrift. It was three in the morning when he got back out to the street. He walked home, a little dazed by the strangeness of being awake and out in the street at that hour, and with a feeling of novelty and gratification, as if he were living out the first draft of an as yet indeterminate adventure. Then he realized he hadn’t even taken the precaution of jotting down Blanca’s phone number.
Seven
HE SPENT THE weekend wondering what to do next and trying to figure out the best way to get in touch with Blanca again. At the age of 28, Mario’s sentimental education was extremely limited. Until he was 25, he’d had a girlfriend he planned to marry. She left him a few months before the wedding, undoubtedly out of sheer boredom though she claimed she’d fallen in love with someone else. Everyone likes to attribute noble motives to their actions, and Juli, Mario’s girlfriend, who’d been going out with him for seven years at that point, must have thought an illicit love affair was a more solid and prestigious justification for breakup than mere tedium. They’d shared one of those eternal provincial relationships that begin at the end of adolescence and end a decade later in a marriage that is lethargic from before the start, so inevitable and immutable that it’s closer to the realm of nature than to the feelings and actions of human beings, one of those relationships whose future is even more unvarying than its past: not only the white dress at the door of the church, the apartment with the brand-new imitation-oak furniture, the honeymoon in Mallorca or the Canary Islands immediately followed by a pregnancy, but also the deeply buried mutual suspicion of having been swindled, the bored bitterness of Sunday strolls with or without a baby carriage, the sweet, familial stupor, so much like the dull, heavy feeling that follows a big meal.
For Juli to have had the uncommon fortitude to break up with Mario and invent a nonexistent infidelity as justification were both strong indicators of the degree of boredom and disillusionment they’d sunk into over the years. Mario took the humiliation of being dumped rather badly at first and tended to confuse his displeasure with the sufferings of love. He wrote several supplicating or insulting letters, amply stocked with literary clichés; he pondered the inconstancy of women and spent a few afternoons wandering around the building where his ex-girlfriend worked, with the rather melodramatic notion of surprising her with his rival — a word much in vogue then on the popular Latin American soap operas. He also feared the vague rural opprobrium attached to bachelors—“old boys,” as his mother used to say.
Then, after summer vacation, he began realizing he could spend whole days without thinking of her once, and shortly thereafter he privately acknowledged that he’d never really missed her. The apartment he’d bought to share with her now struck him as a very pleasant place to live alone. Raised in a large, unmodernized house in a country village, a house that smelled like a stable and was glacially cold in winter, Mario was gratefully appreciative of hot water, clean bathrooms, the luxury of central heating. He chose furniture to please himself alone, though the suspicious looks he got from the salespeople made him uncomfortable; it must have been unusual for a single man to be furnishing a house with such care. He practiced a painless austerity in order to keep up with his monthly mortgage payments without anxiety; he got a membership at a video rental place, and joined a book-of-the-month club. It was then that he remembered his schoolboy affinity for history and bought Menéndez Pidal’s History of Spain on the installment plan. He embarked on a plan to read it from the first volume to the last, and would always remember that he had made it to the obscure and tedious reign of the Visigoths when he met Blanca. At the Council they thanked him for his first three years on the job. He started working some afternoons in the architectural studio a few former boardingschool classmates of his had started, and he’d sometimes venture forth at night with one of them to drink wine in one or another of the city’s bars, with some vague idea of getting drunk and picking up girls. But they never managed to do either of those things, and after a while, bored and disappointed with each other, they stopped going out together. Shortly thereafter Mario’s old friend “got to be boyfriends” as they say in Jaén, with the studio’s secretary, a rather heavyset young woman who was so unappealing that Mario secretly felt some pity for his former friend. Better to be alone than to resign yourself so halfheartedly to a woman like that.