He watched his expenses so carefully that of the two paychecks he received per month, he could put the entire second one away in savings. His parents, now retired, lived alone back in the village, and his only brother, eight years older, was a first sergeant in the Guardia Civil stationed in Irún. Mario felt a strong obligation to bring his parents to live with him in Jaén, but though he had a great deal of affection for them, especially for his mother, he was also aware that they were fast approaching the infirmities of old age and within a few short years their company would become a kind of slavery. One day, in an unprecedented gesture, his father called him at the office and solemnly announced that he and his mother were going to be moving into a Social Security residence in Linares the following month.
The news made Mario so happy that he felt like a loathsome ingrate. He said sincerely, on the point of tears and with a tightness in his chest, that as long as he could take care of them that was not going to happen. When she got on the line, his mother was crying: it’s best for everyone this way, she repeated, in the same words as his father; this way neither of them would ever become a burden. That weekend, Mario drove back to his village and took his parents to the residence, which was a spacious establishment, clean and melancholy, with a modern chapel, bedrooms that seemed to belong in a youth hostel, and a surprising degree of liveliness in the cafeteria and common rooms.
Night fell as he was driving back to Jaén on Sunday, sadly listening to the radio, the results of the day’s sports events, ads for cognac and cigars. But it was the weightless and fundamentally healthful sadness of freedom that he was feeling. When he stepped into his apartment that night, it seemed to belong to him entirely for the first time, as did his future, in which he would no longer be tied down by attachments to his early youth, his parents, his girlfriend, and his oppressive memories of Cabra de Santocristo, to which he would certainly never return since there was no longer anyone there for him to visit. With serene approval of his own practical decisions, he looked over the still scant furnishings, the spotless kitchen, the row of volumes of Menéndez Pidal’s History of Spain, the bedroom once intended for a couple but where now he slept alone, the few light fixtures he had installed. He had dinner at the kitchen table without falling into the lax habits of those who eat any old way when they’re alone. He cleared off the table after dinner and washed and dried the plates, glass, and silverware. He started watching a movie on TV and fell asleep on the sofa before it was over. At midnight the phone woke him up. Only when he discovered it was a wrong number did he realize how much he’d wanted to talk to someone that Sunday night. He switched off the TV and straightened up the dining room a little, though almost nothing was out of place, brushed his teeth, rinsed the brush and carefully recapped the toothpaste, chose a clean pair of pajamas out of the closet that was far too big for him alone, and slipped with anticipated pleasure between the sheets, which he’d changed on Friday afternoon before going back to his village. He switched off the light still thinking he was overcome with drowsiness, but as he lay in the dark he realized that for some reason he was no longer sleepy at all. He turned the light back on: he’d forgotten to plug in the alarm clock, an unnecessary precaution he was always careful to take, though he woke up automatically every morning around 7:15.
A few weeks later, standing in line at the bank, he ran into Juli. Neither of them knew what to say at first; she turned red and nervous, and Mario was stunned to realize that he had lost all interest in her in so little time. He thought she looked older than she was, a bit old-fashioned and tacky in her checked skirt and high burgundy boots, carrying a black plastic file with the logo of the Nuestra Señora de la Cabeza Driving School and Agency in gold letters. They talked for a few minutes while Mario waited for his turn at the window. Juli — suddenly her name struck him as ridiculous — told him she’d thought about him a lot and didn’t want to lose touch: they could call each other sometimes and chat like old friends. Mario made a display of going along with this, but was quick-witted enough to put off the meeting she was proposing to some indefinite future moment. It was a relief to leave the bank and not see her. If Juli hadn’t broken up with him, they would have gotten married a month earlier. How strange, he thought, as he want back to the office; I was on the verge of marrying a total stranger. I suffered over a woman I didn’t actually like much; I spent seven years with her without getting to know a thing about her.
They didn’t see each other again. She may have moved to another city or gone back to the village; she always used to say that big noisy places like Jaén wore her out. Mario believed for years that Juli had vanished from his memory without a trace and had played no role at all in the destiny that took him to Blanca. Only much later, in the choking fullness of his misery, did he think again of his first girlfriend and the future with her that had not come about, and he was afraid that out of some colossal misunderstanding, some fundamental error in the laws governing the world, someone had assigned him a biography that wasn’t really his, a marriage to a woman who was obviously far better suited to another man, perhaps neither the painter Naranjo nor the scoundrel Onésimo, but in any case another man who was not Mario, a man who was taller, blonder, better educated, better traveled, more imaginative, more like her, not a draftsman at the Jaén Provincial Council whose expectations of life were compatible not with Blanca’s — however hard both of them tried to make them compatible and believe that they were — but with those of the secretary of a driving school, the type of woman Juli precisely personified: a woman who would never suffer because she couldn’t attend the Bienniale di Venezia or the premiere of Madame Butterfly in Covent Garden in London, a woman who wouldn’t have known a thing about modern art or opera or Covent Garden, but without therefore being an idiot or a mental bureaucrat, as Blanca so often said, as if there were dishonor in being a bureaucrat.…
On his worst days, during his blackest diatribes against himself, through the many sleepless nights when he lay in the dark next to the inviolate distance that separated him from Blanca, Mario would torment himself with the thought that he should have married Juli, should have arranged a time to get together with her as she’d suggested when they ran into each other in the bank. He accused himself of senseless arrogance, masculine vanity and ambition, of aspiring to things that were out of his reach; he imagined himself coldly leaving Blanca and going off in search of Juli, calculating that if he hadn’t broken up with her they’d have a child or two by now, and in his embittered delirium he imagined the life he would have had with another woman so vividly that he couldn’t help starting to feel as if he were betraying Blanca. Then he was frightened by the danger of never having met Blanca at all, and to make up for these thoughts and console himself he’d plunge deep into the unlimited memory of all the things he’d enjoyed thanks to her and with her, comparing those years of enthusiasm and passion with the years of conjugal stability and paternity he would have been living out with Juli as routinely as he served out the years of his employment at the Council.