What a meager life I’d lived, he thought, if the cafeteria of the Jaén bus station struck me as a luxurious dining establishment. He’d tell Blanca about these things and she would laugh, but he didn’t know if she was touched by the thought of Mario’s primitive past, so different from her own childhood, or simply astounded by the existence of this picturesque way of life that was fundamentally absurd to any civilized person who took an interest in its peculiarities. The odd part of it, given her class background and the little she knew about the real life of people who were poor and working-class, was that Blanca’s political leanings were much farther to the left than his own. In 1986, the referendum on Spain’s entry into NATO had triggered one of the few truly bitter fights they’d ever had. Mario thought that a yes vote was both prudent and reasonable, while Blanca wore a pin bearing a large NO, collected signatures, attended meetings, and participated in demonstrations alongside people whose politics Mario considered loathsome: leftist extremists who were simultaneously in favor of pacifist disarmament and the terrorist attacks in northern Spain. When he saw how sad and dejected she was on the night of the vote, Mario couldn’t rejoice at the fact that his side had won. He felt guilty and even a little reactionary.
As he ate his vichyssoise, Blanca had begun explaining something to Mario about a cultural project in which she might be offered some sort of minor role — as a translator, perhaps, or a costume designer — but he wasn’t paying much attention, though he pretended to be absorbed in what she was saying. What really interested him, what was keeping him absorbed, weren’t Blanca’s vague hopes for employment, which so often came to nothing, but her daily, miraculous presence, the slightly nasal sound of her voice, the way she moved her lips, the focused and serious attention with which her eyes rested on him as she told him about someone apparently very famous who had just arrived in the city and whom they would both very soon have the chance to meet in person. The name, Lluís Onésimo, seemed familiar to Mario but he didn’t want to ask anything more about the man for fear of seeming ignorant. Also, he’d just heard something from the television that had completely distracted him, or rather put him on guard.
The anchorman was talking about a Frida Kahlo exhibition that had just opened in Madrid. When she’d seen the show advertised in the newspaper the day before, Blanca had fervently resolved that they must go: this was a unique retrospective, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. With sorrow and remorse, he’d reminded her that it was nearly the end of the month and there wasn’t enough left in their budget to cover the cost of the trip, the hotel, and the restaurants in Madrid. The show would undoubtedly stay up for several months, he told her by way of appeasement, though he knew it was futile. Anyway, they’d do better to wait until summer vacation; this was the busiest time of year at his office and what he really felt like doing when he got home Friday afternoon was staying home and relaxing, not setting off on an exhausting trip to Madrid and coming back on Sunday night by the express train that got into Jaén at 7:00 Monday morning, which meant, as he knew from past experience, that he’d have to go directly from the station to the office without even time for a shower.
Blanca said nothing, lowered her head, and went to her room and shut the door as soon as they’d finished eating and cleared off the table. Nevertheless, her face didn’t look terribly serious; she had only a faraway air of disappointment that Mario had learned to recognize in a slight fold that formed at one side of her mouth when she gave him a perfunctory smile, out of politeness or as a gesture of kindness, or not even that, as a sign to him to leave her alone: it wasn’t something worth arguing over or even talking about.
Guilty, ashamed, afraid of losing her, Mario knocked softly on the door. When he heard only music from the radio, he opened it cautiously and saw that Blanca was stretched out on the sofa in the dark, in the small, warm room that was her place of refuge, even though it looked out on an airshaft crisscrossed with clotheslines and the neighbors’ voices, noisy television sets and shouting children that were always audible in there and kept her from concentrating. She had an old writing desk, a gift from her mother, with little drawers that she kept locked but that he often wished he could open. Blanca’s pens and pencils were always lined up on top of it, inkwells with sepia-colored inks, the notebooks where she jotted down thoughts, copied down poems and phrases, pasted clippings from magazines and newspapers, the lilac-tinted stationery and envelopes with her name printed on them, her name, which made Mario happy just to see it written out.
He sat down next to her on the edge of the sofa and ran his hand over her smooth, straight hair, over her cheeks that were wet with silent weeping. He begged her pardon, blamed himself for being such an egotist, and told her that if she wanted, they’d go to Madrid that very weekend. Blanca asked him in a low voice to please leave her alone, and she begged his forgiveness as well, blaming herself for being depressed and frazzled: it was the terrible heat that was already starting to set in, the ever-problematic first day of her period. She stood up, her hair disheveled, and Mario thought in sorrow and fear that she had the same empty, drawn look on her face as during the early days, when he was already in love with her without being able to imagine that Blanca might some day pay him sufficient attention even to take full note of his presence, much less reciprocate his feelings.
Twenty-four hours later, when he thought the crisis had passed, Mario, his back to the television, silently savoring a spoonful of exquisite vichyssoise, watched Blanca’s face, waiting for the signs of enthusiasm and subsequent glumness that the name Frida Kahlo would inspire there. She’d see one of Kahlo’s paintings on the screen, one of the self-portraits Mario secretly considered abominable, and she’d regret not living in Madrid and not having the time or money to travel wherever she wanted. She’d probably even stop eating, or stop speaking to him, withdrawing into silence as if into a room that would forever be inaccessible to him, writing for hours on end in one of the notebooks she kept under lock and key.
The name Frida Kahlo was repeated two or three times more, and each time Mario feared Blanca’s inevitable reaction, like someone who sees a flash of lightning and waits, counting the seconds, for the thunder to come. But the announcer moved on to developments in the world of sports and Blanca was still talking to him about a possible job; he couldn’t really understand what it involved but encouraged her warmly to pursue it. If only he’d paid a bit more attention, if only his obsessive vigilance hadn’t betrayed him by keeping him from observing this new danger, the new name that was beginning to crop up in her conversation.
He thought, without being able to acknowledge the thought to himself, that what Blanca really needed was to spend some time studying and then take a civil service exam that would lead to a steady job. If she could devote herself to an ongoing, tangible enterprise, it would take her out of her daydreams or at least offer her a solid anchorage in reality. Maybe the fact that she’d paid no attention to the news about the Frida Kahlo exhibit was a good sign; perhaps she was about to change, but not too much, only a little, just enough to stop withdrawing so frequently into silence, and stop rejecting the idea of having a child with such cutting hostility. “I don’t think we have the right to bring anyone else into this horrible world,” she’d say.
Another man might have thought she was flighty, but for Mario Blanca’s endless sequence of new and different jobs and widely disparate enthusiasms was proof of her vitality, her audacity, her innate rebelliousness, qualities he found particularly admirable because he was largely devoid of them. By means of bitter struggle and scholarships that were always meager, he’d come to Jaén from his village, Cabra de Santocristo, to complete high school, surviving the sad winters of the end of childhood in boardinghouses, and graduating with excellent grades in days when there were still tough exams to pass in order to qualify for graduation. Then, frightened by the length and difficulty of the training period for a technical architect — the career he would have chosen — he’d become a draftsman. Six years younger than he, born into another social class and raised during the days of color television, yogurt, and annual vacations at the beach, Blanca had a far less punitive idea of the world. No one had ever inculcated into her the two principles that loomed over the childhood of every male of Mario’s generation and peasant class: that he was born into a vale of tears and that he had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.