Blanca came from an opulent Málaga family of lawyers, notaries, and land registrars, but she’d never wanted to benefit from these social advantages. Mario thought this was heroic, although he disapproved of her frequent and vehement mockery of all her relatives, beginning with her mother, a menacing widow who wore false eyelashes, smoked Winston Super Longs, and never paid the slightest attention to anything except herself — but who had, more than once, helped them out of a tight spot with an overnight bank transfer or a check made out to cash.
Penury makes people fearful and conformist; it’s the secure possession of money, Mario suspected, that awakens and nourishes audacity. He enjoyed reading works of contemporary history and had noticed that most if not all revolutionary leaders were not of working-class origin. The occasional financial help from her mother aside — and between those occasions whole years could go by — Blanca lived off Mario’s salary and her sporadic earnings as a hostess at conventions, a translator of catalogs, and, eventually, an exhibition guard, but she’d grown up in such great economic security, her sense of entitlement was so innate, that she never felt any fear about the future, and never bothered to behave prudently in view of future benefits, to the extent that both times she’d had a formal contract for a full-time job, she quit after only a few months: the daily routine exhausted her or she couldn’t stand dealing with a boss who was making passes at her. For a person with a temperament like hers, Mario told himself, a day job was worse than a prison sentence.
Her nonconformity and impatience had also propelled her into enrolling for and subsequently abandoning two different university degrees, one in fine arts and the other in English philology. Unlike most people her age, Blanca, who was about to turn thirty, had renounced nothing: she wanted to paint, she wanted to write, she wanted to know everything there was to know about Italian opera or Kabuki theater or classic Hollywood movies, she wanted to travel to the most exotic cities, the most imaginary countries, her eyes would grow moist watching Lady of Shanghai or listening to Jessye Norman, and she’d read aloud in tones of throbbing excitement the reviews in the El País Sunday supplement that extolled the gastronomic delights on offer in the great restaurants of Madrid and San Sebastián, delights that, since they had Italian or French, if not Basque names, Mario was unable to imagine. Each time they ate in a restaurant, he would turn out to have forgotten the names of the different varieties of pasta and the French culinary vocabulary she’d tried to teach him, and it was now a classic joke between them that he’d never be able to remember what gnocchi meant, or pesto or carpaccio or magret de canard, not to mention the even more inaccessible terminology of the Asian cuisines, for which Blanca developed such enthusiasm during a certain period that she learned to use chopsticks with the same ease and precision as she handled a fish knife, until finally the lack of any good Chinese, Japanese, or Indian restaurant in Jaén discouraged her.
When they went out to dinner with friends of Blanca’s, all of them experts in wine and gastronomy, Mario very gladly put Blanca in charge of ordering for him, but Blanca didn’t make jokes about her husband’s culinary ignorance in front of other people and would even attribute preferences to him he hadn’t known he had, and that sounded like flattery: “What Mario really likes is a good fondue,” or “Mario doesn’t trust the sushi they serve in that Japanese place in Granada.”
Mario defined himself as the type who ate to live rather than lived to eat, but that didn’t keep him from appreciating and being grateful for Blanca’s culinary subtleties. The things she cooked had a smoother and more delicate flavor, with strange hints of sweetness or acidity that were always a little bit surprising, and even unexpected shades of color as nuanced as their aromas and flavors. He loved the way Blanca cooked as unconditionally as he loved the sound of her voice or the way she dressed; still, he wasn’t sure that her presence wasn’t the principal condiment of dishes that might otherwise have been rejected by his rustic palate, educated or irreparably desensitized by the noodle soups, beans, garbanzos and lentils, tough meat and potatoes, and truly lamentable fish served at the boarding house.
The flavor of the meals she cooked filled him with a sensory emotion that was similar to the effect of her kisses: it was the feeling of the new, all that didn’t belong to him, that was unknown and inaccessible, all the things he would never have known existed were it not for Blanca’s presence and influence. Money, he thought, doesn’t only educate you, it also gives a particular sun-kissed glow to your skin and frees you from fear of uncertainty; money makes you cosmopolitan, teaches you to use foreign languages and foreign eating utensils, to feel at home and at ease among strangers. He, who was never sure which hand should use the fish fork, was overwhelmed by admiration when he saw Blanca’s speedy and dexterous handling of her chopsticks in Chinese restaurants; she could pick up a few grains of rice or a small, lustrous bit of lacquered duck with infallible precision.
If he enumerated, one by one, all the characteristic things about her that he recognized and treasured, Mario couldn’t think of a single one that didn’t have a kind of meticulous, secret polish of perfection and spontaneity. His love was watchful and serene in equal measure: he loved her as much for the color of her hair as for her radical political convictions (however extreme he sometimes found them), as much for her sexual attractions as for the exquisite way she had of peeling an orange or pronouncing a sentence in English, and the scent of her perfume was as important to him as the intellectual level of her conversation. Little by little, he was even managing to like almost all Blanca’s friends, especially the gay men from whom he had nothing to fear. The one he didn’t like in the slightest from the very beginning, even before meeting him, from the ill-fated moment when he heard his name spoken for the first time, was the individual called Lluís Onésimo, dramaturge or dramatist or something like that, multimedia artist, hypnotizer, con man, metteur en scène, as Onésimo would say, gazing at Blanca as if Mario didn’t exist, speaking French in a thick Catalán accent and sprinkling his conversation with terms that very soon echoed through Blanca’s and her friends’ vocabulary: stage, Mediterranean, virtual, installation, performance, mestizaje, multimedia. Words like these instantly aroused an instinctive hatred in Mario; they were as virulent as a gob of poison spit or the quick, lethal sting of a scorpion — and what made it even worse was that only he, Mario, had been hit with the gob of spit; the sting was lethal only to him.
Four
OF COURSE ONÉSIMO was neither the first moth drawn to the flame of Blanca’s intellectual charms nor the first parasite to feed off her unconditional reverence for any form of talent or skill. Blanca tended to squander her admiration like a foolishly generous heiress frittering away her fortune among swindlers and freeloaders. Except for Mario, whose only remotely artistic skill was line drawing, all her former boyfriends and almost all her current friends were practitioners of one art form or another and were voraciously interested in all forms of artistic expression without exception, including bullfighting, hairdressing, and Spanish pop music. It was the 1980s, and in the mysterious hierarchies of the day, tailors, hairstylists, and flamenco-ish singers were worshiped with the same reverence as painters and sculptors. At first this surprised Mario, who’d been raised with the almost fearful respect that the poor have for art and knowledge, but he gradually came to find it natural, and not only because a person can always get used to anything. As it turned out, after he’d taken a closer look at the works of the painters and sculptors Blanca frequented, he couldn’t find much more merit in them than in a haircut.