Luckily, Jaén was not known for the dynamism of its cultural life. Whole weeks could go by, especially during the summer, without any special event that absolutely couldn’t be missed. But it was during those periods that Blanca’s melancholy longing to travel grew most acute; she’d study the cultural pages of all the newspapers and want to go to Madrid, Salzburg, or even nearby, privileged, almost mythical Granada, where it seemed that the life of the mind never took a rest, where all movies came out right away, some of them in the original, undubbed version, and where there were perpetual international festivals of every variety, including classical music, jazz, theater, even tango.
Around that time, Blanca had developed a taste for the boleros and tangos that were starting to be played in some of the bars they went to on weekends, granting Mario the relief of a midpoint between the symphonic boredom of the concert halls and the industrial-strength heart-monitor noise of the nightclubs, where the music, if it can really be called that, was even more unbearable than the shouted conversations, cheap liquor, and cigarette smoke.
For Blanca’s twenty-ninth birthday, Mario had prepared a modest surprise: two cassettes of boleros by Moncho that were so rare they didn’t seem to figure in any catalog of the singer’s work. He’d spotted them by chance on the counter of a gas station. As he listened to a particularly sentimental bolero in the car on the way home, he felt, from his stomach to his chest and throat and then up into his tear ducts, a dense wave of inexplicable anguish and irrevocable happiness, a happiness that was like a memory of happiness, reaffirmed and exalted by the passage of time. Alone in the car, waiting for the light to change at a fountain commemorating battles long past, his heart melted and his eyes filled with tears, and his pleasure was not only in his love for Blanca, but also in this absolute proof that he could enjoy, without the slightest uncertainty, an aesthetic emotion previously enjoyed by her, certified by her.
How many times in his life had he tortured himself over a painting, a movie, a piece of chamber music, wondering whether he really liked it, whether he’d look stupid if he moved his head in time to the music or tapped his foot on the floor, and whether the next break in the music would be the end, requiring immediate applause, or only a short pause, one of those moments of silence during which people coughed and cleared their throats but occasionally some idiot would start clapping all by himself and then several dozen heads would turn toward him as if to strike him with lightning. But now, in the car, there was no denying it: he was delighting in the music, moved to the very marrow of his bones as the trees and buildings along the avenue sparkled through the windshield, and this emotion was not only real but also the correct response.
In a burst of inspiration, he stopped at the stationery store where he usually bought his drafting materials and picked out some wrapping paper and ribbon. When he got home, Blanca wasn’t there: a note on the dining-room table told him she’d gone to a job interview and would be back soon. If only he’d been paying attention, if only he’d noticed the chance repetition of certain names, coincidences that were already conspiring to wreak disaster upon him, while he, vigilant and inept, dazed, blind to what was irremediable, had seen nothing.
He was touched by Blanca’s meticulous handwriting and the last word: “Kisses.” For once he was glad she wasn’t there. He cut the gleaming black wrapping paper down to size, wrapped up the two cassettes, folded the paper’s corners with the skill and precision of an origami artist, calculated the exact length of gold ribbon required so the bow on the package wouldn’t be tacky or ostentatious. Absorbed in the task, he busied his hands within a circle of lamplight in the small room that was her domain and which they both called the studio, smoothing down the paper, sharpening its folds with a fingernail, sliding the tips of his index fingers and thumbs along the golden ribbon to make a knot that could be undone with a single tug.
He put the package away in a high cupboard with a certain exotic feeling of clandestinity, and that very night, at one minute past midnight, the first minute of Blanca’s birthday, he couldn’t stand the wait any longer and gave her the gift. This time he wasn’t tortured by fear of having chosen the wrong thing, fear that Blanca wouldn’t like it and would politely feign gratitude without fully concealing her disappointment. How clumsily she struggled to untie the package’s golden knot, how nervously she tried to open the folds and edges of the paper! She ended up simply ripping it, and what a privilege to be standing in front of her and receive the full force of her eyes an instant after she saw the two cassettes. “Moncho, Twenty Classic Boleros,” she said, in the tone of voice she used only for unqualified rapture, for marveling gratitude, and that was one of the best reasons for loving her, because she intensely ennobled anything that she admired.
Blanca put one of the cassettes on immediately and turned to Mario as the first song began in an invitation to dance. But they didn’t dance. They just stood in each other’s arms in the middle of the room, slowly swaying without moving their feet, while Moncho sang Llévatela — Take Her Away. But no one would ever take her away, Mario thought in pride and desire, steering her gently toward the bedroom, letting her lead him there.
Five
THERE WOULD PROBABLY never be a respite: he would have to spend every hour, every day of the rest of his life winning her over, seducing her, permanently on the lookout, astute and untiring, for the appearance of any danger, any enemy. That didn’t bother him, of course; he’d known it practically from the first moment he met her, and when he stopped to think about it he had to admit he hadn’t done too badly since then. It had taken him no more than two days to fall in love with Blanca, and the fact that she had begun, little by little, to have feelings for him, that she’d slowly slipped, without realizing it, from friendship and gratitude into love, was not the work of chance or the blind mechanism of passion, but the slow, hard-won result of Mario’s tenacity, his constant, tender solicitude, as unconditional as a nurse’s. In fact, that was what he’d been for a while, in the beginning: an assiduous nurse who cared for her with patience and skill, changed her sheets when they were soaked from long nights of delirium and fever, and little by little gave her back her strength and will to live. “You rebuilt me,” Blanca once told him, “as if you’d found a porcelain vase that was smashed into a thousand pieces and you had the skill and patience to reconstruct the whole thing, down to the tiniest shard.”
Mario, who appreciated almost nothing in life more than stability, had spent the past several years discovering and admiring Blanca’s instabilities, while simultaneously trying to combat or attenuate them by offering her a place where her reference points were secure and her soul could flower, without waste or suffering, into its full splendor. With other men, or abandoned to her own devices, Blanca might drift — in fact, had already once drifted — into a dazed, painful, and sterile chaos, a kind of stupefied contemplation of her own disaster that contained an element of the fatalism with which a near-alcoholic, offered one last chance to go clean, gives in to the temptation to have another glass, or a somewhat untidy person suddenly abandons all attempt at daily hygiene and ends up living like an animal.
At the time Mario met her, Blanca drank six or seven vodkas per day, smoked two packs of Camels, and carried a purse stuffed with a confusion of dirty tissues, shreds of tobacco, loose rolling papers, and pills, both uppers and downers. Her life with the painter Naranjo, who’d initially dazzled her with his pretensions to genius and the visual force of his work, had quickly and foreseeably collapsed into a torturous hell of abandonments, reconciliations, disloyal acts, and abrupt departures that could have gone on for years had it not been for Mario’s appearance.