Free In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina

go on living with her, under whatever conditions—he understood this almost at the end, vanquished, perhaps unworthy, more in love than ever—whatever conditions Blanca, or the stranger or shadow who had supplanted her, wanted to dictate.
    What he most bitterly reproached himself for was his lack of vigilance and cunning, his excessive confidence not in the love or fidelity of Blanca, whom he would never reproach for anything, but in male nature, or the abject version of it represented by the individual whose name Mario had heard and read several times without paying attention to it, without realizing that the only real danger emanated from him. Did he first see the name LluísOnésimo in one of the cultural supplements that Blanca went through so avidly on Saturday mornings over breakfast, did he hear it on television, in that program
Metrópolis
that he always fell asleep halfway through, or was it Blanca’s own sacred lips that had formed its syllables for the first time, with the same reverent and entirely unmerited generosity with which she pronounced so many names that awoke no echo but ignorance and hostility in Mario, names of artists, directors, choreographers, or vile, conceited writers whom she approached after their readings, asking them in her warm and admiring voice to sign a copy of their book for her or talk for a few minutes, men just in from Madrid with the smell of tobacco and whisky on their breath and eyes that would invariably move toward Blanca’s neckline or give her a sidelong glance as she held out the book for them to sign as if she were offering up her whole life on a platter.
    Animosity sharpened his memory: the first time he heard the name Lluís Onésimo was an ordinary Tuesday in June, a day like all the othersweet monotonous days of his vanished happiness, and he even remembered the first course of the meal Blanca had made, a
vichyssoise
, and that the TV news was going on about Frida Kahlo, which alarmed him because he didn’t yet know that Blanca, in one of her impetuous aesthetic shifts, had ceased, from one day to the next, to be interested in Frida Kahlo, and that very soon, fatally drawn by the gravitational pull of Onésimo’s intellectualism, she would abjure what the villainous multimedia artist from Valencia disdainfully called the “traditional supports.” The era of classic formats, canvas, oil, even acrylic, had come to an end, the era of the Painter with a capital P, elitist and exclusive, was over, and had never been more than a holdover from the nineteenth century, a parody whose pathetic extreme was now embodied by the obsolete Jimmy N.
    Those were the things Mario heard Lluís Onésimo say during the first meal they shared on the day Blanca introduced them to each other, and though he understood none of it and dislikedthe artist’s looks and even his exaggerated accent, Mario took base satisfaction in the belittlement of his former rival Naranjo, and observed with tenderness, pity, and almost remorse that when she heard those words Blanca lowered her head and pressed her lips together, and didn’t dare defend the man she had so recently admired.
    With painful lucidity, with the retrospective bitterness of not having guessed in time, Mario realized far too late that Blanca’s sudden lack of interest in Frida Kahlo, which had come as such a relief, was a clue to the fact that she had just developed a gigantic new admiration: she’d learned everything about Onésimo in the art magazines and the
El País
Sunday supplement, she’d read the articles about what she called his installations and performances, and with all the fervor of a recent convert she’d admired his public statements, which were often scandalous, his shaved head, his perennial three-day stubble, his black clothing, the vaguely Asiatic tattoo on the back of his right hand, his rings. She had thought, with an intolerable sense of havingbeen treated unfairly and passed over, that she would never have