Free In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page B

electric company’s warning notices, all unopened.
    Little by little, almost furtively, he was making himself indispensable. When she was at her lowest point, so depressed and weakened she could barely get out of bed, Mario took three personal days off and spent them taking care of her and cleaning up her house, which was a more exhausting task than he could have foreseen but which left him, when he’d finished, with a very pleasant feeling of personal satisfaction, though he wasn’t sure whether Blanca had noticed any of the effort he had gone to. He bought detergents, sponges, window cleaners, polishes, disinfectants, mops, replacement mop heads, scouring pads, dish towels. He went to thehome and kitchen section of the local Pryca and came back with the car fully loaded. He understood that Blanca had grown up in a household staffed with servants, raised in the belief that other people would take care of the housework, and he imagined, as well, with some degree of jealous spite, that Naranjo had been an incorrigible slob, taking the same approach to his own personal hygiene as to his canvases.
    Blanca probably hadn’t had a proper meal for months before they met, “
una comida como Dios manda
,” as Mario would say, repeating one of his mother’s favorite expressions: a meal as God ordains. He talked to his mother over the phone two or three times a week, hearing her voice gradually turn into an old lady’s voice that seemed to come from very far away and that overwhelmed him with guilt and tenderness. It was his mother’s specialties that Mario knew best how to make, and he began preparing them for Blanca; cooking for her gave him a satisfying sense of himself as a skilled and diligent man that turned into something close to euphoria whenshe, at first so listless and uninterested, willingly ate up a plateful of lentil stew or chicken with rice and told him she’d never tasted anything so good.
    He got used to living for Blanca, adapting his schedule to her needs, her sudden whims and outbursts. He enjoyed a kind of furtive and half-clandestine happiness, a happiness sustained by Blanca’s mere presence but continually assailed by crises of dejection and fear. The phone would ring and he’d be afraid the call was from Naranjo; someone would knock at the door and he’d go to answer, drying his hands on his apron and thinking he might see the painter’s hated face in front of him for the first time, afraid Naranjo’s arrival would expel him from the delicate, ambiguous situation he’d grown so accustomed to. He was more than a friend but not a lover, simply a kind of helpful figure, and he was afraid Blanca’s only feeling toward him was gratitude. Sometimes she’d look at him and seem to see not him but someone else.
    He was ashamed of desiring her so much, ashamed of spying on her with primal hunger. Shehad moments of carelessness that plunged him into secret torments of an asphyxiating lust as strong as what he’d felt during his shadowy rural adolescence. Blanca would step out of the shower without having closed the bathroom door and he’d see her naked and white in the steam, tall and slim yet shapely, as elegant and exciting, he thought, as the models pictured in magazines, and so different from Juli, whose small, compact body he remembered only very dimly. Every morning he took a glass of fresh orange juice to her in bed, and when she sat up, still half-dozing, her face deliciously puffy after her first nights of deep, unbroken sleep in a very long time, the sheet would slip off her shoulders and reveal her small round breasts, which he barely glimpsed before averting his eyes in embarrassment, and Blanca would cover herself up unconcernedly as she drank the juice, then fall back to sleep.
    The stronger his desire, the more excessive his love, the stiffer he grew. He became more and more timid with her, ever clumsier and more obliging, trying to make up with efficiency and practicalassistance for what