In Her Absence Read Online Free Page A

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’sgeneration 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.
    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 betweenthose 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 knoweverything 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