In Her Absence Read Online Free Page B

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 precisionas 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 unconditionallyas 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 hesaw 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