In Her Absence by Antonio Munoz Molina

Author:Antonio Munoz Molina [Molina, Antonio Munoz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-619-5
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

Six

SHORTLY AFTER THAT she met Mario. In an inscription written in a book she gave him for their first anniversary, Blanca alluded to the sad state she’d been in and her gratitude to Mario by citing these lines from Rafael Alberti:

Cuando tú apareciste

Penaba yo en la entraña más profunda

De una cueva sin aire y sin salida.

When you appeared

I was agonizing in the deepest cavern

Of a cave with no air and no exit.

They met, she sometimes said, against all odds, on one of the rare occasions when their separate worlds happened to coincide, for even in small cities and state capitals as provincial as Jaén the people who brush past each other in the street live at interplanetary distances from one another: even when their paths cross it’s very difficult for them to actually see each other.

In order for it to happen, Mario had to turn up one night in the kind of place he never went, a newly opened club called Chinatown, housed in a former convent, with laser beams, stacks of video screens, and monolithic black speakers blasting pounding rhythms. One of the department heads had to have a bachelor party, in order for Mario—so befuddled by the music, the lights, and the crowd that he couldn’t locate his co-workers, for they were the ones who’d gotten him into this pickle, as always, practically dragging him to this hellish spot after a dinner that had already been unbearable in and of itself—to be standing at the fluorescent bar of that discothèque holding a lukewarm gin and tonic and trying to hear or say something to a girl he’d been introduced to a while before, whose name (because of the noise and the gin) he wasn’t sure he remembered.

Blanca told him later, when they compared notes in an attempt to reorganize the initial muddled episodes of their shared past, that she couldn’t remember his name either. In her case it wasn’t only the loud music, but also the abuse of alcohol, cocaine, and pills that, combined with perpetual sleep deprivation, had weakened her memory, especially her verbal memory, to the point that she’d be talking and suddenly find herself unable to think of a word, or be on the point of saying someone’s name to find that she’d forgotten it. Words were missing, hours of her life were missing, sometimes a step was missing when she was going down a staircase and suddenly she’d be overcome with vertigo and know that she couldn’t go on living like that.

Mario didn’t know it at the time, but the monitors were playing a video clip about Jimmy N.’s latest show, which had opened in triumph a few days earlier in the galleries of the Savings and Loan, from where, the rumor went, it would be traveling a few weeks later to New York (and indeed, with an eye to the indispensable American market, the clip was narrated in English). The bank’s Office of Cultural Programs had spared no expense in producing the video, which was cofinanced by the Cultural Council of Andalucía.

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