Authors: Antonio Munoz Molina
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. The music hadn’t actually been composed by Santiago Auserón, as was claimed in the opening credits, but was indeed by a very close collaborator of his, and the footage had been commissioned from a director of TV advertisements who’d won prizes at several international festivals.
By then Blanca had broken up with Naranjo two or three times, but that night she couldn’t muster the willpower to keep from going to Chinatown
in the hope of seeing him. She was almost trembling when she got there, already regretting that she’d come, and then all her fear of running into him, which she hadn’t lost even after drinking a vodka straight up, turned to disappointment when she learned that Naranjo had just left. The presentation of the video had been a huge success, one of his disciples who’d stayed behind to keep on eye on subsequent showings told her with effeminate rapture. Everyone had been there, the
most high
, he said in English, the Municipal Cultural Councillor, the Provincial Representative of the regional government, the Vice President of the Savings and Loan, it was overflowing with VIPs in here, chortled the pale, shaven-headed Hare Krishna acolyte in his heavy black clothes and heavy black shoes with thick rubber soles, his temples so closely shaven that they were blue.
Blanca tried hard to keep from nursing a growing resentment, a petty bitterness about being left out of the picture just when Naranjo was beginning to enjoy a success that wouldn’t have been
possible without her. But she knew that success tends to separate artists from the people who supported them during their early obscurity. She still felt a reluctant but obsessive love for Naranjo, in which her memories of pleasure and of their former intellectual alliance played no role whatsoever: it was nothing but the pure inertia of love, its indestructible tendency to outlast everything else, beyond comfort, beyond reason, even beyond Blanca’s own desires, for after the scene in the Madrid studio she was sure she could never go to bed with Naranjo again. Steeling up her courage, fully prepared to understand and accept, she’d asked him if he’d fallen in love with that boy. She wasn’t at all ready for his reaction. Naranjo burst out laughing, looked at her as if she were an idiot he was continually having to reproach for the naive vulgarity of her middle-class upbringing, and said, “What do you mean ‘in love’? He was a rent boy from Calle Almirante.”
She knew she was never going to be able to trust him again, but if Naranjo had come to her
and made promises or tearfully proffered some improbable declaration—“It wasn’t what you were imagining,” as if it were something she’d merely imagined and not seen with her own eyes—Blanca would have gone against the dictates of her dignity and intelligence in order to believe or try to believe him, successfully sustaining the illusion until the next betrayal. She took tranquilizers to fall asleep and stimulants to wake up; she made it through the days on endless cigarettes, vodkas, and coffees, in a stupefied haze of lassitude, bodily malaise, and desolation. She would wake up at 5:00 a.m. to find the television still on, and sometimes when she bumped into doorframes or hallway corners she’d realize that her walk was as lurching and unsteady as a drunk’s.
Standing at the bar in Chinatown that night, she’d barely noticed Mario’s face and would never have had any further recollection of his existence if not for the fact that after a disjointed and practically shouted conversation—during which she never stopped looking around in case Naranjo
reappeared—she started feeling sick. Thinking this was caused by the dense heat in the crowded room, she asked Mario to please excuse her, she was going outside to get a little fresh air and would be right back. A few minutes later, tired of waiting and exhausted by the noise and people, Mario went outside himself, on his way home. He found her on the sidewalk, doubled over between two cars with one hand pressed against her stomach while the other held onto her hair, vomiting and moaning, her body convulsed at regular intervals by violent shudders.
He pushed her hair back and wiped the glistening sweat from her face. Lots of people were standing around the bar’s doorway but no one seemed to have noticed them. He led her over to some front steps a short distance away and helped her sit down. For a moment she thought it was Naranjo who was helping her and threw her arms around his neck and held him, trembling, as she repeated a name that was completely unknown to Mario. He gently maneuvered her away from him,
not only because he felt awkward about receiving caresses intended for someone else but also because Blanca’s breath was an acid stench of alcohol, nicotine, and vomit.
A few minutes later she leaned back with her eyes closed, somewhat calmer but still clutching Mario’s hand. Her own hands, whose softness was delicious to him, were unusually cold. Suddenly her nails dug into his palm and she went rigid: she’d just started to look for something, her pack of cigarettes, undoubtedly, and realized that she’d lost her purse. She became frantic, as in those situations of panic and powerlessness that happen in dreams, wildly enumerating the things she thought she’d lost, though without doing anything more to try and find them than grope blindly around her: her house keys, her ID card, her ATM card, the silver lighter that someone, another male name, had given her.…
It didn’t take Mario long to find the purse. It had been dropped next to the sidewalk, back where he’d first spotted her between the two cars, and it
was still there, splattered with vomit. The drinkers milling around the entrance to the bar had passed by without noticing it, stepping in vomit as indifferently, thought Mario, as they’d have stepped on her if she hadn’t been able to get up. He’d always felt a vague but aggressive hostility toward the denizens of nightclubs, and not just toward their way of dressing, speaking, and holding glasses and cigarettes. It was the hatred of the earlybird for the night owl, deeply rooted in him from the beginning, perhaps inherited from his father, who had risen before dawn his whole life to go out and work in the fields, and who was now languishing in an old people’s home in Linares.
Another thing he’d inherited from his father was his immaculate neatness: he wiped the purse clean with a tissue before handing it back to Blanca. Her hands were shaking so badly as she opened it that everything spilled out and she couldn’t find what she was looking for: her cigarettes and the lighter. She repeated that it was a silver Zippo and was once again overcome with remorse at having
lost it. Kneeling on the sidewalk, she searched around with long, clumsy, nervous fingers, oblivious to the feet of the people who were going by, blindly rummaging, without seeing even Mario. She looked for it just as she would always look for everything, the most valuable objects and the most trivial, even after she had been living with Mario for a long time: very nervous and irritated—as if, in the anarchy of the insides of drawers, the objects had conspired among themselves to mock her—and fearing that she’d lost forever just the thing she needed most, the book she had to read, the first pages of something she was at last beginning to write that, once she’d lost them, left her back at the same point of departure as always, a dispirited tangle of projects, none of them entirely anchored in reality. She finally found a cigarette, a single, bent cigarette, and put it between her lips while still searching for the lighter, but it was Mario who spotted it and offered her a light.
“If you smoke you’ll feel even worse,” he said.
“I couldn’t possibly feel worse.”
“Come on, calm down. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“Don’t go.” Blanca gripped him. “Don’t leave me alone.”
Both of them would have been surprised to learn that before much more time had passed he would be promising never to leave her alone again. That night he took her back to her house in a taxi—she couldn’t remember the address but he found an envelope in her purse that was printed with it—and at the entrance to the building Blanca asked him to come up, clinging to him with the same anguish as a while earlier when she was afraid he was going to go for a glass of water. The apartment, part of which was also the former studio of Jimmy N., looked catastrophic to Mario: a perverse mixture of filth and disorder, sordid domesticity and vaguely bohemian set design, like a movie showing how artists used to suffer in the olden days. Blanca walked across the whole apartment turning on all the lights as if she were afraid someone were there or as if she were still hoping Naranjo had come back. In
the bedroom where, as in all the rooms, canvases leaned against the wall and newspapers and posters were strewn everywhere, the very large bed was unmade and the sheets were visibly dirty, thought Mario. On the night table was an overflowing ashtray, a glass half-f of water and a small bottle of capsules whose label Mario examined with some concern. On the wall over the bed, a large unframed canvas, carelessly held in place with thumb tacks and staples, bore a muddled shape that it took Mario some time to recognize as a body, and then as a naked female body, and a face that, despite the brush strokes that disfigured it as if it were reflected in murky and turbulent waters, was Blanca’s face. For some reason it intimidated him to find himself simultaneously in the presence of a woman and a painting that showed her naked, even though her nakedness was rendered almost unrecognizable by the painting’s style, which Mario dared to conjecture was expressionist—or perhaps by the painter’s inability to correctly reproduce an image.
Blanca sat down on the bed, rummaged through the drawer of the night table, slammed it shut, then poked through the ashtray until she located a cigarette that was almost intact—she must have put it out only seconds after lighting it the night before. The reek of old cigarette smoke and sheets long unchanged was sickening. Mario, who didn’t like visiting other people’s houses, had an unpleasant feeling that he was invading someone’s intimate privacy. What right did he have to be there, with a woman who was a complete stranger, at two in the morning, in a bedroom in which there were ostensible signs of the presence of another male? What was he doing there when the woman, Blanca, whom he was already beginning to like, seemed to have forgotten his presence entirely? Not daring to step inside, he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched her bury her head between her knees, perched on the edge of the bed with a trail of smoke still ascending on one side. He noticed that she was shaking and was afraid she was about to vomit again. But this time she was
shaking because she was crying, silently, in hard, dry sobs that were as alien to Mario as was the cigarette she was holding between her fingers. Afraid she’d set the sheets on fire, Mario approached her, timid and cautious, took the cigarette away, and put it out with disgust in the ashtray. Blanca lifted her eyes and seemed not to remember who he was. At moments, Mario’s compassion was already turning to tenderness. By now he found her much, much prettier than he had a few hours earlier when they were introduced.
“What do you think, shall I make some coffee?” he said, trying to make his voice sound natural and relaxed, the voice of a man who’s used to going out at night and spending lots of time with women and artists. Blanca managed to focus her eyes on him and moved her head in a gesture that looked like nodding.
There wasn’t a plate, spoon, or cup that wasn’t dirty in that kitchen, and that hadn’t been dirty for at least a week. The sink was hard to find beneath the pile of filthy dishes. When he managed to rescue
the coffeepot and began trying to wash it out, Mario discovered that the water had been cut off. And of course there were no bottles of water in the refrigerator stored up in case of the usual restrictions. All that was there were a container of rancid margarine and an unopened bottle of mayonnaise, along with a moldy tomato. Mario, like all very orderly people, was not only appalled by this disaster but felt reaffirmed and almost smug in his own habits. He went back to the bedroom to tell Blanca he couldn’t make coffee and found her asleep, on her side, facing the light on the night table, her two hands holding the pillow, her legs pulled up against her stomach, breathing through her mouth, with sweat gleaming on her upper lip. She hadn’t even taken off her shoes. Very carefully, Mario removed them and then slowly pulled the blanket up to her chin, trying not to wake her, watching her sleep with a delight all the more intense for being furtive. He thought about leaving her a note on the nightstand or even on the bathroom mirror as he’d seen in the movies, but he wasn’t carrying paper
or pen, and in any case had no idea what to write. He was tempted to leave her one of his cards but decided against it just in time; that would have been, he later considered, far too commercial and impertinent a gesture. He stood there for a minute or two more, watching Blanca sleep, without knowing what to do, what strategy to come up with so the night’s accidental connection wouldn’t be lost. But he lacked experience as well as shrewdness and was suddenly afraid that the man she’d called out to once or twice in her delirium, the owner of the three or four masculine articles strewn about the house, would unexpectedly appear and place him in an ambiguous and even dangerous situation.…