In Her Absence (10 page)

He looked long into her eyes before kissing her and she burst out laughing and told him not to look at her like that: the force of Mario’s gaze scared her, and this constituted further and definitive proof of her imposture, because Blanca, his wife, the woman he had loved, the woman who had undoubtedly left him for someone else, had never given any indication that his eyes made a strong impression on her.

He tried to catch her out. He’d call from the office and then stay very silent and listen to her voice, trying to detect an inflection or accent that didn’t sound like Blanca. The radio was back in its usual spot on a bookshelf in the room Blanca no longer called the studio, but Mario could have sworn that the radio, too, though very similar, was not the same, and he despaired retrospectively over the scant attention he’d paid to such things, in the provincial haze, the lover’s daze he’d lived in until then. In any case, Blanca hardly ever listened to classical music anymore and never locked herself in the studio.

And yet, despite all his snooping around and fits of obsession, and without really noticing it, Mario was less and less unhappy. A night came when he accepted that Blanca wasn’t coming back and that it didn’t really bother him so much anymore to live with this other woman who looked so much like her. He was lying in his bedroom, doing a little reading, or trying to anyway, because he never relaxed his vigilance, and the door opened and the woman who was not Blanca came in, closing it slowly behind her, and lay down next to him, looking at him with those eyes that were not Blanca’s eyes, and unlike Blanca she didn’t ask him to turn off the light, and he could take full pleasure in every detail of Blanca’s naked body, those he knew by heart and those that surprised or disconcerted him, he wasn’t sure whether it was because they belonged to another woman or because he’d never noticed them before.

Then, turning on his side to bring her closer, so close that he breathed in her breath and saw his own anxious, masculine face in her pupils, he closed
his eyes and squeezed them tightly shut, afraid that if he opened them the illusion would dissolve, because now he was sure, his eyes shut and wet with tears, that the woman who was holding him was not Blanca: Blanca would never have breathed heavily and moaned like that, Blanca, the other one, the real one, the almost identical one, the one it no longer bothered him to have lost, the one he was not going to see if he opened his eyes, would never have burst out laughing in his arms or murmured in his ear the sweet, shameless words this unknown woman was whispering to him.