In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina

his mind, pursuing even the slightest tangible clue to Blanca’s escape and the appearance of this strange woman in his home. The lunch was held in honor of the closing of the exhibit or installation or whatever it was that had made the cultural center of the Savings and Loan look like a construction site for a month, and wasattended by artists, literary people, local journalists, and the director of the bank’s Cultural Division, who, perhaps the better to represent the institution that was paying for the meal, felt entitled to order a monstrous lobster which he proceeded to make short work of at almost the same velocity and sound volume at which Lluís Onésimo was ingesting his own lunch.
    Alone and quiet, sitting across from Blanca, who was drinking far too much wine and paying rapt attention to Onésimo’s words but none at all to his loud mastication, Mario had to fight back a desire to burst into tears or stand up and leave, telling himself that his self-respect was still intact, or at least his patience, and that the following day, after Onésimo was gone, he could embark once more on the task, now so habitual and beloved, of winning Blanca back through the simple, unconditional force of his love. But he also vaguely, painfully intuited that he might no longer have the energy to go on loving her and go on enduring lunches like this one, listening to all the intellectualterminology he didn’t understand, all the complicated names of foreign dishes and varieties of wines that now aroused a raging secret hostility in him that only with considerable effort could he keep from extending to Blanca, as well.
    The next day, after an extremely unpleasant misunderstanding that cost him almost an hour in Personnel, he got home at about 3:30, still annoyed and also worried that Blanca might have been sitting there waiting for him all that time with the food growing cold. He opened the door and didn’t hear Blanca’s footsteps in the hallway or music from the TV, and when he reached the living room the evidence that she wasn’t there, that she hadn’t left him any food, and hadn’t even bothered to put the cloth on the table as she always did, fell on him like a blow to the back of the neck. In the small living room of his middle-income housing apartment, surrounded by his own familiar furniture, in front of the blank TV screen where he saw his silhouette reflected, Mario López felt that his world was coming to an end. The definitive, silentcataclysm he had so often imagined and foreseen had arrived, nevertheless, with the horrible force of something absolutely novel. To have been left by Blanca was to sit there staring like an idiot at the crocheted doily that she hated, listening for no reason to someone’s footsteps or voice in the apartment upstairs, and feeling that all these things together constituted the devastating totality of his misfortune.
    He discovered that some of Blanca’s clothes and her small black suitcase were missing from the bedroom’s built-in closet. He wanted to believe she’d had to go away for some urgent reason: her mother had suddenly fallen ill or she’d been summoned to an interview for one of the jobs she was always trying to get and then quitting.
    Mario went to the kitchen and poured himself a beer. As he cut a slice of mortadella, he noticed he was leaning lower over the edge of the table than he normally did and an instant later he was sobbing violently. To live not only the rest of his life but even that whole afternoon or just the next five orten minutes seemed an impossible feat he would never be able to achieve. He managed to get hold of himself and went into the studio, seeking further evidence of Blanca’s flight. The little radio Blanca spent many afternoons listening to classical music on was no longer in its place on the shelf. In a fit of rage that brought him some fleeting relief, a childish sense of revenge, Mario ripped the poster for Lluís Onésimo’s exhibit from