Read Online In Her Absence by Antonio Muñoz Molina - Free Book Online

decade later in a marriage that is lethargic from before the start, so inevitable and immutable that it’s closer to the realm of nature than to the feelings and actions of human beings, one of those relationships whose future is even more unvarying than its past: not only the white dress at the door of the church, the apartment with the brand-new imitation-oak furniture, the honeymoon in Mallorca or the Canary Islands immediately followed by a pregnancy, but also the deeply buried mutual suspicion of having been swindled, the bored bitterness of Sunday strolls with or without a baby carriage, the sweet, familial stupor, so much like the dull, heavy feeling that follows a big meal.
    For Juli to have had the uncommon fortitude to break up with Mario and invent a nonexistentinfidelity as justification were both strong indicators of the degree of boredom and disillusionment they’d sunk into over the years. Mario took the humiliation of being dumped rather badly at first and tended to confuse his displeasure with the sufferings of love. He wrote several supplicating or insulting letters, amply stocked with literary clichés; he pondered the inconstancy of women and spent a few afternoons wandering around the building where his ex-girlfriend worked, with the rather melodramatic notion of surprising her with his rival—a word much in vogue then on the popular Latin American soap operas. He also feared the vague rural opprobrium attached to bachelors—“old boys,” as his mother used to say.
    Then, after summer vacation, he began realizing he could spend whole days without thinking of her once, and shortly thereafter he privately acknowledged that he’d never really missed her. The apartment he’d bought to share with her now struck him as a very pleasant place to live alone. Raised in a large, unmodernized house in a countryvillage, a house that smelled like a stable and was glacially cold in winter, Mario was gratefully appreciative of hot water, clean bathrooms, the luxury of central heating. He chose furniture to please himself alone, though the suspicious looks he got from the salespeople made him uncomfortable; it must have been unusual for a single man to be furnishing a house with such care. He practiced a painless austerity in order to keep up with his monthly mortgage payments without anxiety; he got a membership at a video rental place, and joined a book-of-the-month club. It was then that he remembered his schoolboy affinity for history and bought Menéndez Pidal’s
History of Spain
on the installment plan. He embarked on a plan to read it from the first volume to the last, and would always remember that he had made it to the obscure and tedious reign of the Visigoths when he met Blanca. At the Council they thanked him for his first three years on the job. He started working some afternoons in the architectural studio a few former boardingschool classmates of his hadstarted, and he’d sometimes venture forth at night with one of them to drink wine in one or another of the city’s bars, with some vague idea of getting drunk and picking up girls. But they never managed to do either of those things, and after a while, bored and disappointed with each other, they stopped going out together. Shortly thereafter Mario’s old friend “got to be boyfriends” as they say in Jaén, with the studio’s secretary, a rather heavyset young woman who was so unappealing that Mario secretly felt some pity for his former friend. Better to be alone than to resign yourself so halfheartedly to a woman like that.
    He watched his expenses so carefully that of the two paychecks he received per month, he could put the entire second one away in savings. His parents, now retired, lived alone back in the village, and his only brother, eight years older, was a first sergeant in the Guardia Civil stationed in Irún. Mario felt a strong obligation to bring his parents to live with him in Jaén, but though he had a great deal of affection