Read In Her Absence for Free Online

and then several dozen heads would turn toward him as if to strike him with lightning. But now, in the car, there was no denying it: he was delighting in the music, moved to the very marrow of his bones as the trees and buildings alongthe avenue sparkled through the windshield, and this emotion was not only real but also the correct response.
    In a burst of inspiration, he stopped at the stationery store where he usually bought his drafting materials and picked out some wrapping paper and ribbon. When he got home, Blanca wasn’t there: a note on the dining-room table told him she’d gone to a job interview and would be back soon. If only he’d been paying attention, if only he’d noticed the chance repetition of certain names, coincidences that were already conspiring to wreak disaster upon him, while he, vigilant and inept, dazed, blind to what was irremediable, had seen nothing.
    He was touched by Blanca’s meticulous handwriting and the last word: “Kisses.” For once he was glad she wasn’t there. He cut the gleaming black wrapping paper down to size, wrapped up the two cassettes, folded the paper’s corners with the skill and precision of an origami artist, calculated the exact length of gold ribbon required so the bow on the package wouldn’t be tacky or ostentatious.Absorbed in the task, he busied his hands within a circle of lamplight in the small room that was her domain and which they both called the studio, smoothing down the paper, sharpening its folds with a fingernail, sliding the tips of his index fingers and thumbs along the golden ribbon to make a knot that could be undone with a single tug.
    He put the package away in a high cupboard with a certain exotic feeling of clandestinity, and that very night, at one minute past midnight, the first minute of Blanca’s birthday, he couldn’t stand the wait any longer and gave her the gift. This time he wasn’t tortured by fear of having chosen the wrong thing, fear that Blanca wouldn’t like it and would politely feign gratitude without fully concealing her disappointment. How clumsily she struggled to untie the package’s golden knot, how nervously she tried to open the folds and edges of the paper! She ended up simply ripping it, and what a privilege to be standing in front of her and receive the full force of her eyes an instant after she saw the two cassettes. “Moncho, Twenty ClassicBoleros,” she said, in the tone of voice she used only for unqualified rapture, for marveling gratitude, and that was one of the best reasons for loving her, because she intensely ennobled anything that she admired.
    Blanca put one of the cassettes on immediately and turned to Mario as the first song began in an invitation to dance. But they didn’t dance. They just stood in each other’s arms in the middle of the room, slowly swaying without moving their feet, while Moncho sang
Llévatela—Take Her Away
. But no one would ever take her away, Mario thought in pride and desire, steering her gently toward the bedroom, letting her lead him there.

Five
    THERE WOULD PROBABLY never be a respite: he would have to spend every hour, every day of the rest of his life winning her over, seducing her, permanently on the lookout, astute and untiring, for the appearance of any danger, any enemy. That didn’t bother him, of course; he’d known it practically from the first moment he met her, and when he stopped to think about it he had to admit he hadn’t done too badly since then. It had takenhim no more than two days to fall in love with Blanca, and the fact that she had begun, little by little, to have feelings for him, that she’d slowly slipped, without realizing it, from friendship and gratitude into love, was not the work of chance or the blind mechanism of passion, but the slow, hard-won result of Mario’s tenacity, his constant, tender solicitude, as unconditional as a nurse’s. In fact, that was what he’d been for a while, in the beginning: an assiduous nurse