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who cared for her with patience and skill, changed her sheets when they were soaked from long nights of delirium and fever, and little by little gave her back her strength and will to live. “You rebuilt me,” Blanca once told him, “as if you’d found a porcelain vase that was smashed into a thousand pieces and you had the skill and patience to reconstruct the whole thing, down to the tiniest shard.”
    Mario, who appreciated almost nothing in life more than stability, had spent the past several years discovering and admiring Blanca’s instabilities, while simultaneously trying to combator attenuate them by offering her a place where her reference points were secure and her soul could flower, without waste or suffering, into its full splendor. With other men, or abandoned to her own devices, Blanca might drift—in fact, had already once drifted—into a dazed, painful, and sterile chaos, a kind of stupefied contemplation of her own disaster that contained an element of the fatalism with which a near-alcoholic, offered one last chance to go clean, gives in to the temptation to have another glass, or a somewhat untidy person suddenly abandons all attempt at daily hygiene and ends up living like an animal.
    At the time Mario met her, Blanca drank six or seven vodkas per day, smoked two packs of Camels, and carried a purse stuffed with a confusion of dirty tissues, shreds of tobacco, loose rolling papers, and pills, both uppers and downers. Her life with the painter Naranjo, who’d initially dazzled her with his pretensions to genius and the visual force of his work, had quickly and foreseeably collapsed into a torturous hell of abandonments,reconciliations, disloyal acts, and abrupt departures that could have gone on for years had it not been for Mario’s appearance.
    People said, and Mario was sure it was true, that Blanca had played an important role in creating Naranjo’s success. (Mario would have committed suicide before calling him “Jimmy.”) Not only had she encouraged him, not only had she made him a better man, ennobling him with the beneficial influence of her admiration, she’d also used the very family influences she refused to resort to on her own behalf to find buyers for his paintings and convince galleries to show them. She’d marshaled her friends at newspapers and radio stations to interview him and write about his work, and had done so with a grace and tenacity that Naranjo himself lacked, or at least lacked then, when he was still pretending to be an antisocial
artiste maudit
, years before winning the Jaén Biennial and being converted to what he himself called, with the brazenly cynical mercantilism that passed for state-of-the-art modernity in the 1980s,
el bisnes
.
    The energy Blanca would expend on behalf of other people’s talents could be inexhaustible, even miraculous. And perhaps it was because she poured herself so generously into these external causes, Mario thought, that she lacked the drive to make herself into something, to carry through with any project of her own that would have required a concentrated effort of her will to complete. She had a very rare gift, the gift of admiration, and she knew how to explain what she admired and why she admired it with such conviction that her enthusiasm became contagious.
    When she first met Naranjo in 1982 or ’83, no one believed in his work, not even Naranjo. Blanca was the one who somehow convinced him that he truly was a painter and that the general indifference to his work wasn’t due to the mediocrity of his paintings, as Naranjo himself had begun to think, but to the mediocrity of the audience, the incurable Spanish ignorance, the cultural wretchedness of the provinces. It was Blanca who dissuaded him from the grim temptation to take a government examthat could lead to a post as a professor of drawing. It was because of her that his work was entered into the competition for the Jaén City Council Biennial, in which Naranjo was