In Her Absence

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Book: Read In Her Absence for Free Online
Authors: Antonio Muñoz Molina
refusing to participate, not only because it disgusted him to play along with power, as he was always saying, but also because he feared the humiliation of not being chosen. Without his knowledge—at that period he was generally lost in a haze of hashish and gin—Blanca chose one of his paintings and sent it to the Biennial, and she may also have spoken to one of the members of the jury about him, perhaps the very professor to whom she owed her lasting passion for Puccini. That last rumor was one she hotly denied, for even long after marrying Mario it infuriated her to hear anyone question Naranjo’s talent. In any case it was clear that she did everything she could to promote her artist boyfriend’s career, and in her own way she succeeded.
    She was also the one who didn’t let him be lulled into settling for local, provincial accolades. After the Jaén Biennial, he won the Zabaleta Prize,given by the municipal authorities of Quesada, and a few months later he was chosen to do the poster for the Baeza festival, which was a scandal in that very conservative city, a shocking rupture with the conventions that had governed that type of poster until then. In the province of Jaén, Naranjo became the radical personification of the avant-garde, but he would very likely have squandered this success if it hadn’t been for Blanca’s impassioned demands: he couldn’t settle for what he’d already achieved, he had to make the definitive leap and become known in Granada, Madrid, across the wide world.
    Without realizing it, she was working toward her own downfall. It was the contact with Madrid that finally sent Naranjo over the edge and transformed him into his abominable caricature Jimmy N., which sounded more like a disc jockey’s name than a painter’s. It wasn’t always possible for Blanca to go with him on his trips to the nation’s capital city, and though she was far too generous to be jealous on principle, as so many women are, she soon noticed that Naranjo was transformingat a dizzying rate, or perhaps showing his true colors.
    News of his great triumph in Madrid spread all over Jaén, though it later became clear that word of said triumph had never actually reached Madrid. People were also talking about what they started to call his “Nuevo look.” The crew-necked sweaters, work pants, and solid work boots of a proletarian realist or American abstract expressionist had been replaced by a wardrobe abundant in tight black leather garments and leopard- or zebra-print fabrics. He got rid of his beard and shaved his sideburns all the way up to the temples, for those were times in which the audacities of modernity seemed inseparable from a certain extravagance of hairstyle, and the selection of that hairstyle was as decisive in a person’s life as the choice of a political ideology had been ten years earlier. Startled, then dumbfounded, and finally shattered by bitterness and a sense of betrayal, Blanca still couldn’t bring herself to break up with him, and she attributed the most benign meaning she could to the new thingsshe heard him say and saw him do, while trying not to pay too much attention to the pointy-toed shoes and newly acquired passion for disco music, parties, and cocaine. Even so, where he was concerned she was already starting to lose her habit of passionately adopting as her own the enthusiasms of a man she admired.
    The Naranjo she’d fallen in love with was a gruff, taciturn artist, reserved to the point of claustrophobia and misanthropy, a steadfast communist, a user of hashish, but especially of alcohol, alien to all social conventions including employment, monogamy, paternity, scheduling, and the latest styles in painting, fond of finishing off his nights of bohemian revelry drinking pastis in the brothels, for in certain provincial intellectual circles of the time such inveterately masculine debauchery was celebrated as a statement of liberating marginality and dynamic dissidence. The Jimmy

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