En ausencia de Blanca
Antonio Muñoz Molina
Publicado: 2001 | 72 páginas
Relato Otros

En ausencia de Blanca es una historia de dependencia emocional más que una historia de amor. Novela corta, escrita por Antonio Muñoz Molina, en la que se nos narra la relación de Mario con su esposa Blanca, dos personas muy diferentes que en algún momento de sus vidas se encontraron y se necesitaron. Ahora, Mario duda de que su mujer sea la misma y analiza los pormenores de su fracaso y las sospechas del alejamiento de su esposa. Mario es un funcionario de la Diputación de Jaén, un hombre metódico, tranquilo, de pueblo, un tipo de costumbres, ahorrador y equilibrado. El desequilibrio llega a su vida en forma de mujer, una joven llamada Blanca a la que él rescata del infierno de soledad y drogas, en el que la ha sumido su afición por el mundo bohemio, egoísta y descontrolado, del arte y los artistas. En ausencia de Blanca se erige como una muestra incontestable de la capacidad creativa del escritor, siempre atento a lo que acontece a su alrededor, a la sociedad y a los personajes que la conforman: seres que viven y aman esperando que el hechizo mágico de su realidad no se desvanezca.

8422681757

Good god, this was boring. I want my 45 minutes back.

Mario is a government draftsman who has, to his eternal surprise, gratitude, and pleasure married well above himself socially and intellectually. He shares none of Blanca’s passions for literature and art and music; he is a man of “instinctive caution” with a “lacerating inferiority complex”, but he is beyond happy in his predictable, mundane life because, “…he alone had the privilege of desiring beyond all other women the precise woman he had married, and the absolute certainty that when he opened the door of his house, he would find her there.” The story in this novella is told through the eyes of Mario, but it would not take much imagination to see that some might interpret his devotion to Blanca as cloying in its closeness, perhaps doomed by its lack of shared interests: “…for Mario Blanca’s endless sequence of new and different jobs and widely disparate enthusiasms was proof of her vitality, her audacity, her innate rebelliousness ,qualities he found particularly admirable because he was largely devoid of them”.

Mario falls prey to suspicion that Blanca (who had a wild life with a number of lovers, mainly artists, before meeting and marrying Mario) has fallen for yet another artist who is, “neither the first moth drawn to the flame of Blanca’s intellectual charms nor the first parasite to feed off her unconditional reverence for any form of talent or skill”. Mario thinks that he sees differences in how Blanca acts around and with him and he convinces himself, in a slightly surreal touch, that the woman he is living and sleeping with is not the real Blanca, but he is less and less unhappy because, “A night came when he accepted that Blanca wasn’t coming back and that it didn’t really bother him so much anymore to live with this other woman who looked so much like her”.

This is an entertaining read; an author in command of the emotions and relationships that he portrays with an admirable economy of description. It is a story about identity and desire and relationships and what attracts people to each other, and also about blindness and narrowness, and the inability to accept change that is not necessarily threatening, nor what we might think it to be. The ending is enigmatic; reasonable people could argue what it means and that is part of the charm.

rec by oprah- on marriage in spain