Blanca and Santi

Blanca and Santi’s relationship is a long-running affair whose physical intensity gives Blanca temporary relief from grief, while its limits keep her waiting for a future that never quite arrives. Santi is married, and Blanca’s account of their connection holds attraction and frustration together: she is repeatedly drawn back to him, yet recognizes that he cannot offer the reciprocal, unencumbered partnership she wants.

An Affair Kept at a Distance

Blanca has been seeing Santi for more than two years. She has deliberately avoided asking about his relationship with his wife, describing that silence as a matter of delicacy and respect, but also of fear. Her policy is to know as little as possible about other people; in her view, time and attentive observation will eventually reveal what matters. In Santi’s case, that restraint lets the affair continue without making its terms easier to ignore.

Their history began when Santi had separated from his wife, who was having a love affair with one of his friends. When that relationship failed, Santi returned to his wife to comfort her and repair their marriage. Blanca understands that the marriage had already traded sex, curiosity, and admiration for comfort, companionship, and children, but its familiarity still draws him back. Their own relationship, meanwhile, had begun to falter after a couple of months. Blanca sees its revival as powered by the impossible and the unattainable: she had not found anyone she liked more, while Santi recognized that his marriage had resumed where it left off. The affair’s renewed intensity depends in part on what neither can fully have.

Desire Against Bereavement

The relationship takes on particular force during Blanca’s mother’s illness and after her death. In the months when her mother was struggling with illness and dementia, Blanca also sought sex as a way to prove to herself and the world that she was still alive. As the illness worsened, she describes her sexual encounters as becoming more fierce, as though the battle in every bed were somehow the same battle being fought by her mother. She frames sex not as a cure for grief but as its bodily opposite: it pulls her into the present even while death remains close.

After weeks without seeing Santi, Blanca meets him in what she believes is Badalona. They eat croquettes in a shabby bar that feels, to them, like the most wonderful place in the world. Santi arrives on his bicycle wearing her favorite, very old faded-red jeans and a khaki parka they bought together long ago. Blanca reads the clothes as an attempt to please her and as a charm against the storms in their relationship. His compact, tanned body and battered workman’s hands still make her heart jump. Her mother used to tease her for liking handsome men; Blanca recognizes the attraction as a preference for appearance over power, intelligence, or money.

Their closeness shows itself in small, almost unspoken gestures: a hand at a waist, a touch on a shoulder, a caress of a little finger while he lights her cigarette. They keep themselves a few centimeters nearer than ordinary friends would. In a passageway, Santi pushes Blanca against a wall, kisses her, and puts his hand inside her trousers. The encounter makes physical desire an immediate counterweight to mourning, but it does not resolve the uncertainty surrounding their relationship. Blanca’s attraction remains vivid precisely where the future remains unsettled.

A Bond That Repeatedly Revives

Santi’s messages sustain the sense of possibility. When one arrives saying he has just reached his destination and is eager to see her, Blanca’s attention shifts from her mother’s death to her body and the people around her. Her blood, imagined as frozen, begins to circulate again. She jokes with the children, plays on the floor with her goddaughter, hugs Sofía, strokes a cat, eats olives, and urges everyone outside to look at the moon. The message does not change the circumstances of the affair; it changes Blanca’s immediate capacity to inhabit the evening.

That revival is also part of the relationship’s frustration. Blanca likens Santi to a phone whose arrival she is always awaiting: she anticipates that something wonderful may happen, although it usually does not. The contrast clarifies what desire gives her and what it withholds. Sex anchors her in the present, whereas Santi leaves her oriented toward the next message, the next meeting, or a transformation of their relationship that may never come.

The Imbalance Becomes Explicit

A late meeting in a hotel in Cadaqués makes the gap between anticipation and fulfillment stark. Blanca has never before stayed in a hotel there and finds its familiar view newly foreign: even in company, such rooms can feel solitary, like a temporary place of rest before a struggle. She arrives late, and Santi says he has little time. He undresses her slowly and appreciatively, but appears tired and has red eyes; Blanca supposes he has been smoking while he waited. She attends to her own desire, waiting for it to spread through her body, but Santi comes after a minute and a half and cannot bring her with him. He spends the next ten minutes apologizing. Blanca tells him not to worry, though she is lying; her body cools while her desire remains suspended in the room.

Their conversation exposes a further imbalance. Blanca says that if Santi’s wife found another man, he would no longer love Blanca. He seems more troubled by the possibility of his wife finding someone else than by Blanca one day no longer wanting to run into his arms. He then volunteers that he and his wife have not had sex for a long time. Blanca finds the disclosure repugnant and says that his marriage is not her business. Until then, he had never discussed its intimate life with her.

The Decision to Stop

Blanca tells Santi that they should stop seeing each other. He protests that what he gives her is very little, but says he cannot stop seeing her and tells her that he loves her very much. Blanca is surprised to realize that she has already begun to speak of his love in the past tense: the problem, as she understands it, is that he has loved her, rather than continuing to love her. She does not pursue the thought aloud, judging any attempt to measure their love together futile.

They both say they have to leave. Santi asks to see her soon and presses his lips passionately but awkwardly against hers; Blanca’s lips remain inert. The farewell does not establish with certainty that they will never meet again, but it marks a decisive change in how she receives him. The kiss that once carried the promise of renewed life now registers the distance between his urgency and her withdrawal. Their relationship has offered real bodily intensity and brief relief from grief, yet it has not overcome the marriage, the unequal stakes, or Blanca’s growing recognition that waiting for Santi is not the same as being chosen by him.