Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  PART ONE

  1

  Harri Gabilondo took great pleasure in describing where it happened and believed that what she was telling them was astonishing. She always believes that when she tells them about something—it’s something amazing and incredible. “You won’t believe what happened to me,” she’ll say, for instance, but everything that comes after that passionate announcement seems dispensable to Julia and, usually, far too long. For Julia—unable to avoid Harri’s gray eyes—the pauses she makes when telling her stories are too long, and the gestures she uses to show how amazed and surprised she is are too much, especially compared with the listener’s lack of excitement about the stories.

  Julia knows that when she finishes the first version of her story, she’ll go back to some part she thinks particularly significant in order to underline it and, with her eyes wide open, say “what do you make of that?” Then, without stopping, she’ll ask the same thing in Spanish—“¿Qué te parece?”—and even though this “what do you think of that?” is no more than conversational filler in her story, Julia thinks that when Harri says it, she’s asking Martin, leaving her out of it.

  “¿Qué te parece?”

  Harri’s greatest desire is to inspire Martin to write a story in which she features as a character. But she’s unable to keep his attention for long. His eyes suddenly dart toward the pages of a book, or he turns the television on very obviously, and when that happens, Julia listens even harder, so that Harri won’t get angry. But her efforts are in vain, because what matters to Harri is having Martin listen, and she always gets angry enough to stop being polite. “You two aren’t paying attention to what I’m saying,” she says, in the plural.

  In fact, when that happens, Julia feels for her.

  This time, she tells them that she’s in love, that it was “un flechazo,” love at first sight, and she makes even more exaggerated gestures than usual, a hand on her chest, her eyes closed. “You aren’t going to believe it.”

  She doesn’t bother to take off her new camel-hair coat—an “incredibly expensive” coat, and no, she won’t tell them how much it cost, it’s a disgrace how much she paid for it in London—but Julia knows that she’ll end up telling them the price even if they don’t ask her. It’s a beautiful soft coat—though it does make her look very much like a señora—and she wants it to break it in as soon as possible so that it’ll start looking the way only good cloth can after it’s been well used. She was interested in the man as soon as she saw him at the airport; she’d dropped her daughter off at a boarding school in Surrey, where she’d taken her to distance her from “the conflict.” She says she doesn’t know why, because he looked like your typical Basque man: bearded, checked shirt and corduroy pants, about her age, maybe forty-five, intellectual looking, probably a university lecturer, from the Humanities and Social Sciences Department perhaps, which his two plastic bags full of books, as well as his backpack, seemed to confirm. A man who looked like any other, but with something special, too, something she could see, a spark in his eyes, a warmth. They were sitting across from each other. The man was reading a book whose title she couldn’t see, because glasses don’t look good on her, but she glanced up from time to time, and then, unlike at first, she looked straight at him, with no embarrassment. Unluckily, the seats to either side of her were taken; she’s sure he would have come and sat next to her otherwise. She’s sure of that, she repeats. There was a free seat next to the man, and now she regrets not having dared to sit there. She also regrets not wearing the black silk blouse and pantsuit that look so good on her, but which she was afraid of creasing on the journey, instead of jeans.

  Harri’s habit of drawing stories out, her insistence on giving details that are almost always irrelevant, finally drives Julia crazy. Probably because she herself tends to do the opposite. Martin accuses her of being too direct, but what he really means is too hurried, and he’s not wrong there—when she starts talking about something in front of two or three people, she gets frightened she’s going to bore them and begins speaking very fast, avoiding all details, maybe skipping over things that would really add to what she wants to say. But, then, we all have our limits, and she’d much rather have her own sort. So she asks Harri to get on with it, to come to the point once and for all, without mentioning that she has work to get back to. She even tells Harri that she’s dying to hear about it, and just this once, although he’s always complained that Harri is tedious and dull, Martin stands up for her, just for the pleasure of attacking Julia.

  “God is in the details,” he says, using someone else’s words, although Julia almost says that it’s the devil who’s in them. She knows a lot of quotes in praise of details: “Reality is just a detail”—Márai; “The holiness of minute particulars”—Blake; that famous quote from Nabokov she’s forgotten. She holds her tongue so as not to cause a fuss and so that Harri can start her story again as soon as possible. As if Harri didn’t have enough of her own to say, Martin’s words have given her an excuse to carry on talking slowly, savoring the moment, her gray eyes looking from one of them to the other, as though she herself were amazed by the sharpness of the question she’s now asking them: Why are left-leaning and culturally-minded people more cold-natured than executive types? It seems like a fair question. The first wear thick sweaters, warm tops, and big boots, while the latter seem just fine in a shirt, jacket, tie, and thin goatskin shoes. The secret’s in the tie, which is the most differentiating garment. And all of that was just to lead into the fact that the man had been wearing not only a checked shirt, a wool sweater, and green corduroy pants but also a blue duffel coat, and finally Martin, who regrets having just spoken out in favor of details, says that she’s rambling and tells her to come to the point. Harri goes on to say that she got very nervous when she was thinking about whether or not it was up to her to go and sit in the free seat to the left of the man and that when she, growing increasingly nervous, was just about to decide, the executive in the light flannel suit to her own right got up, and so then she decided to wait, being sure that the man was going to come and sit down in the free seat next to her.

  Just in case, she closed the book she had open in front of her and was careful to put it into her bag, because it might have seemed like inappropriate reading to the man—it was Jon Juaristi’s El bucle melancólico, a history of Basque nationalism. She had been planning to boycott the writer, among other things because he said that he wasn’t going to use the murderers’ language any more, but apparently Julia had made her read it—the book was very well written and the writer was a great polemicist, and she argued that great polemicists’ attacks on attitudes help us to understand those attitudes.

  “It’s your fault,” she blurts out, as if Julia’s recommendation of El bucle had put her introduction to the man at the airport at risk. She read somewhere about someone who chose books to travel with as if they were clothes: chic books; ones that gives you a serious touch; books for going out for a stroll; ones that make you look young; ones that give you an air of spirituality. You have to decide where to open them. Julia remembers something and giggles. Harri points a finger at her angrily—“You made me, do you remember?” Julia remembers that she’d explained at the time that it was a sentence based on Gorz’s famous “I’ll never speak German.” A wholly inappropriate sentence, obviously, but one that shouldn’t be taken literally; it was pure rhetoric, designed to provoke. What’s more, it wasn’t Jauristi who said it, though that’s got nothing to do with what they’re talking about. So in the end, did the man sit next to you or not? “He couldn’t.” She shakes her head in regret. What happened was that as soon as he stood up, the boarding call went out, and he didn’t have time to go up to her, everybody started rushing toward the gate, and she, too, had to get up.

  “¿Qué te parece?”

  The telephone rings, and Martin rushes over to the shelves between the living room and the work area to pick it up. “The penthouse gir
l,” he says, looking lively. The two women keep quiet and listen to him speaking in English. Martin speaks fluently but with a terrible accent, he doesn’t make the slightest attempt to follow phonetic rules. Apparently, given that it’s impossible for him to pronounce really well, he thinks it’s useless to try, and that in fact, and most especially, making any effort reflects a complete lack of style. He is very good at sublimating his inability.

  “I was waiting for your call.” They have no trouble deducing that he’s talking with the woman he’s offered to rent out the top floor rooms to, because he’s explaining where the small Belle Époque mansion is, next to the river (he doesn’t say that it’s actually closer to the railroad than it is to the river), that it has a large garden with many beautiful trees in it, among them a particularly fine Magnolia grandiflora that gives the place some privacy from the rest of the neighborhood, which is a little rundown but has good transport connections for getting downtown.

  He says that they have excellent land, sea, and air connections and laughs at his own joke. Julia is angered by his excessive enthusiasm as he speaks, and when Harri asks who Martin is speaking with, she says she doesn’t have a clue, not wanting to hide the fact that she’s angry; until that very morning, he hadn’t told her that he wanted to rent the apartment out. It’s his house, and he has the right to do whatever he wants to with it, but he’s always full of doubts, asks her opinion about any trifle, and she’s hurt by him being so independent and unforthcoming about such important things.

  What’s more, she suspects he intends to let the woman have the apartment at no charge, or almost free, and that he only said otherwise because he didn’t want her to accuse him of going around playing at being generous (some friends have given him the honorary title marquis of Martutene to tease him) only to later complain that people take advantage of him and are ungrateful. They don’t take advantage of his generosity; it’s his idiotic vanity they take advantage of.

  And so Julia doesn’t listen to the conversation Martin is having with the woman he wants to rent the apartment to (the train’s the easiest way to get there, it’s quick and runs on time, she can come by whenever she wants, he’s always holed up at home) and instead asks after Harri’s daughter. “How’s Harritxu?” She’s sent her—exiled her, she says—to an elite school for her final year, in order to get her away from the radical environment. A difficult decision, inspired by Martin, to a large extent, and opposed by her husband and by her daughter herself; however, although she’s thought of little else over the last few months, she isn’t interested in the subject today. Harri looks toward the bookcases, as if to judge whether Martin will be able to hear her, and speaks in a low voice as if to hide what she’s going to say, although Julia knows only too well that what she is now going to tell her in secret she will later repeat in greater detail when she has Martin there to listen to her as well; she tells her, so that she can see just how worked up she was at the airport, that right then, right when she heard the boarding call, she absolutely hated Martxelo, knowing that he would be waiting for her at Loiu Airport with that dumb look on his face and that she’d have to go back home with him, tell him stupid things about London, listen to the bad things that happened to him at work at the hospital, and then make dinner. She wanted something to happen to stop him from going to pick her up, an accident, anything, and then perhaps the unknown man would go up to her and, if nobody was waiting for her in Bilbao, suggest that she could go with him.

  After hanging up, Martin tells them about the possible tenant, whom he’s just spoken with: she’s a young American woman, she’s very interesting, and he thinks she’s a sociologist. He says she won’t get in their way, because there’s a separate spiral staircase to go up to the top floor. Then, to stop Harri from worrying when she asks if he has to rent the apartment out because of money problems, he says he just felt like having a penthouse girl, and after coming out with the pleasantry, and afraid she might not get it, he explains that penthouse means a luxurious top-floor dwelling in English. As far as Julia knows, that dwelling has to be crowning an apartment complex as well as being luxurious if it’s to be called a penthouse. She nearly says that a chambre de bonne would be a better term for the apartment and that she’d like to know what title would better fit the tenant, but she keeps quiet, among other things because he’d react horribly, and also because Harri, who seems to be genuinely worried, stops saying silly things and asks Martin to tell the truth about his money situation. He says once more, trying to be convincing, that there aren’t any problems, not making any use of that part of the house just makes him feel guilty, that’s why he’s renting it out. After saying that, and obviously wanting to change the subject, he asks Harri to tell him what he hadn’t been able to hear while he was on the phone, but although she’s dying to tell him, she makes a sign as if to say “that’s our business” or “it’s women’s stuff.”

  It’s ridiculous, among other things because she has a closer relationship with Martin than with Julia—the two of them have known each other since they were teenagers, since they went to the French lyceum together. Julia’s only recently arrived on the scene, she’s a parvenue, as Harri usually reminds her when Julia complains about the cloying complicity between her and Martin. There aren’t many secrets between them, in some sense they’re incredibly similar (twin souls, as Harri would say), they have that awful, revolting habit of whispering things to each other, and Julia’s sure Harri knows about intimate things in her relationship with Martin.

  So it would be out of character for her to resist telling him about the hate and disdain she felt for her husband, “as awful as that might sound,” and sure enough, after complaining, in that affected tone she normally uses to cover up the fact that she’s being serious, about Martin being insensitive (she, an honest wife, who is faithful to her husband, is confessing that she’s crazy about some unknown man and is prepared to do anything for him; meanwhile, Martin’s sitting there talking about playboy girls and renting out apartments over the phone), she starts her story again where she left off, in other words, in the boarding lounge, at the moment when the seat to her right became free and the man got up holding his backpack and plastic bags full of books. He took two steps toward her, and her heart started beating like a frightened mare in her chest, but just then, the boarding call went out, and she had no choice but to stand up, as well, although she would have happily stayed sitting there and let the plane take off if the man had made some sign that he intended to stay.

  She thinks that he would have stayed, too, if she had dared to remain sitting there and held his look. She has no doubt about it. Now she regrets not having taken that risk, even knowing just how cowardly men are. And, she says, she wouldn’t have minded having to remain alone in the boarding lounge and watch the plane take off with the man in it. She would have had the consolation of having tried. Now she dreams about having been brave enough—the man sitting down next to her, the two of them keeping silent while the last call for travelers to Bilbao comes out over the speakers, repeating their names, and watching the plane as it goes up into the air without them.

  “Can you imagine it?” she says to Martin, as if to say “doesn’t that inspire you?” A gesture of sorrow. She wasn’t brave enough, and now, she thinks, she would be, more than enough. Unfortunately, good sense got the better of her and she got into line, although she did pray—something she hadn’t done for a long time—that they’d be sitting together. But luck isn’t on their side. She sits down first, the man stops at the door, or he’s been stopped by the flight attendants, she’s not sure why, probably because of something to do with his bags, and when she sees him coming down the aisle, walking sideways, carrying one bag in front of him and the other behind because it wouldn’t all fit otherwise, their eyes meet, the man gives her a long, agreeable smile, he even lifts his chin a little to greet her, and she also smiles, in what she hopes is an unaffected way, though she’s a little ashamed of her darin
g, and when he’s almost up to where she is, two or three rows in front of her, one of the bags, the one he’s carrying on his front hip, bursts, as was to be expected, and ten or twelve books or more fall to the floor.

  He crouches down and tries to pick them up, holding them between his thighs and his chest, but they fall down again. “Joder,” he swears in Spanish, which proves he’s from here, and he lets the stress fall on the o, a form of enunciation that makes it seem like he’s not really all that put out about it, or over-worried or nervous at blocking the way, even though there are people waiting behind him who are getting visibly impatient, though not enough to prompt any of them to help him.

  Harri, however, resolutely gets up without thinking twice, takes her two Harrods bags out of the hand luggage compartment, puts the contents of one of them into the other, and offers him the empty one. The man smiles again, grateful now, and she helps him to pick the books up from all over the floor. They’re both crouching down, face to face, he doesn’t care about holding up the people behind him, and she’s waiting for something to happen, wishing for something to happen, her heart beating fast, when the man and she both reach out to grab the last book, and their hands touch.

  There’s a beach on the cover of the book, a beach with two empty hammocks on it and a lighthouse in the distance. The man opens the book and reads, “This book was written in good faith,” very slowly, with complete calm, as if it were just the two of them on the plane and they weren’t holding up any other travelers, as they are, and he offers her the book in English, as well. “It’s a present for you.” But she, fool that she is, doesn’t take it, she’s incapable of doing anything but looking at the picture on the cover, or rather, she’s incapable of doing anything but wondering if it’s a beach in the north, with those clumps of grass, the long shadows of the two empty deckchairs, a headland in the distance where there’s a lighthouse with a red stripe halfway up it.