Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  The pale-yellow tablecloth reminds her of the kitchen at Sagastizabal—the lower half of the walls painted green, white cupboards and storerooms with handles covered in a thick coat of red paint (and a circle in the same color around them, traced with a glass). A design scheme very similar, in fact, to that found on coastal fishing boats. After dinner, while her mother washed the dishes, her father used to sit with his back against the wall, his feet resting on the firewood basket, and sing improvised rhyming bertsos with great enthusiasm and little harmony; he enjoyed singing as much as he liked being out of tune. His endless strings of bertsos were usually sad. “Markesaren alaba”—meaning “The Marquis’s Daughter”—and “Limosnatxo bat”—“A Handout”—were his favorites, always the same monotonous tunes. He was happy, because he wasn’t hungry and because he was giving his daughters the education that he himself hadn’t received. It was a type of well-being based on the modesty of his aspirations, taking the form of the quiet desperation of the age. As a child she had hated those songs and now thinks they’re beautiful. She regrets not having sat by his side to sing them, she would give a lot to be able to do that now.

  Etxezar. The name of her mother’s baserri. Her mother never lived there, but her family rented it out from the Marquis of Villafuerte for generations, the latter selling it to her grandfather, Julia’s great-grandfather. Julia’s grandfather put up what was, at the time, a lot of money toward the purchase—seven thousand pesetas; his boss at the baserri where he had been a servant since he was a boy had kept it aside for him. A good man, apparently. But the baserri was inherited by the grandfather’s brother, and now his grandson is the owner, the son of one of Julia’s mother’s cousins, an alcoholic bachelor who makes a living without working by selling bits of land from time to time at a bad price to an unscrupulous neighbor. Her mother periodically follows the progress of her ancestors’ home’s destruction with despair and sorrow, and her heart breaks each time she hears about more land being lost. Today, when she arrived back from Otzeta, her sister told her that he had sold the pine grove behind the hermitage the previous Friday, and on Saturday an employee from town had found him lying on the ground, covered in vomit and surrounded by scattered bills that the dogs were already chewing at.

  That’s why she looked unhappy and upset. Her dream is to recover the family seat where her ancestors were born and died, and which cost her father who knows how many years of hard work, and she has sometimes said—although never in so many words—that she might ask one of the rich friends her husband had, colleagues of his from the Amaika social club, for a loan to help her buy Etxezar. “If I asked any of them, they’d give it to me,” she says, and Julia doesn’t know to what extent she’s serious, because her relationship with her father’s friends doesn’t go beyond a short greeting whenever they happen to pass on the street, and she’s sure that her father would be terribly embarrassed there in his eternal rest at the bottom of the sea if he found out that his wife wanted to do something that he himself would never have considered even in the most difficult of situations: asking friends for money. Julia suspects that she’s hinting for her to ask Martin for the money, and just in case, she once told her mother that if she ever did have enough money to “save” that gloomy pine grove beside Etxezar, she’d rather use it to buy a little house with a garden in Les Landes.

  Zigor’s walked in. He looks at her first, then at his grandmother, who is still washing the dishes, and then back at Julia. There’s a question in his eyes. Julia knows that he’s examining everyone’s moods and wants to know if she’s said something to their grandmother that’s saddened her. He’s in a serious mood. It seems to her that he’s suddenly become a man, and that he’s aware of that. He says he hasn’t finished his vacation homework yet, and he goes back to his room. Running away from the gloomy atmosphere.

  Mother and son do not hug each other as much as they used to, and when they do, it’s not the same as before. She feels rigid now, and the thought that he might feel revolted by coming into contact with her terrifies her. The same thing happened to her with her mother; they long ago stopped giving each other kisses, she doesn’t know when, though she often dreams that her father’s calling her, and she runs toward him, and they embrace. Her mother, who is so affectionate with little children—all those “I could just eat you ups” as she kisses tummies and tiny hands—becomes very physically distant with them when they reach a certain age she can’t quite calculate. That’s how she behaved with her and her sister, and with her grandchildren, as well. She can remember her sitting with naked babies on her lap, literally kneading them all over with her hands (according to her, it was a grandmother’s duty to knead babies in front of a warm fire, and she even has a saying for it: basking the baby), but after a certain point, all physical contact with her disappears. Nowadays, when cultural shifts have made giving a kiss on the cheek such a common form of greeting—even men and women of a certain age in Otzeta have taken on the habit—it’s not strange to see her receiving kisses from others, or even leaning forward and offering a cheek herself, and she finds it strange to see her mother hugging or kissing people of her daughter’s age, and when they’re together in a group, she often feels embarrassed, because it’s so obvious that she and her are the only two who don’t kiss.

  She feels obliged to watch the television with her mother for a while. She withdraws into herself and thinks about things that have nothing to do with what’s on the screen: Harri’s fantasies, her harsh words about her husband. She doesn’t think her mother is paying much attention to what’s on the screen, either. In Martin’s words—in fact, they’re a copy of Faustino Iturberena’s—old people watch television as they once used to watch a fire in a chimney: without leaving their own thoughts.

  “What’s ‘solipsism?’” Zigor asks from his room.

  Although she knows the answer, she masters her desire to answer the question and, like always, shouts that he should look it up in the dictionary. Martin long ago told him—and Zigor greatly respects him, because he’s a writer—that the best way to acquire knowledge is by looking up unknown words in the dictionary. As well as sharing his opinion, the difficulty she was often met with when answering seemingly simple questions of his also influenced her in her decision to instill that beneficial habit; she would be embarrassed whenever her excessive lack of knowledge became too apparent, putting off her answer by using any excuse she could, saying she had something on the stove, or that the washing machine was leaking—as it often does—in order to be able to secretly look at the dictionary herself. Sometimes the problem was not so much the gaps in her knowledge as the enthusiasm to teach she often feels, a mother’s need to explain things in all their complexity, to give all the details, to go into related ideas, to look at the causes of things, forgetting that what the boy wanted was to find the easiest, quickest answer; her reasoning usually confused him and made him nervous rather than helping him. “Forget it, I’ll figure it out myself,” he would finally say, sorry he had asked the question. So now the boy usually sorts things out by himself, often with the help of IT tools, and that’s why Julia is amazed when he asks what “solipsism” is. Could it be a way of trying to get her to follow him into the other room, she wonders.

  She sits on the edge of his bed after he’s gotten in and they talk for a while. It’s always been one of Julia’s happiest moments. They tell each other what’s happened during the day, speak together as if he were a grown man; she wouldn’t like to lose the habit, she wants it to always be the same, for them to carry on getting together when he’s twenty, whether at his place or hers, or somewhere else—“chez toi, ou bien chez moi ou sur à une terrasse,” as Reggiani puts it in the song—but she’s started to think that won’t be easy. Now she’s the one who finds it hard to open her heart, she’s bitter, and she thinks the boy realizes that. To a different degree, of course, but whatever dark thing it was that separated her from her mother is also moving her son away from her. Sh
e thinks that all generations of parents believe that they will have an open, trusting relationship with their children, better than the one they had with their own parents. Julia is sure that it will be like that in her case, but she also knows that it will only be a partial improvement, less than what she hoped for when the boy was a small child.

  She wouldn’t want him to be too devoted to her, either, to have that excessive love that some men have for their mothers—the love Albert Cohen portrays in his book, for instance—and which comes with a hatred for other women, in her opinion. Unexpectedly, it comes to her that she once carried this well-behaved being, who already has a trace of a blond moustache, in her belly, and the thought makes her stand up all of a sudden. She sits in front of her son’s desk. It’s too small for him. She says they’ll have to buy a new one, and he says it’s not worth it. He’s very careful about what he asks for, and she’s grateful to him for that.

  “Hey, ama,” he says, sitting up in bed. Julia pays attention, instinctively sure that he’s going to ask her one of those questions that will put her to the test, rather than a dictionary question. “Why do they stop us from deciding if we want to be independent?” Suddenly she feels very tired, despondent, and doesn’t know what to answer. Whenever he comes back from Otzeta, his hands are swollen from playing pilota—Basque pelota—and his heart is full of that patriotic abertzale spirit. “What do you want me to say?” She realizes they all must have talked about that after lunch at Torrekua and now he wants to have a heart-to-heart with her about it. The boy’s obviously nervous. “I don’t mean the right to be independent, I mean the right to decide if we want to be independent.” Julia gets furious with her sister, her brother-in-law, everybody at Torrekua, because they fill him with ideology; she’s angry with herself, too, because she leaves him with them for too long, because it’s easier for her that way. The boy’s waiting for her answer, his lips pressed tight together, arms folded, and Julia’s sure he can read what’s going on in her mind. The people at Torrekua really are Basques through and through, and no doubt about it. What is she going to say?

  “Things are more complicated than they seem,” she comes out with, and she regrets it as soon as she says it. Why does she always need so many words, nuances, and details to explain different points of view? “Everything’s very complicated for you, but in fact, things are very simple.” Zigor said that, Zigor senior, in 1977, when amnesty had just been declared and he told her he’d decided to go back to leading a clandestine life and she tried to convince him not to: “Things are more complicated that they seem.” They got to talking about politics. He said that when Franco died, the apparatus of the state was never purged and everything remained just the same. As simple as that. For her, too, things were simple; she loved him more than anything and anyone else, and she dreamed about having dinner with him and sleeping in the same bed with him, and she couldn’t stand living in fear that she would one day hear on the news that he’d been shot dead somewhere. As simple as that. But those were not words that a person who was prepared to give his life for his ideals could hear without contempt.

  Now, too, she doesn’t know whether to express her feelings or not, she’s afraid her son may think she isn’t loyal to her own people, and perhaps thinking that will prevent him from ever coming to her. She isn’t even absolutely sure that independence is the best strategy for preserving their language and culture, and even if it is, it wouldn’t be legal, and according to the elections, most people don’t want it to be, either. So why make such a fuss about it? The way forward would be to make good use of the autonomy they’ve already won in order to convince those who are still on the fence, and whatever any case, violence isn’t the way. “Do you understand that?” He’s identical to his father when he looks her in the eyes. He nods at her in silence and, with a gesture of boredom, lies down on the bed and faces the wall. Julia is about to ask him for a kiss when her mother calls up from the kitchen to let him go to sleep, it’s late and he must be tired out.

  When she walks past the bathroom, she sees her mother brushing her hair, which goes all the way down her back. She has gray hair, with an almost even number of white and black strands, like Julia’s, and it’s curly, as well, but only from the neck down, because she wears it in a tight bun during the day. Julia finds it disturbing when she sees such long hair. Perhaps it reminds her of the iconography of witchcraft—such a clearly feminine feature in such an old mother. She swears that even though she gets so many compliments about it, she’s going to get her own hair cut before long.

  2

  Abaitua is brushing his teeth when his wife comes into his bathroom. They’ve been sharing it for a few days now, ever since Pilar decided to do hers up. She thought that renovating it and opening a door straight onto her bedroom was a very good idea from a practical point of view, but it’s one that also means the decision to sleep in separate bedrooms is not going to be a temporary measure.

  Abaitua does not go into the bathroom when Pilar’s in it, even if the door is open. But she does go in, unless he takes the precaution of closing the door completely, that is. He isn’t sure how to take it, though one thing is clear: Pilar isn’t embarrassed about her body and sleeping in separate beds doesn’t seem to have changed the way she walks around in front of him. Abaitua, however, finds her more distant and unfamiliar by the day and, to that extent, is reluctant to be in intimate situations with her.

  He doesn’t know how long they’ve been sleeping in different rooms. At least two months. The current situation started after their last quarrel, and it was Abaitua himself who opened the door to it. “It’ll be best if we sleep separately,” he said to her that night when she reproached him for his insistence on going to sleep with the radio on; so she picked up two or three pots of lotions, the alarm clock, her robe, and her book from the bedside table and moved into the room next door. He could have stopped her when, at the door, holding her lotions, the alarm clock, and all the other things in her arms pressed up against her chest, she said to him, in that unusual way of hers, that sleeping in separate beds was pushing them apart. “We’re separating by moving apart,” was what she said. Pilar is a woman of few words. That’s why he’s thought so much about that sentence, which seemed strange to him. Of course, what she wanted to say was that by deciding to sleep separately, they were closing the door forever on the chance of getting back together; in fact, most of their previous makeups had come about thanks to their physical relationship, which was made possible by sharing a bed and not thanks to talking.

  But he didn’t care anymore. He was more tired than angry; each quarrel, whatever caused it—they were normally about petty things—opened up a deep wound inside him, brought him deep regret, and he found it more and more difficult to go back to where they were before. He was convinced that even though they managed to make up, they’d end up tripping on the very same stone once again. In a sense, he felt that you could only be sorry about things so much, that there was a limited stock of regret for putting the relationship back on track, and his stock, and probably Pilar’s, as well, was running out.

  At first, their quarrels and distancings led to the joy of rediscovering each other, realizing that they had to get to know each other again, and in that sense, many of his most tender, exciting memories are from their peace-making. Moving apart to come back together again. The last time was on the beachfront promenade, the Kontxa Pasealekua. He remembers it well. That time it was he who left; he moved into the apartment that previously housed his private practice and which his son is living in now. In that new situation, separated and living alone, he didn’t feel like going out with his friends and he soon grew tired of the restrictions the lifestyle forced on him—he had taken only a suitcase full of books and a few changes of clothes with him, and in the office storeroom, which had been set up as a kitchen, the microwave oven was the only thing working—and tired, in fact, of living like a refugee, and almost without realizing it, he started wa
lking around the places where he might bump into Pilar, without knowing to what extent his desire to go back to her was conditioned by his lack of supplies, his inability to manage by himself, or some sort of psychological dependence or possessive desire, or whether, on the contrary, he really did love her. He still hasn’t resolved that worrying doubt. On the one hand, he had to admit that during their periods of separation, he hadn’t wanted to see his friends and lost his interest in women, even those who offered him their company—they seemed too motherly to him, and he ended up avoiding them—and he missed Pilar terribly. But sometimes he didn’t trust that feeling, thinking there was some pathological dependence at the bottom of it and that what he had to do was resist the desire to see her, learn how to be free, and it was laughable, if not pathetic, for him to waste his time like some silly adolescent, hoping to run into her. It was just such a day when they came across one another. She was walking along the roughcast sidewalk, which was later replaced with a terrazzo one as ugly as it is practical, on the far side of the Pasealekua, beneath the tamarinds, as if she wanted to hide, with that curious walk of hers—half aloof and half languid, with her arms hanging loosely at her sides—which now seemed pitiful to him. They’d been separated for more than a month, and all they had to do was say hello—then they held hands and went back home together. Before, their separating had been a way to feel the desire to come together again, building up the strength to find each other once more. He thinks it was that way for Pilar, as well, but recently he suspects that this separation is for the sake of separation itself and not to pick up speed, and he’s decided to do nothing to get back together again, leaving things to happen as they will rather than participating in them, with the curiosity of a mere witness interested in seeing how things will turn out.