Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  They decide to have their coffee in a café outside the hospital, Kepa saying that the hospital cafeteria is usually packed, but Abaitua knows it’s because he wants to smoke. He doesn’t like the cafeteria, either, it’s like a canteen in a bus or train station. It creates a bad impression, one even worse than that of the medicine that’s practiced there, a more anachronical image. Mass-produced pastries, potato omelets, and greasy fried squid on the bar, and in front of it, workers in white coats with glasses of wine in their hands. That’s what he remembers, at least; he hasn’t gone there for a long time. He makes Kepa take the stairs with him. In the main vestibule, there’s a group of pharmaceutical sales representatives standing in a circle. Perhaps they aren’t the same ones he saw when he came in, but they look just the same. As they walk by, several turn toward Kepa and show their disdain for him, to which he replies in a low voice, “Bunch of vultures!” But bearing in mind the strength of his voice, Abaitua isn’t sure whether they’ve heard him or not, and taking his arm, as if he had impaired sight, he leads him straight out to the street.

  It isn’t easy to choose a bar. Kepa suggests the first one on the right, down the hill, so they can eat some fairly decent fried eggs with fries and chorizo, but Abaitua doesn’t allow himself such things at that time of day, or at any other time of day, come to that. He thinks that Kepa should take better care of himself but doesn’t say so; he long ago decided not to give more advice like that, he’s aware that he seems more and more like a nagging mother. In any case, the smell of fried chorizo makes him want to throw up. “We said we’d have a coffee.” They have to run between cars to cross the road. He doesn’t care where they go, the coffee’s bad everywhere. He hasn’t been out hiking in the hills for several weeks now and feels he’s moving slowly. He also has the sensation that drivers go faster when they see pedestrians crossing the road where they shouldn’t. It’s probably a false impression, something to do with the feeling of danger—it’s a two-way road, and there’s a lot of traffic on it, cars going fast. He asks Kepa if he, too, thinks that they’ve become the drivers’ target, but the other man is two steps ahead and doesn’t hear him. It’s very noisy, and he’s often said he’s half deaf as the result of an explosion, which must be true. Abaitua hears him saying that they’re a bunch of vultures. He catches up with him. He says he’s talking about the pharmaceutical sales representatives when Abaitua asks him. He doesn’t know what Kepa’s talking about, as he, Kepa, also used to be a pharmaceutical rep. Abaitua found him a job at Schering, although he didn’t last much more than a year there. Everyone said he had a veritable vade mecum in his head—he could tell you about the results of clinical tests, about the interactions and counter-indications of all the pharmacopeian products, and he made sales like nobody. Kepa himself tells jokes about it: even the first aid kits in convents were full of the Schering three-phase hormonal contraceptives he sold them.

  Problems were soon to arise. Six or seven months after he started work, Abaitua began to hear some other doctors talking. What they didn’t like was that when he visited them, it wasn’t so much to give them information as to accuse them of having sold themselves to the laboratories. Abaitua knew that he had problems, but he took it all to an extreme at the closing ceremony of a conference financed by the laboratory. The room was full of people drinking cocktails and looking forward to the dinner about to follow, and the director of the conference and the director of the laboratory in Spain were speaking a final few closing words. Kepa appeared just as the act was about to finish, wearing a white coat covered with bayer, cinfa, merck, europharma, liberman, and ibys laboratory stickers, something like a Formula 1 racing driver, and, from up on the platform, he asked for silence. He was applauded, everyone was happy, and they thought it was going to be some kind of joke. In fact, over the last several years, it had become fashionable for comedians to perform parodies at the endings of conferences. When Kepa started talking, saying that medications had come to occupy the witch doctor’s place of honor—“El medicamento ha sustituido al médico en el sitial del hechicero”—people laughed, but not for long. There was soon a frozen silence. He said that the amount of public money being spent on drugs was incredible and unsustainable, and that the amount of money spent on developing new products was outstripped twofold by that spent on marketing. The murmur of indignation rose like a wave when he mentioned what had happened in Italy: a class action suit had been filed accusing thousands of pharmaceutical sales representatives, hundreds of travel agents, and thousands of doctors of corruption, of accepting gifts worth double a typical wage earner’s yearly income. Then Alzola—people call him Orl, the Spanish abbreviation for ENT specialist, believing him to be the best ear, nose, and throat specialist the world has ever seen—went up to him and told him, in his high-pitched laugh, that he had said enough, and when Kepa paid him no attention, grabbed him by the sleeve, which only made things worse; up until then, Kepa had spoken calmly, but now he started shouting at him to go to hell and that he was sick and tired of organizing trips for him to the fjords of Norway and the brothels of the Caribbean every year, which is when the security guards took him away. And they fired him, naturally.

  Abaitua had reproached him for that suicidal outburst, and Kepa had listened to him with his head hanging, like a little boy being told off for being naughty. Pilar, on the other hand, thinks it was daring of him to do that, and fun, as well, and it doesn’t stop her from getting on well with him, even though Orl is the brother of Yago Alzola—her brother-in-law and boss. There’s no doubt she lets Kepa get away with things she’d never allow him—her husband—to do. They’d had a quarrel about that, as well. What really made him angry was that Kepa’s foolhardiness—which Pilar thought of as a heroic act—was something he himself would have had to pay for; he’d gotten the job for him, it had made him look bad, and even worse, now he’d been left without any source of income, and he knew he’d come to him for help finding something again soon enough. And that’s just what happened. Kepa had two dreams. The first was to open a small restaurant with just a few tables in it, where he would offer only a few dishes depending on what was available in the market each day. Abaitua had to admit he was a good cook. His second dream was a bookstore where there would be a space to have a tea or a coffee and read quietly, without the latest bestsellers, so to speak, works of the highest quality, and at low prices, chosen according to his own, personal criteria. Pilar said he should help him. The bookstore seemed the more sensible of the two projects to him, or, more accurately, the least dangerous; he didn’t think that Kepa, knowing how generous he was, and in the jazz- and blues-warmed atmosphere he wanted to create, would be up to actually bringing his regular customers the check when the time came or be able to stop buying drinks for everyone around him, as he always did whenever he went into a bar. That didn’t mean he didn’t see any risks in the bookstore business—he did see them, and they were similar to those in the other business—but they decided in favor of culture, because they found a small storefront near the Ibaeta University campus and, particularly, because Edurne, Kepa’s wife, had the same fear as Abaitua and didn’t think that having to follow a restaurant schedule was going to be helpful in terms of leading an orderly lifestyle. It was a disappointment for Pilar.

  They would never know what might have been of the small restaurant; the bookstore, for its part, was not a success. Being next to the campus was not such a strategic place as he had thought. It turns out that the students who go to the university go to attend classes there, and to play cards in the bar, but don’t do anything else there, and they buy their books, and probably everything else, as well, downtown. What’s more, as well as choosing the books according to his own criteria for taste and quality, he refused to sell textbooks, saying he hadn’t left the world of laboratories just to take part in a bunch of unscrupulous professors’ dirty deals, making students buy appalling texts that had been copied and pasted together from who knows where and then sold for their
weight in gold. He said pushing cocaine would be nobler. Abaitua’s blood boils every time he hears him say that. Kepa being so righteous makes him furious—in the end it’s he who will have to pick up the tab for his dignity. He lost a lot of money with that bookstore. And at the same time, he can’t help feeling guilty about feeling so bad about losing money that he doesn’t really need, knowing, as he does, that Kepa wouldn’t hesitate to give him everything he had if he needed it.

  But he doesn’t have anything. In fact, Kepa and his business ideas make him feel guilty and give him mixed feelings. He thinks that the rant he’s on right now about doctors and corruption is a way of putting off asking for money, and he decides to wait until they reach the bar before asking what he wants to talk about. “Tarugueo”—a Spanish word for “bribery” not found in the dictionary. Even the most honest doctors find it hard to remain a hundred percent free from the pharmaceutical companies—they finance everything. Even though he agrees, and even though Abaitua knows that if he’s talking to him about that revolting practice, it’s because he’s one of the few who agrees with him, he finds it awkward after a certain point, because he thinks he should do something about it and feels quite incapable of doing anything, and then he inevitably has to defend his profession. Not all doctors let themselves be bought, and at worst, while many try not to prescribe generic drugs—they might prescribe Clamoxyl instead of amoxicillin, for instance—he doesn’t think many doctors are corrupt enough to prescribe things that will actually harm their patients’ health.

  Kepa says he’s an innocent abroad. He points at him with his finger. They’re still in the bar. All the varnished wood tables are either taken or already laid for lunch. They remain at the bar, sitting on tall stools. Does he think there are many other doctors like him, ready to pass up on gifts? Abaitua finds it even worse being put on the altar of incorruptiblity. He doesn’t like Kepa considering him to be so upright. He asks him if he knows anyone else who would say no to a case of 1970 Vega Sicilia Unico. He keeps on bringing that up, and Abaitua regrets having told him and knows he tells everybody about it whether it’s relevant to the conversation or not. He decided years ago not to accept gifts. He talked with Pilar, and she agreed, although she also probably thought he was exaggerating. She always says he exaggerates about everything. But he got the impression that the concierge—a passionate socialist from a village in the province of Valladolid—understood what was behind his decision when he told him that he wouldn’t be accepting any gifts that Christmas. He said it to him when his son was there, intentionally, so that the boy could see that his father took things seriously when it came to corruption. And then, one morning, the concierge knocked on his door with some urgency and said there was a package for him, a registered delivery of a case of 1970 Vega Sicilia Unico, and he wanted to check if he was going to accept it or not. He confirmed that his refusal was for any and all types of gifts, and with that, he won the concierge’s respect forever—he was a man who knew the price of the wine, which was from the same area he grew up in, and he went around telling everyone in the neighborhood how honest Dr. Abaitua was. In fact, it was a profitable decision in terms of feeding his narcissism, but he feels like an impostor whenever Kepa reminds him of it with such admiration. He regrets not having given the case of Vega Sicilia to the concierge, who recently passed away, instead of refusing it. That’s almost certainly what Kepa would have done.

  The coffee’s undrinkable. How can it be that when using practically the same coffee—usually it’s Colombian—and the same machines—they’re usually Italian—the result is so different from what they serve in Italy, he wonders. He thinks it’s the human factor. In bars here, they fill the coffee machine up, press the button for the water, and leave it to look after itself. He pushes his cup of coffee—still full—toward the inside edge of the bar, and Kepa, apparently taking that as a sign, says he’s left home.

  In order to signal that he wants to pay for the coffees, as usual, he taps the bar with his hand and holds up a bill between his second and third fingers, and Abaitua—very surprised, and quite critical—asks him, rather loudly, why he’s left home. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised to hear that he’d been kicked out. He’s always thought him to be incomprehensibly in love with his wife, an affected woman who describes herself as a “psychopedagogue,” has badly dyed blonde hair, talks about French and French television whenever she can, and treats her husband with arrogant disdain. Whenever the two couples have gone out for dinner together, she’s always complaining about their lifestyle, probably with good reason, but Abaitua thinks she treats Kepa cruelly, especially that way of hers of interrupting him when he gets affectionate—“Don’t try to butter me up with your Andalusian charm”—and reproaching him for his faults in front of whoever they’re with at the time. Kepa, on the other hand, always takes great care of her, he loves her, admires her supposedly “good” family, her fine manners, and her perfect French. He’s proud of her and, like many husbands in love, of everything around her. He’s proud of her family’s baserri, the oldest in the entire region of Goierri, according to him, and even of her parents—her father is a sharp-minded constructor who’s made a bundle off his work, and her mother is a witch whose main claim to fame is making the best garlic and codfish zurrukutuna soup in the world. But Abaitua’s always thought they take him to be a lazy Andalusian, a carpetbagger who showed up there in the Basque Country and married their daughter for ulterior motives. He’s often seen in Kepa’s beaten-dog eyes that he’s aware of his wife’s disdain, but, then, it can’t be easy to live with him, and his wife does, in fact, put some order into his life.

  Abaitua feels forced to say that everyone has problems, wanting to believe that his leaving home has been no more than a quarrel and that they’ll sort it out. Obviously, his 65 mph drive along Mirakruz comes to mind, with Pilar about to open the door and jump out without him stopping. “We all have problems,” he says, thinking he’d rather leave the matter at that. Having to listen to personal problems makes him feel dejected, but he has to admit it’s a relief to see that going for coffee hasn’t had anything to do with getting asked for money.

  “I couldn’t take any more, it’s over.”

  By looking at him, you’d think he was confirming a piece of news that wasn’t particularly agreeable, but his voice reveals another emotion. After saying “it’s over” for the second and third times, however, he puts his elbows on the bar and holds his head in his hands, showing deep despair and a lack of energy. Abaitua looks around them, afraid that someone might see that gesture, which he finds so over the top; because they’re so close to the hospital, someone might think he’s been diagnosed with a deadly illness. He doesn’t know whether to put a hand on his shoulder or not. He lifts a hand up, but then decides he’s overdoing it as well and decides to move a step away. They both remain silent for a while there by the bar, which now has people all along it, until the barman asks if they want another coffee (he seems to think removing the cups while still full is the most normal thing in the world, as if they’d ordered them simply to savor the bouquet). A way of asking them to leave their spaces free for others. Abaitua takes another step away from the bar. He should have something to say to a friend who’s left his wife. What he thinks of saying is that he’s done the right thing, that she’s ugly and affected. But he doesn’t know if he’ll take that well and, not having anything else to say, sticks to what he said before: “All of us couples have problems.” Which puts him in danger of having to say what he and Pilar’s problems are if Kepa asks him. He doesn’t ask him; it doesn’t look like he’s realized what’s just been said to him. “It’s over, it’s over,” he repeats who knows how many times, shaking his head, and now Abaitua, afraid he might even start crying, suggests they go outside.

  Feeling the sun on their faces after two weeks of nonstop clouds and rain is pleasant, and he suspects that there, in the outdoor seating area where they’ve just sat down, even with the
loud noise of the traffic going by, he’d fall asleep if he closed his eyes, and he rubs his eyelids to keep himself awake, a gesture that could be taken to express grief. “You’ll have to think about it carefully.” He’s sometimes thought he’s incapable of having disinterested feelings, of being disinterested—to the extent to which the suffering you feel on account of other people’s suffering, or the joy you feel on account of other people’s joy, can be considered disinterested—and even, in fact, that he’s incapable of really loving.