Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  The most positive influence the illness has had on the man’s life is a newfound interest in watercolors. He’s using Hazel Harrison’s book The Encyclopedia of Watercolor Techniques to learn, and he likes painting out in the yard; since the last time Julia used the computer, exactly a week ago now, Martin has written a couple of pages about how run-down the yard is.

  “There is no love in a house without flowers.” Julia thinks Harri said something like that about the terrible state the yard’s in, she doesn’t remember it exactly.

  The damaged pale-pink hydrangeas that tell of the gardener’s lack of interest, the wrinkled violets, the drooping irises that survive anywhere. As if that weren’t enough, the rows of bottles buried upright in the grass with their necks showing, which Martin said were to frighten off the moles, do not make the lawn any prettier. He stuck a few dozen of them into the ground (being tired, he buried them increasingly haphazardly as he went on). He’d been told that the sound of air going into the bottles would frighten the vermin and scare them away. The method does not seem to be particularly effective, or he hasn’t executed it properly, because there are molehills everywhere; Julia is glad about that, because she supports the moles that Martin is at war with, because they’re animals she likes.

  The cats’ bowls are empty. As she knows, Martin often empties them because the feed is said to attract rats. Martin hates cats—all animals in general, and cats more than any others. “Almost as much as people,” he often says. Julia doesn’t much like them, either, admitting that they seek protection self-interestedly. She thinks they’re a mother and her kitten, and the pair only tolerate the presence of one of the other cats that would like to have the yard to live in, a young male, and only at meal times. The mother is white, and her probable kitten is, as well, with black spots, while the visitor is striped. The latter is the most beautiful and the most affectionate. Julia would like the mother and kitten, which have taken the yard as their own, to accept the other cat for good, but she doesn’t know what to do to help that come about.

  A taxi has stopped in front of the iron gate, and she sees a woman getting out and removing several things from it. Being shortsighted, she can’t make anything out very well, but she does see Martin running toward the taxi. After exchanging the customary two kisses, he and the woman go toward the house along the gravel path, Martin in front, carrying two suitcases with some difficulty, and the girl behind, bags in each hand and a large backpack on her back. Julia wonders whether she should go out to help them, because they’ve left more things at the gate. In the end, she decides to go into the house and sit down in front of the computer. By the time Martin opens the door, she looks as if she’s deep at work there. “It’s her,” he tells her in a whisper, his head sticking through the half-open door and looking around at everything in the living room as if wanting to make sure that it’s in a fit state to welcome their lodger. Disappointed, perhaps, because Julia hasn’t tidied up the mess the place is always in while he was out? He invites the girl in by opening the door completely, making a gesture with his hand and bowing.

  The penthouse girl. Julia wants to slap Martin when he uses the expression again. Doesn’t he realize it’s like calling her “the porn girl”? But the girl doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. She isn’t the type of girl to get put on a magazine cover, beautiful though she is. She has nice hair, halfway between mahogany and red, coiled up into a bun, in the style of her time; she’s around five foot nine, thin, but in the way today’s girls are, with large breasts and a fine behind. What the French call a fausse maigre, a deceptively thin woman. She doesn’t look much over thirty. She seems nice. She’s wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, black penny loafers, and a blue leather jacket, very much like one Julia herself has had for many years. Her style is very much the same as her own, which is as faithful to the seventies as possible. The girl’s weakest point is her wan, freckled skin. Her name is Lynn, and she’s from New York.

  She works in the sociomedical sciences department at Columbia University and is on sabbatical for the year. She confesses that she came here to take part in the San Fermín festival when they ask her what brought her to this part of the world. “It’s a joke,” she adds immediately. Apparently, she’s used to answering that question, and it’s a pre-prepared joke. “A joke,” she says, laughing from ear to ear. She has a large mouth, one of those mouths where the lips don’t fully cover the opening, so it looks as if it has cracks at the sides. It turns out not to be a complete lie that she came for San Fermín. She made the trip with a friend who used to be a teacher of hers and who’s taking part in two international anthropology research projects, one about large popular festivities and their contexts, of which San Fermín is one, and the other about violent conflicts, which includes the Basque Country, unfortunately. Her friend has had to go back for a time due to a family problem, and she’s been left on her own. On her own and homeless. As soon as her friend went, the owner of the house she was in asked her to leave—apparently he needed the room for his son.

  After shrugging her shoulders, she makes a gesture of regret that puts wrinkles on her face and says, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” It seems he did her a favor, because she’s going to end up better off. She’s really happy when she says that she thinks the house is wonderful, praising its light and splendid trees, and that gives Martin his cue to talk about the district’s golden age, the bullring with its glass roof, the Kursaal amusement park, and the grandly named Campos Elíseos gardens. At the beginning of the previous century, there were only baserris here, surrounded by fertile vegetable gardens, and little mansions with beautiful gardens like this one. The house was built in 1910, and they call it “the witch house” around here—because of the conical slate roof on the circular tower there was on one side of the building, of course—despite the fact that no evil stepmothers or sisters have ever lived in it. That’s what Martin calls an English sense of humor. He tells her in Spanish that the house used to be surrounded by farmland—“Antes los terrenos llegaban hasta allí.” He always tells people that, as well as the thing about the witches, and when he does, he never forgets to point out the San Luis Clinic on the other side of the river and say that the old building and the land it sits on were stolen from his grandfather.

  Putting ideas together when he mentions the clinic, Julia remembers that she has to ask him about his test results; seeing him so lively, it is obvious they’re good. So she says to him, “Speaking of that, have you gotten your test results?” Perhaps at the wrong moment, judging by the look he gives her. Instead of answering, he talks ironically about health checkups—as if the business of illness weren’t enough, doctors have added on preventive care to increase their profits. That’s Martin’s point of view, and the American woman agrees with him—do the deaths that all these prevention programs seek to avoid, she asks, make up for the tiredness and nervousness that they force healthy people to go through for nothing? Probably trying to be nice, she also agrees with her own position that people just get accustomed to going for routine checkups. She seems very diplomatic. If the two of them were alone, without their American lodger, she would tell him, as would most of the women in his circle, that she thinks of going to checkups once in a while as something normal; at least she doesn’t get as hysterical as he does every time he has to go to the doctor. Although she’d decided to keep quiet, she thinks of Harri, of that gesture of hers, touching her armpit, and says the worrying thing is a person’s symptoms, not the checkups themselves. Then the American girl turns to Martin and says in formal Spanish that she hopes he himself has no cause to be concerned—“Pero usted no tiene ningún motivo de inquietud, espero.” “Of course not,” he answers in English. And he asks the girl not to speak to him so stiff and politely, because he’s not so old as all that.

  “Tea or coffee?” After asking the question, while he’s making space on the coffee table, Martin knocks over the nut bowl and a glass that he only just av
oids breaking. He says they’re computerizing their library, “we are,” he says, in the first person plural; he seems to be embarrassed by the mess, by having piles of books all over the place. After classifying and registering the books as they had agreed to, Martin was going to be the one to put them back in their places; because she wasn’t prepared to continually take on all the work caused by his neglect, Julia has decided not to give in and do it herself this time, even if the books did invade the whole house. “Our yard’s in quite a state,” he says, still speaking in the plural, and the American girl offers to do some gardening. She would be happy to take charge of it, and Julia can’t help smiling, thinking that perhaps love might make the house’s devastated yard flourish once more.

  Martin asks her what’s so funny—“¿Qué es lo que te hace gracia?”

  The striped cat’s exile. Seeing it stepping through the iron gate and calmly walking off up the street after being escorted down the gravel path by the other two.

  The American girl reminds Martin that he told her he likes cats—“Me dijiste que te gustan los gatos.”

  And of course, he quickly says yes, he loves them, the yard’s full of stray cats and they always make sure to feed them, and Julia gets the impression that the look in his eyes is asking her not to deny what he’s saying. What he most admires about those elegant, lithe animals is their independence, they’re nothing like dogs; dogs, as Baroja once said, are the most foolish of animals, because they serve the stupidest ones. He praises cats’ incredible senses, which not even the best dogs can improve on, and also their whiskers, which can perceive even the smallest movement in the air, and Julia finds it impossible to sit through this demonstration of feline knowledge, which the girl is listening to with pleasure, without interjecting a cutting remark to the effect that she had no idea he was so well-informed about cats. “No sabía que estuvieras tan puesto en gatos,” she hurls at him, and the girl, joining in what she takes to be her admiration, says, “Yes, you’re an expert on cats.” Julia hates women who seduce men by pretending that they’re interested in what they’re saying even more than she hates women who show off their breasts. But she doesn’t want to be too hard on her because of that; the poor girl could hardly act otherwise in her situation as a lodger in a bargain house. The American girl’s very glad to hear that Martin loves cats and is sure that they’ll like Max, and Martin says they will, they’re sure to like him. It’s at this point that Julia finds out that Lynn is the owner of a cat called Max. A striped miniature Danish, beautiful but bad at making friends; she speaks about him with enthusiasm and love. She says she can’t live without him, even though he sometimes causes her serious problems. Even so, she says with a sense of humor, she hopes that they don’t believe that widely held idea that women who live alone with cats are quite witch-like, and Martin laughs as he assures her that if that’s the case, she’s in the perfect setting—“Oh, en ese caso estarías en el marco perfecto”—but the joke goes flat on him, because he has to remind her that some people call their place “the witch house.”

  Julia puts the china teapot and the ugly cups and saucers on the table. It’s a set that apparently belonged to Martin’s grandmother or great-grandmother—“Made in England by Wood & Sons; genuine hand engraving”—and it’s completely cracked (if only they’d break once and for all, she does put them in the dishwasher, after all), and as she gets ready to pour, Martin puts one hand on the teapot and the other on the milk jug and suddenly orders rather than asks her to stop. Would she do them the honor of serving? The girl looks astonished, a little scared by his abruptness, but picks the teapot up with her right hand and the milk jug up with the other, while they both watch her attentively. She must think they’re out of their minds, of course. She has quite small hands and very fine fingers. First she pours into the cup that Julia holds out to her, measuring the milk with a precise movement of her hand. And then the tea. “Why do you do it like that?” Martin asks, and in case she doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, he goes on to enquire if she has some special reason for pouring the milk before the tea, whether she always does it like that. She says it’s something they do at home, her mother does it like that. She’s read somewhere or other that people recommend pouring the milk in first for dietary reasons, because otherwise the proteins can lose their properties, and that way the tannin in the tea doesn’t damage them, or something like that; but her mother’s reasoning, apparently, was that it’s better for the cups, because the milk stops the hot tea from cracking the fine china, or, as was their case with no fine china to look after, it stops the bottoms of the cups from going yellow. After giving her explanation, she smiles from ear to ear once again, as if she were a smart student in class, happy to know that she’s been able to answer the question.

  Martin could barely stop himself from clapping. “You see?” he says, as happy as the American girl. Who would believe he’s forgotten that just the day before, he defended the opposite point of view to Harri? And his theory about the aesthetics of the cloud of milk? Julia isn’t worried by his dumb behavior, and she’s glad she isn’t worried by it. What’s more, Martin’s shamelessness allows her to say that she should get back to work as soon as they finish their tea. “Oh, les estoy molestando,” the young American says immediately in Spanish, apparently genuinely concerned that she’s being a bother, but Martin quickly says that she isn’t. Julia does work like registering books, which is not very demanding, when she doesn’t feel like translating or when she needs a break after struggling with an over-long sentence. Sometimes it’s quite a mechanical task, although deciding what materials to include or not can be quite a job for her obsessive nature. This morning, at least, it’s not. She starts clearing the table after finishing her cup of tea, not giving the other two the choice of having more; she only just manages not to take the cups out of their hands. She realizes she’s left the teapot on the tray. She asks them if they want more, and, of course, they say no. The American girl offers to help her, but she doesn’t insist when Julia says no, and Julia is glad, finding it irritating when Martin and Harri repeat their false offers to clean up the kitchen after lunch. Especially Harri. She prefers to do the housework by herself, the way she likes it done. She tells her not to worry about it—“No, deja”—and the girl sits down again as she’s told. It isn’t true that Lynn being there will interfere with her work, but she is worried about the fact that from today onward they’ll always have her in the house. In the kitchen, she sits with her back against an old coal box that, having been scrubbed with bleach, is so white and soft that it doesn’t even look wooden. It used to be in Sagastizabal. Sometimes she still feels the yearning to smoke, even though she gave up long ago. She’d like to sit in the corner without doing anything, but Martin could come in at any moment to find out what she’s up to. In fact, in this house, just as much as at her mother’s, there’s nowhere apart from the restroom where there’s no risk of people bothering her. She listens to them talking.

  The American girl, in addition to speaking Spanish well, shows the respect that some foreigners have for Basque and uses a few words of it—eskerrik asko to say thank you, for instance, and a handful of short sentences, as well. “Oso ederrak dira,” she says—they’re very beautiful—when they bring out the remains of the old tea set. With no inhibition or fear of making mistakes or pronouncing badly, with the impunity that being an outsider gives you. They’ve often spoken about the subject and have come to the conclusion that apart from some people simply hating the language, one reason many local people, or some, at least, are hesitant to start using what little Basque they know is because it is, at least theoretically, their own language, and they’re ashamed of speaking it badly. On the other hand, be that as it may, the embarrassment of speaking a language badly, like most embarrassments, arises when you’re with your own people, and less so or not at all in front of outsiders. Martin, however, is not at all displeased at having an opportunity to practice his English. He’s l
ike that peculiar type of town weirdo who has no contact with the local people but jumps out to welcome the first stranger who turns up. He has a lot of friends in the English and American expat community in Donostia. That’s what allows him to get by with the language, while Julia, for her part, does not. He doesn’t make much of an effort to study languages, because he has no difficulty using them, although it is true that by learning them that way, he never understands them in depth. The two of them are talking about books. She thinks the girl must know by now that he’s a writer. She’d like to know how he told her. “I write,” perhaps? In any case, he won’t have said “I’m a writer”; never that.

  “Before, I read a lot of fiction, but not now.” He doesn’t like being corrected, either. At one time he used to read all published literature endlessly, wanting to find something new, but he’s stopped doing that in recent years, either because there isn’t anything new, or because he isn’t capable of finding it. It’s striking how many books there are on the shelves that haven’t been read completely and that, judging by the evidence—he underlines a lot—were abandoned in the very first chapter. It’s obvious that he jumps around when reading, choosing snippets here and there; there are very few books that he reads to the end. Bearing in mind how much gets published, trying to stay up-to-date is an impossible task. He feels inhibited and lowers his voice, knowing that she’s listening to him from the kitchen, Julia thinks, but he still keeps on throwing out his favorite lines just the same. One: Apparently Schopenhauer, at the end of his life, said that he only read books that had been published at least fifty years earlier. Another one: The ageing process is noticeable in a person’s reading habits; you read less fiction and more history and confessional writing as you get older. Old age is the time to reread things, to go back to the classics. Look at that fancy detail of calling himself old, all to get the American girl to say he doesn’t look his age.