They toast Harritxu, unhappily exiled in Surrey, with the second bottle of Le Pin that Martin opens, and while he’s uncorcking it, he tells the young American about his wine collection. Julia finds his efforts to impress the girl rather moving. Using his best manners, keeping his jacket on, opening two of the best bottles from his collection. They come from a wine cellar that doesn’t make many more than five hundred cases, and so that she can appreciate what he means, he says that a winery like Château Lafite-Rothschild produces thirty thousand, as he skillfully removes the cork.
It isn’t hard to tell that he’s intent on them realizing the value of what they’re drinking, and Harri, apparently thinking the same thing, and because she’s jealous, or because of the respect that Martin is displaying toward the young foreigner, blurts out that he doesn’t have to tell them he’s giving them a particularly good wine, they know how to appreciate good wine and deserve no less. What’s more, he’s getting miserly as he grows older, as the jacket he’s wearing goes to show; it may be a Loewe and all that, but it’s still two sizes too big for him. Doesn’t she agree, she asks the young girl, who doesn’t reply right away. It’s obvious Harri’s put her in a difficult position and she doesn’t know how to get out of it. She figures there are two sizes for everyone, some people prefer the larger one and others prefer the slimmer-cut version. “Maybe a bit too large?” she replies, forced to by Harri, and then she laughs as if to apologize, knowing somehow that the writer’s sensitive about this, and she adds, with great conviction, that it’s a very elegant jacket.
“And you’re a very diplomatic American,” Harri jokes. Martin admits that as far as the size is concerned, back in the days when cloth was made to last forever, he used to buy his clothes with the same criteria as one buys clothing for children, so that it can be grown into, and Harri, on the other hand, buys things a couple of sizes too small, in the hope that she’ll lose weight. It is true that she tends to buy tight clothes. She takes a black dress out of the bag she’s brought with her and holds it against Julia’s body to see what it looks like on her and then complains, saying that it looks better on her, and Julia’s sure that with just a word—merely saying that she liked it would be enough—Harri would give it to her. She often gives her clothes that she’s hardly ever worn. Harri’s decided to change her style and is dressing sexier. Sexy isn’t a word Julia likes. She finds it slightly laughable, asks her why she wants to look sexy now, and Harri, after shrieking a lot about Julia not knowing, as if it should be obvious, answers it’s because she wants to look as attractive as possible to the man from the airport if she bumps into him. Before meeting him, she always hated having to go to the head office of the Osakidetza public health service in Bilbao once a week, but now she regrets having been so determined to bring the biostatistics conference for the health workers back to Donostia; if she hadn’t forced the switch, it would have been an excuse to spend another day in Bilbao. Of course, for the young American to be able to understand any of this, Harri will have to tell what she calls the story about the man from the airport again.
Reality imitates art. But there’s no need to force Harri into telling her famous story once more. To start off, she goes back to the roundtable discussion at which Julia met Martin and reminds her that she’d asked him an inappropriate question: whether he could tell her anything about what he was writing at the time. Martin had answered that he was writing a novel that begins with a man and a woman meeting each other at an airport, a chance circumstance that would completely change both their lives. Julia doesn’t remember it like that, but she doesn’t say anything, and Martin happily nods his head as Harri extolls the gift of foresight that artists such as himself have, as can be seen in the fact that events that he wrote about in his story “Less Avoidable than Death” were later reported as true facts in the newspapers. That’s why she says that reality imitates art. She’s imagining it: she’s lived the start of a story whose script has already been written, and she’s sure, given that the story must continue, that they will meet up again sooner or later, somewhere or other, the bearded man and her. “¿Qué te parece?” Although she makes gestures to indicate that she’s joking—her usual histrionic overacting—Julia begins to doubt whether she doesn’t actually believe what she’s saying. In any case, the American girl takes her “¿Qué te parece?” literally, because she doesn’t understand the story she’s telling very well, and Harri starts explaining what she calls their “meeting” in full detail, starting at the terminal at Heathrow, how her eyes and those of the bearded man in the duffel coat cross, how she has to hide the book she’s reading so that he doesn’t get the wrong idea about her—she has to give a short explanation of who Jon Juaristi is so that she can understand—how his bag breaks on the plane and the couple breaks up at Loiu, which is either her fault or a result of her influence—she underlines that—in the sense that if she hadn’t taken the same plane as him and come across him, then the woman who was waiting for him wouldn’t have said those terrible words to him, to the man she hopes to see soon, the man she hopes will leave that ugly, vulgar woman in order to be with her instead. Julia wants to ask her to stop saying silly things, embarrassed about what the young American might think, but Harri doesn’t pay her any attention and after uttering a disdainful “What would you know?” starts to make her storytelling even more dramatic. She was furious about not having gotten to know him, because then she had to go back home with her husband, she wasn’t interested in what he was telling her, and she found his affectionate, sentimental behavior revolting. He often gets like that when they’ve spent a few days apart, and she found it hard not to throw up when he said he was driving fast—literally, word for word—because he was in a hurry to get home after ten days of abstinence. A taxi overtook them at a traffic circle, and there he was. He saw her, as well. A second was enough for her to see the full intensity of his look, and she wanted the two cars to crash into each other so that they would have to stop, so that her husband and the taxi driver would have to sort out the insurance coverage and they, meanwhile, would have a chance to talk. In her dreams now, while her husband and the taxi driver are quarrelling, she and he swap addresses, even have their first kiss. In some of the dreams, the accident is so serious that her husband dies and she and the man are taken away in an ambulance, injured but not seriously.
Julia asks her again not to be silly. She finds her portrait of Martxelo hurtful—he’s a sincere, agreeable man. She cares about him. In fact, Harri doesn’t seem to be overacting or exaggerating her anger when she replies, with considerable disdain, “What do you mean, stop saying silly things?” Then her disdain seems to become pity—her poor friend seems to think these things only happen in novels. She turns toward the American girl and asks if she believes in flechazos. She doesn’t really understand her. Flechazo: love at first sight. Finally, she says she does, “definitely.” With that comically serious tone once more, firmly sitting up in her armchair. But she seems then to doubt the tone and how much conviction the conversation requires, saying, “Of course I believe in it.” Of course I believe, in a very low voice.
Because Harri also believes in it, she can’t wait to go to Bilbao, she dreams about meeting him again. Sometimes it’s she, Harri, who goes right up to him. She reminds him that they met each other on the plane coming back from London and she had to give him a bag because the one he was carrying full of books broke. Other times it’s the man—“Do you remember? I wanted to give you a book.” And so on. But most times, they look each other in the eye and fall into each other’s arms.
And why does she think it’ll happen in Bilbao?
The young American sociologist asks the question completely seriously, in just the same way they were talking about medical examinations shortly before. Harri, too, answers with the seriousness of an epidemiologist—it’s a matter of statistics. Although many Gipuzkoans and Donostians particularly use the Loiu airport, especially to fly to London, the population figur
es mean it’s much more probable that he lives in Bilbao somewhere. Intuition tells her the same thing, as well. She thinks the man seemed more open than Gipuzkoans normally do. His way of speaking, the fact that he looked straight in her eyes, the generosity with which he gave her a book, just like that. That’s more like a Bilbaoer, she says, looking dreamingly up at the ceiling as she remembers that moment, the man picking up the last book, opening it, and in his manly voice reading, “This book was written in good faith.” Julia can’t take any more. She loses her patience when she hears that the man had a manly voice, not to mention of course those senseless clichés about Bilbaoers and Donostians. She’s furious that she has to hear that Bilbaoers are happy and fun-loving and Donostians are dull and boring, but no more so than if she had said that Bilbaoers are crude and Donostians are elegant. It’s probably because of her nationalist education that she can’t stand these dumb clichés about the two cities, which just create a sort of rivalry between them, and she tells her off. There are all types in all places. It’s a stupid phrase, to which, as could be expected, Harri replies, “Sometimes more in some places than in others.” They’re just about to get stuck in a senseless argument when the young American, raising a finger to ask for permission to speak, asks Harri if she remembers what book the man was going to give her.
It is a strange question, and one that nobody has thought of yet. Harri doesn’t know what to say. She says she’s tried to remember hundreds of times, but to no avail. Now she regrets not having taken it, because she would have had something of his, it would give her some clue about him, tell her something about him. The only thing she remembers is that there was scenery on the cover. She’s very sure about that. And it wasn’t a photograph, it was a painting, a watercolor or pastel probably. She can visualize it. She looks mystical again, she holds her hands under her cheeks and looks at the ceiling. It was probably pastel, there was an unspoiled beach, with two empty deckchairs on it, and in the distance, a lighthouse with wide red stripes on it. It was colorful but sad-looking scene, she remembers that. The man probably chose it by chance, simply because it was the last one left on the floor. In any case, before he offered it to her, he opened it and read to her in his serious, manly voice, “This book was written in good faith.” His English was easy to understand, his accent was the same as ours, proving that her intuition was right and he wasn’t English.
“My God, it’s Montauk!”
Lynn raises her hands to her face, suddenly excited, as if someone had just turned up by surprise. “It would be amazing if it were Montauk,” which sounds a little hysterical to Julia, and she doesn’t understand why Lynn is so amazed. They admit they don’t know what Montauk is, they’ve never heard the name before, and she’s thrilled as she explains to them that it’s a place on Long Island, Montauk’s a hamlet on the eastern end, it has a beach and one of the oldest lighthouses in the States, but it’s also the title of a novel by the Swiss writer Max Frisch.
Julia and Martin know Max Frisch very well, he’s one of the writers they admire. They’ve read I’m Not Stiller, Homo Faber, which has been translated into Basque, Gantenbein, Man in the Holocene, Autumn in Peking, Difficult Persons, also called J’adore ce qui me brûle; they haven’t read his plays but think they’ve read all his novels, and even so, they’ve never heard of Montauk. The American girl says it’s probably his best novel. She explains it’s autobiographical, the writer wanted to talk about a weekend he spent in the small hamlet with a young girl, and suddenly she holds her face in her hands again and starts saying “oh my God”—incredibly moved—“oh my God, it’s magical!” She’s jumping up and down with the incomprehensible excitement of a hysterical child, and when she pulls herself together, she asks them if they know the name of the girl who spent the weekend on Long Island with Max Frisch. They’ll never be able to guess—Lynn. It’s magical. Magical is another word Julia hates. She hates to break the spell, but she thinks there must be thousands of books around the world with beaches, lighthouses, and deckchairs on their covers. Just as there must be a huge number of books that have a Julia as their main character, or even in their titles, thousands of books, and it’s no reason to be particularly proud, which the young American seems to be, and all because there’s a Lynn in this Frisch novel they’ve never heard of. She can’t understand all the enthusiasm, it irritates her a bit, and that’s why she says there must be millions of books with beaches, deckchairs, and lighthouses on their covers. But they don’t seem to be listening to her. The book the man offered her could be Montauk, says Harri, her face lighting up as if the possibility were extremely important for her. Her two hands together as if she were going to pray, her nose against her forefingers, and her chin resting on her thumbs, she reflects for a moment, and the American girl remains alert. She’s almost sure he said, “This book was written in good faith.” She’s sure about that. Well, in that case, there’s no doubt it was Montauk, the American concludes, like a doctor telling a patient that a certain medicine will clear up their disease. With a bit of luck, it’ll be in the box of hers that Martin helped her carry upstairs that morning. And having said this, she rushes to the spiral staircase leading up to the attic.
The rest of them keep quiet, as if they really were her patient and her two assistants, waiting for the doctor to return and tell them the results of some X-rays. Harri’s heard of Frisch but says she hasn’t read anything by him. But Julia’s sure she gave her the Basque translation of Homo Faber, because she’d said hers was getting rusty and she needed to read something in the language. She remembers that Martin once said that Gantenbein was Frisch’s best work, which she didn’t agree with. Harri and Martin wait in silence, while Julia goes over to the bookcase and starts looking for Frisch’s books. She finds them quickly, he’s one of the authors she’s registered. There’s Gantenbein, Homo Faber, I’m Not Stiller, and the other novels, Military Service Record, Bluebeard, some plays—Andorra, for instance—a couple of newspapers, his correspondence with Dürrenmatt, but no trace of Montauk. She doesn’t see it mentioned in the other books, so it must have come out after them. Martin’s copy of Gantenbein was published by Debate, and hers, which she keeps at home, was published by Barral, an older edition. As she flicks through the pages, she sees that the underlined sentences stop about halfway through, so she thinks it could be one of those books he thinks is a masterpiece but gave up on because, as he confessed, he finds reading them painful. The last underlined paragraph is on page 98—“It always seems to us that a man who feels the absence of a certain ability in a woman doesn’t love her enough.” Page 96: “Sometimes Lila, like all intellectual women, suffers from depression.” Page 75: “Lila cheats on me, to use that dumb expression.” Page 73: “He used to think that all the women, all the women he had embraced, felt loved; but all the women he really started to love sooner or later told him that he, like all men, had no idea about love.” Page 66: “They had promised not to write each other letters, never, they wanted no future, this was their oath: No repetitions. No stories.” Page 65: “Why is it always today?” Page 18: “I’m trying on stories as if they were suits.” The first underlined passage, on page 9: “A man has had an experience and is now looking for a story to go with it—apparently, it isn’t possible to have an experience that doesn’t have a story to go with it—and I worked out that sometimes it’s someone else who’s got my story.”
The young American apologizes when she comes back; she’s taken so long because her books are still packed away. She goes up to Harri slowly, with the book hidden behind her, and when she’s an arm’s length away, like a magician who’s going to guess the number she’s thinking of, she makes a sudden movement and brings forth from the void the object she’s made disappear. Julia can only see the reflection of the light coming in from the garden on the cellophane-wrapped cover, but Harri, who’s incapable of saying a word, nods her head two or three times and whispers that that’s the book, there’s no doubt it’s the actual book, and Julia�
��s amazed to see her looking quite disconcerted.
She has no doubt about it.
Now she’s shaking her head, completely convinced, with a seriousness that’s a far cry from the histrionic attitude she had shortly before, and because of that, her verdict seems to be particularly important, and so it is, of course, for the young American girl who’s holding it in her hands as if it were something sacred. Harri gently picks it up, looks at it for a moment, and then opens it, turns a few pages as if she were looking for something specific. After reading the words she knows by heart aloud and with great emotion, she holds it against her chest and asks the American girl if she can borrow it. Lynn says yes, and then they both, in their own languages, say that it’s magical.
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