Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Martin keeps quiet throughout the scene and looks slightly amused, and Julia wonders if he realizes to what extent Harri’s putting on a show for him. It’s an attractive book cover. Julia almost has to wrench it from Harri’s hands to be able to look at it. The beach looks rather desolate, probably because it’s empty, and for some reason, she thinks it looks like one of those sad beaches in the northern part of the region that are so often battered by the wind. The sea’s blue and calm. In the background there’s a promontory with a red-roofed little house on it and a white lighthouse with red stripes. On the beach there are only two empty deckchairs and their shadows. It looks like a Hopper. The title’s printed at the top, Montauk, with the first M and the final K set somewhat larger than the other letters and stretching down below them, and in that lower space between them is the writer’s name, Max Frisch. The cover’s wrapped in cellophane, and the author’s on the back cover, in a photo that takes up the entire space, wearing his horn-rimmed spectacles, as always, and with a pipe in his mouth. The sign for Sweet’s Restaurant behind him, he’s leaning against a trash can, his hands in his raincoat pockets, his right leg in front of his left one, with the tip of his shoe resting on the ground. Frisch wasn’t a good-looking man. The sentence on the dedication page is the one Harri remembers—“This book was written in good faith, reader.” It’s the same observation Montaigne makes at the start of his essays, and Julia would have recognized it had it been in French. “I am myself the matter of my book.” A text she’s transcribed and knows by heart: “I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one, I have had no thought of serving either your or my own glory . . . You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” She opens a page at random and reads: “Whom is Lynn thinking of?” Then she looks at the back cover again.

  “Montauk: A love story, tender and tenuous, serves to illuminate a lifetime of attachments. Max Frisch, Swiss novelist and playwright, reveals himself as a man, loving, jealous, possessive, and possessed.” She can’t read any more, because Harri snatches it from her hands as if she were afraid she was going to keep it for herself.

  Apparently it’s time for her to leave for the biostatistics roundtable discussion. The young American’s going to leave with her, to go and collect the last of her things and the cat called Max, which are still at the other house. Julia stays there. The American girl seems to think that she, too, is a teacher, and asks if doesn’t have a class. It goes to show she didn’t actually understand much of what they said before lunch. It’s just as well. Harri explains that she’s taking part in a course on literary translation, but as a student, and Martin, with a playful laugh, says that she’s always attending lectures, courses, workshops, and things like that. He sometimes teases her about what he sees as a compulsive feminine thirst for education, and she knows that, deep down, he thinks it’s the result of some complex she has about not having a degree. They’re now in the yard. Julia doesn’t hear what Martin says to the young American, because she’s gone to pick up the cat dishes, and she doesn’t pay any attention until she hears Harri say, “These two are like Beauvoir and Sartre.” She’d like to know what made her say that. Martin replies, “Obvious differences aside.” He hopes, at least, that she won’t wreak her vengeance by writing a ceremonial book after he dies. Julia pretends not to hear. The American girl goes up to her to offer to help her with the yard once more, she says she really likes gardening and she’s good with flowers. It’s remarkable how she knows all the names—the flowers in the pots in front of the house are fragrant violets, and the ones that Martin moved to the flowerbed are a type of pansy, from the old French pensée, the Latin pensare, a thought, but the current English name is a long way from its origin. Martin is standing next to them. He promises the American girl that he will look after the yard, admitting that it’s a little neglected at present. Harri, on the other hand, says that he should stop wasting his time and finish his novel once and for all. Then she looks upward and crosses her hands over her chest, “Let’s see if I’m lucky in Bilbao tomorrow.” This time Julia can’t help telling her that she, too, would be better off if she stopped wasting time and just asked Abaitua for an appointment already. “Ugh, you’re such a pill. Can’t you see I have other things to think about?”

  As soon as they close the iron gate, Martin rushes back to the house, and Julia knows why he’s in such a hurry. It’s time for Marie Lafôret’s segment, and it would be the first time he’s missed it since they started broadcasting it. By the time she comes into the living room, Martin’s already sitting down in front of the television and Marie Lafôret’s talking about the weather, about an anticyclone over the Azores. She really is beautiful, and her signs of ageing suit her, like the good use of beautiful things made of fine materials; those are the words that Martin used to write about a certain television presenter, without mentioning her name. Although Julia agrees—she’s a beautiful wordly forty-something woman—she doesn’t like cet air languissant, that languid French style of hers, which is probably what Martin most likes about her. He calls Marie Lafôret la fille aux yeux d’or, the girl with the golden eyes, which is what people called the actress and singer from the sixties who she looks like; and he’s not wrong, her “golden eyes, as beautiful as they are sad”—Martin’s words again—are indeed very similar to that woman’s.

  She tries not to make too much noise as she tidies things up in the kitchen, not wanting him to feel he has to offer to help her. She’d rather do it by herself than have to put up with him doing things badly and against his will. But he soon pokes his head through the door and asks how he can help, and because the way she replies that she doesn’t need any help comes out a little disagreeably, she tries to make up for it by saying that Harri’s out of her mind, an attempt at the type of chitchat a couple that’s just said goodbye to their guests might engage in. “You don’t understand her” is his answer. With no trace of humor or irony. She turns the faucet off, dries her hands, and hangs the kitchen rag over the oven rail. It’s obvious he’s challenging her, because he’s normally the one to call Harri crazy, and for any reason whatsoever.

  “Don’t tell me that fantasy of hers about the guy at the airport seems normal to you.”

  “It seems she’s fallen in love.”

  She knows he’s goading her on, and she doesn’t say anything, but Martin wants to continue.

  “You probably can’t understand it.”

  The calm, natural way in which he says this irritates her. She knows she’s going to lose the argument, tries to be as relaxed as he seems to be, as natural as possible, and asks him what he means, does he actually think that she’s incapable of understanding someone falling madly in love? She doesn’t avoid his eyes. She knows he’s serious when he jokingly replies that that’s exactly what he means: that she’s quite unaware of certain feelings.

  “But it’s a complete fantasy,” she blurts out without wanting to. “The only thing the poor woman wants to do is inspire you, be a model for a heroine in one of your stories.”

  “There, you see—what some people despise, other people want.”

  Why doesn’t she stick a knife in his belly and stir his innards around a bit? She, too, would enjoy being an inspiration for a real artist to create something fine and beautiful with, or even, if nothing else, being the cockroach in some Kafka piece—that really would be an honor. But giving life to a character in one of his stories is just worthless. But she can’t say that, she’s not brave enough to attack him on his weakest flank. It’s compassion, but also cowardice. Because she doesn’t dare to hear what he would probably answer: What could she possibly inspire for him apart from irritation, failure, and misery?

  Misery is the only thing he’s given Flora Ugalde, misery is what you see in the relationship between Flora Ugalde and Faustino Iturbe. All he’s done is to bring that misery out into the open, her misery, their misery, without anything fine or noble, just m
isery. Pages and pages spent looking into his memory, “her treason,” as he puts it, with the perverse aim of bringing it to life again.

  She tries to do something that will let him know that she’s not going to stay over that night, but without actually saying it, and she opens the refrigerator. She puts the bits of fresh cod that were going to be their dinner and are currently sitting in a colander into a Tupperware container. He looks at her in silence and makes a show of moving away toward the door and leaving the kitchen. A sign that he has no intention of doing anything to stop her from going.

  If he were to ask her why she’s angry, she’d admit it’s because he was too welcoming to the young American (she could have killed him when he started petting the cat he usually kicked at, just to create a good impression), because he treated her arrogantly and disparaged her work, and because he went out of his way to compare the two of them—obvious differences aside, as he’d said—to Sartre and Beauvoir, leaving open the possibility of occasional lovers and for him to fool around with the young woman. But she supposes he knows all that, and in any event, he doesn’t ask her. In the living room, she opens her bag and puts the first two books she comes across into it. “So you’re not going to stay over?” he then asks her. She thinks he looks relieved.

  The Civil Guard has uncovered half a ton of explosives that two young brothers had stashed in a zulo—an underground hideout—in the stables at their baserri. They’re the type of strong, surly-looking guys you often see in Otzeta, and they’re frowning. Their hands are cuffed behind their backs, they’re tired and broken. The surrounding woods are being searched; apparently they’ve confessed that there are more zulos than just the one. Julia’s mother and Zigor are watching the news on the television. They stare at the images in silence while a voice talks about the damage that the materials the pair were keeping there could have caused. Julia knows that her mother feels sorry for them, and that makes her furious, though not as much as finding out that she, too, pities them. What must have been done to them at the Intxaurrondo barracks to get them to agree to show them where the zulos are? And what about the madness the two might have committed? If her mother says “poor boys,” as she often has, Julia will say “I’m glad they’ve been arrested,” but she doesn’t think she’ll say it. She doesn’t dare to anymore, because she’s told her off about it so often. She’s often told her—at the same time as fighting off her own demons—that she shouldn’t feel more sorry for people who were only going to bring about destruction and suffering than she does for the victims, who are at times our own kind and, in any case, still people. Her mother would always reject that argument—she does feel sorry for the victims. She’d say that she condemns violence but that the people using it are just unfortunate souls who stand no chance against the police and the army and she’s sorry for them. She’d usually take refuge in a sort of resigned silence, above all for Zigor’s sake, while those on the television talked about the need to respect the rule of law and said that the suffering caused by violence serves no purpose, and then she’d mumble her disagreement: “The thing is, we’re the ones who always end up suffering.” It was always something like that, and if Julia didn’t stop her, she would start reciting the long rosary of insults and injustices they’ve been subjected to: they tried to blame the gudaris—Basque soldiers—for the bombing of Gernika; they executed her uncle; her nephew’s been in prison for twenty-five years; her family’s been working hard for generations without being able to get out of poverty; her husband—Julia’s father—had to pay a ten thousand peseta fine for speaking in Basque. Until Julia would shout at her, asking what she was talking about, what she was trying to justify, until she’d shut up, but then, after going quiet, she would look at her with a martyr’s eyes and say, with deep sadness, “Have I said anything that’s untrue?”

  Her mother never tells lies. She always uses the same truths in her arguments, and whenever someone tells her they’re not relevant, she can’t understand how anyone from her family could say that the bombing of Gernika, her uncle’s execution, or the centuries of hard work and exhaustion there at Etxezar aren’t a problem, however terrible whatever’s just happened might be.

  When he goes to bed, Julia asks her son how his interviews about the war are going. He’s supposed to write a paper over the school vacation, and in order to gather material, he’s been going to nursing homes to interview people about the war. It’s an initiative designed to promote relationships between the generations and to strengthen historical memory. Julia thinks it’s a good idea. Not all kitchens preserve echoes of war stories as the one at her house in Martutene does. In that kitchen, although there have been several remodelings to make it more up-to-date, there’s still a small Our Lady of Mount Carmel on display inside a vitrine, a blind goldfinch singing in his tiny cage, a cricket they sometimes try to get drunk by giving it bread soaked in wine, and socks drying on the cauldron chain. It seems amazing to her that there are some kitchens without any memories. How quickly people get used to modern design and halogen lamps. That certainly isn’t true of this kitchen.

  Apparently, it’s not going well, most of the old people only offer him generalizations: the Germans and the Italians helped Franco; war is the worst thing ever; everyone went hungry. In the end, he has more to talk about from the three weeks he spent at summer camp in Urbaso than the old men have from a whole war. What’s more, the Donostians don’t speak Basque very well, while in Otzeta, on the other hand, they speak it very well, but then it’s he who has difficulty understanding what they’re saying. What he’d most like to know is whether on the eve of the war, you could sense that it was going to happen.

  But he doesn’t want to talk about the civil war right now.

  Why was his AITA—his father—called Zigor? He’s lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. He tends to repeat questions. Julia thinks it’s something left over from his childhood, to an extent; he likes hearing stories time and again, and the possibility of comparing different versions of the same story. He was already going by that name—Zigor—when Julia met him. She thinks that when he first joined the organization, someone called Zigor had just been killed in a shoot-out, and since he needed a secret name, they gave him that one—one Zigor falls, a new Zigor rises. She tells him that she doesn’t know, that he had that name when she met him and she doesn’t think there’s any special reason for it. In any case, he isn’t particularly interested in the question itself—he wants to talk about his father. Julia isn’t sure what impression she’s given the boy of him. It’s probably changed over time, just as her perception of the decisions Josean made during his life has changed.

  She finds it more and more difficult to talk to him about his father without denying what his grandmother and aunt tell him, and she tries to make what she herself tells him as truthful as possible. Her mother didn’t approve of Josean, but since his death, she seems to have decided that it’s better for her grandson to see his father as a hero rather than a terrorist or an unlucky adventurer. Her sister has another point of view. She always admired him, and she always does her best to make Zigor feel proud to be a martyr’s son. She puts so much effort into it that Julia is afraid her sister’s sons may end up hating their own father for continuing to have dinner in the kitchen with them every night rather than giving up his life for the nation. Julia, too, tries to help him think of his father as a generous man, ready to give his life for a noble ideal, because she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing to believe and thinks it’s a fine thing for a son to be proud of his father, and she wouldn’t like to spoil his idealized image of him at this stage.

  Did he ever kill anyone? His hands are still behind his neck, he’s still looking up at the ceiling. This is a new question, something she’s often thought about, a question she never dared to ask. She decides to say that she couldn’t imagine him killing anyone, and it’s the truth. Once, she went across the border to see him, shortly after t
hey killed that businessman Berazadi like a dog. That death had moved her deeply, she’d felt quite close to him, she knew people who’d known him, and she was aware that he was patriotic, that he’d worked to promote the ikastolas—the schools where students were taught in Basque—that his employees had looked up to him, and that he’d been a fine man. She was told that he used to make the daily meals for his captors, those children who, when they became frightened that the Civil Guard were onto them, shot him dead. Their fear was greater than their compassion. She’d asked Zigor what a person must feel when they kill someone. It was an indirect question, and the word must was purposefully chosen. “Fear, I imagine” he’d replied. Now she regrets not having asked him the question more directly, but at least she can hang onto that “I imagine.”

  He never killed anyone, she says to her son. She asked him, and he said no.

  “But he was killed,” says the boy. There’s a question behind his words, even though it comes out as a statement. They’ve always believed that it was an act of sabotage that made his car go off the road and over the cliff as he was driving along the Corniche route from Sokoa to Hendaia. There weren’t any witnesses, nobody had heard from him since that midday, and there was nothing to explain his driving along by himself at two o’clock in the morning. What’s more, he’d apparently told a lot of those closest to him that he knew someone was after him, and the fact that he’d been wounded in the attack on the Hendayais Bar led them to think it wasn’t just an accident. The Gendarmerie, which didn’t seem to have investigated very much, decided that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. Perhaps being assassinated would make his life—in terms of how he’d chosen to lead it and the decisions he’d made—more meaningful than dying in a straightforward accident after falling asleep at the wheel would, but she doesn’t want what happened to feed her son’s hatred. She doesn’t want his father—his death or his life—to determine his existence in any way other than genetically. He looks just like his father—soft, carrot-colored hair, a narrow face, melancholy eyes, a long angular nose, a small mouth, and a weak chin. Considering the life he led, anything could have happened to Zigor, including falling asleep at the wheel. She tells him the police didn’t find anything suspicious. The boy wraps himself in his blanket and turns toward the wall, angrily, because it’s not what he was hoping to hear. At least he says good night, even if only in a low voice.