Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Zigor is written on the rectangular envelope, in the black ink of a fountain pen. It’s fine English handwriting, perhaps a little affected, the upward strokes thin, the downward ones thicker, the tail of the Z underlining the other letters of the name, which gives the impression that the name was written as part of some important rite. It’s sealed. There’s not much inside it, a couple of sheets, or maybe just one thick sheet. It’s the only thing of his she still has. She destroyed everything of Zigor’s, in case the police ever came to search the house; that’s what she told herself when she got rid of it all, but now she knows it wasn’t quite true, she could have kept a few things. He gave her the envelope a couple of months before he died.

  “Give it to him on his fifteenth birthday,” he said, when the boy was nearly four. He always had the shadow of death over him, and he said those words very seriously, with solemnity, giving the idea that he was in some sort of mortal danger, and she quickly put it in her pocket without taking the time to look at it; it was all she could do. She didn’t ask him what it was all about, whether there was any special reason for him to think that his life was in danger. She thought about asking him but didn’t; she didn’t want to know. She wanted to flee from him, from his world, from danger, from fear. She simply replied that she’d give it to him; she didn’t need to swear to it, and he didn’t ask her to. “I’ll give it to him,” and they started talking about something else. What was it about? Why did he seal the envelope? What was in it? Didn’t she have a right to know? Why when he was fifteen? Questions that keep her from sleeping many nights but that she never thought of back then. The only thing she was concerned with was not falling into his trap, not letting his tearful, morbid, sentimental ways affect her, not accepting the emotional blackmail of someone positioned so close to death, whether deliberately or not.

  She put it away with her invoices and tax returns. She can’t say that she ever managed to forget it, but she didn’t start worrying about it until Zigor’s death made the unknown thing inside it become the sacred last will of someone who’d died, an obligation that had to be fulfilled. From time to time, she took it out of the file and felt it to see how much it weighed, and held it against the light to try to see inside. Even so, she wasn’t very curious, she didn’t have much doubt about what was inside—a letter written in affected words to justify his life, rejoicing in his choice to dedicate it to an ideal. “I fought for our country so you could be freer.” Messages like that, sent from the tomb, could influence her son profoundly and become a terrible burden for him. And now, as her son gets closer to fifteen, she’s getting more worried, and her obligation to fulfill Zigor’s final wish often keeps her awake at night. Of course, the right for father and son to have a relationship is not broken by death, a father has a right to pass his inheritance onto his son, and the son to receive it, and they both have the right for the privacy of their mutual correspondence to be respected. It is for her, on the other hand, to respect those rights—the father’s words, made sacred by death, belong to the son—but at the same time, she has to look after her son’s well-being and the greater good (and, to the extent to which his father’s words might be a condemnation, to protect him from them). Those are simultaneously her rights and her duties. She’s sometimes considered waiting until her son comes of age—which is to say until he’s old enough to be able to fully measure the significance of his father’s words—and she’s also thought of opening the envelope and deciding what to do after seeing the contents. But she hasn’t felt able to. Not because it would be a breach of the privacy between father and son, or not only because of that, but mostly because she’s afraid of seeing the contents, of hating Zigor forever if, as she believes, he’s going to come back from beyond the grave to urge his son to fight and sacrifice himself.

  She’s sometimes even thought of burning it without opening it. A fantasy, of course. She cries when she imagines how she would feel if she received a letter from her father. A few words for Julia. She lets all her tears come out—she was a fatherless teenager—and feels all her pain. She’s still an orphan. She’s sure that if he’d ever written a letter, it would have been to tell her that we’re in this world to be happy and to help others to be happy—that’s what he always used to say. She cries softly, without sobbing or moaning, as she remembers her father’s words, and she feels easier. “Txata fea,” he used to say, poking fun at what he called her ugly little nose, but he would say she was a pretty girl, as well. He could have said that in a letter; although everyone thought her sister was his favorite, in fact it was her. She can’t imagine how moved she would have felt if her father had left her an envelope like that. She sets Zigor’s to one side, with her tear-soaked hand pulled up inside her sweater sleeve so as not to get it wet.

  She hasn’t told anyone there’s a letter. Partly because she finds it hard to talk about her intimate things, partly because she’s afraid people won’t understand the ethical doubts that Zigor’s instructions have raised for her, or because they’ll take them as a lack of respect on her part for the wishes of the dead. It would be useless to look for advice from those closest to her. Her mother and her sister would definitely say that she has to respect Josean’s wishes and her son’s rights and that she could have refused him when he first gave her the letter. Having doubts at all would seem terrible to them, a serious sin. Harri, on the other hand, would no doubt make her open it at once in order to satisfy her own curiosity. She would think the ethical problem a matter of irrelevance—who knows what that lunatic might have written, she’d say—and while children do require guidance, they also have to be protected from their parents. What’s more, if Julia didn’t do what Harri told her to, Harri would criticize her and be incapable of keeping it to herself, she’d let Martin know somehow or another, and Julia doesn’t want that to happen. Martin is jealous of her past—she thinks that’s why he finds it difficult to get on well with her son—he wouldn’t be comfortable with Josean’s presence, or presence of a sort, and his opinion on the matter would of course be biased. Whenever Josean’s name comes up—and Julia tries to make sure it doesn’t—Martin says something unpleasant, even if it’s irrelevant. When the American girl went back to the subject of nicknames and pseudonyms at lunch, because she suddenly understood that Zigor was a “war name”—and funnily enough, they use the French term, nom de guerre, in English—Martin mentioned the “drôle de guerre,” the Phoney War, to round out the conversation. “So, she’s already told you that she had a relationship with a war hero,” Martin said with an insincere smile, and Julia stopped herself from saying what she was thinking, which was that she can’t stand people who, out of pure cowardice, never took part in the war and now shamelessly give lessons in morality to those who had.

  Even so, those aren’t the only reasons for her not talking about Josean’s letter, nor are they the main ones. The biggest obstacle is that Martin has asked her to be the executor of his literary will, and she wouldn’t like him to doubt her ability to do that because of her doubts about complying with Zigor’s instructions.

  Martin explained to her in a normal tone, without getting too serious about it, as if he were telling her about some normal, everyday event, that there was nothing in particular to be scared of or to worry about but that he would be more comfortable if he knew that if something did happen to him, she would see to destroying his papers, drafts, notes, and his computer. He didn’t want anything to be kept. “There’s nothing that deserves to be kept, really,” he reassured her. “I want to know that you’ll throw everything away.” It seemed like a genuine request to her, because they once complained together about vultures going through people’s trash. He didn’t say much more than that, asking only that she go ahead with it regardless of what might happen with their relationship; he hoped she’d keep her word. “You’ll do it, won’t you?” She said yes and doesn’t have any doubts about it. She has sometimes thought about what will happen when the time comes. They haven’t talked
about it directly again, only indirectly. As she remembers it, Harri once mentioned that she was reading Max Brod’s Kafka. She certainly agreed with his decision not to respect Kafka’s will and ventured that writers can’t really want their unpublished work to be destroyed, that such a wish could be neither true nor credible. Then they discussed whether the world would be different without The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika. Julia thinks not and that another way to describe absurd nightmare situations would have been invented. Then, and with a certain degree of seriousness, but naturalness, as well, Martin said that he didn’t have much to leave behind him but he’d rather it wasn’t published, and Harri was concerned by that. And that was where they’d left the matter.

  Julia knows that Martin trusts her and believes her when she assures him that she’ll carry out his will. In general, people do tend to trust her, they think she’s sincere. People close to her know that her character wouldn’t allow her to break her promises and that she’s incapable of revealing a secret. She’s not proud of that, because it isn’t a virtue, more like an inability, a lack of flexibility, and to an extent, like imagination, it’s something connected with an inability to deceive. At the same time, just thinking about doing something unfair makes her feel sick, she has no ability to act wrongly, and she couldn’t stand the humiliation if she were ever caught doing so. It’s something like the sensation of vertigo when looking over a cliff. The people she knows are aware of her limits in terms of being able to tell lies, in terms of betrayal, and sometimes she imagines that they enjoy sharing things with her that they couldn’t trust anyone else with while still maintaining their dignity, sordid things she’d rather not have to hear, she imagines that they’re allowing themselves to behave like those who, when faced with a blind person, don’t bother to keep their rude gestures and attitudes in check.

  She puts the letter back in the file it’s sat in for more than ten years. If she had a piano, she’d play something about pain, she’d play Jose Gontzalo Zulaika Agirre’s Oinazez.

  4

  Iñaki Abaitua has his jacket on by the time Pilar comes into his room. She’s decided to go to the clinic, and can he wait for her a minute. But she’s still in her pajamas. She said before that all she had that day was someone coming in with a hyriated disc at the end of the evening and that she was going to stay at home all day and put some documents in order. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready.” She’s quick and doesn’t spend too much time getting made up—very little time at all compared with other women, if some men’s complaints are to be believed—but she’s going to make him late even if she tries to hurry. He tells her he has a meeting first thing, and could she please get a move on.

  He finds arriving late for any appointment embarrassing; he’s usually the first to demand punctuality. He can’t stand unpunctuality. He doesn’t like waiting for any longer than the quarter of an hour required by politeness and doesn’t hesitate to tell people who are late that their lack of punctuality is not just a lack of courtesy, it’s also an unforgivable lack of respect. He’s sometimes asked people—half jokingly, half seriously—who they are to steal even five minutes from his life. And this time it’s even more serious, because there are going to be people from outside his immediate group at the meeting, such as Harri Gabilondo, the department’s epidemiologist, who is very strict when it comes to manners, and they usually understand each other very well, particular when they’re criticizing the general lack of respect and the amount of neglect at the hospital. “And then we say we aren’t Spanish!” That’s what Gabilondo said once when she wanted to show someone up for their lack of politeness.

  “Just a minute,” Pilar says once more. She’s taken her shower and has a yellow towel wrapped around her head and another one of the same color around her waist. He leans against the side of the bathroom door as he watches her applying lotion around her eyes with her little finger; it’s his bathroom, after all, and he wants to make it clear that her being there is making him late. Pilar, looking at him in the mirror, asks him to close the living room blinds, otherwise the sun will get in. She always does the same thing: when she’s running late, she asks him to do something or other so that he doesn’t feel like he’s waiting.

  “Here’s the expert at last,” says Arrese. He’s also been known to call him “the learned one” from time to time. That’s one of his habits, poking fun at Abaitua for studying too much or wanting to know too much. The one who knows the most, the one who studies the most. Medicus sapiens. “My wife’s doctor” he also sometimes says. Abaitua thinks he actually means it and that he respects him. The thing is, he likes making a caricature of Abaitua’s shortcomings in order to make up for his own, and he mentions Abaitua’s lack of practical ability and absentmindedness continually, marking him down as an eccentric scientist at best. He also tends to make a caricature of himself. He often praises his own ordinariness and straightforward character, mentioning his lack of enthusiasm for studying and other shortcomings without any embarrassment, in a provocative way, even. Many colleagues and nurses have told Abaitua—and he doesn’t think they do so to flatter him—that it’s clear that when he’s with Abaitua, it’s his own complexes and feelings of guilt that make him speak like that and that the man believes that by rights, Abaitua should be the head of the department, not himself. With regard to that, it’s significant to point out that he in fact says department heads do not necessarily have to be the smartest or the wisest individuals in their respective departments. According to him, that characteristic rebelliousness that’s deep inside us is rooted in our inability to accept someone less capable than us being put in charge of us, which is a situation that’s accepted as normal in more advanced societies, like cars stopping when the traffic lights are red without ever asking why they don’t stop when they’re green. To be in charge, you only need precisely the amount of intelligence required to be in charge, no more and no less. He’s heard him say it hundreds of times.

  “The doctor who knows most about perinatal health in all of Europe.” He says that to a young redheaded woman; she must be the sociologist Harri Gabilondo told him about. So there’s no formal introduction. Gabilondo points at the free seat to her right for him to sit in. The young American sociologist looks to her left, raises her chin, and smiles at him. It’s a short, fleeting gesture, a stretching of the lips, a closing of the eyes, and wrinkles appear all over her face. Then she introduces herself in Spanish—“Mi nombre es Lynn.” Her pronunciation is clear, but she speaks very low, almost as if she were going to tell him a secret.

  The plan is to access all available data over a period of three months relating to subjects’ pregnancies and birthings and their infants’ first month of life, in order to be able to connect that data with information about mortality and sickness rates as well as the greatest possible number of endogenous and exogenous factors. In addition to that, the Gen laboratories in the United States are doing a related study to look at all the mothers’ and babies’ mitochondrial DNA. Abaitua is proud that Harri Gabilondo mentions him as a reference in her research. It must have been a lot of work back then, she says. He thinks she’s younger than Pilar, though not by much, and there’s more contrast between her upper and lower parts—small breasts and wide hips, good for childbirth. Their hairstyles are similar, as well, short with long layers, almost pageboy-style, making them look young and full of life. The color of Harri Gabilondo’s hair is very beautiful, straw-blond, and it goes well with her light-colored eyes. People often take her for being Danish or Dutch, but she describes herself as a simple, homegrown Martutene girl.

  Abaitua knows that she likes him a lot, and she often shows it. She says that this opportunity to take part in research in conjunction with the best-run hospitals in the world is thanks to him, thanks to the personal efforts of Doctor Abaitua, and that’s true. Arrese was hesitant to sign on to the project, because he was afraid his standards wouldn’t look very good compared with other people’s, although he
does normally accept Abaitua’s suggestions. Abaitua can’t complain in that regard. Arrese accepts his moral leadership and gives him total freedom to organize his work, carry out research, and go to conferences and roundtable discussions; but even so, Abaitua feels relegated to a lower level every time he has to introduce himself as a mere assistant when he meets up with old colleagues from other hospitals or when, as has just happened, Arrese, in his role as head of the department, speaks clumsily, using inappropriate words, even though he knows that people who know them both are aware that his inferior status is a result of his own decision to try to avoid the administrative responsibilities and problems that come with authority—and Abaitua himself has encouraged that impression. And Arrese himself often admits, though mostly in a humorous manner, that he’s the leader because Abaitua didn’t want to be. “Boss by default” is how he describes himself.

  In fact, in the past, Abaitua used to head the Maternity-Pediatrics Service when old Olano was having his heart attacks and having to take long periods off afterward; then, when he died, nobody was surprised that Abaitua became the provisional head.