Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “A great beauty,” but still a Goytisolo, and whenever they mention that particular surname in Martin’s family—complete with the Spanish y—they always have to mention the fact that they were dispossessed by them. The Goytisolos, too, are from Otzeta. All the land around their clinic, on the other side of the railroad, which is surrounded by beautiful hundred-year-old cypresses, used to belong to his family—he makes the usual gestures of despair, scrunching up his shoulders, when he says this—but at the start of the war, when Donostia fell, Abaitua’s father-in-law, a young doctor who was a Requeté officer at the time, seized it, taking advantage of the fact that Martin’s family, who were Basque nationalists, had had to flee to Hazparne, in southwestern France. After the war, when his grandfather crossed back over the border again to see what the situation was and find out if they would be able to get their property back, he had no choice but to accept a “reasonable” deal for it from Goytisolo, who had just opened a maternity hospital on the land, the first incarnation of the San Luis clinic, in the building in which his own grandfather had planned to open a hotel. He makes the another typical gesture at this point, pointing off into the distance with his arms held wide open, to show the extent of his family’s property before the war, a display that always makes Julia think of the devil tempting Christ by showing him “all the kingdoms of the world in all their glory.”

  “But Doctor Abaitua isn’t to blame for that, now is he?” The American girl’s voice is softer now, but there is still a bit of a challenge in it, which really surprises Julia. It occurs to her she must be a very loyal woman. Martin looks down again, shaking his head to say that Abaitua isn’t at all to blame. The four of them are silent for a moment, until Harri says she’s “definitely late” now. The American girl, too, has a lot of work to do and wants to go, and the writer, faced with the prospect of being left alone with Julia, asks Harri to drop him off downtown, he has to go and look something up at the Koldo Mitxelena library.

  While they wait for him to go and get a jacket, Harri talks about him. He’s not looking very well, he’s pale, he should get out more, and do something to lose less hair, there are treatments; Julia feels herself to be responsible for some of the things being brought up. She also wants to know if he’s making any progress with his novel. Julia doesn’t like the subject and avoids it without bothering to come up with much of an excuse. She points at a thrush, a bird she thinks is a thrush, that’s hopping back and forth between the magnolia and the path. “Look at that happy little thrush!” she says, assuming that he must have told her the story about the pharmacist who said he had a “culo gordo,” but he hasn’t. She says the bird is also bound to have some problem or other; everyone does, after all. They try to figure out the motivation behind the bird’s ritualistic movements—he goes quickly over to the side of the pebble path and then back again, stopping to peck at the grass after every two or three jumps. Julia has never heard this bird that appears to be a thrush sing, while the pair that usually perches on top of the reed fence hardly ever shuts up. “Chatterbird,” she thinks of saying. Chattering bird, chatterbox, but not so much as a parrot. Chatty bird. Sometimes she thinks the girl doesn’t understand a thing. They look like sparrows, but she doesn’t think they are, because they’re almost completely green. She doesn’t know anything about birds, nor does Harri.

  The American girl thinks that the Basque word txori is not just beautiful, it’s also a natural word for “bird,” probably because it’s an onomatopoeia. She asks them if that’s right, if it’s an onomatopoeia, but they don’t know. Txio is how you say “to cheep.” They agree that there are words in all languages that seem more appropriate than those in others for the same things. Txori seems more appropriate than bird, and much more so than the Spanish pájaro. Pájaro does however seem a better choice for the word’s other meaning, describing a wicked, wily sort, than Basque’s birigarroa.

  That reminds Julia of something by the Donostian writer Ramon Zulaika that she read a long time ago. Apparently, he was on a beach in Finland and came across a local person. They couldn’t understand each other, because it wasn’t so usual for people to know English back then, and they didn’t share any other common language. The local wrote something in the sand—unfortunately, Julia can’t remember what the word was—and asked the writer to do the same thing. He had to choose a word to respond, and Julia does remember the one that he chose. The Basque word for “butterfly”: pinpilinpauxa.

  The American girl likes the word pinpilinpauxa. “Butterfly” is a beautiful word, as well.

  To fly—when you say it, it’s like your arms are opening wide, Harri says. And she demonstrates.

  Martin finds them taking turns expressively repeating words when he comes out. He wants to know what they’re up to, but Harri takes him by the hand and leads him to the car; they’ve already made her wait long enough, too long, in fact. He couldn’t find his key, he excuses himself, to which Harri replies that he never remembers where he leaves things. She says it like a mother. And when she takes an eyelash out of his eye, she’s absolutely like a mother, telling him to keep still and open his eyes wide, and Julia can’t deny she finds it all a bit repulsive.

  When they’re left alone, Julia asks the American girl if she wants a coffee, and she says “pozik,” accepting gladly. It isn’t the first time she’s heard her say the word, which sounds like Russian with her accent. She sits on the coal box as she watches the coffeemaker fill up, her perfect feet dangling down inside her sandals, and she looks younger. “Tell me,” she says, like in the novel.

  “How many of your last names do you know by heart?”

  “Six for sure. And another one or two out of order.”

  “Are they all Basque?”

  “Yes, all of them.”

  “Would it be a problem if they weren’t?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Would you mind if your last name were to disappear one day?”

  “Not at all. But what is this, an interrogation?”

  The girl stirs her coffee, her thin legs swaying a bit as she does. Normally Julia is alone when she has coffee in the kitchen; Martin only goes there to cook, and she finds it strange to be there with someone else. They stir their coffee in silence until the girl says, “An open question now,” imitating a pollster’s voice.

  How do you feel about being the inspiration for a literary character? That’s the question, and Julia doesn’t know what expression to put on her face when she hears it. The first thing she thinks of is asking her not to say silly things—“a literary character” seems a bit over the top—but she’s also tempted by the chance to get to talk about something she doesn’t talk about with anyone else. She doesn’t know what to say and plays for time by asking her not to say silly things. She’s been told that Flora Ugalde is exactly the same as her physically and “de mucho carácter”—a woman with a strong personality. Julia decides to take it as a joke. That description of her character is just a euphemism for saying that she has a temper, and making a carbon copy of her physical characteristics can’t be that hard—big lips (she’s been lucky in that regard, full lips have become fashionable, but when she was a child she used to bite them whenever she had to have her photograph taken, because people used to call her “Lips”), graying hair that she doesn’t want to dye (“jet black with threads of silver” would be one way to describe it), and above all, the mole on her jugular fossa, which makes her neck stand out as singular. She thinks Martin must have enjoyed himself when he created the character; he likes sowing doubts, confusing people. As if it weren’t enough that nine out of ten readers think that the narrators of stories told in the first person are the writers themselves (she’s read that somewhere, and of course it’s reasonable to suppose that the confusion between the narrator and the writer will be complete if the former, too, is a writer), Martin always makes use of real events to lend his stories plausibility, and she also suspects
he likes giving critics who enjoy looking for biographical details something to keep them busy. She admits that there are clearly bits of her in Flora Ugalde. Does she mind? Well, not really, in fact, she doesn’t mind people deducing that she talks to the electrical appliances in the kitchen, mostly to the washing machine, or that she snores, or that when the hot water in the shower cuts out, she runs down the hallway with her arms crossed to protect her breasts, or that she has no sense of humor. Not nearly as much as she minds when he gives the character faults that she herself doesn’t actually have. What most hurts her is when he takes things out of context, twists them, criticizes everything. She’s even gotten to imagining him as one of those reptiles that hunts insects with its tongue, on the lookout for words and actions that can be converted into evidence of misery. That’s what he does, he hunts for misery. He’s a reptile uninterested in colorful butterflies. His insistence on giving bitter, cruel caricatures of her—of both of them, in fact, because he shows no pity to himself, either—and on never showing anything noble, only bringing out the worst, is disappointing. Why does he feel the need to do that? Once, she thought it was a writerly characteristic specifically, but now it’s on television, it’s something that happens in all parts of society—the need to show misery and vileness. Julia thinks the situation has a lot in common with the type of people who go on television to share their most intimate things with the whole world. The only difference is that Martin uses a format conventionally connected with art and culture.

  In fact, he’s interested in talk shows, reality TV, and all sorts of trashy programming like that. When the genre was just starting out and that type of show was new in the world of television, his friends used to deny watching them, but he defended them. He used to say—and it was to impress them, to an extent, but also because he really believed it—that they were the seeds of future narratives, sociologists had only to sit back in their chairs and turn on the television to see things they could use for their work. He’s fascinated by watching people talking about their sordid lives. He still watches the shows from time to time, but recently he’s begun to complain that the format’s exhausted, because they always show the same types of people talking about the same things. There’s one show where people call others close to them, often people they live with, their partners, parents, brothers, or sisters, to tell them things that are in principle intimate—saying they love them or hate them, they’re not willing to put up with some particular attitude or conduct (a lack of care in their personal hygiene, for instance)—but that for some reason or other they’d rather say in front of the entire nation. “Delante de toda España”—that’s the expression they often use, “ante toda España”—instead of saying it in private, and that’s led a few people to complain from time to time, saying, “You could have told me that this morning when we were at home.” It was something like that for Julia, she would rather have heard directly, for instance, that he found the smell of her shower gel overpowering, rather than having to find out from Faustino Iturbe.

  It happens less and less, for one thing because her model, too, has been exhausted, and for another, because Julia has learned to protect herself better. There was a time, however, when they could be sitting there together, each of them going about their own business or talking quietly to one another, and there would suddenly be a special shine in Martin’s blue eyes that meant something had attracted his attention (it was like seeing, and almost not seeing, a long agile tongue catching an insect); sometimes it was something obvious and sometimes something that wasn’t so obvious, and Julia would ask herself what it was that she had said or done that would be ridiculed next. Of course, Julia knows what attracts his interest, and occasionally she plays at being Flora Ugalde for his benefit, though not often. But in general it’s the other way around, she tries hard not to say things that Flora Ugalde will end up saying, and, obviously, she’s already stopped doing certain things when he’s there. He’s described her in the bathroom in full detail—he’s portrayed her sitting astride the bidet (why does he describe the towels so meticulously, so exhaustively, in the way his beloved Flaubert describes Madame Bovary’s hat?), brushing her teeth, holding her breasts with her free hand, plucking the hairs off her chin with tweezers, and leaning in toward the mirror, her reading glasses on the end of her nose, to measure the mole on her neck. The mole on Flora Ugalde’s neck has become a mark of death. It’s clear moles are no longer what they used to be. They used to be sung about, along with jet-black hair and strawberry-colored lips, and not so long ago, people used to tell Julia herself that it was pretty, its heart shape standing out so perfectly in the middle of her neck, and her father used to kiss it and call it “my little heart,” but now it’s completely different, people are obsessed with cancer, and when they see it, what they see is a tumor, or the start of a tumor. The family doctor told her it was a good idea to keep it under observation, and she thought of tracing an outline of it on a piece of transparent plastic with a thin felt-tipped pen, in order to see if it was getting any bigger or not. When she stood in front of the mirror with the bit of plastic in her hand, she realized that responsible action of hers would be stretched into something out of proportion and ridiculously obsessive. And that’s what happened. From then on, he hasn’t written a single episode in which Flora Ugalde doesn’t appear to be obsessed with cancer at all hours of the day—getting up in the middle of the night or leaving in mid-conversation to go to the bathroom “to inspect the silent growth in that little black heart where the illness thrives.” He wrote that.

  Shortly after meeting him, she discovered the risks of being by his side, but she accepted it as something inevitable if she wanted to live with him. Seeing herself reflected in that painful, pathetic way was a tax she’d have to pay, something she’d have to take or leave. He would find it difficult to renounce something usable, even if it meant hurting the feelings of people he liked or respected, if he thought it might interest a possible reader for a moment, if he saw some way of making it into a sentence. It’s his nature, as the scorpion would say. There’s nothing higher than making literary use of life, and he has to devote himself to that.

  Once, she was weak enough, or daring enough—she’s not sure which—to ask him not to use a particular sad incident from her life, one that, unusually, he’d let her read as soon as he’d written it. Against all expectations, he accepted her request, saying that he had only written it for her. Remembering that makes her feels terribly ashamed, because then, to balance out his generosity, she was lowered around him to the level of a dog. She admits she’s worried that she may have censored some pages that might have been important for literature by preventing the publication of that narrative (she’s never liked widows and widowers who doctor their dead ones’ diaries, although she does like Leonard Woolf), but now she’s sure that he gave them to her because he saw they were of no value. Otherwise, and with the best of intentions, she’s pretended not to notice when she sees herself reflected in his manuscripts, particularly in the pieces about Faustino Iturbe. So he can say explicitly that he takes great care to respect the literary contract, one clause of which—and it’s one the critics respect less and less—says that there must be a distinction between the author and the narrator. With regard to that contract, Martin has written that the reader is like a polite gentleman who looks at the dog when a lady has an unexpected moment of flatulence. It isn’t much of a consolation, but at one time that’s what it was, a consolation. At the end of the day, though, everyone around them respects that hypocritical convention, which doesn’t protect her from anything and condemns her to awkward silence. Nobody draws a direct connection between her and Flora Ugalde, though they may suspect one, and so she can’t clarify which bits of the character really are hers, which bits are a caricature, and which pure invention (to continue the comparison, she can’t allege in her defense that it really is the dog that’s flatulent). Sometimes, when someone says they’ve read something by Martin, she has th
e feeling they’ve been looking at her through a keyhole. Once, one of her coworkers kindly said to her that she identified completely with Flora Ugalde in one episode. It seemed to Julia that she was telling her that the miseries that Martin described were fairly universal, that they affected her, as well, and Julia didn’t mind her words, they made her more relaxed. But that was an exception. Harri, in fact, who was so insistent about distinguishing between the author and the narrator in Montauk, has never said anything about connecting them with Faustino Iturbe and Flora Ugalde. She hasn’t even asked her if she was afraid of her mole getting bigger, and that seemed a bit too respectful. Although it could be because Harri doesn’t want to see the similarities between Flora Ugalde and Julia, because Martin hasn’t used her in the same way, as a “literary subject”.

  Was it Harri who said she was recognizable in Flora Ugalde?

  The American says no, it was Iñaki Abaitua. When she told him where and in what circumstances she lived, he said that he’s read Martin’s work, and as was inevitable, they went to talking about her. He said she seemed like a woman with a strong personality (“in the good sense,” he’d clarified), very smart and beautiful. She makes that typical gesture of hers, frowning and looking straight at her in order to be taken seriously, and Julia feels embarrassed. She’s aware that Iñaki Abaitua knows that Martin suffers no lack of sources for inspiration when it comes to sordid details. Julia used to be his patient—she doesn’t like that word, but she likes the one the young American normally uses, “client,” even less—quite some time ago. She could say that she had no choice but to stop going to him because of some exclusivity clause when he closed his private practice, but it wouldn’t be true. It is true that Abaitua shut down his private practice, but for a while, she and a few others went on seeing him almost free of charge, and that made her feel like part of a special club. She doesn’t know why, but she tells her about the time she asked for an appointment because she was experiencing clear symptoms of a vaginal infection. Laboratory tests were ordered, and as expected, it was an infection. He prescribed a treatment to her and said that Martin, too, whether he had symptoms or not, should take the antibiotics, so that they wouldn’t pass the disease back and forth to each other in some sort of ping-pong contagion effect.