Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  It often happens, especially when it’s obvious that the questions are being asked out of politeness and that the contents of what’s being said are not the most important thing and instead it’s being comprehensible and grammatically correct, like in a conversation class. However, even leaving aside the fact that the American girl gets by pretty well in Spanish, Abaitua would like to express himself with precision.

  People say that Loiola looks exactly like him, a clear case of biological determinism. If the question is whether he likes that, on the other hand, the answer is no. He finds it disappointing to see himself in him, and sometimes, when they quarrel—the boy holding his chin, which is weak like his, looking at him with hatred—he thinks that his son blames him for making him as he is. In short, without even bothering to give a smile to let her know that he’s saying too much, he tells her that because he doesn’t like himself all that much, he isn’t particularly proud of his son, either. And he doesn’t say it as a boutade.

  The girl doesn’t smile, either.

  He thinks the borrowed French “boutade” must be used in English, as well. But he doesn’t ask her. He could specify that what he really dislikes about the two of them being the same and both of them knowing that they are is the fact that they both try to hide what they’re really like. But he thinks it would be difficult to explain and, in fact, out of place. And there are easier questions for him to answer.

  He isn’t a doctor. He studied business, probably because he wanted to do something different. He thinks his grandfather probably conditioned him, as well, asking him if he’d like to be the skillful manager his clinic really needed, but he works at an NGO and spends long periods in Latin America and says that he plans to work there in the future. He probably wants to be loyal to the ideals that he—his father—has betrayed, also differentiating himself in that way. His son is at the radical age, whereas he, the old doctor, is at the age of frustration. Although on the scarce occasions they do talk about his son’s plans for the future, he tries to hold back his egoism as a father, to emphasize the need to have coherent principles, the importance of being able to choose your way of life freely, and using noble ideas to do so. But his son’s unpleasant attitude, his arrogance—similar, if not identical, to his own arrogance when he used to get up from the table and walk out on his own father in mid-sentence—and his belief that he knows everything drive him up the wall; he’s often come very close to asking him just what he thinks he’s doing in Latin America, to shouting that he’s a paternalist, a missionary, and that the only thing he does there is gobble up in a day as much as a whole indigenous family does in a week, and he’s wasting his time in the name of fucking principles and he’ll never make the world change. For some reason, he’s never said all that. But it’s as if he had.

  So it’s not an easy question to answer.

  The night before, in fact, when reading the novel that the American girl left in his office, he thought about how different the main character’s approach to fatherhood was from his own. Because of what he says about a conversation he had with his daughter. A daughter the same age as the girl he’s spending the weekend on Long Island with and who, as a child, he abandoned when he split up with her mother. The daughter sends him a postcard from Scotland to tell him that she’s going to marry a German man she’s met, and when he visits them, he’s already a grandfather. The writer says it was about time he visited them, because his grandson had already started talking, and he said the visit was “neither easy nor difficult.” Abaitua is sincere when he says he envies relationships like that. He thinks it’s good for the children, above all because it helps them to be freer. In our culture, on the other hand, dependence is encouraged—parents make sacrifices for their children but then pass them the check later on. An unfair check, what’s more, because the costs are exaggerated. Some parents—though more in the past than now, that’s true—torture their successors, reproaching them for how much they had to give up for their sake, perhaps wanting to reinforce their awareness of their obligations for the future.

  The pelican strategy. Apparently that’s the name for the behavior that Iñaki Abaitua has intuitively described. The young sociologist explains that the name comes from the myth that pelicans feed their chicks with their own flesh. The basis for the myth is that the chicks peck at food that’s kept in a special pouch in the mother’s bill, food that’s often splashed with blood, and because of that, it was believed to be the parents’ flesh. She explains it in a simple but serious way, in the way she normally explains things, without showing off or talking down, making it clear, once more, that she knows all about the type of things that the old doctor might tell her about. Everything’s already been said, he remarks, amused. Everything that we think, all our clumsy reflections, have already been precisely and properly explained, usually by some short phrase in Latin.

  He’d say that he’s never used that strategy, the pelican strategy, no way, at least not consciously, even though his son is still feeding off his parents’ flesh.

  The young girl says it’s clear he loves his son a lot.

  Something difficult to deny, even though he doesn’t see many things with such clarity, but which he does know without any doubt, is that if either of the two of them were to be the target of a hit, he would prefer to be the one to get hurt. No doubt about it. He’s thought about it every time he’s been frightened by the thought of a terrorist attack. An altruistic feeling, preferring one’s own death to that of another, something hard to feel without being a parent. But it isn’t something that he thinks of as being noble, or that makes him feel he’s a better person. It’s a primitive instinct, derived from some gene for the best interests of the tribe, and like most primitive, instinctive things, he doesn’t like it. He’s sure that if he told her about it, the young American sociologist would give it a technical name. But he thinks he’s spoken enough or too much about himself already. What’s more, he doesn’t think it’s right to mention his fear of becoming the object of a terrorist attack, and by not mentioning it, what’s already a hypothetical matter can become even more theoretical.

  There’s a train going by.

  The young woman is half facing the door and puts her left hand on the handle, as if she were just about to open it. He would like her to, because the situation is becoming uncomfortable, but he’s also afraid of her doing so. As afraid as he is of her inviting him to come in for a drink, which isn’t probable but can’t be entirely ruled out. He puts his foot on the clutch and reaches for the parking brake. He even puts it into first gear, ready to drive off.

  He doesn’t notice the giant excavator until its driver starts knocking on the car window. “Tocándose los cojones,” he hears the man say, grumbling about him sitting there scratching his balls. So it’s obvious he’s complaining about having to do his work with the machine while a couple of bourgeois parasites lounge around laughing in their large car. He’s angry, and he’d gladly get out and tell him he’s just spent ten hours standing up in the operating theater, but he contains his rage, not so much because he doesn’t want to put on a show in front of the young girl—he’d actually quite like to put the guy in his place—but because he somehow feels he’s been caught in an embarrassing situation: an old man with a young girl, putting off the moment of saying goodbye like some adolescent kid. He moves the car further back toward the house’s iron gate and waits there with both hands on the steering wheel and the engine on, like before. The young girl still has her hand on the door handle but still doesn’t open it. He wonders if the girl would misinterpret it if he invited her to lunch. The Barkaiztegi grill and cider house is just a few steps away, and it’s a place entirely above suspicion—he would never take a lover to a cider house. He could say that it’s too late now to go have lunch at home. But he knows he won’t. And even so, he suddenly regrets the fact that she’s going, inevitably, to open the door and say “see you.”

  One English expression he
likes is I miss you.

  Will she realize the ridiculous old man is nervous?

  The young woman leans over the dash to get a view of the house and, turning back to him, says it really does look like a witch’s house. He also leans over to see it, even though he knows it perfectly well. They’ve never been so close. He smells her perfume once more, it seems quite acidic to him, very different from the one Pilar uses. He sees the hairs on her neck that are too short to be tied up—they’re curly, as shiny as copper. He agrees it looks like a witch’s house, with its slate roof and conical tower. The girl’s happy that she’s found a really cheap apartment, a bargain, un chollo in Spanish, and he finds it strange to hear that word, which is difficult for her to pronounce, on her lips. He doesn’t know much about rental prices, but the figure she tells him does sound cheap. She’s been lucky. Very lucky. That quick smile of hers, just enough to stretch her lips. “Well,” she says, now putting her right hand on the door handle, and although she makes no further gesture to suggest that she’s going to open the door, the man knows that the time to actually say goodbye has at last arrived. He decides to keep quiet, with his left hand on the steering wheel, his right on the parking brake, waiting for her to open the door. She doesn’t do it immediately. First she looks out the windshield for a moment, she’s quiet, too, and after opening the door, she waits a moment longer, as if unable to find the right way to say goodbye. Finally she turns toward him, and lifting up her index finger, like a schoolmistress to a naughty child, she reminds him that he has two promises to keep. When the man says he isn’t aware of having promised to do anything, she says that he has, and not just one thing—two things. The man remembers them only too well. He remembers that joke he’s supposed to tell her, the one about the woman whose vagina gives off a terrible smell and who puts an ad in the paper seeking a man with anosmia for oral sex. The other promise is to do her portrait. It was meant as a joke when he told her, a little earlier, about his drawing hobby. He accepts that commitment, but not the commitment to tell the joke. He can’t tell jokes, he says in his defense. Even if he finds them funny when he hears them, he forgets them immediately, but she won’t let it go: “A joke about discharges,” she says in a natural way, as if trying to help him. “Remember?” He can’t keep saying no, but the mere thought of having to tell such a vulgar thing—and such an unamusing thing, at that—makes him feel nervous. He moves his foot onto the accelerator once more. He steps on it, the engine’s two hundred horses whinny to express their strength, and the young woman puts one of her feet on the ground, almost certainly taking it as a sign that he wants to go. She threatens to remind him once more the next time they meet. There is no sign of anger on her face or distrust in her voice. “It was a pleasure,” she says, sticking her head into the car once more. “See you,” says the man. And the girl, “I hope so.” And then she closes the door.

  Pilar is sitting reading the newspaper, which is spread out on the coffee table, with her breasts almost resting on her thighs, as usual. She sits up when she realizes Abaitua’s there. He thinks she must be wondering where he’s come from so late, but she doesn’t say anything. There’s turbot in tomato sauce for lunch. It’s an unusual way to cook the fish, but a good method, according to one fisherman’s wife, and ever since first hearing that, they often prepare it that way. Pilar knows he likes it a lot and has been waiting for him to begin lunch. She hasn’t laid the table, the kitchen is tidied, and the turbot’s still in its pot, untouched. But she says she isn’t hungry. Normally she doesn’t have a proper lunch when she’s alone, not wanting to heat things up just for herself. A piece of toast, a simple omelet. He prefers to say that he, too, has already had a sandwich and isn’t hungry. He couldn’t stand her sitting there watching him eat. He goes back to the living room. The prospect of not having lunch doesn’t make him feel any better. On the television, which has the sound turned down, a woman of around fifty is talking with tears in her eyes. What’s wrong with her? Pilar turns it off with the remote control, stretching out her arm unnecessarily to do so. He thinks she looks gloomier than usual and weighs up asking her if there’s some problem. He doesn’t need to ask. Without looking up from the newspaper, she says her father’s dying. Her voice sounds more angry than sad. Why does she say that? Because she’s sure, she answers. But she doesn’t have any objective facts to back her up. It’s just what her mother says—he isn’t eating properly, and he looks tired to her. It could be any little thing, he says to cheer her up. She shakes her head. She’s convinced he has esophageal cancer. She wants him to have it looked at, but he won’t let anyone come near him. Abaitua doesn’t know what to say and so he says, once more, that a lack of appetite can be caused by many different things. Pilar answers that she has a better clinical eye than he thinks.

  On top of the bureau, there’s a framed full-length photograph of Pilar and her father standing in front of the big palm tree at the clinic. They’re both flashing their excellent teeth as they smile. The old man’s wearing a blue beret and still has his thin white moustache, which Pilar had always said he should shave off, because it made him look too right-wing, and then finally, some years ago, he did shave it off. It’s from less than ten years ago—Pilar is wearing her red jacket. The one she was wearing that time when she came home in the early hours and sat on the side of the bed in silence.

  The window is open, and the sound of the waves is very clear. It’s more than a vague sound. Two white lines are continually advancing toward the beach. When the first wave peters out on the sand, the second wave starts coming in behind it. When it fizzles out, the next one starts, and so on. He would miss the sea if he ever had to live in a house you couldn’t see it from. That’s why he bought this house. Sometimes Pilar insinuates that he accepted an “incentive” from her father—in other words, money from his business of “trafficking in pain”—to be able to buy the house, which is far beyond the reach of a doctor employed in the public health system, a house close enough to the beach to see the waves breaking on the shore.

  She says that Loiola called to ask if he could keep the car for a few more days and that she said yes. Nothing more than that. Not even a word to suggest she might be nervous about the approaching trial date for those boys. She turns the television on once more and seems to go back to her Sudoku. He says he has to read a bunch of articles.

  The photocopies of Montauk are on his desk. He begins reading randomly. “1972, I’ve never met a Lynn before.”

  Suddenly, he has the impression once more that he’s bored the young sociologist. Like one of those people who tell you all about themselves when you’ve only asked them out of politeness how they are.

  He can’t get to sleep. He realizes that when he gave the girl her file folder back, he said, “Here’s your carpet.” A “carpet,” he’d said, carpeta being the Spanish word for “folder.” A real Turkish carpet. He’s so embarrassed he feels queasy.

  7

  It’s nine o’clock. A van parked in front of the iron fence is honking its horn nonstop. Julia is putting on a sweater to go out and open the gate when she sees the writer coming down the spiral staircase. He’s elegantly dressed, all in white. A white polo shirt, white linen pants, a white sweater knotted around his shoulder—he looks like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Orratzetik hara; de punta en blanco; se mettre sur son trente et un; dressed up to the nines. He says that he’ll open the gate and hurries into the yard.

  It’s a cardboard box the size of a closet, and he tells the delivery guys to take it into the library. Even though she doesn’t ask him anything about it, he tells Julia that it’s a surprise, and also asks her to help him move a revolving bookcase and a table covered in books and to take a couch out of the room. It’s clear that he needs some space for whatever it is he’s had delivered. But it’s a surprise, he says once more, and he asks her to go back into the living room. He’ll tell her when he takes it out of the box.

  She rules out the possibility of it bei
ng a piece of furniture, because they already have a lot of furniture: the new modern light-colored and functional furniture Martin had brought in, and the original house furniture—heavy, dark, and clumsy—that they can’t completely get rid of. But Julia can’t think what else it could be. It springs to mind that they might end up acting out one of Ionesco’s plays, the one called “The New Tenant”—the main and almost sole character is trapped in his chair, surrounded by furniture the stage crew keeps bringing onto the stage throughout the play.

  It turns out it’s a Ping-Pong table.

  When he suggests they give it a whirl, she blurts out that he’ll be able to use it with the penthouse girl. So she can’t hide her indignation. She’s promised herself a thousand times that she’ll let him do whatever he wants to, that she won’t judge him, won’t interfere in his life, but she can’t avoid her pain. It’s obvious he’s bought the Ping-Pong table to be able to play with his tenant, because in Montauk, the writer called Max also enjoys playing Ping-Pong with the young woman called Lynn. But what annoys Julia isn’t that he wants to play Ping-Pong. Rather it’s that being as he is, with his hesitation when it comes to making even the smallest of decisions, being incapable of even buying a pair of socks, he’s mustered up the energy and the decisiveness not only to go and buy that great big thing and have it delivered but also to defy his mother’s wishes by setting it up in the formal library. She hasn’t forgotten how hard he found it to take her crocheted covers off the armchairs, even, and he’s never brought himself to give her a birthday present—pretty or ugly, expensive or cheap—that he thought of himself, having noticed some whim or need of hers; often, although he hasn’t ever gone so far as asking his sister to go and purchase something in his name, she herself has had to help him come up with ideas and even go with him to pick something out.