Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  And so, fear of failure making him reach for the reins and slow things down, he never goes along at full gallop, and if after reading something he’s written it happens that he likes it, which isn’t very usual, his productivity will suffer. For one thing, because he wants to prolong his enjoyment, and for another, and to the same degree, his fear of not being able to work stops him from working. He can spend days playing around with a paragraph, trying to make it perfect, like a cat playing with a dead mouse, adding a comma, changing a name, removing an adjective. Unable to move forward because of the fear of making a mistake, or of not achieving the same standard, and above all wanting to prolong the pleasure of being a writer with a good piece of work in progress. That’s happiness for him. Julia doesn’t need to look on his computer to see which days they are, they’re the ones when he’s talkative and full of joy, happy and amenable, quite pleased with himself, in fact, with that look of believing himself to be “nel mio mestiere dunque sono re”—the king of his craft. Until, of course, he finally becomes anxious that he hasn’t written a single line for too long. Julia doesn’t know how she’s aware of all this, but she is.

  Tempus fugit. And that’s how he spends his life, seeing the time he doesn’t spend in front of the computer as time wasted, complaining about how great his sacrifice is, moaning, just like his beloved Flaubert, about how tiring it is to write, comparing—again just like him—his enormous ambition with his lack of respect for anything other than writing, lost in a sad existence that means nothing without literature. In fact, the piccolo scrittore is seeming more and more like Flaubert—although they are completely different, she sees the Normandy writer reflected in Martin’s watery blue eyes and in the bags that are beginning to form under his eyelids—and she wonders to what extent that image is influencing her, because sometimes she thinks that she herself is starting to look a bit like Colette. The Colette who complains that Gustav is avoiding his friends because he’s always immersed in his work, because he thinks loving or being loved is a waste of time, and Colette feeling hurt because he forgets to give her the money that she so desperately needs, tired of his endless monologues about his art, bored of the one night every six weeks that they spend together at a hotel if his book’s going well. That woman on all fours, picking up the scraps of warmth that fall from that obsessive, unpleasant man’s table, jealous that he’s taken a young woman into his house but ready to accept her if the arrangement helps to improve his mood and entertain him during his breaks.

  She should cut back on that tendency of hers to make cruel caricatures of herself. She thinks it’s self-destructive. What’s more, it isn’t true that Martin has her dominated. If she does give way to him, it’s because she wants to convince herself that in some near, visible future—after the final family problem is solved, or when he finishes the story he’s working on—the source of her bitterness will be cured. But this putting off of things is endless, a new problem always crops up, another story he can’t finish, and her hope inevitably runs out. But sometimes, when she sees a little affection left in his eyes, when he laughs all of a sudden, she’s taken over by the irritating belief that she could be quite happy, and she decides that whatever’s keeping her from that happiness is of no real consequence, nothing compared to what draws her to be with that ironic, sarcastic man who can be tender and move her when he wants to but is ruled by stubborn energy. Vulnerable—as she is, as well—discerning, funny at times. “Intellectually acute, a keen wit, perceptive.” Those are the adjectives that the young American uses to describe Faustino Iturbe. She says she’s really enjoying Ez du sekula atertuko, a story of his whose title means “it will never clear up.” They both laugh as they recall the start of the book. Faustino Iturbe is walking under a series of balconies on a rainy day, trying to keep as dry as possible, keeping all the way over to the right, just next to the buildings’ façades. He’s ready to move over to the middle of the sidewalk to let others pass, providing the person coming the other way is old, or even if it’s a young woman who’s just come from the hair salon or is wearing light clothes or high-heeled shoes that make her particularly vulnerable, but he is determined to protect his right to walk on the right-hand side from those going the other way who are also sticking close to the façades, but on his left. There are people who move aside out of politeness, people who respect his rights. There are inconsiderate people who walk on until they run straight into him, and others, too, who despite having umbrellas want to walk with their left shoulders brushing along the façades and do so, until, one step away from him, they realize that he’s decided to keep on straight ahead and then they move aside with a look of contempt on their faces, many even challenging him by standing their ground, thinking it’s he who should step out and get wet and not them. Faustino Iturbe hates those people. He thinks that the seed that makes the world vile is sown in their hearts. What wouldn’t they do for their own well-being over that of their neighbors’ in protected, intimate circumstances if they dare to behave that way in public? As Voltaire described them, they’re people who wouldn’t hesitate to set their neighbors’ houses on fire in order to keep their own children warm. If they had to flee a public building that had caught fire, they’d be the first ones out, killing more people by trampling over them than the fire itself. It’s also funny to read the precise, exact descriptions he gives of the methods people use for line-cutting, from absent-mindedness to that obvious, unashamed trick—“I just want to ask a question.” Which is a way of saying that they have no consideration whatsoever for other people’s time. These things drive the character wild, because he thinks that society is too tolerant, that being shameless is thought of as a rather charming quirk, and as if that weren’t enough, protesting victims are thought of as intolerant, but he thinks it’s something that shows a completely selfish nature and is, at the very least, a symptom of being anti-social.

  God made Martin just the way he is.

  And that’s how Martin is. Intolerant, overly sensitive when it comes to what other people do, attentive to how people greet him, or fail to greet him, how they look at him, the tone they speak to him in. When he comes back into the house after running an errand, it’s like the return of Ulysses. When he writes, it’s a caricature of himself, but he’s very much like the caricature. He complains about everything that people do—they speak too loudly, they honk their horns, they litter, they don’t give way when they should, they push, they don’t apologize when they bump into someone. The American girl says that those precise descriptions of the way people behave, for example when they’re in a line to buy bread, are good examples of behavioral sociology, like those given by certain authors that she mentions but Julia hasn’t heard of.

  Julia’s glad to hear that she likes Martin’s book.

  The young American just read that one passage this morning where Faustino Iturbe’s in a city he’s not familiar with, walking along an empty street, and it’s pouring down rain. He has a date and is nervous, afraid that he’ll be late. He wants to find someone to tell him the way, but the street is deserted. He’s soaking wet from head to toe and is getting more and more worried as time goes by. Eventually he sees a girl at a railroad crossing and goes after her to ask her how to get to where he has his date, but the girl, noticing that he’s walking behind her, walks faster, and so he does, too, in order to catch up with her, but when he’s just a few yards away from her, she starts running fast. He thinks it’s because the rain has started to fall even faster, and he starts running, as well; they both run fast along the lonely street, and when they finally reach a doorway, the girl presses all the buzzer buttons with the flat palms of her hands, wanting to raise a general alarm. She turns toward him with her eyes wide open in fear, panting like a wounded deer, and he’s frightened by the fear that he himself has caused, incapable of saying a single word, and finally, when the door opens and the girl disappears inside, he doesn’t get the chance to explain to her that he only wanted to ask her for help fi
nding a street because he had a date at a bar there with a beautiful woman who, by that time, might have gotten fed up with waiting for him; he stands there in the downpour, upset, deeply unsettled, unable to catch his breath from running so much, and panting, to his shame, like some lustful animal.

  Perhaps the description of Faustino Iturbe as a compassionate, remorseful writer affected by his abhorrence of violence against women is comic, in that young women end up running away from him down empty streets—he, noble and sensitive, who only deserves to be smiled at—because the media reports daily on the rape and murder of women. Everything that can possibly happen happens to him. In any case, the most important thing for him is how monstrous things that can happen to anyone affect him. The caricature he gives of the egocentric character may be merciless, but that peculiar exercise of confession, in which neither regret nor any intention of self-improvement are mentioned, no longer redeems him in Julia’s eyes. And in fact, she no longer finds it so amusing, probably because something in her sense of humor—in both their senses of humor, most likely, in his as well as hers—has changed; in the end, she begins to doubt whether the caricature is a real caricature, and her having doubts about that, about whether or not she is interpreting the text in the proper tone when she reads it, is one of the biggest problems she has when it comes to translating his work. It’s part of the trouble she’s having with Bihotzean min dut.

  She has other sources of trouble, as well, starting with the title. She thinks the literal translation in Spanish—Me duele el corazón, meaning “my heart hurts”—would sound too much like heart disease. Someone translated it once as Duéleme el corazón—my heart pains me—apparently trying to give it a literary feel. She’s left it provisionally at Me duele el alma—my soul hurts. My heart is broken? It hurts my soul? It’s Martin’s best-known story, or novella, for those who prefer the term. The story starts with the murder of a Spanish policeman, his car is blown up with him inside it just as his daughter walks out the doorway of their apartment complex. The events he writes about actually happened, and Martin himself lived through them; at that time, he was a Basque teacher—his only real work experience, and short-lived, at that—and the policeman’s daughter was a student at the private school he taught at. The policeman used to drop his daughter off at school every morning on his way to work; she was a smart, responsible student, and it was she who used to remind him to look under the car every morning just in case there was a bomb there. But that day he didn’t, because they were late. She’d been running behind that morning, finishing off a piece of work she was supposed to hand in that day, and her father got angry with her. And then, to add misfortune to misfortune, she realized, as she was finally coming down the stairs, that she’d left her essay in the kitchen, so she had to go back up again for it. She grabbed it, ran down the stairs, and when she reached the doorway, she heard a loud explosion. Then she saw her father’s body on fire; the entire chassis of the car had been blown up into the air.

  Martin really liked the girl—she was respectful, sensitive, and loved literature. He was amazed that when she wrote about literature, she often picked up on ideas and details that he’d missed, and he often talked to Julia about her. The student must have really liked her unconventional and interesting Basque teacher, as well. Nobody apart from Martin knew that her father was a policeman; she let him know in one of her papers. She told him that her father had a false identity as a commercial rep for reasons of security, and also to make her life easier. However, even taking into account her father’s need for security, it was starting to be difficult for her to live such a lie. To an extent, it didn’t seem right to her, it meant denying her father, but above all, it was because she had the feeling that covering it up meant betraying her friends, especially when someone opened themselves up to her and told her intimate or secret things.

  She lived with the fear of being rejected because of her father’s job and the discomfort of hiding the truth, the fear of exposing her father to an attack and the discomfort of denying him as a whole. She used to say that she loved the Basque Country, its language and its culture, more than anyone else in the class, because she was a Basque speaker, and also that she understood the mistrust there was toward the Civil Guard and the police and even the deep hatred that still exists toward them today because of the role they played in the past, and because of the atrocious acts that continue to take place from time to time; but she couldn’t help loving her father, because he was a good, loyal man, incapable of doing anyone any harm, and he’d promised her that he would never do anything outside the law. She said that her father, too, loved the Basque Country and tried to fit in there, not letting hate take him over, not letting fear cloud his intelligence. She had to tell someone, and she opened her heart to her teacher, knowing that he would understand her; he’d revealed his sensitivity in their literature classes, he understood people’s feelings, and their failings, as well. It was a moving text, of course, because the girl put her trust in him, and Martin felt proud of that.

  In Martin’s usual style, the narrative is in the first person and the voice is Faustino Iturbe’s. The extreme sensation he feels on hearing about the murder makes him want to throw up; it’s nothing like the more manageable reactions of revulsion and despair he’s experienced up until then on hearing about new attacks. That day, he knows that he will not be able to look away from the corpse, and he feels an absolute need to face up to his student’s pain. He hesitates over whether to cancel the class, as a way of setting an example for his students and his more radical colleagues, but in the end he decides to go ahead with it and use the time to speak about “violence that only causes destruction.” His students are upset by the murder and amazed to find out that the best student in Basque language and literature is a policeman’s daughter. He sees serious, anguished, rigid faces. There are a few arrogant faces in the last row, a few wretches who think that justice has been done by killing a pig, and the teacher, like a good shepherd looking for a lost sheep that’s strayed from the flock, speaks to them, for in the future, if someone doesn’t prevent it from happening, they, too, will become victims of violence, even if they have noble aims, and he wants to convince them that violence achieves nothing. Then, bracing himself, he goes to the student’s home to give his condolences. There’s no doubt that it’s a sincere text condemning ETA’s violence, a text that addressed the suffering of victims at a time when it went largely unseen, but now that Julia’s translating it, she sees in that grieving teacher the same Faustino Iturbe she’s always seen—a man giving a detailed, precise account of his own experiences after the attack, a man who is always seeing himself as the main victim, on this occasion a victim of the terrorist group, because of the thousands of police objectives they could have gone after, they chose the father of one of his students. Julia laughs to make it clear that she’s joking. She doesn’t mean anything by it, she knows she’s tired and that that’s affecting her. It’s a sign that Martin’s suffering moves her less and less. For while it’s true that he suffers because of everything (because of the wars that are destroying the world, the seals and whales that are being killed, the children who are being raised badly and litter the streets as a result, because he has writer’s block . . .), Julia decides that his suffering does not excuse him for the anguish he causes her. Yet even leaving her subjective position to one side, it’s undeniable that the story can no longer be read as it was at the time of its writing, because everything has changed since then. Everything has changed, just as Martin and Julia themselves have. Many, themselves included, used to see the consequences of violence as some sort of fatal, inevitable accident. And the victims, too, have changed. Everything has changed, and in order to protect the story from misinterpretations, Julia thinks it would be good to write an introduction, in order to place the story in its historical context. At the same time, in addition to this subjective problem that conditions her more than she would like, there is another serious problem with the
translation: Basque and Spanish are both used in the original text, depending on the particular situation, and putting everything into a single language leads to the loss of many things. Lost in translation. Having the text in a single language smooths away details, while the decision to write in one or the other in certain moments can be even more meaningful than the words themselves when it comes to creating an atmosphere, and sticking in a footnote to the effect that some word or phrase was “in Spanish in the original” does not solve the problem. When the teacher reaches the house, which is full of people, all the expressions of grief, of anger, of consolation are said in Spanish, which is the language the main character also uses to introduce himself as “el profesor de Ana”—Ana’s teacher. When thinking to himself, he uses Basque to describe the scene and his impressions of it. He has to say that he is “el profesor de Ana” two or three times in Spanish, while speaking inwardly, in Basque, he decides he’ll say that he teaches literature if anyone asks him what his subject is—he won’t say he teaches Basque. The first person who asks him is the one who opens the door to him, and who then knocks on another door and informs Ana in Spanish that her literature teacher is here to see her—“Ana, tu profesor de literatura viene a verte.” He, her Basque teacher, trusts that his student will understand that it’s only a minor deceit—he does teach literature, as well, when it comes down to it. It’s the game they always have to play. His Spanish sounds peculiar to readers when teacher and student hug each other and he says “pobrecita, cuanto lo siento”—poor thing, I’m so sorry—that being the first time they’ve ever spoken to each other in that language; and they find it very moving when the girl, in tears, her voice broken, says to him in Basque “min dut, bihotzean min dut”—I ache, my heart aches.