Hearing those words by the Basque poet Xabier Lizardi in a Spanish policeman’s house. Women standing up, holding hands, and asking why it happened, beating their chests with their fists, embracing each other without doing anything to hide their distorted faces, demonstrating what real crying is; men who stare at them, unable to do anything faced with that measureless expression of grief, smoking in silence, leaning against the wall, some of them in uniform, one of them sitting down and staring at the floor as he moves his cap from hand to hand, another unaffectedly holding his pistol in place as he gets up. Most of the men are dark, they speak in low voices, and in thick southern-Spanish accents, from Andalusia and Extremadura, and they stand aside respectfully so that the teacher—who is ashamed or afraid to say that he’s a Basque teacher—can walk through, the daughter of the murdered policeman leading him to her room by the hand, probably because she’s aware that the atmosphere must be very foreign to him. The teacher compares her room with that of one of his nieces of the same age. It’s smaller and more childish. A lot of stuffed toys. A lot of pastel colors, and her mother’s extreme tidiness and cleanliness in full force, so that the room might be shown to visitors. There are books, a shared space for literature and the books recommended to her by the teacher, some of which he himself gave her. On a small folding table, there’s a copy of Lizardi’s Biotz-begietan, whose title translates to “in the eyes of the heart.” The teacher picks it up and glances through it to cover up how uncomfortable he feels. He doesn’t know what to say, and the girl whispers, “I have pain in my heart, desperate pain.” A parasitical thought: Could poor old Lizardi ever have imagined that around seventy years after his death, the daughter of a Spanish policeman who’s just been killed in the name of the Basque Country would pick up a book titled In The Eyes Of The Heart and express her unbearable pain with a verse of his?
The girl takes some papers off the only chair in the room, so that the teacher can sit down on it, and asks him to excuse the untidiness. She says it’s a mess, even though everything’s very tidy, maybe even too tidy. She feels guilty, because she had to return to the apartment for her essay and that’s why they didn’t look beneath the car in the way they always did every other day—she feels guilty because she’s still alive. The teacher tries to comfort her. It was his idea to replace the language exam with an at-home essay on Lizardi and his context—should he, too, feel guilty? He tries to convince her that the terrorists are the only ones to blame. Blame is the key word in the narrative.
Later, when the teacher says that he has to go, the girl puts the pieces of paper she’d picked up from the chair into a plastic folder and gives the whole thing to him. It’s the paper she was supposed to hand in to him. “Xabier Lizardi and His Context.” She tells him that she cried the night before while reading “Xabiertxoren eriotza,” but that her crying for “little Xabier’s death” in the poem was nothing like the tears of anger that she’s shedding now. Last night they were liberating tears, almost happy tears, because of the poet’s nobility and goodness, the subject of the poem being respect for the happiness of the boys and girls going from door to door because it’s Christmas Eve, letting one of the groups in to sing even though little newborn Xabier is lying dead in his crib in the next room.
So Julia has to tell the young American something about what happens in “Xabiertxoren eriotza,” in the same way that she’s going to have to put in a few words—as few as possible—in the footnote to her translation so that Spanish readers know that Lizardi gets his wife, who doesn’t want to hear the songs, to open the door so that the boys and girls can sing around the crib, telling them that they don’t have to worry about the child, that he won’t wake up, because he’s in a deep sleep, and the American girl, with tears in her eyes, says, “It’s so moving.” Julia now thinks it’s what the girl’s found most interesting of everything she’s told her. She finds it moving and asks for details about the poem and about the writer. When did he live? Is it still a custom to go from house to house on Christmas Eve and sing? How long had the dead child lived? Her answer to that last question is “around a month and a half,” although she’s not sure. She’s amazed by her own ignorance. She doesn’t know how old Lizardi was when he wrote the poem, either, but he must have been young, because he died before he was forty. She says he was thirty-three, because that’s the age Jesus Christ was when he died.
The young American is Jesus Christ’s age, as well.
She has to use the piano to give her voice some support in order to recite Lizardi’s “Bihotzean min dut, min etsia.” She’s asked Julia to recite it, “Just to know what it sounds like.” It must have been years since she last recited a poem, since the days when she used to recite them for her father. They were often Lizardi’s verses. He made her read them to people who came to visit, and when they were alone in the kitchen, as well, and apparently she didn’t get as embarrassed about it back then as she does now. Her sister is constantly reminding her of it, resentful that she was their father’s favorite.
Her fingers play that lively phrase that answers the orchestra’s dark question in Ravel’s Concerto For The Left Hand. Perhaps because it’s the most difficult thing she knows and she wants to impress and move the girl, who’s now sitting next to her and looking serious, following the movements of her fingers with great attention. She asks her if she knows the piece, wanting to lessen the concert’s excessive solemnity, and the girl shakes her head. But she has heard about concerts written for one-armed pianists. What she doesn’t know is that the pianist was Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the good-looking philosopher, and that the most famous concert written for the left hand, more so even than those written by Prokofiev and Richard Strauss, is Ravel’s. “Ravel, the one who wrote Boléro?” Julia’s amused by her surprise, and also by the way she pronounces it “boh-LAIR-oh.” But she must have just replied a little vindictively when she told her that she likes Ravel a lot and that he’s one of her favorite composers, because the girl rushes to admit she’s completely ignorant when it comes to music.
The part she plays best is when the thumb comes in.
And suddenly she realizes why she chose that particular part of the Concerto For The Left Hand. A little earlier, when they were talking about Montauk, they mentioned the natural way in which Max accepted the superiority of his friend W.—the tall, well-educated, rich man who passed his fine English wool jackets on to him—and how, to an extent, they’d stopped seeing each other because of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The writer tells us that he had been going out with a woman—there was no doubt she was the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann—who studied philosophy and had written something about the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a fact his friend W. didn’t know; when he introduced them, W. found it unbearable that such an interesting girl, who knew so much about philosophy, was sharing her life with someone as pathetic as Max.
And a little later, when she was telling the young American about the misfortunes of the Basque teacher in the Bihotzean min dut story, she was reminded of Wittgenstein once more. Because a few days earlier, when she first realized what she’s just told her—that there was something in the story that she wasn’t comfortable with—and she worked up the courage to tell Martin that she thought it would be a good idea to write an introduction to guide the reader (now she doesn’t know how she managed to be so daring) and shared an idea she’d had for it and asked him what he thought of it, he said, “Don’t touch my dream with your dirty hands.” Or something like that, a brusque reply. He said, in fact, that her job was to translate, no more than that. And as if that weren’t enough, he compared her “shameless” behavior with that of the pianist Wittgenstein, “to put it in musical terms,” because the one-armed pianist had wanted to adapt the concert Ravel gave him, and the composer, of course, wouldn’t let him do that at all.
“Your hands are beautiful.” Julia thinks that the young American has been listening to her out of more than just respect, but at the sam
e time, she has the feeling that she’s been talking too much. To bring things to a close, she says it’s late and shuts the piano lid, without remembering to put the protective strip of felt in its place. The girl smiles. Without looking at her watch, without moving. She says that it crossed her mind the day she met her that she might be a piano player, because of her hands. “Very beautiful hands.” As she says this, she takes Julia’s right hand, which was resting on the stool. She likes hearing that, or at least she isn’t ashamed to hear it, because she is indeed proud of her hands.
Ecce homo. Martin appears in the hallway once more, this time he’s on the phone. Julia knows, from the way he strokes his hair back whenever he’s nervous, that either his mother or his sister is talking to him about something to do with the care his father is being given. He’ll listen to them without saying a word for a long while as he walks up and down the hallway like a wild beast in a cage. They love tiring him out with their moaning, and he gives way to all their wishes and commands, although they always allow him, in the end, to assert his masculine privilege to shout whatever comes to mind and reproach them for not respecting his work. They’re always interrupting his work, day and night. That’s what he’s saying right now to whoever he’s talking with. He’s not shouting—the American girl being there prevents him from doing that—but not speaking too softly, either, standing in front of the large 1:50,000 scale map of Sicily, which is stuck on the wall with pushpins and measures at least six by four feet, and he’s thinking of Syracuse, she imagines. At least in that respect he has clearer ideas than his beloved Flaubert, who, while resolved to pack up and leave if and when his mother finally died, couldn’t decide whether to go to Rome, Syracuse, or Naples: “Si ma mère meurt, mon plan est fait: je vends tout et je vais vivre à Rome, à Syracuse, à Naples.” He’s made a more precise decision than the genius from Normandy: when he’s finally free, he’s going to Syracuse.
The first reason he’s angry is that his sister in Paris is demanding that he book a suite at the María Cristina Hotel “at all costs,” even though it’s absolutely full up right now with film festival crowds, for some Catalan friends she owes a big favor to. The second reason is that when he complained, and he thinks rightly, about how the caretakers they hired for their father are not very professional—treating him like a child, speaking to him with too much familiarity, and often holding their own conversations as if he weren’t there—his other sister, the one living there at the family house, got upset and told him that one of them had actually just announced that she was going to quit working at the end of the month and that he, Martin, would have to take charge of finding, hiring, and paying her replacement, because she’s sick of constantly hearing that she does everything wrong, and then she started sobbing as she always does, and that drove him up the wall.
He asks what the two of them have been talking about. It seems he hasn’t realized until just now that the two women are sitting next to each other on the piano bench, and he looks at them with curiosity, as if suspicious of them. Julia is about to say that they’ve been talking about “women’s things,” but Lynn gets there first and says, in a completely natural way, that they’ve been talking about him and, more precisely, his literature. She repeats more or less what she said when the two of them were alone. Intelligence, precision, irony, acuteness, face-to-face interaction. Descriptive tools of an almost scientific nature to describe people in public places. “A dramaturgical approach to human interaction.” Goffman is one of the authors she mentions to explain what she’s talking about. Goffman with two fs. Martin hasn’t heard of him but seems to be glad to hear that his story is connected in some way to what is apparently called the sociology of interaction.
When Harri arrives, she finds them talking about Bihotzean min dut, about the impossibility of translating the ways in which languages interplay. At one time, Martin had been thinking about writing a bilingual novel, and Bihotzean was a sort of rehearsal for that. His intention was to address the linguistic reality in which the two languages coexist in greater depth. Julia thinks that part of that idea was driven by his wish to demonstrate that as far as he was concerned, there were no ideological obstacles, or obstacles of any other type, to his writing in Spanish. A pretty dumb aim when it came down to it, because only Basque speakers could read a bilingual Basque and Spanish text. So the question would be why doesn’t he just write in Spanish—it’s the more widely spoken of the two languages, and “everyone” understands it. The question is taboo, but Julia’s very interested in it. Some angles are very clear. For instance, the idea that abandoning Basque would be betraying the Basque linguistic community, and the consequences of that—although she doesn’t know what exactly those would be—would have to be faced. Martin certainly doesn’t have any objections to the idea and admits that he finds it easier to write in Spanish than in Basque. Young writers, on the other hand, usually say that for them, choosing Basque is something quite natural, among other things because it was the language they used at school, and at university, as well. Julia doesn’t know whether to believe them. One of the real masters of the Basque language, Anjel Lertxundi, says, “I’d happily change Basque sentence structure if the strength of the language could be preserved, and then I’d be able to write with the security that writers in hegemonic languages have, rather than having doubts all the time.” But apparently, ease is not the only factor, not even the main factor, when it comes to choosing to use a particular language for literature. And Basque, too, offers certain advantages, features of its own that are more functional than the equivalent resources in Romance languages for those who know their secrets, and in particular for poets, offering them “a path less traveled.” Among other things, virgin words—words that have not been worn down and disfigured by centuries of misuse.
Naïve logic. So, if he finds it easier to write in Spanish, why does he write in Basque? It’s easier to believe the question’s being asked in good faith when it comes from a foreigner. There are clearly social, cultural, political, and economic factors involved. Recently, in order to sidestep the question, Martin has taken to saying that writers don’t choose the language, it’s the other way around, and usually the person he’s talking with doesn’t dare to ask how exactly that happens. “I see,” says Lynn, thoughtfully, not understanding him, or so it seems to Julia. But Martin has other joke answers to the question, as well, some of them perhaps not without a firm basis. One thing he mentions is that Beckett chose to write in French because his writing ability being more limited in that language, he was freed from the need to pay attention to his style. Another thing he brings up is how the sculptor Eduardo Chillida spent a period using only his left hand to draw, finding it too easy to use his right hand, because he went too fast with it. The third thing is Conrad’s choice of language, which he explains by saying that although the author had a perfect mastery of the French language from childhood, “he would have been terrified to have to make the effort to express himself in such a perfectly crystallized language.” Of course, Basque has additional difficulties (some of which are intrinsic and stem from it being an agglutinative language, and then there are the many consequences of its never having been the language of power and authority, of its having become linked to culture at a comparatively late date, of its lacking a strong written tradition, and of its having limited rhetorical resources, mostly catch-all terms and fillers, which both Spanish and French, the languages that Basque has had to survive between, have in abundance, being as they are among the most rhetorical languages in the world), although the bulk of the tests to which Basque is put in terms of its usefulness and precision involve being in the difficult situation of having to use it to explain what politicians and civil servants have said in Spanish, and not the other way around. It is true, in any case, that Martin expresses himself with greater ease in Spanish, letting himself be carried away by his sentences, even falling into the trap that many Basques who write in Spanish do by using too many of the rhetori
cal resources that Spanish offers and that aren’t available to them in Basque. Julia thinks that only a few Basques actually prefer to use Baroja’s short, direct style. But she also thinks he writes better in Basque.
Political correctness. The Basque grammar system’s lack of gender signifiers, which the young American sociologist thinks may be very helpful when it comes to political correctness, is what gives him the most difficulties, Martin says. He says it makes it hard for him to refer to his characters with any apparent sense of objectivity or distance, to be able to describe them in the French narrative style of his youth—which he is still so attached to—by making use of pronouns. Il parle, tandis qu’elle écoute. Elle et lui. Lui e lei. She and him.
They talk, above all, about Basque being judged by people who are more used to Spanish. A Basque speaker, however, would also find it difficult to understand why a question such as “How many sons/daughters do you have?”—which seems perfectly natural to their ears—should sound so strange to someone accustomed to Spanish.
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