Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Sweet defeat. The girl says the sculpture transmits the idea of a sweet defeat. It’s very different from monuments to the victors, stuck on top of uncomfortable pinnacles or astride rearing horses with swords at the ready. In comparison, the death of that soldier, held there by such a beautiful angel, is sweet. “Isn’t it?” Abaitua was brought up in the culture of defeat, he was taught that defeat is dignified. Soldiers who were proud of having lost the war, who’d never dirtied their swords killing unarmed enemies, who would rather die than murder, who lost in spite of being brave, who died because some rich, powerful nations got together to attack them from the sky with their fancy planes, when all the soldiers had to defend themselves were stones. They lost, but their dignity was still intact, unblemished. That’s what his parents had passed onto him—defeat, if dignified, is beautiful.

  Cheeeese. Kepa tells them to smile for the photo.

  The endless line of pine trees stands out against the mauve sky, and the low sun sends lively bursts of light through the gaps in the forest. They haven’t spoken for a while. Kepa, sitting next to Abaitua, is breathing slowly, like someone who’s about to fall asleep, and the girl is looking at the Frisch book in the back seat. Abaitua says he can’t read in the car, he gets dizzy. She doesn’t. She thinks she might be able to understand the text in French, she says, sticking her head between the two front seats. Because she knows the book so well.

  “Il est encore surpris de connaître son corps, son corps à elle. Il ne s’y attendait pas. Si Lynn ne lui signifiait pas de temps en temps qu’elle aussi se rappelle cette nuit, les mains de l’homme n’oseraient pas saisir la tête de la femme.”

  Her pronunciation is not perfect, far from it, but it’s intelligible, among other things because he, too, is familiar with what she’s reading. Kepa says he likes her pronunciation—it reminds him of Jean Seberg in Godard’s À bout de soufflé—and why doesn’t she keep reading.

  You’re laughing at me.

  Abaitua cannot remember the girl’s body. He just remembers that her contours seemed fuller to him when she was naked. He also remembers that her white skin was tinted blue by the light coming in through the window. Her laugh. You’re tickling me, she’d said.

  Abaitua thinks she didn’t choose that particular passage—about how he’s still surprised that he knows her body, and he hadn’t expected to, and if Lynn weren’t hinting to him from time to time that she, too, remembered that night, then the man’s hands wouldn’t ever have dared to reach out and touch the woman’s head—by chance. He remembers another bit: “Lynn will not become a name for guilt.”

  Toward the end of the book, the writer drops Lynn off at her house in the early hours after spending their last night together—it hadn’t been a melancholy last night, but the writer says that he hadn’t felt well physically—and as he lies diagonally across his hotel-room bed, that’s the thought that comes to him. Lynn will not become a name for guilt. His plane ticket is sitting under the yellow lamp where the girl had left her lighter the first time they met. Lynn isn’t expecting the writer to change his plans, and he doesn’t expect her to ask him to do so, either.

  Abaitua feels envious of that relationship, which is based on sincerity—they both know there’s no future for them together after their weekend together in Montauk. But while the narrative, which seems sincere, tells the reader that the girl shares the man’s point of view—in other words, she has accepted that the relationship will not last—it does not explain exactly how they came to that agreement, the words they used to make it, or how they said them. It’s true they both agreed not to write letters. Just a postcard every year on the anniversary of day they met—and the date is given—assuming, that is, that neither of them has forgotten about it by then.

  Although Iñaki Abaitua doesn’t remember his son’s birthday, incredible though it may seem, he does remember that date: May 11, 1975. That very morning, when the girl asked Kepa how old his daughter was—she’s sixteen—and he then asked Abaitua how old his own son was, he wasn’t able to answer. Kepa quickly changed the subject, realizing that he’d put his foot in it. It felt as if they were both thinking, “around Lynn’s age.” Unfortunately, he can’t forget her birthday.

  The weather has turned by the time they reach Biarritz. There are large waves in the old port, and when they hit the seawall, they break into spray, falling like light rain. Kepa says that the grimy pier leading out to the Rocher de la Vierge had been an idea of Napoleon III’s. Biarritz had its golden age and still retains some of that old splendor, but Abaitua thinks that Donostia was more beautiful back then and still is now. He realizes he’s talking to himself and that Lynn and Kepa are a few paces behind him. They’re looking downward as they walk, and the girl is talking. Abaitua doesn’t want to know what they’re talking about and continues walking.

  They stop in front of the window at The Bookshop, a store near the Galeries Lafayette department store, also called the Dames de France. The girl has seen a book about Ravel and wants to buy it for Julia—he’s one of her favorite musicians. Ravel, the one who composed Boléro and Concerto for the Left Hand. The other two go in, and Abaitua waits outside for them. On the cover of the book about Ravel, the composer is sitting on a rock on the seashore, looking straight at the camera. He looks to be a young man of around thirty, thin, agile, with sideburns that almost join up with his moustache. He’s wearing a suit and a bow tie. His hands are resting on his knees, and there’s an unlit cigarette in his left hand. But most striking are his white shoes, which stand out in contrast to the gray-black background, and his elegant black beret. He’s very glad to then be able to tell her that Maurice Ravel was a countryman of theirs, from Ziburu, a Basque speaker. A yokel’s satisfaction, a rather ridiculous sort of pride, but he’s glad to have something to say.

  Kepa’s bought a bunch of books. He takes a wrapped-up book out of his full plastic bag and gives it to the girl as a souvenir—“En souvenir,” he says as he presents it. She is obviously excited to open it, but he stops her, saying she shouldn’t look at it until she gets home. She thanks him with a kiss, and without having to stand on tiptoe to do so. She seems happier now. Very kind of you, and then she repeats her thanks in Basque—Eskerrik asko. Now they’re getting in the way of the many people who are walking by, the three of them can no longer walk in line, and Abaitua, who’s walking on the left-hand side, has to stop from time to time to let the people coming toward him go by, and on one occasion, getting stuck two or three steps behind the other two, he’s tempted to let them go on, to see how long it will take them to realize that he’s missing. Like a child. He knows it’s what a little child would do.

  When the two of them first met, Kepa already had a lot of gray hair, and he often used to wear it in a short ponytail. He still has a lot of hair, and it’s still curly, but he has a bit less at the back of his neck, and it’s much whiter. The girl adjusts her ponytail, and Kepa pulls it affectionately. Her hair looks darker in that light. They turn around and look at him. “Oh, were losing our doctor,” says the girl.

  They cross another street. The cars let the pedestrians pass on the crosswalks, and there’s no need to actively assert your right to cross the road. In Donostia, too, cars stop at crosswalks. Less so in Bilbao, and not at all in Gasteiz. He’s seen that for himself, but he doesn’t know why drivers behave in such different ways in cities across such a small area, unless, come to think of it, it’s simply because of how far each of them is from France. He’s also seen for himself that French people can be very poorly behaved when they leave their own country. Terre conquise—it’s all conquered land for them. The girl, all of a sudden, and as if it were something she’d been thinking about for some time, says she doesn’t know how to thank them for the wonderful trip they’ve taken her on, and Kepa replies that it’s just a start to things, putting his hand on her back with what seems to Abaitua to be a very surprising degree of confidence, and then says that they’re g
oing to drink hot chocolate at the famous Dido café.

  There aren’t any tables free at Dido, and Kepa decides they should go to Miremont. Place Clemenceau. An old-fashioned tearoom in which the diligent waiters and waitresses move around discreetly and the floorboards, to their steps, make gentle noises. The customers drink their hot chocolate with measured movements, there are some old ladies in wide-brimmed hats with small dogs, and Kepa’s voice is like a roll of thunder over the gentle murmuring and discreet clink of teaspoons. They’re talking about music. Abaitua only knows classical music, maybe also a little jazz and blues, but only a very little. They mention names he’s not familiar with, and so that the girl can have the chance to hear them, Kepa quietly sings a few songs in his deep voice, which, broken though it is, is quite pleasant. Abaitua, in order to remove himself from the situation, picks up the book about Ravel from the bag that Kepa’s left on the free seat next to him. On the dedication page, it says, “Voyez-vous, on parle de ma sécheresse de cœur. C’est faux. Et vous le savez, mais je suis basque et les Basques se livrent peu et à quelques-uns seulement.” That explanation—“People are always talking about my having no heart. It’s not true, and you know it. But I am Basque. The Basques feel deeply but seldom show it, and then only to a very few”—is a cliché, and like most clichés, it has some truth in it. There are a lot of photos in the book, and in most of them, the older Ravel we’re all familiar with can be seen clean-shaven, without either a moustache or sideburns, and, as always, with a cigarette in one hand.

  Un chocolat chaud, recouvert de son exquise chantilly maison—hot chocolate, covered in our exquisite house Chantilly. He says that this time, they have to let him have everything—whipped cream to top his hot chocolate, and some vanilla éclairs. The only thing he does not have is a bolado. The girl doesn’t know what a bolado is, and Kepa explains that Alexandre Dumas discovered them in Tolosa in the nineteenth century and describes them in great detail in his book De Paris à Cadix. It was the first time he ever had them, and he thought they were very good, as good as the hot chocolate itself. On the other hand, he didn’t like the place so much, and the waiter seemed rude to him. They look like big stones, Kepa says, they’re made of sugar, and the sugar, of course—and Abaitua was previously unaware of this—is mixed with egg whites. As children, they used to like watching them dissolve in glasses of water. Abaitua doesn’t want anything but the hot chocolate, and he tells Kepa that he, too, would be better off eating fewer sweet things. This tendency he has to cut people off is something he inherits from his mother. “Can it be good for you to eat so many sweet things?” she would have said to him in her soft voice. Kepa has thick elastic lips, they move a lot when he chews food, and it isn’t the first time that Abaitua’s thought they look a bit obscene.

  Kepa, as if he hasn’t heard Abaitua, says that they should show the girl the town of Donibane Lohizune and then stop in Ziburu to pay homage to Ravel and his Boléro; after all, countless people have used that particular piece of music to improve their sexual performance. He laughs again, his whole body shaking as he does.

  Abaitua would like to be home already. More precisely, he’d like to be in bed, in the dark, not thinking about anything, after having gotten through the moment when Pilar will look at him inquisitively and he’ll tell her that the trip was a success and throw in some anecdote or story he’ll make up as he goes along. Even so, after the girl touches his hand with one finger—quickly, as if it were a fish—and says she doesn’t know whether “our doctor” is in a hurry or not, he says that he isn’t, that there’s no hurry, although he says it without any conviction, without making any effort to sound convincing, even though behaving like that makes him feel mean, and the girl, obviously, doesn’t believe him. After saying something in English that Abaitua doesn’t understand, she takes her old coin purse out and waves the waiter over.

  The two men try to stop her from paying by mentioning their joint fund, but she gets her way—they have to let her repay their generosity, even if only to that modest degree.

  On the road again. While Abaitua drives, the other two play games to keep themselves entertained. Kepa has to answer the battery of questions the sociologist asks him with only a yes or a no. She doesn’t ask him how old he was or what year it was when he got married, just if he was young at the time. He says yes. Was he in love when he got married? The answer is yes. She knows that he’s separated. In fact, it was practically the first thing he told her when they picked her up in Martutene.

  Abaitua concentrates on driving. He works out that if they stop in Ziburu, he won’t be home by ten o’clock.

  When she asks him if he wanted to marry a woman who was Basque—ethnically Basque, she specifies—he says yes, which is something that surprises Abaitua. Really, he wouldn’t know what to say if he were asked the same question. And in any case, he would find it very difficult to keep his answer to a simple yes or no. He doesn’t think the ethnic question would have been a conscious condition or obstacle for him, but he would probably have preferred a Basque speaker, if only for practical reasons. He’s had relationships with women who weren’t Basque speakers, for example with Bárbara, the Port-Royal pharmacist, but it never crossed his mind that he might ever have a child with her. To an extent because although she met the conditions to be his ideal woman—she was educated and very beautiful, had blue eyes, a long neck, long soft blonde hair, she was elegant, affectionate, and sweet—their relationship ended when his residence ended. When it was time for him to go home. He’s thought more than once that if she’d been Basque, they would have returned home together and their relationship would have continued its course, which is what happened later with Pilar. But it never occurred to him back then. Just as it never did with any others back then, because of the circumstances, because it wasn’t the right moment. And although his parents wouldn’t have been happy to see him going steady with a girl from another culture—he’s not sure to what extent the ethnic factor would have counted there—they wouldn’t have had any difficulty accepting her, above all if the girl showed signs of wanting to integrate, especially if that included learning Basque. Racism? It seems too extreme a word to him. What’s more, as someone once told him, Basques can’t be racists, because they aren’t a race—they’re a species.

  Rue Gambetta. Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Tourists from Paris enjoying the light, the happiness, and the picturesqueness of the south. Tourists from Madrid enjoying the discreet, elegant picturesqueness of the north. Different colored berets, different colored espadrilles, tablecloths with white, red, blue, and green stripes, oxen yoked together in pairs. Macaroons from Maison Adam, muxus from Pariès. Iguzkia, Txiberta, Maïtia, Hegoa. The girl says, “It’s beautiful, really beautiful.” Some children in the Place Louis XIV are wearing traditional clothes and singing “Urso luma gris gaxua.” Specks of rain. They wait stoically in the damp until the children finish their song about the poor little gray-feathered pigeon.

  They only have to go over the bridge to get to Ziburu. Abaitua mentions that it’s difficult to park, trying to scupper the plan they’ve made to stand in front of the house Ravel was born in and hum the Boléro there in tribute. The rain helps him. Kepa asks him to at least drive past it as slowly as possible. The house is made of stone, it’s noble looking, like the ones bordering the canal in Amsterdam. There are gaps on the top floor on both sides of the balcony, to be able to stick canons out. According to Kepa.

  They soon reach Sokoa. Its beach and the remains of its fort, the round tower—a good place for shooting a pirate film. The girl says “it’s really nice” again, and Abaitua’s afraid Kepa might suggest having dinner at one of the little restaurants where the tablecloths are made of those striped fabrics they sell on the Rue Gambetta. There’s a backup on the road, some campervan that’s broken down, and they have to wait. On the beach, in the middle of the sand, there’s a completely circular restaurant with a tall mast, on which a Basque flag is shaking in the wind.
They’ve eaten some memorable paellas there, just as if they were tourists from Paris. Kepa also remembers them, “We sure have had some good paellas there.” Back then, although it was some time ago, they were as good as the paellas from Valencia. They’ve put away their share of Sauterne there, too, the white wine that Pilar likes, though Abaitua did use to put a limit to how much they could spend on wine. For his own personal preference, out of a sense of moderation, and also because Edurne, Kepa’s wife, didn’t drink and hated seeing money being spent on expensive wine and not at the Dames or the Biarritz Bonheur department stores. She didn’t like the sun or the beach, either, being afraid of burning her white skin, and after lunch, at siesta time, she used to lecture on and on to them about the dangers of ultraviolet rays and the polluted sand; she wouldn’t leave them alone, until finally Pilar would say, “Let’s leave these two here looking at tits and go and see some shops,” doing them the favor of getting her off their backs.

  It seems to have stopped raining. Kepa gets out to see what’s happening on the road and smoke a cigarette. The girl goes with him.

  Abaitua has another memory from further back in the past. It’s a memory of disappointment and sadness in the outdoor dining area of the very same restaurant, a scene that unfolded next to the mast that the Basque flag is flying from right now. There’s a man in the scene, he’s well dressed—either a suit or an overcoat, he’d say—and he’s telling some boys and girls where to stand for the photo he’s preparing to take of them. The man’s extremely excited. Abaitua’s not sure what language he’s speaking in, Spanish or Basque, but he’s clearly come up from the south and hasn’t seen a Basque flag for a long time. At the same time, there’s a group of waitresses looking on, as young Abaitua is also doing. They’re wearing black uniforms and white aprons and they’re nudging each other, playing around, laughing, mocking what they see as the incomprehensible excitement of the man from the south. Abaitua doesn’t know what he was doing there at that beachside restaurant, but he doesn’t think it had anything to do with the man. He knows he felt sad that those women—or perhaps they were young girls—who were Basque, as well, just like the man and himself, didn’t understand the man’s excitement and were mocking him; Abaitua, though, did understand him, he’d even drawn a bunch of ikurriñas, Basque flags, which were still illegal at that time, on the inside covers of several of his books. He knew that such demonstrations of patriotism could be severely punished, but he wasn’t prepared to see them being made fun of, and still less so by fellow Basques (his father used to say that the people on the other side of the border weren’t French, that they, too, were Basques).