Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  They spent the first night in Ainhoa. She liked the village a lot, it was so neat and tidy, so pretty, it seemed like something out of a fairy tale to her. “Fuimos . . . estuvimos . . . vimos . . .” She can’t stop using the first person plural, perhaps because she’s talking about more than two people. We had dinner and spent the night at a small hotel.

  Argi Eder. Julia and Martin spent three days in that hotel seven years ago, during the period of time he refers to as “her infidelity,” the crazy days following his discovery that she’d been in another relationship. “When you got together with that young poet” is something he also says. Remembering that turbulent phase is a nightmare. Martin hadn’t been paying her any attention, and so she felt free, until finally someone she met at a writing workshop and had hit it off with realized that she felt alone and managed to get her to accept his continual requests. She liked the young man, he wasn’t very complicated, was even a bit simple, and to tell the truth, they enjoyed spending the afternoons together, talking about any old thing and listening to Leonard Cohen songs. She didn’t feel that she was being disloyal, because she didn’t feel loved. It could have become a fond memory, but he, the cuckolded writer, tried hard for that not to happen, and he hated the other poor guy, because he was part of the nightmare, like Argi Eder, which is where they took shelter after her “infidelity” was uncovered, in the hopes of starting a new phase in their relationship.

  Suddenly the writer seems more cheerful. He says that it was at Argi Eder that he wrote Beroki gorria jantzita ohe ertzean jesarria dagoen emakumea. “The Woman in the Red Jacket Sitting on the Edge of the Bed”—do you remember?” he says with a false smile. Julia usually tries to avoid any word at all that might remind him of all that, in order not to give him any excuse for continuing to punish her, or himself, with those memories. She still avoids words that could be interpreted as having even a very distant connection with that short tryst, so that the writer cannot latch onto them as an excuse to recall that day he cried aloud so bitterly. She was really moved by his pain. He was incredibly distraught when he heard about the relationship she was having with the younger man, and Julia, in her innocence, believed it was no more than frustrated anger at her clumsy betrayal of their love, when in fact it was simply anger at someone daring to use something that he considered to be his own. Although it didn’t take her long to realize that, it was too late by the time she did. She agreed, dazzled by his manic rage, to start a new phase in their relationship, a phase in which there would be no secrets, and she innocently answered the questions he maliciously asked her, convinced that he had a right to know and without realizing just how much he despised her. He wrote nonstop, as if possessed, for two nights and two days—except for the time he spent having wild sex with her, which was something that caught her completely off guard, and with an intensity that he had never shown before and never has since—until he filled the lined composition book he’d bought at a stationery store in Ainhoa. He gave it to her to read. What he’d written was moving, and at the same time desolating. She realized too late that he was going to make her suffer, punish her terribly, and in a display of weakness, she asked him to destroy the notebook. If that was what she wanted, she should destroy it herself, he told her.

  “Do you remember?”

  She brusquely tells him to stop fooling around. She’s not worried what the young American might think. She’s learned that she mustn’t give him any openings when it comes to this issue. A simple no. She will not accept his digging up the memory of what happened back then even in jokes, because she knows, even though years have passed since then, that he’ll take advantage of it to punish her. And to torture himself, as well. She remembers him crying, shouting that she was a whore, walking continually from one side of the room to the other while she sat there on the edge of the bed with her red jacket still on, wishing she were dead. She felt like a whore.

  The girl seems lost, she doesn’t know whether to continue telling them about the trip or not, and Julia asks her to go on. She liked Bordeaux. A lot. She says it’s a very beautiful city and she had a great time eating, drinking, and walking through the streets there, maybe too good a time, she says, moving her hips from side to side comically; it reminded her of Paris. But what she was really impressed by was “the other side”—the green hills, and the villages of white houses with red peppers hanging on the balconies to dry, the pilota courts, and the churches. She speaks with enthusiasm, mixing Spanish and English, as she always does when she’s excited. She talks about the beautiful Basque they speak there (she knows how to say iguzkia, maithia, and atherbia—sun, dear, and inn), and the charm of Ainhoa, Sara, Azkaine, and Donibane Lohizune. Saint-Jean-de-Luz: “She had the chance to see her happy in the sun and melancholic under the rain.” It’s no wonder Borrow, Humboldt, and so many other Romantics fell in love with those special places.

  Until the writer suddenly stops her enthusiastic list by saying that she sounds like someone from the Syndicat d’Initiatives—the tourist bureau. He wants to tell her that he was only joking, but the girl picks up on his disdain and looks at Julia for her protection. The poor girl doesn’t know that the sensitive writer feels put out by hearing that she’s had a good time—“Maybe too good a time,” and moving her hips around, what’s more—and even more put out at hearing her call the French Basque Country “the other side” and linking Bonaparte with Azkaine, Abbadia with Hendaia, and Unamumo with Biriatu—the latter being information that hints at the fact that her guide for the weekend is someone who knows about Basque culture in the area, is an educated person, and is of a certain age, among other things because they went for hot chocolate at Miremont—and now he lays into whoever the man is, really angry now, saying that the picturesque things they’ve seen are all made-up traditions for Parisian tourists, and he attacks this man from his own cultural background who took the young American girl along the Corniche and who, he thinks, maybe shared more than hot chocolate in Biarritz with her, maybe even a bed in Argi Eder. He rails against the unknown man who used the same tricks he would have, who did and said exactly the same things he would have if he could’ve.

  Sometimes, against her will, Julia finds it moving when Martin behaves, as he’s doing now, like a spoilt, capricious child. The girl suggests they play Ping-Pong, as if she had to make it up to him somehow for having gone on a trip without him, and he turns her down. The girl, too, realizes that she’s talking to a child with a hurt sense of pride, and it doesn’t take her long to win him over by asking sweetly, “Are you angry?” So they go to the library to play. Neither of them are skillful players, it turns out; what Julia hears mostly is the sound of the ball bouncing off the floor.

  When Ping-Pong is mentioned in Montauk, Lynn is a good player but doesn’t know how to smash the ball home, which is what Max does to win. Julia decides that because the sound of the ball makes her nervous and distracts her from working, she’d better go to the library, as well, and just watch them play, but they’ve finished their game by the time she gets to the hallway. It seems Martin has won. A sweaty Martin is showing the unruffled loser a portrait of his father. His father was a good-looking boy, he’s wearing a beret and a woolen jacket, and the portrait is by the great painter Olasagasti, to whom Celaya dedicated those two verses of his: “Es terrible Jesús, no nos dejan ser niños”—Lord Jesus, it’s terrible, they won’t let us be children. The girl says the boy’s eyes are clear and tender at the same time, and they are. There aren’t many books worth showing her, even though some of them have luxury covers. One exception: A first edition of Biotz-begietan, signed by Lizardi himself, and a volume of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, with notes by Altuna—Rousseau’s friend from Azkoitia—which Martin values highly, he says. He always shows off that engraving depicting a gentleman seated with a woman on either side of him, both of them holding his penis, from the Bécquer brothers’ book whose title, Irurac-bat, meaning “Three in One”, is also the motto of the
Royal Basque Society of Friends of the Country; and also a book of nineteenth-century illustrations with scenes of peaceful-looking bourgeois living rooms that have little flaps you can open up to reveal beautiful young girls and licentious old men involved in spicy, obscene activities. That’s what Martin is showing the young girl, and Julia is unnerved by the sight of the two of them leaning over the book and opening the paper doors to look at the bawdy scenes in the illustrations, above all because, without having planned it this way, the little window where she’s standing at the end of the hallway—a window whose purpose is entirely unclear to her—allows her to see them without them being able to see her, and so she is momentarily struck by the scene that the three of them are forming right then—a horny old writer showing a young girl dirty scenes while his longtime partner looks on at them from a small window in the hallway, a picture of voyeurism just like the ones in the book. At first she wants to make them aware of her presence by coughing, but, fortunately, she decides not to, and she moves away from the window and back into the living room on tiptoes.

  Some years earlier, Martin told her something that happened to him in that library when he was an adolescent, and she recalls it now. She thinks it’s rather terrible, although depending on how you look at it, it could also be taken as comic. The small window is something like an old-fashioned ticket office window, and there’s a wooden sash blind that closes it from the library side. It’s usually closed, except when, as now, it’s been opened in order to show someone around the room. Because there are wooden shelves on both sides, you might think it was designed for returning books to a hypothetical librarian, or for her to give them over to you, which could, in turn, lead you to deduce that Martin’s grandfather acquired the furnishings from some large library somewhere. What they do know is that he used to take his siestas on the leather couch that’s still sitting underneath the window, and that a cup of tea was always waiting for him on the shelf when he woke up from his doze. Apparently, Martin got into the habit of spending time in the library, which his mother put up with but not without keeping an eye on the situation, sometimes going in when he wasn’t expecting her in order to see whether he was studying or just wasting his time with the novels of Blasco Ibáñez, Valera, Ricardo León, and so on that he always had near, and when he heard the door opening, he would quickly hide under the table. On one occasion, when he thought his mother was not at home, he came across that book with the illustrations on a shelf and found the pictures very exciting, to such an extent that he was unable to resist the temptation to lie down on his grandfather’s divan and masturbate. He was doing just that, apparently, when he heard his mother shouting, asking what was he doing, and then saw her stick her head through the window. Julia doesn’t understand how Martin could have answered here, he who was so careful and secretive about his private world, especially when it came to physiological matters. It must have been incredibly embarrassing for him. She often feels sorry for Martin the child, the victim of such a terrifying mother, when he tells her stories like that. She’s often asked herself how she would feel if she came across Zigor masturbating, but she’s sure that, unlike Martin’s mother, she would retire, in the same way she just has, without saying a word.

  The girl asks if she’s bothering her. The writer’s had to go upstairs to change shirts, and the girl, who’s perfectly composed, not sweating at all, has sat down on the edge of Julia’s work table. She asks about her translation of Bihotzean min dut, and Julia has to admit that she’s not making any progress. She’s at the part where the student hands the teacher her essay on Lizardi and he says “the terrorists are the only ones to blame.” Now it reads like an attempt to lessen the responsibility of those who, without participating in the murder directly, helped the killers by keeping quiet themselves. And so she, in translating, has to silence her own voice. She’d rather write about what she’s translating than translate it. She’d like to write the story of what happened to her and people like her. The terrible admission that some people make nowadays—that they turned a blind eye—makes her profoundly uneasy. She’d like to know how such a thing could happen, if it really is what happened, and she thinks she’ll never be able to know unless she writes about it.

  Has she really just said that she wants to write? It makes her laugh.

  Why not?

  Harri doesn’t look bad, and she’s very elegantly dressed in gray. A jacket, a tube skirt, and a low-cut blouse, and when the American girl says she couldn’t look more elegant if she tried, she juts her hip out to the side like a model, one hand on her hip and the other in the air, her green briefcase dangling from it, a very similar gesture to the one the girl made just a few moments ago when she said she had “a good time—maybe too good a time.” Martin says that they’re going back the nineteenth century when it comes to necklines and that she doesn’t have all that much to show off anyhow. But she doesn’t seem to care. When she gets her breasts remodeled after her cancer, she’s going to get huge ones. They find this morbid attitude distasteful. Julia says she’d be better off getting an appointment with a doctor rather than saying stupid things like that.

  Harri replies that she wants to find the man from the airport first. As always, she starts making jokes to avoid the serious issue. Even if looking for him by placing that personal ad doesn’t work, she won’t mind—quite the opposite, she almost prefers it not to work, because that would mean he doesn’t spend his time reading that particular section of the paper, which is really for crazies anyway. She tells them she has a plan to actively search for him, but she gives no details. The others don’t ask her for any, either. Furthermore, when she realizes that the American girl has a packet with a large red ribbon around it in her hand—“Here’s a little souvenir for you,” she says to her—she remembers about her trip and, taking her hand, makes her sit down on the sofa by her side and tell her everything, without leaving anything out.

  The present for Harri is a crystal ball, inside of which snow is falling down on the red roofs of the little houses in Ainhoa, and Julia envies the young American’s ability to show—in such a simple, uncomplicated way—that she’s thought of everybody. The snow globe, which she thinks looks cute in Harri’s hand, would have been corny and inconsequential if she, Julia, had given it to her.

  Snow in Ainhoa. It’s said that Basque shepherds used to have several different words for snow depending on the size and consistency of the flakes. Martin replies that shepherds all over the world do, the word snow by itself not being descriptive enough, but the girl doesn’t seem very interested. “Elur,” she says pensively, repeating the Basque word for snow. Then she tells them about the sensation she has when she hears certain words such as su, ur, and lur—fire, water, and earth—which were the same words used many thousands of years ago. Primitive words. She looks at them, smiling, but they don’t say anything. Julia’s moved, that’s the only way to put it.

  She also knows that haitz, aizto, azkon, and aizkora—rock, knife, lance, and axe—have the same root. Peculiarities that natives tell visitors to demonstrate that their culture is of value. A language that has no Cervantes or Shakespeare but is so old that it was spoken in the Paleolithic Period, when people had only stones to put around them, and that’s why they chose stone as their key word. Julia can’t help feeling a liking for the man who told her those things, and she feels sorry when she sees the girl dismayed by the writer’s loud laughter at her as he tells her that it’s all a bunch of absurd speculation—why shouldn’t harri, which also means stone, be the root instead of haitz? And he mentions the contemporary Basque linguist Lakarra, and others. Julia thinks the poor girl’s about to cry. But she stands up to the myth-shattering writer, firm, although with a slight tremor in the back of her neck, and what Julia finds moving now is how loyal she is to the man who told her these peculiarities about their national language. She says that the most scholarly textbooks on prehistorical anthropology are full of far less substantiated theories. What�
�s more, the most interesting thing about Basque is what a fertile language it is for speculation and fantasy. It isn’t possible to have such far-reaching dreams about Spanish or English. The girl smiles again. It’s obvious she would rather avoid the debate that the myth-destroying writer would like to carry on with. He says she doesn’t know how short-lived dreams can be. Dreams become nightmares. And so on and so on. Until Harri tells him that’s enough, stop talking.

  Julia makes tea to go with the gâteau basque, and she asks the girl to serve it. The milk first. At Harri’s request, she tells them about her trip again, where they spent the two nights, the towns they visited, what she thinks of Bordeaux. This second time it’s even more apparent that she doesn’t want to say who she went with, it’s obvious that having to refer to her friends indirectly makes it more difficult for her, and it’s impossible not to deduce that it must be someone they know, and finally, worn down by Harri, she implicitly admits it, and that only increases their curiosity.

  Someone from the hospital? The girl laughs and says she isn’t going to give any more clues.

  But when she serves the gâteau basque—which the hurt writer refuses to taste—she goes and talks about the cake and its ingredients, saying that the cherry filling is inauthentic, the original cake was made with sweetcorn flour and pork fat, and this, unwittingly, gives the myth-destroying writer the opportunity to go on talking about the invented traditions that are built up to satisfy tourists in the north and nationalist sentiment in the south. None of the things that are sold as being Basque—béret, maison, linge, gâteau, and so on—are at all Basque. Does she really think that they ever made anything like this—he points at the cake from Dodin—in the baserris around Ainhoa?