Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “Tell her, tell her how you used to eat dessert at Etxezar.”

  Julia once told him that at her mother’s baserri, after eating their daily portion of black beans, they used to clean their plates with bread, turn them upside down, and eat their daily baked apple on the underside. It must have impressed him greatly, because he’s asked her to tell people about it more than once, or told them about it himself while chatting after a meal, thinking it could be a curious peculiarity as far as the other people at the table are concerned, in the same way that he thinks it worth mentioning that the plates and cups they’re using are the remains of a large crockery set that used to belong to the wife, mother, or daughter of a Carlist general, or to all three of them. Julia feels more humiliated than embarrassed that something that’s so natural for her is so strange or comical for him; she doesn’t like it, even if his intentions are good, and in fact she doesn’t think he means any harm. In any case, she dislikes having to talk about the intimate kitchen details of Etxezar whenever he wants to entertain someone. She also thinks it goes against the family’s dignity, although she worries that she may have this idea because she’s reserved and untrusting, and she wouldn’t like to keep quiet out of embarrassment. So she tells them about it against her will, to avoid problems, and because otherwise, he himself will tell them about it. Every day, her grandmother used to bring out and put on the table a dish of beans—which are now so highly thought of—and another of cabbage with pork fat and pork ribs, and on holidays, there would be white beans or garbanzos instead of black beans. She knows from her mother that in some baserris, everyone used to dip their spoons into the pot without using plates and pass the wine from hand to hand to everybody, everybody except the farmhand. Not at Etxezar. But she only tells them what Martin wants to hear: after eating the beans, cabbage, and pork, they used to turn their dishes over when it came time to serve dessert, and dessert was never anything like the gâteau basque from Dodin, it was always a baked apple.

  But what great baked apples they were. Harri seems to want to praise the cooking at Etxezar when she talks about the excellence of Errezil apples. Julia is glad that he then praises her recipe for apple pie, because she knows he means it. Martin agrees it’s the best dessert he’s ever eaten, and he included the recipe in one of his Faustino Iturbe episodes. At the same time, the recipe couldn’t be simpler: apples, sugar, the pulp of a lemon, half its rind, and pieces of ladyfinger sponge cake. But the apples have to be Errezil apples, because of their wonderful flavor, and so that the dough comes out with the right texture without having to add any sugar.

  All of a sudden, the young American lifts her hands up toward the ceiling and laughs. “Oh, your exquisite, your delicious, your unique Errezil apples!”

  So she’s heard about Errezil apples. She’s even been told about Flora Ugalde’s recipe. But who exactly did this girl spend the weekend with?

  The poor thing must realize that the silence that falls after her ironic words is a question that requires an answer—she blushes up to her ears. A freight train going by gives her a brief respite, but after that, she has no choice but to say something about Flora Ugalde’s wonderful apple pie recipe, and embarrassedly turning to Martin, she admits it was a friend of his who told her about it. Harri and Julia also turn toward Martin, as though they think he will be able to solve the mystery, and he holds both hands up to point at the middle of his chest and, amazed, almost frightened, says, “A friend of mine?” The girl nods. “Yes, Kepa,” she says. Laughing from ear to ear, as if saying the name of her friend on the trip were a relief, and Martin incredulously repeats his friend’s name, which she confirms by nodding again and again, apparently not realizing how stirred up the writer is. They spent some time together in Bordeaux, he tells her, but they haven’t seen each other since then, and she thinks he feels very nostalgic about it.

  I find older men very interesting, you know?

  She says it with the gesture of a naughty girl answering back. She says Martin’s friend is great fun. He’s going through the process of getting separated right now, and he’s feeling quite sad, but he’s a happy person per se. Something she remembers makes her smile. “He is so funny.” She continues praising him. He’s an understanding man, sensitive, he knows a lot of things, but above all, he’s gentle and he’s fun. The memory of something else makes her smile. She thinks he’s a comfortable man. “Comfortable.”

  Harri and Lynn have to go to Donostia for something to do with work, but they don’t move. They’re enjoying trying to define what a “comfortable” man is. Meanwhile, Julia puts the tea things away. Harri doesn’t need a comfortable man; she thinks she’s got more than enough with her husband when it comes to that. She says she needs a man with passion. Julia is never sure if she’s being serious. The writer, on the other hand, seems livelier, as if he didn’t think his friend could possibly outshine him, and he asks the girl what type of man she would need. She avoids answering. What a question, how should she know . . . Julia takes his cup of tea away even though he hasn’t finished it yet, a way of telling him to leave the girl alone, and also an excuse to disappear into the kitchen. But he doesn’t give up. From the kitchen, Julia hears him saying that “need” isn’t the right word and that he’s going to ask her the question another way, but the girl interrupts him and says she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with needing a man. There’s a short silence. A few seconds later she says she probably needs someone brave. A brave man.

  Julia thinks that she, herself, could do with an easy man.

  Eventually, they start to get going. Martin suggests they come for lunch; he’ll fix up something simple. What he wants is an excuse not to have to sit in front of the computer. Now he’s like a child who wants people running around the house so that he can break his routine, and there’ll be a special dessert, and his parents won’t remember to tell him to do his homework, even though later on he’ll regret not having written even a single line, complaining like his beloved Flaubert that he’s only written fifteen pages in the last seven weeks, and none of them are good—“depuis sept semaines j’ai écrit quinze pages et encore ne valent-elles.” But their work won’t give them time to come, and they’ll have to make do with a sandwich. What’s more, Harri wants to go to the hairdresser’s, “to look pretty in Bilbao tomorrow.” More jokes about looking for the man from the airport. She says she feels he’s close. And now Martin, wanting them to forget how unpleasant he’s just been, challenges the girl to a Ping-Pong rematch before dinner. If Julia were to make her famous apple pie for them, he’d happily buy the apples and ladyfingers. He asks Julia what she thinks. While he asks, he puts his hand on her shoulder, and she doesn’t dare to take it off, although she’d like to somehow exteriorize the anger he’s pretending not to notice. She’d like to tell him that she feels immediately relegated as soon as a third person comes along. Julia needs problems to explode in order to stop the routine of time from leaving them behind and forgotten like trash in the wake of a ship. What they have always, always done has been to start talking again without explicitly mentioning the real reason for their quarrels, not just the pretexts Martin usually reproaches her with to explain his anger. At the beginning of their relationship, and later on, as well, she used to feel doubly guilty, first for getting angry and second for being unable to keep her anger appropriately in check. She has accepted that her way of reacting, that need of hers to pop the pimples, so to speak, is a function of her culture, as well as a sign of bad taste, and she’s made an effort to adapt to his way of doing things, getting over quarrels without sinking deep into the mud at the bottom of each issue.

  “What do you think?” Again. She thinks he gets bored with her. She’s never been so completely sure. She’s felt hate, anger, sorrow, love—even a lot of love—when looking into those blue eyes on occasions when they’ve been asking for a truce. But what she feels now is boredom. She isn’t going to stay. She says that she has to go, too, putting
the first thing she picks up into her bag, without bothering to think up an excuse. She decides she’ll go to Donostia with the other two and then come back by train and go to her mother’s house.

  It looks as though the American girl may be feeling sorry for leaving the writer alone, because she not only promises to play the rematch some other time but also says that she wants to finish his book of short stories that night, and he says, meekly, that he’ll go with them to the iron gate. Maybe he’s hoping for an opinion about his book, an opinion that, for the moment at least, he doesn’t get. They walk in silence. When they’re in the car—and Martin, behind the bars, looks as if he’s in a cell—the girl says that she has a complaint for his publishers, as if she’s suddenly just remembered it. In Ainhoa, she was reading his book in the bath, and the dye of the bookmark ribbon washed away upon coming into contact with the water. She laughs. A way of saying that he was there with her in Argi Eder, with her in any circumstance. “This girl’s a real artist,” Julia says to herself. The writer stands frozen in astonishment at the gate, probably imagining Lynn naked in the bathtub with his book in her hands.

  On the drive, Harri wants to get some more details out of the girl about her trip. “So how many people were there? Did you hook up with anyone? Who’s the guy?” And even though she gives indirect answers as far as possible at first, Harri doesn’t give up, and finally Lynn asks her, firmly but without being harsh, not to ask any more. “He might not like anyone to know. You know what I mean?”

  Harri, very excited: “So it’s someone I know, then!”

  Lynn: “Oh, come on. You’re misunderstanding me, that’s all . . .”

  Harri: “So is he interesting?”

  Lynn: “Very.” She covers her face with her hands. “Oh my God, I’m completely in love. ¿Qué te parece?”

  Harri: “You want the truth? I think you’re going to suffer.”

  Riveras de Loiola. A sign pointing downtown. It’s really easy to get lost on this bit, Harri says to cover up the silence. But Julia deduces that Harri’s guessed who the man is who might not like his name being known.

  When the lights turn red at the Maria Kristina zubia—or bridge—she wonders whether to get out and go straight to the station and catch a train back to Martutene, but she thinks that would make it all too obvious that she only wanted to get away from Martin, and so she stays in the car. When Harri asks where to drop her off, she says somewhere near Bretxa Azoka—the Brexta market. At the bridge, at Kursaal Zubia, that would work.

  La Bretxa is no longer the same place as when Olasagasti and Celaya, both nighthawks, used to come across the early-rising farmers from Igeldo, Ibaeta, Martutene, Astigarraga, and Altza on their donkeys, laden with containers of milk and baskets full of fresh fruits and vegetables. Almost everything sold there now comes from greenhouses, and some fruits and vegetables may even come from the central market, exactly the same ones on offer in the grocery stores, but more expensive because they’re passed off here as being local products. Aitor still sells Errezil apples. Their appearance is better than it used to be, but they no longer smell as sweet; she thinks it must be a new grafted variety. She buys a few, because she’s decided to make an apple pie for Zigor, and she’ll take the American girl a piece.

  You can still read the word Pescadería—fish market—on the façade of the classical-looking building, but now it houses a multiscreen cinema and the franchise pubs, sausage restaurants, and candy stores that you see in any suburb. She’s not going to go straight back home. She’s going to have a coffee and a pastry and then go to the movies. Something a free woman might do. She likes going to the movie theater by herself. First she’ll stop in at Otaegui, the pastry shop, to buy the ladyfingers for the pie.

  She decides to buy a notebook, as well, and while she’s doing that, waiting at the counter inside the store, she feels something like what she used to always feel whenever she got a new notebook as a child, excited because she was going to fill it with her careful calligraphy and beautiful drawings, and worried about what the new school year would bring. Rather silly excitement, she admits, and now she’s worried, because she’s going to use it to write down her own ideas, not to translate other peoples’, which is what she usually does. She asks for any color except red, because there’s a book written by a woman called The Red Notebook, and she doesn’t think she needs to ask for it not to be gold, she doesn’t think they’ll have one that color.

  People still look with curiosity at women like her, she thinks, who go to the movies by themselves. It’s as if they wonder what type of lives such women must lead, don’t they have friends, or anything better to do than stare at a blank screen or sit around all alone waiting for the phone to ring?

  The movie’s about an American writer. She’s a woman with writer’s block, and her friends send her on a trip to Italy to help clear her mind. She falls in love with a house in the beautiful countryside of Tuscany and decides to renovate it and live there. Julia isn’t surprised that more and more people are feeling the urge to write novels when doing so is portrayed as being the type of job that makes you famous and earns you a lot of money; the way writing’s presented today is so far from the Romantic idea. She doesn’t think the movie interesting, but the countryside’s very beautiful. The time passes quickly as she sits there thinking. She knows now why she found it so painful listening to Martin question the notion of Basque uniqueness. It’s obvious: it was because he wanted to hurt her. It’s because of this sort of desire to hurt that she often feels personally attacked when myths and superstitions that should rightfully be destroyed are attacked, and she sees something like that in Unamuno’s complaint when he said that the Basque language should be abandoned—he was applauded not because people thought he was right but because what he said hurt his countrymen. She admits it’s an irrational feeling, one that she should have gotten over by now, but at the same time, rationalists’ over-simplifications and arrogance drive her up the wall.

  With regard to the mythical status that some people give Basque, she thinks it’s fairly clear that it’s a reaction, at least to an extent, to the idea, which until recently was commonly held, that it’s a vulgar dialect, a useless relic, and an obstacle to cultural development. A reaction to the need for self-esteem, in fact.

  two beds, central location. Women in the train station advertising rooms for rent. A spectacle she has not gotten used to; she can’t believe anyone doesn’t have a bed in her city. Lots of people are coming off the trains, mostly young people, retired people, and women with children, on their way back from the beach. She decides not to bother trying for a free seat and hangs back on the platform for a few moments instead. It’s very rare to hear anyone say “excuse me, please”; people just push their way through. A stocky, swarthy man of around fifty—wearing a thick gold chain around his neck and rings on his fingers—doesn’t take his eyes off her. It’s a habit of hers, probably not a very healthy one, to guess people’s ethnic origin; she imagines this man is from eastern Spain. Because she’s embarrassed to turn around and sit with her back to him, she spends the whole journey looking at the digital display that’s announcing the names of each of the train’s coming stops.

  She has always thought that it’s extremely difficult to combine the rhythm of the drum with the txistu flute. She can hear it from downstairs—an arin-arin dance, and very well played. She opens the door without making a noise, to catch them by surprise. Zigor is playing, sitting on the kitchen table, and her mother is dancing. Her arms raised to the level of her head, no trace of tiredness, elegantly, on tiptoes, marking the movements with great precision, a certain heaviness only noticeable if you look at her feet, but that isn’t the impression you get in general, quite the reverse, that wide-hipped body gives off an air of agility, and even though she’s overweight, she moves with incredible ease through the air to the fast rhythm, dancing with her inner self, dancing with her bones and her very essence. That sad wom
an, with her bun undone, her hair down to her behind, looking like the image of death itself, that old woman, who always complains about her rheumatism, is incapable of keeping her feet still when she hears a fandango or biribilketa. She thinks her mother must be one of the last examples of Voltaire’s vision of the Basques, “a people who sing and dance at the foot of the Pyrenees.”

  She lets her arms drop when she sees Julia. Zigor stops playing, as well. “You’re early,” Julia’s mother says. She replies that since she had to go to Donostia, she took the chance to buy some things. She’s going to make them a good dinner. Her mother: Are we celebrating something?

  They talk about the etymology of the name of the village of Errezil. Julia’s mother is peeling the Errezil apples, the three of them are sitting around the table, and she says that the name comes from errez hil—meaning “kill easily.” It isn’t the first time Julia’s heard this, of course. The Basques found it easy to kill the Romans who were trying to get to Azpeitia, they simply threw stones at them from the slopes of Mount Ernio, and that, she says, is where the name of the creek, Errezil-erreka, comes from. It isn’t the first time Julia’s contradicted her, either, and she does so again now, not in the hope of convincing her to change her mind but so that Zigor won’t take her seriously. There’s no way that’s the etymology of Errezil. While she’s trying to fix on the best way to contradict her—she wants to be pleasant and pedagogical when she breaks the myth—her mother shrugs her shoulders and says to her, softly, “That’s what my dead father used to say.” Sometimes she’ll say, in a regretful voice, “I’m ignorant, and you went to school.” Sometimes, to Julia’s despair, after this declaration of faith—“That’s what my dead father used to say”—she wraps herself in silence like a Christian about to give herself up to the lions. Maybe what Julia’s saying is very wise, but she won’t listen to things she wasn’t taught at home.