Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  She stayed friends with the other girl until their adolescence, but they didn’t see much of each other after that. The friend became rather forward and started going out with older girls than her, from the factory she worked at, while Julia, on the other hand, kept her friends from school. Once, she bumped into her while out somewhere and asked her if she remembered that old man who used to touch them, but the other girl didn’t want to talk about it. The subject never came up at home, either, and, of course, she never saw the man again. She’s always thought that when her father heard about it, he must have given that vile man a really good beating. She’s always hoped he did. From time to time, she’s been tempted to ask her mother what happened, what they did when they heard about it, but she’s never dared, for her own sake and for her mother’s, as well; she knows it would be tough for her to talk about it.

  Martin was not disappointed by the story. He probably hadn’t been expecting anything like that, and he was moved. He held her in his arms as she told him, and she remembers well that he caressed her and said “poor thing,” as if the dirty man were still abusing the child, and that it comforted her.

  Even so, not much time was to go by before he made use of what she told him in that moment of weakness. One day, he allowed himself to joke that she’d been a Lolita; on another occasion, trying to be ironic, he said that the old pervert had been wrong in his predictions about how much her breasts would grow; and finally, in the episode he titled “Worse and Worse,” he wrote, in order to complete her psychological portrait, that Flora Ugalde had had an “unfortunate sexual experience” in her childhood and that as a result of it, she’d “always had a guilty conscience for having sold her little vulva, and she lived in fear that the calculating little girl who’d let a dirty old man touch it in exchange for pencils was still somewhere there inside her.”

  There are expensive brand-name neck scarves that she never wears lying in a drawer in her closet, all given to her by Martin, her mother, or her sister. Flasks of eau de cologne and perfume that she’s never worn, all of them Christmas or birthday presents. There’s also fancy lingerie, particularly expensive and uncomfortable, which she seldom wears, and only ever for Martin, on the occasions when she decides to overcome the embarrassment of revealing her wish to be desirable. The times she’s daring enough, or humble enough, to say “I want you to desire me.” On the other hand, when she met up with that other young man, she would always wear her usual panties, those completely comfortable, flesh-colored ones that go up to her waist and that men, apparently, can’t stand.

  (She likes the fact that in Montauk they don’t use any strategies for seduction, that everything seems to come about easily. Max can smoke his pipe in Lynn’s kitchenette as if he were in his own home, while the girl does her daily relaxation exercises. She likes the fact that Lynn has no trouble saying to him one evening, “We can’t today.” When they go to bed together, she turns down the sheets just as she would if she were going to bed by herself on any normal day. That’s what it had been like for her with that young man, as well.)

  Why does she have the suspicion that her mother’s been prying in her drawers, the same way she snoops in Martin’s computer? She thinks she must be looking for something to tell her how her relationship with Martin is going and will draw her conclusions when she sees that she isn’t using her lacy lingerie.

  Julia hasn’t opened the red notebook of his since she read it in Ainhoa. Now, prompted by the sentence she’s just read in Montauk, she opens it: No he vivido contigo para servirte de material literario; te prohíbo que escribas una sola línea sobre mí. Je n’ai pas vécu avec toi pour te servir de matériau littéraire. Je t’interdis d’écrire sur moi. I have not been living with you to provide literary material. I forbid you to write about me. She found what he wrote to be denigrating, and she begged him not use it. He got on his high horse, something she hadn’t seen him do for a long time. He seemed, once more, to be that domineering man who was always so sure of himself. “I have no intention of using it,” he said. “I wrote it for you.” And he threw the notebook down onto the bed of the Argi Eder hotel in Ainhoa. The next morning, when they were leaving, she put it in her bag, and ever since then it’s been sitting in her drawer.

  The Woman in a Red jacket sitting on the Edge of the Bed.

  Flora Ugalde is sitting on the sofa in the living room wearing a red jacket. Like someone ready to rush out of the house as soon as the clock strikes one. That’s how Faustino Iturbe saw her, and that’s what happened in reality. Normally, she would kill time until the 16:40 train, because she always met up with the young man at five o’clock, and after the six-minute journey, it was only another five minutes to his apartment if she walked quickly. She might well have been reading a magazine, “like someone in a waiting room,” just as in the description, because she no longer felt at home there, and she made a show of that by not looking after things there in the way that she had done before.

  That scene—the two of them sitting in the living room one afternoon while she waited for her 16:40 train—had played out in exactly the same way every day for the last week, not much longer than that. Since the day the young man first invited her to dinner on the way out of their writing workshop. They’d seen each other every day since then, and she left the apartment at the same time every day without giving any explanation—Martin didn’t ask her for one, either—and came back at nine o’clock every evening. Martin would make his own dinner, and she would skip it. She would already have had a little something to eat at the young man’s apartment.

  That day, the day she was wearing her red jacket, was the last day she went to the young man’s apartment. By the time she came and sat down in the living room, she realized that it wasn’t going to be a day like all the others. There was something disturbing in the atmosphere, and Martin’s face was not, as it usually was every day when Julia started getting ready to go out, the picture of seriousness and indifference. He was obviously nervous, he was looking at her furtively from the behind the book he was pretending to read, he had her under surveillance, that was the term for it, and he seemed to want to break the silence but without knowing how to do so, and she, even though she was already wearing her jacket and ready to leave, decided to stay sitting there and let the 16:40 train go by without her.

  She doesn’t know what she would have answered if he had asked where she was going. “What do you care?” perhaps. She thinks her answer would have depended on the way he asked the question. She has the idea that if he’d suggested going to the movies, she would have accepted and broken her date with the young man. Because as she sat there waiting for the next train departure time to roll around, she was also waiting on some miracle that might get the two of them speaking to each other once more. But nothing like that happened.

  At that point, they only ever broke their silence to say words that were strictly necessary—“You got a call from the doctor’s,” or “Someone’s coming by to fix the antenna tomorrow”—a very few sentences like that, and, of course, they said them angrily. They’d both returned to this practice after a period of strict silence in which they hadn’t even given each other messages or told each other things, a phase that had led to many practical problems: the new washing machine was taken back to the warehouse three times, because each of them would hang up whenever a phone call came in for the other; and Martin’s insurance policy lapsed for the first time in twenty years, which was a very serious matter for him. And there were even times when they pretended not to know each other in front of other people, in order to prolong their standoff. But then there was a new circumstance that made Julia especially angry. It was Martin himself who told her that he’d once read an interview with Gabriel Celaya, or with his partner, Amparitxu, or maybe he’d heard it on the radio, in which he talked about a tactic the couple had for preventing their quarrels from becoming disastrous. They said they long ago agreed that whatever the situation was, even if they w
ere incredibly angry with each other, every day, at a certain time, they would stop whatever they were doing and get together at a particular place in the house—they even gave the place a specific name, which he doesn’t remember—and drink a whisky together. Martin suggested that they should do the same thing, and Julia, although she didn’t think that admittedly sweet-sounding method would work with her, accepted the idea as a show of good faith.

  She promised she would always keep the appointment, and they decided to make it nine o’clock in the evening, in the formal library, and they would drink a gin and tonic together. However, the agreement did not last for long. Stopping what you’re doing at exactly nine o’clock to have a gin and tonic that you don’t always feel like drinking isn’t the best way to guarantee a good time, and the day came when they just emptied their glasses in one big swig without saying a single word to each other—it reminded her of the words she’d read in a children’s book on religion, “You have finally drunk the Chalice of Martyrdom”—and then they each went back to their own activities without saying anything at all. It has always been a matter of debate between them who usually gives in first by breaking the silence. Julia is convinced she does, but she could be wrong. What she doesn’t have any doubt about is that it’s Martin who usually stops talking, and then, faced with his silence, she does the same thing and goes mute. Be that as it may, it was he who broke their gin and tonic pact. She wouldn’t have stopped going into the formal library with the two gin and tonics in her hand every day for anything in the world. But he would have, and he did. That day, they’d quarreled because of a decision her son had made about music. Zigor told her that he wanted to stop taking piano lessons in order to concentrate on the txistu, and Julia didn’t like the idea. Because of that, and, more precisely, because she almost hated the txistu in any other context than at village festivals, she found it hurtful to listen to Martin, who as well as ridiculing the boy’s choice also said that she was to blame for having brought him up in an atmosphere of “patriotic, abertzale folklore.” She answered him aggressively, saying he was just an elitist and had obviously joined in with that unpleasant, fashionable craze of attacking anything even remotely Basque. Things like that. It was a terrible quarrel, and they fell into silence afterward.

  It was almost nine o’clock, and she was preparing to go into the library, with her gin and tonic in her hand and ready to admit that his words had hurt her precisely because of the fact that she found her son’s decision frustrating and assure him she was going to do all she could to get the boy to change his mind. She was even ready to confide to him that she wasn’t sure if their Basque musical instruments were of any use as an outlet for musical talent or whether they in fact relegated people to less productive or expressive pastures. She was expecting him, too, to admit that he was nervous because he hadn’t written a line for over a month; she knew that was the case, even though he was telling everybody that he was making progress with his novel. But the clock struck nine, and she heard the door to the gallery bang shut with a force that made the glass windowpanes tremble, and then she heard the sound of his steps on the gravel path outside.

  It had been a long time since she’d last cried. That day she did, because she understood, without any doubt in her mind, that Martin could never be the man she needed, a man who would console her by saying that her son’s playing the txistu wasn’t that bad, that a nice biribilketa tune can be quite beautiful—she’d have laughed if he’d said that—and that, when it comes down to it, it’s something that might make him very happy. The man who would take advantage of his sway—Zigor greatly admires him because he’s a writer—to try and influence him as Julia would like him to, inviting him to the house and encouraging him to play the piano there, at least so he wouldn’t give it up completely. Martin was not that man.

  So why didn’t she leave?

  It hurt her to admit that when it came down to it, she was constricted by a material need, which is something that makes her feel lousy. There was nowhere she could go. Renovation work was being done on her mother’s house. There had been a flood, and because the floors were going to have to be ripped up anyway, they decided to renovate the whole place at the same time. Her mother and Zigor were on vacation in Otzeta, there wasn’t any more space for her there, and she would have found it humiliating to ask her sister for refuge. So she made the worst possible decision—staying put until the work at her mother’s house was finished.

  But the relationship was over for her, and she was sure that Martin thought the same thing. In fact, she was convinced that he’d made the decision and that he was putting up with her at the house only until she found an alternative. To such an extent that she would have been prepared to restart the relationship if he had shown some sign of good will, but that didn’t happen. Or she was never aware that it did. He used to spend the whole day in his pajamas and slippers, wrapped in his robe, sitting in front of his computer without doing anything, looking depressed, and that must have meant something, but he still had writer’s block and wasn’t prepared to talk about it. She, on the other hand, started going out more, among other things so as not to force her presence on him. She started saying yes to having a few glasses of wine with friends, and that’s what happened that one day as she was leaving the writing workshop. It’s easy to go from literary matters to personal ones, which is perhaps why people read. Be that as it may, her friend from the workshop figured out that she was lonely and invited her to dinner. He was a young man, quite a lot younger than herself, and at first she only liked him because he was nice and easy to get along with. He wasn’t at all complicated, and she didn’t have to worry, as she did with Martin, about him taking what she said the wrong way or making her feel ridiculous for giving her opinion on certain subjects. She felt that he was not her intellectual superior, and the young man himself accepted that and admired her. He wrote poetry and had even been published in some magazine or other, but it was nothing out of this world. The truth be known, he was a pretty average poet. Once, before Julia and Martin’s last quarrel, he had asked her to give Martin some of his poems, because he looked up to him a lot and wanted his opinion of them; but his opinion was so negative that she didn’t dare pass it on to the young man. She told him that he’d liked them. That’s what she told him every time he gave her a poem for Martin to read, even when she didn’t actually show them to him. Martin is as strict and destructive with writers he doesn’t like as he is with himself. He used to tease her about the writing workshop, saying that the participants were fools because you don’t learn how to write, putting sentences together isn’t writing. Julia, in fact, was pretty much in agreement with him, she had no doubt her friend was quite naïve and not very smart. She accepts that it may be for that very reason that she felt good by his side when compared to her stormy relationship with Martin; she never felt domineered, despised, or denigrated when she spoke with the young man from time to time, which was usually on the way out of the workshop.

  The evening they had dinner at Casa Cámara in Pasaia Donibane, he invited her up to his apartment to see what he called “a visual poem”—slides of flowers with drops of dew on them—and although that wasn’t anything special, they did end up in bed together. She didn’t feel uncomfortable with a man ten years younger than herself, even though she hadn’t gone to bed with anyone apart from Martin for many years, and she was delighted to feel desirable once more. What she most enjoyed was not feeling ashamed of the cellulitis on her thighs or her saggy breasts. Less so than with Martin, at any rate, who was a perfectionist, selective, and who couldn’t stand ageing or deterioration.

  After that, they saw each other every day. Time passed easily for her without doing anything in particular, she talked about whatever came into her mind, however silly it might be, never worrying about bringing it up. She was grateful he didn’t see things in such a negative way, and she enjoyed planning trips around Greece and Turkey, listening to the music he liked. She didn�
��t think about the future, she lived for the moment, and the young man’s feeling when he’d open the door to her and stand there happy as a dog seemed to rub off on her. They hardly went out, they didn’t need anyone else, and also because she wanted their relationship kept secret until she could move out of Martin’s house. He suggested she come and live with him, but she’d had enough of living in one man’s house for lack of anywhere else to go and felt no desire to go straight into another man’s home for the same reason.

  She never found it hard to talk to the young man about the difficulties of her situation, although she didn’t explain all that much to him. She told him that Martin was a complex man, and difficult to live with because he was obsessed with writing. They talked a lot about Martin. The young man would ask her questions, and she was glad to answer as far as she could, because he listened to her with attention. They were usually questions about his habits when he wrote, his routines, and his obsessions, what he was working on, what his timetable was, whether he listened to music.

  These are, apparently, things that interest a young writer about a seemingly more experienced one. In that sense, the young man respected Martin a lot—he thought he was a very talented writer, one of the most talented Basque writers, and Julia was glad to hear that. He told her that it’s called writer’s block, being afraid of the critics, not publishing for fear of failure; and she was indignant that some jerks in a bar said Martin was finished because he was blocked, and she defended him. She was sure he would write a good novel sooner or later, he’d always found writing hard, because he was very demanding with himself, perhaps excessively so, and she told the young poet as much, and also, by the way, that she was fed up of them always talking about Martin.