Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  The husband visits his wife, who is convalescing after a life-saving operation. Her illness has enabled him to see just how much he needs his wife, he feels completely in love with her and regrets having been a disloyal, careless husband. So he is fully determined to change, to be more responsible and agreeable, and that’s why he’s so sorry to see the large bunch of flowers on her bedside table—he regrets not having thought of that himself. He’s been thinking about more practical things. Tidying up the house and painting their bedroom, as his wife had long wanted him to do, arranging a trip—he hasn’t quite decided where—for when she’s fully recovered. He figures her coworkers must have sent the flowers—someone usually goes around to all the desks collecting money for such things—but when he asks her, she gives him an ambiguous smile and says she doesn’t know, there wasn’t a card with them. There’s a sticker on the cellophane around the flowers with the florist’s name on it, and the husband decides to call after he leaves the hospital, and the urge to find out makes him cut his visit short and, above all, prevents him from being as open with her as he had wanted to be. When he leaves the hospital and telephones to investigate, they answer him politely but firmly that they are not allowed to give the information he’s asking for, because they have a strict privacy policy, and after listening to an uninteresting lecture on client confidentiality, he decides to call their friends and relatives to tell them how she is and casually drop in a thank you for the roses. All the people he calls deny having sent them and sound embarrassed, because they think he’s reproaching them for not having done so, all except for a neighbor woman and a brother-in-law, both of whom say it was the least he could do, his wife had always been so good to them, although the man is sure they cannot possibly have sent them, because of the sheer quantity of flowers—he counted four dozen roses—and because both of them are incredibly tight-fisted. And then, feeling jealous, he goes to the florist to investigate further. He buys a bunch of flowers, neither very cheap nor very expensive, as an excuse to establish contact, and then he goes back again, becoming a regular customer, in order to gain the florist’s confidence; she’s an agreeable and beautiful woman. He buys flowers every day—not as many as the ones his wife received in her bouquet—and the florist treats him exceptionally well. A man who enjoys buying so many flowers for his mother, aunt, and sister—that’s what the jealous man tells her—just has to be affectionate and caring. In fact, he starts giving flowers to everyone, to his wife, as well, because he thinks it’s a pity to throw them away once he’s bought them, though he sometimes has no choice but to do so—and here the writer intervenes in a friendly way to reflect on the things that the man is, unfairly, not allowed to do—because he’s afraid that people might think something strange is going on.

  Martin is still at breakfast, even though it’s very late. He’s wearing pajamas, one of those pairs that’s completely shriveled up and that Julia hides from him whenever she finds them. She doesn’t really need to ask him what sort of mood he’s in, that’s clear from the expression on his face, and even more from the state of his hair, ruffled and standing on end as if he’s had an electric shock. She thinks that if she were to hold a small piece of paper to the tuft of hair standing up in the middle of his head, the paper would stick to it, like the bits of paper they used to get to stick to pens at school by rubbing them, but she doesn’t dare to do it.

  So when she asks him how he is, it isn’t because she’s holding onto some remote possibility that he’ll say he’s fine, instead it’s to let him know that she’s ready to listen to his reasons for feeling low so early in the day. But he only answers that he’s had a nightmare, a reply that’s almost become a proverb and that he uses to say there’s nothing for her to understand, she should just leave him alone.

  The phone rings. A game of suspense to see who will be the one to get up and answer it. Because it’s always for Martin, Julia’s decided that she won’t pick up the phone ever again, tired as she is of having to guess if he’s supposed to be “at home” or not for different callers, and of him reproaching her for being a bad liar when she says he’s out. Martin gets up. It’s someone from his family, she can tell just by his “hello.” He goes to the library for some privacy, as if Julia cared about what he discusses with his mother or his sister.

  She picks up the pieces of paper, notebooks, and loose index cards and puts them on a corner of Martin’s desk. She’s picking up plates, cups, and yogurt containers when Martin appears again. He’ll do it. Astonishingly, he even starts dusting off the coffee table and, while he does that, asks if she’d like him to make her some coffee—he has a delicious fruit cake in the kitchen. Julia doesn’t know why he’s being so considerate. He says he hasn’t seen Zigor for a long time and he’d like to have lunch with him one day. She soon finds out the reason for his change of mood when he says, as if he’s suddenly remembered, “By the way, speaking of food . . .” and tells her that he has to go to his parents’ house for lunch. In fact, he’s arranged with his mother or sister on the phone that they’d both go, and now he’s worried that maybe she won’t go with him or won’t behave as he’d like her to—comme il faut, in other words—in a way that will demonstrate they’re an exemplary couple.

  Suddenly she feels an almost sadistic urge and takes advantage of the importance of the moment to mock him, asking him about his penthouse girl. Isn’t he afraid of what she might think if she catches him in those ugly pajamas and robe, and she’s amused to see that he’s still irritated with the girl, still feeling betrayed, or left out, perhaps. “She went out very early,” he says, with a note of disdain in his voice.

  The excitement of opening a package. The mailman’s brought the original version of Montauk, and another book by Frisch called Fragebogen, which she hadn’t heard of before.

  Montaigne sounds like this in German: Dies ist ein aufrichtiges Buch, Leser, es warnt dich schon beim Eintritt daß ich mir darin kein anderes Ende vorgesetzt habe als ein häusliches und privates. So the book is “aufrichtig”—sincere.

  Ein Schild, das Aussicht über die Insel verspricht: overlook. A sign promising a view across the island: overlook.

  Being familiar with the Spanish and French translations helps a lot when reading it in German. The shaggy white jacket is “la velluda y blanca chaqueta” in Spanish, and in German it’s “weißliche Zotteljacke halte”: “Als ich ihr später die weißliche Zotteljacke halte.” She doesn’t know how she would translate that. She imagines she’d prefer the Spanish version of “shaggy”—de pelo largo—to velludo, meaning “fluffy.” In any case, that wouldn’t be the most pressing problem.

  Dies ist ein aufrichtige buch, leser

  und was verschweigt es und warum?

  This is a sincere book, reader,

  and what does it reflect, and why?

  Lynn shows up loaded with file folders. She’s come from the hospital with Harri, but Harri stopped in at the pharmacy to buy something for her headache. She’s glad that the German copy of Montauk has arrived, it seems to confirm to her that Julia is going to translate it into Basque, and she wants to look for the passage titled “Check out,” the one that has Max reflecting on how much he spent for the two nights at the hotel, the passage whose Spanish translation made her so angry. But the writer, who she finds still in his pajamas, is determined to explain to the girl why he’s still dressed like that and to describe the nightmares that have been spoiling his sleep for years now.

  It always starts with him standing in front of the door to a room. For some reason, he doesn’t want to go in, but someone forces him to open the door, and there, inside, he comes face-to-face with a couple, a man and a woman. The woman is sitting on the side of a bed, and the man is standing next to her, a hand resting on her shoulder. The man is wearing serious-looking clothes, dark clothes, a black vest and tie, and the woman is only wearing a negligée. He says that he’s aware of some things even though they aren’t made clear in the nightm
are. For instance, the woman is young and beautiful. He says he doesn’t see her face, or the man’s. But he does see some other things in great detail. For example, the woman’s negligée is made of satin, it’s salmon pink, and it had bows on its edges; she has long nails that are painted bright red. He says once more that he doesn’t want to see what there is on the other side of the door, and Julia thinks he looks like a madman from an old-fashioned asylum sitting there in his shrunken, striped pajamas, his hair standing on end, his eyes closed, gripping the arms of the chair with all his strength to demonstrate how he is trying to resist being made to go into the room, but someone is forcing him, pushing him and dragging him. Finally, just when he can’t take any more—and here he puts on an expression of being absolutely defeated—seeing the couple makes him feel incredibly frightened, and then he wakes up sweating. The girl, after listening to him seriously, says it’s probably a trauma from his childhood. What else could she say to him?

  Julia wonders where some people get the idea that their dreams, whether good or bad, might be of any interest to the rest of humanity.

  Dann irritiert es ihn. As was to be expected, what Max is irritated about is the fact that Lynn “da sie die Reservation besorgt hat, ungefähr weiß, was er da bezahlt für zwei Übernachtungen”—that she made the booking and she therefore knows how much he had to pay for the two nights.

  As soon as Harri comes in, she tells Martin that he cannot receive people at home dressed like that, and she sends him upstairs to get dressed. She says her headache’s nothing serious, she just isn’t sleeping much, because she’s in a state of permanent excitement, “because I’m still looking for the man.” Julia’s beginning to feel bored by the whole story, and in fact even more so by Harri’s insistence on telling them stupid stories, as if she were a teenager, and at the same time, she dislikes her own weak personality, which leads her to always allow other people to impose their stupid topics of conversation on her.

  She’d like to share with Lynn her impression that she will never be able to read another novel by Frisch, and how arriving at that conclusion has been one of the saddest confirmations she’s ever felt of the fact that life is limited. A foolish thought that moves her in the same way that some sunsets in the countryside do. She’s sure Lynn would understand her. This whole line of thinking came about because of her disappointment at learning that Fragebogen is not, as she had thought, a lost Frisch novel but, as its title—which translates to “Questionaire”—suggests, a recompilation of questions that appeared in Tagebuch 1966–1971. Ten questionaires, with twenty-five questions each, except in the fifth one, which has one more. Two hundred and fifty-one questions altogether—a new and unusual way of approaching the concept of an essay. Questions about the human condition (about marriage, hope, property and money, friendship, country, death, and many other subjects), some of which seem dumb, most of which are unanswerable but unavoidable, simple, and frightening; the publishers’ presentation says they “challenge the reader to recognize the fragility of the world we live in and to acknowledge the false assumptions upon which the human condition is constructed.”

  She translates a few at random:

  DO YOU LOVE ANYONE?

  WOULD YOU CHANGE PLACES WITH YOUR WIFE?

  YOU FIND OUT THAT SOMEONE HAS AN INCURABLE DISEASE: DO YOU GIVE HIM OR HER HOPE THAT YOU KNOW TO BE FALSE?

  HAVE YOU EVER EMBRACED A DEAD PERSON?

  WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT DEATH, WHAT COMES TO MIND:

  What you’re leaving behind?

  The international situation?

  A particular landscape?

  The idea that it’s all been in vain?

  The things that won’t get done without you?

  The mess in your drawers?

  HAVE YOU EVER FOUND YOURSELF WITHOUT ANY FRIENDS, OR LOWERED YOUR STANDARDS FOR FRIENDSHIP WHEN FACED WITH THE POSSIBILITY?

  Now Harri’s complaining that they’re talking about Fragebogen rather than paying attention to what she’s telling them about her efforts to find the man from the airport. “You’re awful, you could stop reading for a minute,” she says to her, and Julia, overcoming her desire to tell her that she’s bored of her silly stories, closes the book. And then, all of a sudden, she sees Harri touching her armpit, and she asks her if she’s gotten an appointment with Abaitua yet.

  It isn’t the first time Harri’s called her an embittered old woman.

  So when Harri starts telling her story, Julia has no choice but to pay attention to her. At first, when she says once more that the man not answering her ad only seemed like a setback at first glance, Julia is sure that she’s pulling her leg, but when she starts telling them about her trip to the Iberia offices, she realizes without a doubt that she actually has gone down there and told them that she unwittingly picked up something of someone else’s on a flight back from London and now wants to return it. What she wanted to do was return the object, she felt it was her obligation. The object, of course, was the English edition of Montauk that Lynn had lent her. On the dedication page, she wrote more or less the same thing she had put in the newspaper, asking the man for a second chance, and adding her cell phone number. She went to the offices, showed them the dedication—which she deduced must have been something very personal for the owner of the book, seeing as how it had someone’s telephone number on it asking for a very important second opportunity—and told them she felt very bad about having taken the book into her possession, absolutely accidentally—she underlined that—because the man had dropped a bunch of books, she’d helped him to pick them up, and apparently she put the last one into her bag, because she, too, had had a book in her hands, which, it seems, she must have given to the man somehow, because she can’t find it now, but that isn’t what she’s concerned about, that isn’t the question, the other book is the question, the one she showed them, and it was irreplaceable for the man, she had to give it back to him. She said that she hadn’t realized during the journey, because although she always takes a book with her, she never reads in planes, her fear of flying spoils her concentration, and instead she’d entertained herself by glancing at magazines; she only realized that the book in her bag wasn’t her own when she got home in the evening. Apparently, the people in the office passed the copy of Montauk around, at least half a dozen people looked at it, and all of them read the dedication without seeming impressed. Stupid women—the type of women who think they’re beautiful and elegant just because they’re dressed like flight attendants—who didn’t realize what an important problem it was. They started saying that, when it came down to it, it was only a book and if it really mattered to him, he would take the trouble to try and find it. And after listening to all they had to say, she asked to speak with the manager, and when he came out, she repeated her request to him, word for word, with a whole crowd of people listening to her, office workers, customers, and even a courier. She tried to convince him that there was no doubt that the book was more than just a book—mentioning the message and the telephone number once again—and she also said that the man might not have realized where he’d lost the book, and because of that, she was asking them to do all they could to get in touch with him, to tell him they had the book. The office manager was very strict—they didn’t have time, they didn’t know the man’s name, they didn’t know what seat he’d sat in, and all of that theoretical effort just to ask him if he’s misplaced a novel called Montauk. But Harri didn’t give up. If they gave her the passenger list, she would be happy to take care of it herself. She was just trying to do a good deed, to give the man back something that could be of vital importance to him, and give some woman the second chance she was so urgently asking for. She said that they couldn’t possibly ignore such a request, and an older woman who was standing next to her said that she was right. Perhaps the two lovers would never see each other again if the book didn’t make it back to its owner. The issue of confidentiality came up. Nowadays, it’s the f
irst thing you’re told when you ask for information at a counter. She’s convinced that passengers’ data is sent from computer to computer, from phone companies to insurance companies, from travel agencies to banks, and that all of it probably goes through the Civil Guard and the CIA, as well, but she has no choice but to say that she understands.

  “¿Qué te parece?”

  Happy that they have listened to her with attention, she starts using pauses. To an extent, her habit of telling things in the present makes everything take longer. Julia’s talked about it with Martin, because he also tends to do that with the verbs in his writing. You could say “rabies drove him mad, and he killed everyone,” but if you said it in the present, you would need more details. And she gives them. Harri plays the part of each person in the conversation, doing their voices and expressions, too—herself trying to convince the office manager, speaking slowly but seriously and emphasizing her words, saying that love has to be given a chance; the understanding, sympathetic elderly woman behind her saying that she’s beginning to rethink her trip to the Canary Islands; the office manager, more understanding now, as well, perhaps taking the other customer’s reaction to heart, saying he’s sorry, he would love to help, but as he said . . . and Harri, once more, saying she’s not asking this for herself—she points a finger at her chest—but for a couple that undoubtedly has problems. But the office manager, against his own will, sticks to his story and says that tracking the man down might put him in a difficult position. What would happen, for instance, if the book guy is married and traveled without telling his wife about it to go and see a lover of his, and the wife, on reading the letter that they would have to send the man, finds out about his affair that way? He says that some women are very jealous, real control freaks, and he knows what he’s talking about. Harri didn’t like him calling the man “the book guy,” but in any case, to counter those unhelpful observations, she tried to argue that if they did it intelligently, they’d be able to avoid that problem. There’s no need to write a letter, it would be better to phone, and if a woman answers, they could say it was for a market survey. But the office manager was inflexible. Theirs is a serious company and they can’t deceive their customers by doing fake surveys, and it was then that Harri realized that the old woman who had come out in her support had growing doubts as she listened to the office manager’s objections, and the situation got even worse for her when he asked whether the “book guy” had sat next to her, and when she had to say no, he hadn’t, he took out a seating plan for a 727 and asked her to please point out what seat the guy had been in, and she couldn’t tell him that, either. It was then that she realized, by the way everybody was looking at her, that she couldn’t do anything. As if what had happened thus far weren’t enough, the manager said that she should leave the book with them, just in case the man came and asked them for it, and, of course, she had no choice but to do so.