Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  One of the fenders on his motorboat isn’t where it should be, and he doesn’t know whether to go down and put it right while he waits for Lynn or not. He does have time, because it’s a quarter to one according to the San Pedro clock, but afraid of getting dirty, he decides to leave it for later.

  He goes toward Portaletas, which is where they’re meeting.

  There used to be a barometer hanging there, protected by nothing but a thin iron mesh, and sailors used to go up to it and tap on it to get the needle to move and find out if they were going to have good weather or bad. His father used to do that, as well, and that gesture proved to him that his father was in possession of what he thought was very important knowledge. He’s had some very good times here.

  He sees her walking toward him along Portu Kalea from a distance. She’s wearing a denim skirt, a dark turtleneck sweater, and a long jacket, which is also dark and looks like a sailor’s. That’s what he says to her, wanting to seem natural, that she’s dressed absolutely right for the place, and she, laughing, says it’s difficult to measure up to the standard of such a wonderful place. She seems glad to see him, and he’s glad, as well, although he does feel nervous, because they’re going to have to “talk about us.” He tells her there used to be a barometer there. The girl turns toward where he says for a moment and then replies that she was afraid he might not show up. He thinks it best to pretend he hasn’t heard. She’s done her hair up in a bun, and a few shiny locks are hanging loose. He thinks it’s the hairstyle that suits her best.

  They stand in front of the plaque put up in honor of the arrantzales—the fishermen—and talk a little about people’s tendency to become sentimentally attached to things that no longer exist. He says they should knock that ugly building down, it’s just in the way, or otherwise find some different use for it, it’s completely unsuited to what it’s being used for now. Nostalgia for the primary sector. We want to believe that it’s still the essence of our ethnic purity. We still talk about “our arrantzales,” but at this point it’s really only a few Peruvian and Senegalese guys scraping up the Bay of Biscay’s last remaining fish stocks. The real locals are all civil servants now. Any tourist who wants to see them will have to go to the regional government headquarters.

  The girl would like to see his fishing boat.

  He has to explain to her that the small boats, like his, that don’t have a cabin and look more like skiffs than fishing boats are actually more expensive than most things that look like yachts. That’s what our things are always like, good quality but humble appearance. Discretion above all. Our elegance is manifested in the same way when it comes to clothes—we’d rather wear high-quality suede jackets than cheap suits and ties. But, then, everything’s changing very quickly.

  His boat has a bait tank, a sounding line, a Volvo motor, sixty horsepower—real horses, not like the ones in some family sedan, the ones real boats use. He hardly takes it out anymore. He used to enjoy fishing, when there were still fish around, and above all he loved letting the boat drift on summer evenings, the sensation of freedom it used to give him. But you have to love a boat, and he’s lost that love. Ever since he found out that some friends of his son’s were using it for transporting explosives. After transferring the stuff from at least two other ships out at sea, they went up river and stored it all in his father-in-law’s mastless yacht, which was less anchored there than it was run aground.

  He could probably come across as a daring man if he told her what happened on the boat, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Unfortunately, it’s too late to keep quiet, because the girl now wants to know if they suffered any consequences afterward. Nothing, happily. Father and son had to go through some unpleasant interrogations, particularly his son, but they themselves reported what was going on and were able to prove that those madmen had forced his son into it all. The trial will be held soon, and he hopes they won’t even be called as witnesses. That’s all there is to it. He isn’t sure if it’s the first time Lynn’s asked him if his son is like him. Everyone says they’re identical. Straight hair, round, soft faces, vulnerable characters. He doesn’t like them being similar, it makes him feel guilty. But he doesn’t mind him not having studied medicine. What he would like is for him to go back to the States as soon as possible.

  He decides to raise the mooring rope on the bow a little and put the fender in the right place, so after going down to the bilge, he jumps from boat to boat until he gets to his own. He has to keep his balance, and he needs strong legs to not look ridiculous holding onto things with his hands. He knows the American girl’s watching him, and like an adolescent in front of his girlfriend, he makes a show of moving with agility and strength, even at the risk of falling into the water. After completing the easy, precise task, he lifts his head up and there the girl is, sitting on a bollard, and next to her, Jaime Zabaleta and his bodyguard. “That’s quite something, you’re in shape,” says Zabaleta cheerfully.

  At first Abaitua doesn’t dare introduce them, but as time goes by, he finds it increasingly difficult not to do so, and the situation, with the girl sitting just a step away, becomes more and more uncomfortable for him. Jaime Zabaleta asks him how things are going at the hospital, how he’s getting on with Arrese. He seems to know all about what’s going on in the department. Abaitua’s always found him to be quite a gossip. Now he doesn’t know how to get rid of him. He tells him the first thing that comes to mind, but there comes a moment when it becomes impossible for him to go on pretending he doesn’t know the girl, who’s still sitting there, because Zabaleta doesn’t take his eyes off her, and Abaitua can’t find the right way to say that he’s with her. Until, finally, Zabaleta says, “I see you’re in good company,” showing off his large teeth when he smiles, as if he’s just caught a child doing something naughty, and he walks away with his bodyguard after openly inspecting the girl.

  Donostia is very small. It’s so small that there’s every chance of a victim’s mother bumping into his killer’s mother. Iñaki Abaitua feels the need to tell the girl that Jaime Zabaleta used to have a boat he talked about as if it were a yacht, he christened it Nire aberria—meaning My Homeland—and he used to moor to the starboard of his own boat. But the police advised him not to go out to sea in it, because they’d gotten word of a plot involving a boat, and since the objective may have been to kill him, he ended up deciding to sell it. He doesn’t have much contact with him, and he doesn’t particularly like him, but the memory of running into him from time to time and exchanging hellos during the so-called “years of lead”—the bloody years—in the eighties and nineties does make him feel he has some type of connection with him. He’s sure they both used to think about the possibility of someone coming up and shooting him in the back of the neck as they stood there talking on the corner of the avenue and Andia Kalea. Sometimes he even arranged to run into him when his son was young, for the boy to realize how absurd it was for a man like that—a Basque speaker, a much better Basque speaker than many people who consider themselves to be nationalists, a man who had a boat called the Nire aberria, who was friendly and polite—to require the protection of a bodyguard, and Zabaleta always tried to fulfil that pedagogical mission, being a friendly, polite, genuine Basque to the best of his ability.

  The American girl didn’t realize that most of the bollards for tying up the boats were actually canons stuck nozzle-down into the ground.

  They go along the city wall toward Mount Urgull, one of the city’s treasures; he would like to show it to her but doesn’t know if that’s a good idea. It’s too romantic. They only go as far as the Paseo de los Curas—the old priests’ promenade at the foot of it—where there are views of the bay and the smell of grilled sardines from the quay. The girl praises the view, and he can’t stop himself from mentioning how it’s changed over time. She should have seen it when he was young, without so many buildings, when there were elegant houses around the Kontxa rather than those great ugly b
uildings. The girl jokes that it can’t have changed all that much over just two centuries. Abaitua’s sure that if he went up to her and opened her jacket to put his arms around her waist, she wouldn’t object. But he’s promised himself that nothing will happen.

  He shows her Chillida’s marvelous alabaster cross on the baptistery wall in the Santa María Basilica. The girl speaks with enthusiasm about how well the old and the new combine together when both are beautiful; she strokes the warm, luminous stone with both hands. Abaitua puts his hands in his pockets. In any case, the church smells damp, like it hasn’t been ventilated enough.

  On what at the time was called Trintate Kalea, one of the few houses to survive the fire of 1813. It’s one of the dates he knows—August 31, 1813—because it’s the street’s current name. That day, the English and Portuguese allies liberated Donostia, which had been fairly peaceful during its six years of French occupation, the high command having previously ordered the Gipuzkoan battalions to withdraw, and to celebrate the liberation, the allies pillaged the city and set fire to it in an orgy that lasted for six and a half days. The Donostians who didn’t manage to escape were put to the knife. They raped the women, including children and old ladies. A record of the events, written by a group of responsible citizens, referred to the city in the past, saying that Donostia “ceased to exist”: “San Sebastián dejó de existir.” Perhaps that explains the Donostians’ lack of bellicose enthusiasm the next time a war broke out, having learned that the difference between an ally and an enemy can be far from clear.

  Konstituzio plaza. Apparently, Le Corbusier said its measurements were perfect. Abaitua presumes that half the plazas in the world meet those criteria. They’re standing in the middle of the square, and the girl says that she shares the Swiss architect’s opinion. In the past it had other names, as well, the Plaza del 18 de Julio, among others. It was Plaza Berria, meaning “New Square,” when they first opened it to the public, and that seems a more appropriate name to Abaitua. There’d been a guillotine there when the French were trying to spread their revolution southward. The numbers painted on the balconies draw people’s attention—they used to be rented out back when bullfights were held there. The square’s current name reminds him of an anecdote about when they changed the name of the hill from Ategorrieta Gaina to Konstituzio Gaina. Apparently, an English general who’d been invited to the ceremony said that from then on, the place would be called Constitution Hill, and everyone laughed out loud at that: “Konstituzioa hil, konstituzioa hil!” The American girl isn’t aware of the homophony between the English word “hill” and the Basque hil, meaning “kill” or “die,” but she laughs and says, “Aberria ala hil”—homeland or death. She does know that expression.

  Everything he tells her seems interesting to the girl, and he doesn’t have any trouble finding things to talk about. Everything he sees brings a story to mind, and the American girl listens to him with attention, but he gets the feeling that he’s making use of that parliamentary obstruction technique known as filibustering in which, to prevent others from speaking, you never stop talking.

  They go from street to street—she likes the street names, Bilintx, Perujuantxo, and so on—until they reach Kanpandegi Kalea. They can see the bay on one side from the walkway that crosses over Portu Kalea, and one of the gates into Konstituzio Plaza off in the distance on the other side. There are people walking around below them, but not many anymore at that time of day, “because we’ve become European,” he says. They look for traces of fossils in the paving stones for a while. An almost perfect fern leaf, it looks like a red fern. The girl sits down on the stone bench and leans over the handrail to look at the people below. It’s a situation that even with the most charitable interpretation possible is compromising. It’s true that he doesn’t mind if some acquaintance or other sees them, unconvincing though his explanation would be—the young American sociologist and anthropologist is taking part in a research project at the hospital. But if such an encounter has to happen, he would rather it not be on a dark, empty street, as if they were teenagers in love. Sitting on stone is a good way to get acute cystitis, he says, and the girl leaps up as if on a spring and salutes him, “Sir, yes, sir.”

  Now they’re walking along the empty street in silence, like a couple with nowhere to go. They will soon be back where they started. Kokotxa, the restaurant, is on the corner across from Santa María. A fine restaurant that experiments with new recipes, it’s just the right choice for taking the American girl to, and he thinks there’s little risk of coming across any friends there. His friends prefer more traditional places. He decides to invite her to dinner. Contrary to what he thought just a short while before, it seems to him that having dinner together will give their meeting purpose, while without having dinner, their sole, unavoidable reason for meeting up would be to talk about “us.”

  Kokotxa is a nice place. “I like the wine,” says Lynn as she raises her glass.

  They talk about gastronomic societies. (He can see Gaztelubide through the window.) A space of freedom for men to get away from their Basque wives, who usually have very strong characters, despite the fact that it’s the women who always do the cleaning, and often the cooking, as well, he admits. He’s never been a member of one himself, but when he does go, he prefers the traditional ones, ones that women aren’t allowed in. The anthropologist doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Abaitua thinks that men don’t speak much about women when they’re at these traditional clubs, despite what many people believe. The men, in general, talk about things of little importance, they become like children in order to avoid the arguments that would arise if they talked about serious matters. As far as different social classes mixing together is concerned, which Kepa talked a lot about on their trip, he wouldn’t like to spoil this idealized view of it all, but he doesn’t want to lie to her, either. It is true that in the past, more than now, business owners and workers, shipbuilders and fishermen would get together at the same table and, as he’s just said, forget about serious matters that could lead to disagreements. It’s also true that their bourgeoisie was discreet, they didn’t say much about their own status and either shared or knew how to adapt to the working men’s culinary tastes and, especially, to their financial limitations. And the proletariat, in that context, were able to maintain their dignity and their punctiliousness about paying for their rounds.

  The girl suggests toasting Kepa’s health. Her eyes are shiny, and her cheeks red. It’s clear that drinking makes her more emotional. He’s very lucky to have such a good friend, she says, “You are a fortunate man.”

  It’s difficult not to mention Bordeaux. Abaitua thinks that the memory of it is hovering in the air, it’s something that would be coming up again and again in their conversation if he weren’t making an effort to talk about things far removed from it. Now, for instance, when they’re served their coffee and some truffles, there aren’t any jokes about chocolate’s aphrodisiac qualities.

  “We’re leaving, then.”

  The girl keeps quiet in the car while he talks about the places they’re driving past: the Bellas Artes building, where, on Thursday afternoons, they used to go to watch double bills. He doesn’t tell her that he also used to go there in order to feel up the servant girls, who, like the schoolchildren, had the day off—anything to avoid talking about sex. They would sit up in the highest seats in the wooden amphitheater. As soon as the lights went out, they would go down, step by step, to the lowest level, where the girls sat, and touch their breasts from behind. Normally the girls let them. Later, on the way out, they would pretend not to know each other, and in fact, you couldn’t really say they did. They were mostly slightly older than the boys, from Extremadura for the most part, and he was occasionally embarrassed on exiting to see how ugly the girl he’d just been fondling was.

  Where those red brick buildings are, the ones that stretch out from the park to the hill the hospital’s on, there were
once marshes. He used to go around them by boat. Now Lynn turns toward him and says that must have been back in the Holocene era. It’s the second time she’s made that same basic joke, and Abaitua is aware that he’s to blame, because he refers to his age all the time, as if it were a matter of style. He uses the expression in my day a bit too much.

  In my day. The American didn’t know what in illo tempore meant. In illo tempore Jesus dixit discipulis suis . . . Blessed are those who haven’t had to learn the Latin verse by heart.

  He stops the car in front of the iron gate, having already turned around to be ready to go back to the road. He does not turn the engine off. Lynn opens the door but not completely. He makes sure the parking brake is on by pulling it up with more strength than is really needed and doesn’t take his hand off it, ready to let it down again. “Eskerrik asko afariagatik,” she says, thanking him for dinner. She learned to say that in Ainhoa. She says it was very nice and smiles at him. It’s no longer the same smile she had just half an hour ago when they raised their glasses in the restaurant, now there’s a shadow of sadness in it. She’s so grateful. She puts one hand on her chest and says “I . . .” twice, as if she were in pain, before completing the sentence. “I feel very grateful.” She has a few freckles where her full breasts start. He knows about that nasty scar of hers, too. And knows that her body, which looks so discreet when she’s dressed, is exuberant when she’s naked. She sits up just enough to be able to kiss him on the side of his lips. He doesn’t move, he holds tightly onto the steering wheel with one hand and onto the parking brake with the other; he looks at the hydrangeas. She opens the door a little more and keeps it open. “I don’t want you to do anything that’s uncomfortable for you,” she says, and she turns toward the house, in which there are many lights on. Now they’re both silent and looking at the house. The flickering of a television can be clearly seen through one of the windows. The writer seems to be a nighthawk, he says, to say something, but she doesn’t pay any attention to the comment and looks at him so seriously he gets frightened. He’d say the youngest thing about her is the soft, curly hair that sticks out from the base of her neck below her bun. When she asks if he wants to come in, he doesn’t answer. “I don’t want you to do anything that might cause you problems,” she says again.