Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  On his way down the spiral staircase, as he goes past the ground floor, he hears the voices clearly, although he still can’t tell whose they are, and he has the uneasy feeling that he’s walking through someone else’s living room. It’s a narrow, difficult staircase, and he has to walk down it on tiptoe to make as little noise as possible, one hand on the handrail and the other against the wall to avoid falling down. A pretty ridiculous scene, he thinks. He doesn’t turn around until he reaches the yard. There are still lights on in three of the windows. It’s clear the writer is awake, and if he’s nosey, he’ll look through the window and recognize him. Abaitua doesn’t care.

  It isn’t the first time he’s walked across a yard at night trying to keep the sound of his steps on the gravel to a minimum. When he was young, he used to go and visit a girl who lived in a house in Ategorrieta and got turned on by hearing her parents in the downstairs living room while they were together. At that time, Abaitua hardly used to have any dinner, because of the anxiety that his nightly clandestine activity made him feel; in addition to the parents, the girl’s elder brothers lived there, but he’d been unable to give up the privilege of her favors even though it meant having to leave by the window and in total silence.

  There’s a smell of hyacinths in the yard. (He thinks it’s hyacinth.) He feels good walking with his jacket over one shoulder. Healthy, younger, although he knows that it wouldn’t be the same if he stopped to think about it. It’s better not to think. He puts his tie on in the car and both cufflinks, gray pearls connected with thin white gold chains. A present from Pilar on his birthday last year. That’s what Pilar’s been giving him recently, cufflinks; she isn’t very imaginative.

  He’s glad he left the car positioned to drive straight out onto the road. And that he didn’t say “I love you.”

  It isn’t the first time he’s gone to the hospital in the middle of the night after going out to dinner and before going home. He likes the hospital at night. It’s also a way of purifying himself, of course. It’s occasionally been a kind of weak excuse. People, especially people who are sitting through the night with a patient, are grateful to see a doctor coming in at unscheduled times to see if everything is going well, and he’s also sure that it’s because of that habit of his that the nurses think he’s one of the good, old-fashioned doctors, even though they can tell what he’s been up to. He doesn’t try to hide it: coffee and alcohol are keeping him up. Even so, it is true that he’s managed, thanks to these unexpected visits, to save a few lives, and that gave him something noteworthy to tell Pilar when he arrived home just as she was about to leave for the clinic.

  At the nurses’ station, the duty nurse says everything’s quiet. He sees there are some files with lab results on the table. He looks through them to see if there’s anything about his patients and is glad to see the results of the additional biopsy on Room 207’s lymph gland in the neck is negative. A good piece of news that’s been locked away for almost twenty-four hours. News that could put an end to outpatients’ worries often takes days to become known, because of appointment timetables and safety margins. His suggestions for improving the flow of test result notifications, at least in hypothetically serious cases, have come to nothing; they would, it seems, lead to insuperable administrative difficulties.

  The carcinoma case in 207 is awake. She’s amazed to see him at that time and without his coat on. He tells her he has good news, everything’s all right, and the patient sheds a tear. She takes his hands and strokes them. Five, ten hours less anxiety for that grateful woman. Some other cases have to wait in vain much longer. She says that the young female doctor told her not to get her hopes up. That doctor with the bad expression on her face enjoys making people scared, he’s seen it himself, just as he likes letting this patient believe he had something to do with her news being good. Two different forms of pleasure, conditioned by different neurotransmitters?

  The front door of the house is locked with two turns of the key, a sign that Pilar isn’t at home. Very surprising. It could be, as has happened sometimes, that she’s heard some frightening piece of news on the television, gotten frightened, and locked herself in. He makes the least noise possible and goes slowly down the long hallway. On tiptoes once more. He keeps as quite as possible, more in order to not scare himself than because he doesn’t want to possibly wake Pilar. In situations like this, he sometimes remembers the Léo Ferré song, “Il n’y a plus rien.” If your wife is sleeping, slap her as you would someone who’s fainted or having a panic attack and shout at her, aren’t you ashamed to be lying there submerged in your liquid decadence like that? That’s more or less what it says, and it usually cheers him up. He stands motionless outside her door, listening for sounds to confirm whether she’s in there or not. He doesn’t hear anything and doesn’t dare open the door to check if the bed’s empty.

  He doesn’t know whether to brush his teeth or not, because of the noise of the electric toothbrush. He looks for a normal one, but the bristles on all the ones he finds are too soft.

  He has to fight against the impulse to go and see if Pilar’s in her bed. He remembers how nervous he was that night when Pilar arrived in the early morning. He doesn’t know how many sleeping pills it took him to get to sleep, and when he woke up at dawn, she wasn’t there by his side. They slept together back then. He’d gotten up and gotten dressed. He didn’t think that anything bad had happened to her, that some problem had prevented her from coming home. It didn’t even occur to him. She’d been speaking about the new neurosurgery resident doctor for weeks, because her brother-in-law was treating him unfairly and excluding him from the operating theater. He was a good guy, smart, someone who deserved better. Suddenly it was clear to him that Pilar was with the young neurosurgeon, and he sat down in the living room to wait for her. He heard the key in the door about an hour later. When she came in, she didn’t look left or right, just walked straight through the living room without saying a word. He remained there, sitting in the living room, seconds, minutes, he doesn’t know how long, and then he got up and went to the bedroom himself. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing her red jacket, her gloves still on, as if she were ready to leave again. “I fell asleep,” she said. And he was amazed by her saying that. He gets the impression she didn’t realize what she was saying. He saw in her only sorrow and ruin. That’s what she looked like, the very picture of sadness and desolation, when she said those words. He had never felt so unhappy; he felt every bit as bad as his wife. He put a hand on her shoulder. It was an impossibly sad moment. He wouldn’t say that Pilar was running away from him when she stood up and walked toward the window. It was cold, and the windows were steamed up. They spent a while like that, the husband standing next to the bed, the wife at the window, with her red jacket and black gloves still, at least the one on her right hand, which she raised slowly. After that long moment, he went up to her from behind, still not knowing what to say to her, what was going to happen. The young neurosurgeon’s name was written in condensation on the window. It was moving and meaningful at the same time. Funny, too, if you looked at it that way. He remembers that everything you could see through the letters was gray, everything except for the white foam on the waves.

  SECOND PART

  13

  When my left kidney stopped working, too, and it all became clear to me, I went straight to a private clinic to have my tests done. At private clinics, they give you your results in an envelope, and you decide when to open it, you choose the best surroundings and conditions for it—lying alone in your bed, for instance, without anybody looking at you. I knew I wasn’t going to be up to hearing the results from the doctor at the hospital without fainting, there in his cold office, the naked strip lighting in my eyes, the nurse standing by, complaining over the phone to someone about her shift having been changed.

  Because that’s what happened the first time, when I found out I had a deadly illness for which there was a treatment
that could guarantee a reasonable expectation of life. The nurse sang out my first and last names from the doorway, the doctor greeted me, trying to see me not as a human being but as a hypernephroma case, I thought, and looked at my lab results with concern, tilting his head to one side and then to the other, while the nurse listed the various inconveniences that having her shift changed was going to cause her. And I, trying to decipher the way the doctor was moving his head—more and more—and the unknown secret in the wrinkles appearing on his forehead, waited for him to give his judgement.

  It lasted forever. I thought I could hear the starter in the lamp, in spite of the nurse talking so loudly. It was the blood in my head, pulsing in my temples. Finally, after muttering a quick “malas noticias”—bad news—in Spanish, the doctor, who had enough medical knowledge to have earned his position even without knowing Basque, gave his judgement, and the blood froze in my veins, I suddenly started sweating, I lost my vision for a moment and thought I was going to fall out of my chair. They must have noticed; the doctor looked at me with distress, I think he liked me, and the nurse, without taking the phone away from her ear, looked on with curiosity as I loosened the knot in my tie.

  Having had that experience, I don’t feel up to going through the same or worse again, which is why this time I’ve decided to request the tests myself and at my own expense. (Even so, it wasn’t easy. I had to overcome the laboratory staff’s reticence to do the tests without a doctor’s prescription, and it was even more difficult to get them to give me the results. I had to proclaim, and even raise my voice in the process, that the sample of blood they had taken was mine, just as the crazed cells they had taken out of me were my property, as was the money I had used to pay their bill.)

  When I got ahold of the results, I didn’t open the envelope straight away, I held onto it. I didn’t open it on the train, either. I made the most of a sort of false control over my destiny. The judgement was in my pocket, and it wouldn’t become final until I wanted it to. I thought about giving myself a few days, pretending I was ill—technically speaking, at death’s door—preparing a short trip, to Syracuse, for instance, to which I’d always wanted to return, in order to enjoy the sun, to eat pasta with those famous sardines, sarde a beccafico and cassata allay siciliana, as if I thought myself to be eternal, which is the same as not thinking, just like the other people on the train, who themselves aren’t free from the risk of dying in some stupid accident before ever reaching the point of being diagnosed with hypernephroma.

  That’s what I should have done, but I’m not like that. And after all, what if the results weren’t all that bad? Saying that hope is the last thing you lose isn’t enough; you practically never lose it, even when there is no hope. I was tempted to take the envelope out of my pocket and open it, but I put it back in again, and then took it out once more, that’s what I did as far as Txominenea, where I decided to leave it until I got home, to the intimacy of my bedroom, because I was afraid that if the results were as bad as I feared, I would lose all my strength, not even be able to get off the train, and then what would I do when I got to Zumarraga, the last stop on the line?

  She was in the house that afternoon. I went into the bathroom to open the envelope, but I didn’t open it, because afterward I would have had to face up to her look and hide my tears if I wanted to cry, which was highly probable. I would wait for her to leave the house. As the minutes went by, my desire to be alone, to lie down on my bed and be able to open the envelope, increased. Finally, she realized she was in the way. She told me off from the living room, because I kept on coming in and going out again with a cigarette stuck in between my lips, since I’d started smoking again. “That’s how you’re going to end up,” she said to me, pointing at a picture of a blackened lung on one side of the cigarette pack, and I answered her sarcastically. She, too, got irritated. She said I was a self-destructive person, my despair was worse than AIDS, because you could catch it in the air, and she didn’t want me to infect her, so she left and slammed the door. A few seconds later, right after closing the door, in fact, she came back in and immediately whispered sorry, she hated seeing me like that, and did I want her to stay. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked me, and I managed to keep calm and answer that I’d rather she leave.

  As soon as I saw she’d gone, I smoked a bunch of cigarettes, one after another, to try to calm my nerves, but without managing to avoid the feeling of guilt smoking gives me. Then I went up to my bedroom and lay down. I opened the envelope with great care, took out the piece of paper with the results on it, and sat motionless with it in my hands for a moment, my eyes closed. Then I opened them and closed them again. It was bad news, as my doctor would confirm to me a week later. As expected, the treatment was killing me; it would affect me more slowly than the illness itself, but it would be more painful. I felt the same sort of sensation as when the doctor diagnosed my illness a year before. A tingling in my head, a roaring in my ears, my sight distorted—I’d explain it if I were up to it, I don’t know why I seem to recall, though I must have read it somewhere, that flies’ sense of vision is supposed to be something like this—profuse sweating, the feeling of being drained of blood, but all of that was quickly alleviated because I was lying on my bed, and so there was no risk of me falling out of my chair.

  I lived through the following days in a dignified way, knowing that death was close. I’d say the hardest thing was when some neighbor would ask how I was and I would have to suppress the urge to answer “at death’s door.” (Sometimes I would reply “still alive,” but they always took it as a joke and said that keeping alive was the most important thing.) I didn’t tell her anything, because I was sure I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to use my situation to blackmail her, and in fact, I would have preferred to make her feel anger or revulsion than to make her feel sorry for me. My intention was to wait until the results were official before saying anything, until the Department of Public Health ran the tests for me again. Meanwhile, I tried to be more agreeable. Let’s say I started to worry about what she’d think of me when I was gone, what kind of memory she’d keep of me, and I tried to not leave things lying around the house and to use her name more when I spoke to her. (I remember I once asked her, “Flora, have you seen my glasses?” and she looked at me with tears in her eyes, and then, too late, I had the feeling that our relationship could have been saved.)

  Sometimes, just for a very short while, I hoped that the laboratory results from the hospital might contradict those from the private clinic—that does happen occasionally—but I didn’t let myself get my hopes up, and when the day of my appointment arrived, I was ready to confront the situation with dignity. I won’t say I found the situation amusing, but strange as it may seem, I went through it as if somewhat removed from it all. To start with, when I walked into the room and the doctor shook my hand—the nurse who was always on the phone was looking for something in a drawer and hardly lifted her head to glance at me—he didn’t know that I already knew that this story was nearing its ending and that he was going to have to break it to me in the right way.

  I found it surprising that after asking me to sit down, the doctor needed so much time to work out that I had hypernephroma. He took some time to find my medical record, and that meant he hadn’t been interested in finding out the verdict before the very moment of giving me my sentence, which is amazing to anybody who isn’t a doctor, because it seems as if it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out beforehand—even if it’s only the slightest information—so that you would know, before the person involved sits down at the desk in front of you, what expression to have on your face, because it isn’t the same thing to say “good morning, have a seat” to somebody you’re going to then go on to tell something pleasant to as it is to say the same thing to somebody who you’re about to tell they’re dying; in the latter case, it’s best to avoid saying things like “it looks like we’re going to have a lovely summer this year.” It’s true tha
t the waiting room is normally full and that the patients, and even more so the people who come with them, don’t normally say nice things about having to wait so long, and because of that, or because he just isn’t much of a talker, the doctor doesn’t usually chat much before getting down to business. It’s also true that looking for paperwork and examining it takes a lot of concentration, and he does that in silence, without making small talk about the weather.

  And then, finally, when he realized what my situation was—my liver and kidneys destroyed by the disease, and my pancreas by the treatment—he lifted his eyes up from the paperwork, and I noticed a gesture of compassion. I also saw that the nurse was looking at me, in the same way, to see to what extent the doctor’s words were going to affect me. I think something in the doctor’s expression must tell her when things are going badly. In any case, she stopped talking on the phone, and, finally, there was complete silence.

  I could only hear my own body’s sounds, it was as if my ears were blocked up, and I wondered what would have become of me if I hadn’t known about my condition beforehand—in other words, if I hadn’t known what was going to happen to me—and even though I knew what I was going to hear, I held on tightly to the arms of my chair, just in case.

  “Malas noticias,” he said, just like the first time, and I deduced that he was going to use one of those techniques they teach them for giving patients horrible diagnoses. He avoided looking at my face, and I was convinced, once more, that he felt compassion for me. He told me that the figures were the same as those from the private clinic, and after putting them into a file folder—by the way, nobody knew where the rest of my medical record was—he added that they were going to do everything scientifically possible. He recommended that as soon as I started to have problems urinating, or if I noticed any hematuria, I should check straight into the hospital, which would make everything easier. There was no need to ask what it would make easier, and I didn’t. Although the doctor’s discomfort was obvious after a certain point, I decided to force my presence on him a little longer, something which, just shortly before, I wouldn’t have been capable of. I was even so bold as to tell the nurse—who had started opening and closing drawers again—not to worry about misplacing historias because I could tell her some new ones, but she didn’t laugh. Perhaps she didn’t realize that the word means both a medical record and a story in Spanish, or perhaps she just didn’t find my play on words funny.