The battered hake looks excellent, and he almost prefers it cold to reheated. Pilar knows that. He just has a couple of pieces, not wanting to tempt fate, but he can’t resist the urge to have a glass of wine. There’s white wine in the fridge. There are two glasses on the drying rack, and when he picks one of them up, he knocks the other off, and it smashes to pieces on the floor.
They struggle momentarily over who’s going to sweep it up with the brush, and finally Abaitua gives in, mostly so that Pilar won’t notice his smell. A scene of domestic submission: the woman kneeling down to pick up the broken pieces of glass while the man looks on, a glass in his hand, leaning against the door frame. The same parasitic idea comes to mind again—the thought of telling her that he’s spent the afternoon having sex with a girl—and he remembers back to one particular schoolday afternoon, just as he always does each time he’s tempted to play with fate. It was a Saturday afternoon, because they’d been singing the “Salve Regina” out in the courtyard, and that was what they used to do after the last class on Saturdays. He was standing with López and several others on the second-floor balcony, directly above the principal, who was conducting the downstairs singers, as well, from the bottom of the stairs. “Bet I can hit him with my spit,” López used to say, letting some saliva dangle off his lip before sucking it back in again, doing that several times, until once, all of a sudden, he let too much out at once and it fell straight onto the principal’s bald head. It was a dramatic event and led to the entire group spending the whole term without any recesses, because their system of loyalties included protecting even the worst-behaved, cruellest, most sadistic, bullying, and selfish classmates, and so nobody told on the culprit, who couldn’t work up the courage to admit what he’d done.
“I wanted to tell you something,” says Pilar, and Abaitua puts his glass down on the sideboard. They’re in the living room. Pilar is sitting on the sofa with the file on the table in front of her. Her way of talking makes him think she isn’t going to say anything about their relationship. He thinks it’s probably going to be some family problem, something to do with the inheritance from her father, but even so, he’s startled and can hardly keep his voice calm when he asks her what it is she wants to tell him about. The problem’s the clinic. They’ve received an offer to buy it, and her siblings, brotherand sister-in-law included, want to sell. Her brother, Arrese, Orl, and many others are already at retirement age and don’t have any intention of continuing to work. And they’re all shareholders. So what sort of offer is it? He looks straight at her, as if he were seriously interested in finding out. She doesn’t know whether the offer is good or bad, but she’s going to oppose it, because it isn’t what her deceased father wanted.
She says it with a firm voice, completely believing what she says, one hand open on the great book of papers in front of her, as if she were going to swear on it. He thinks it looks like a medical book, and that’s what it is, a neurosurgery manual—Manual de neurocirugía, M. Greenberg, he reads—and after that, she rests her hand in her lap.
She’s talked about the clinic with Loiola and gets the impression he’d be prepared to do a Master’s course in hospital management in order to be able to take over at some point in the future. “To carry on the work,” she says, in a way he still finds ridiculous. He feels sorry and to the same degree touched that she feels the need to idealize her father’s business. On several occasions since his funeral, she’s mentioned the conversations she had with the old man—she says he was lucid right up until the end—and it’s as if she’d been debating with Plato, judging by the respect and admiration in her voice when she talks about them. She says she’d be willing to take on the responsibility, and thinks it would be a good option for their son, at least as good as working in some NGO, anyway. She wants him to help her convince him. Abaitua accepts, even though working at his grandfather’s clinic isn’t what he dreamed of for his son. But above all, what he wants to do is retire to his bedroom and be alone. He rubs his eyes very obviously to give the idea that he’s exhausted and, on doing so, gets a waft of Lynn’s scent.
He thinks it was rather cruel of him not to pay more attention to the problems the old man’s clinic is facing.
As he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, he doesn’t understand how Pilar can have missed the loads of cat hair stuck to his pants—even though the hairs and his pants are the same basic color, charcoal gray, the pants are a shade lighter.
15
The man moves his face toward the mirror until his nose is almost touching it. His lower eyelids aren’t swollen, but his eyes are very yellow. When the concierge’s wife arrived with the newspapers, she pointed it out to him and speculated that it might be a consequence of eating too many eggs. He decides it’s time to stop the treatment and let nature—the illness, in other words—get on with its business with no impediments. He supposes his bilirubin levels will go up if he stops taking the medicine; the color of his eyes will improve in exchange for his kidneys shutting down. He hopes he’ll stop losing his hair, too. Repetitive ideas about Jacques Rigaut and his book Je serai un grand mort.
A memory from childhood. He’s standing on the kitchen table. He must be very small, because they’ve put him on the table to be able to dress him more easily, and he sees his mother’s and his nanny’s faces at the same level as his own. It’s very surprising that his mother is dressing him, and that she’s in the kitchen, where she hardly ever goes. She looks nervous, and it’s obvious she’s in a hurry. She hurts him as she pulls a wet comb through his hair, but he doesn’t cry. He feels uncomfortable, and there must be clear signs of that, because his nanny, who’s the one who usually takes care of him, says, “This boy isn’t well, there’s something wrong with him,” and she says it several times, but his mother tells her to be quiet, to stop saying silly things. His mother makes him stick his tongue out, looks under his lower eyelid to examine his connective tissue. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” she says, “his eyes are just a little swollen because he’s slept a lot.” The boy knows that isn’t true.
It seems the concierge’s wife forgot to bring his mail in, and there she is knocking at his door again. He thinks she does it on purpose, to be able to talk some more. Whenever he sees the couple at the front door of the building, the husband is telling his wife to be quiet. This time the woman recommends he go out and enjoy the good weather—“Wonderful autumn weather.” He thinks it would make a good title—Wonderful Autumn Weather. They talk about the seasons. Now that she gets hot flashes, she doesn’t find the winter so harsh. “Do you know what I mean?” It’s because of the hot flashes, of course. He hates the winter, that’s why he plans a getaway to the southern hemisphere every year. Midwinter. The painter Ruiz Balerdi titled his mural at the entrance of the Kutxa savings bank headquarters Las tres estaciones—The Three Seasons—sensibly leaving winter out. He agrees with the concierge’s wife, summer is the best season in Donostia. Spring is short, and it isn’t a sudden explosion of colors, there’s no swift rush of magnificence as there is in places where the winters are cold and there’s snow. But autumn is wonderful, délicieux, peaceful, and cosy, with the perfect light for bringing out the full range of different ochres. He says, without any affectation, that if he had the choice, he’d like to die in the middle of the autumn, when the wind is blowing the leaves of nostalgia around (he remembers “les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, les souvenirs et les regrets aussi”—the dead leaves being raked up along with memories and regrets—from a song made popular by Yves Montand), sometime before the first signs of harsh winter appear, and when spring is too far off to wait for.
The concierge’s wife says that poets like him—he can’t get it into her head that he isn’t a poet, he writes prose—are madmen and they’d be better off paying attention to what they eat.
Then he remembers that song of Brel’s that talks about how it’s hard to die in the spring—“C’est dur de mourir au printemps, tu sais.” Brel ma
naged to live on until the autumn. De Quincey, on the other hand, thought it was terrible to die in the summer, because the body loves days full of light. Barbellion, on the other hand, in The Journal of a Disappointed Man, found cemeteries generally harsher in the winter and thought that his old bones would take to the land better in the summer, when the earth is warm. Barbellion also says that the first night after the funeral is the worst. A tomb under the rain. Dying on a rainy day would make death even more melancholy, and the sight of a blue sky, on the other hand, would be a painful contradiction. He has these types of thoughts one after another, thoughts that are morbid, “but inevitable in someone with the hand of death on his shoulder, hearing a voice telling him that it’s almost time. What else could he think about?”
The sky is lit up with sunlight at the moment. Light is an invitation to live. I say this with no bitterness.
She stays in the gallery for a while watching Lynn weeding the flowerbed. Then watering her bougainvillea. When Julia goes out into the garden, Lynn is raking up the leaves on the path. She offers to help by holding the basket and apologizes for not having pruned the hydrangeas earlier. She used to look after them, but little by little, taking care of the garden became just another duty she was forced to carry out. She thinks it’s another symptom of her loss of affection for Martin and everything around him. She doesn’t say that. What she does say is that he doesn’t know anything about flowers and he’s no good at gardening. Lynn, on the other hand, knows a lot about it. What most people take to be the bougainvillea’s flower is actually a type of leaf, and the real flowers, which are small and white, are inside those leaves. Julia tells her she’s like an encyclopedia. She laughs. She says she never knew that before, either. Kepa, Martin’s friend, told her.
It was Kepa, too, who told her that the chubby birds with the round heads, one of whom has a sort of crest, are melodious or polyglot warblers, and that they have that name because they imitate other birds’ songs. The one with the pointed crest is male, so that dilemma, too, has been sorted out. Julia thinks that Lynn doesn’t know how to explain the fact that Kepa’s been at the house—she says it was a dinner party to celebrate the three month anniversary, so to speak, of their trip—without her having mentioned anything to them, to Martin and herself, beforehand. She seemed to have hidden the fact. But the reason is obvious: she can’t bring up Kepa without mentioning Iñaki Abaitua as well. Julia thinks that’s why she normally feels the need to refer to him as “Martin’s friend,” separating him from Abaitua in order to make the connection legitimate in some sense. In fact, she only mentions Kepa’s name when talking about the dinner party—what a good cook he is, how delicious everything he makes is, the strange stories he tells, how much he makes her laugh—until Julia works up the courage to tease her: she doesn’t believe the shine in her eyes is all down to Kepa. She laughs. He really is an incredible man, fantastic. As well as having the erudition of an encyclopedia and cooking like an angel, he’s running a bookshop and taking care of his mother. The latter doesn’t make him a very attractive man, Julia jokes, but Lynn, for once, doesn’t continue the joke. His mother is seriously disabled, and he takes care of her by himself, feeds her, bathes her, everything, and without ever playing the martyr, always good-humoredly. He doesn’t put himself across as a victim, and although he wants to put his mother in a home, he hasn’t found a place for her yet.
“You have to meet him. You’ll like him.”
“I have enough of men with mothers with just Martin.”
She isn’t embarrassed to show her bitterness, quite the contrary, she feels a sort of exhibitionist pleasure in complaining to the girl. She tells her they quarreled first thing that morning. His mother and sister kept calling and calling him to tell him about their problems, until he finally lost it, and then she had to put up with his complaining for an hour about how the whole world is against him and conspiring to prevent him from having the even minimum degree of tranquillity needed to be able to write. It irritated her. The final straw was his telling her that her obsession with tidying things meant he couldn’t ever find anything. Even though she sometimes manages to take quarrels like that with a sense of humor, knowing that not paying him any attention and waiting for his anger to pass is the best thing to do, she wasn’t able to do that today, partly because she was having trouble with the translation of a particularly difficult paragraph she wanted to finish. She was furious because of his complicated, dark way of writing, and then he just kept going on and on about how nobody ever helps him and he always has to sort everything out himself. He was hurt because she hadn’t helped him find someone who could go to his parents’ house and look after his father. Finally, fed up, she said she had no intention of helping him with that, she wouldn’t put her worst enemy under the orders of his mother and sister. She knows she hurt him, that family’s still family however much he hates them, but she couldn’t take any more—the fact that he gets overcome by so little drives her up the wall. Could she imagine how he’d react if he ever had to bathe his mother? Lynn doesn’t answer. They keep quiet for a moment. Then the girl smiles, takes Julia’s hand, and asks if she’ll invite her in for coffee.
Nobody would have guessed that she’s spent an hour tidying up the books, pieces of paper, index cards, and notebooks lying around. There are work materials on the tables, the floor, and the chairs, everywhere. She’d picked up a dozen of his little notebooks alone. She shows them to Lynn. Useless notebooks with illegible writing scribbled all over them. The worst of it is that Julia’s started doing the same thing, uselessly filling notebooks.
“¿Qué te parece?”
“As Harri would say,” they chant in unison. And they laugh out loud.
A little later, when Lynn mentions Kepa again, they say “Martin’s friend” in unison and laugh together once more. Lynn told Kepa that Julia was planning to translate Frisch’s questionaires, and he thought it was a good idea. Apparently, he said he’d be able to find her a publisher to finance the project, and also that in any case, he thought her own Fragebogen would be a much more interesting read.
Julia is embarrassed that Lynn’s told somebody about a project she wouldn’t dare mention to anyone herself. What’s she up to, acting like her own personal Celestina? They have to look it up in the dictionary. Celestina. Old women in classical theater pieces who serve as matchmakers. Celestina, alcahueta, procuress, bawd. She says she doesn’t mind being a matchmaker, because she’s sure she’s going to like “Martin’s friend” a lot.
Lynn looks at her watch. She says she has to tidy up her apartment. Julia doesn’t want her to go—she can tidy it up later. She’d beg her to stay if she had to. She tells her she doesn’t feel like doing anything. Perhaps what she’s feeling is that emptiness you get when you finish a piece of work that’s taken you a lot of time and effort. Lynn asks her if that means she’s finished Bihotzean and sits down next to her, happy. They’d said they were going to celebrate it. Julia doesn’t feel like celebrating anything, she feels as if she’s lost an arm. Finally, she has to admit that she doesn’t like the story, the novella, or whatever it is; reading it now, it seems really dated to her, it oozes with that self-satisfaction sentimental people feel because they know they’re sensitive, which she finds so repulsive, and it will probably be even more obvious in the Spanish translation because of her. She doesn’t want to tell Martin that she’s finished the translation. She’ll tell him in a few days’ time, and she won’t ever translate any of his work again.
Sometimes, she doesn’t know what she’s going to play until she hears the first chord. The book about Ravel, the one Lynn gave her, is on the stand. Dans tout ce qui est basque, il y a un peu de musique—there’s a little music in everything Basque. Her fingers start playing the Adagio from the Concerto in G Major. Ravel was planning a concerto for piano and orchestra titled Zazpiak bat, meaning “The Seven Are One.” An expression defending the unity of the Basque Country and its seven provi
nces, dating from at least 1906. In 1913 he wrote to Stravinsky that he was working on it, but then he left his notebooks in Paris in 1914 and never started working on it again, using pieces of it in other works instead. Fragebogen: Why did Ravel never finish Zazpiak bat, the concerto for piano and orchestra that he started? She thinks she’s going to buy another blue notebook to reflect on that. First off, she thinks that a concerto for piano and orchestra, just like a symphony, needs a story and that, unfortunately, Ravel never found one. He had the music, but not the words. Nonsense she wouldn’t dare say to anyone other than a foreigner, and not to anyone who didn’t know a lot about music. So the Basques never got their Zazpiak bat, and she misses a work that has never existed. “¿Qué te parece?” “As Harri would say,” they chant again in unison.
They don’t realize that Harri herself is there, knocking on the gallery door. They don’t know what to say when she asks them what’s so funny, and then, when she asks after Martin—“What’s the boy up to?”—Julia tells her that he’s gone to his parents’ house and thinks that Harri can tell there’s a connection between her good mood and Martin’s not being there.
She says “poor Martin,” with a voice full of pity, when she hears that he’s having trouble finding somebody to look after his father. Julia doesn’t like him being seen as a martyr. “What do you mean ‘poor’ him?” she says. “Poor everyone else around him,” she moans like a wife. She’d like to see Harri spend more time around him and then hear what she has to say. But Harri says she’s always complaining, she should be more understanding about all his problems, his wanting to finish his novel, his need to look after his family. Lynn is afraid they’ll start quarreling, apparently, and so she starts talking about Martin’s recurring nightmare, in order to say something. She’s told them her theory on other occasions, saying the nightmare must be connected with something that happened to him as a child. She’s realized that when he talks about problems connected with his family, or when he’s spent time with his relatives, or his sister’s come to visit, or he’s gone to see them, he always complains the next morning that he’s had the nightmare. So they have to watch out, the same thing could happen tomorrow. She says it in a completely serious tone, with no sign of it being a joke, just as seriously as when she’s doing research work at the hospital. Harri, too, listens to her completely seriously, agreeing that the poor writer’s nightmare must be linked to some trauma from his childhood.
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