Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  To change the subject, Julia brings up her cousin in Sagastizabal. Her mother said that the guy’s girlfriend is Peruvian and that she doesn’t want to give birth at the hospital. Apparently it’s a cultural tradition, children have their roots in the houses where their mothers give birth to them, they become part of that place, and that’s why the girl wants to give birth in the cabin they have out there in Sagastizabal. Her mother doesn’t approve. She says they shouldn’t let foreigners impose their customs, quite the opposite, they should be made to integrate. Julia disagreed, and as is always the case whenever they disagree, they ended up getting angry.

  Harri agrees with Julia’s mother. She has no time for immigrants from underdeveloped countries and their backward cultural traditions, among other things because they usually harm women. We already have enough work overcoming the obstacles our own culture creates. Just when we’ve managed to make miniskirts acceptable, now we have to accept people wearing veils. Lynn says that cultures other than our own can make positive contributions. What’s more, giving birth at home is something some people are demanding in today’s society, and they want to do it in the most natural but also the safest conditions possible. In her opinion, the Department of Public Health should guarantee the option of giving birth at home for those low-risk patients who want to. Harri doesn’t agree. She says it would be too expensive, and in any case, who is it that’s demanding it? She can’t stand all this alternative medicine, philosophy, and so on, or put up with those people who speak in low, soft voices about the goings-on in their intestines; she hates brown rice and soy milk, she finds women who don’t shave their armpits and placenta-eating bald men revolting. Who knows how long she would have gone on if Julia hadn’t stopped her with a loud “that’s enough!”? She shuts up and looks at her with a smile. She, too, knows that she gets hysterical.

  She docilely asks her what she wants to talk about, and Julia says why doesn’t she tell them about her search for the man from the airport, just as she might have asked to talk about Lynn’s bougainvilleas, or any other old thing, but Harri starts talking without realizing it was a joke. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have much to tell them. The Iberia guy from Iberia is still looking into it, but so far his calls have led to nothing. It’s going slowly, but she’s placed her trust in the Iberia guy. Now she defines him as “one of those young people” who are exactly what they seem to be, not like people back in her day, who seemed forward-thinking from the outside but deep down were sexist and retrograde.

  Julia doesn’t know if Lynn is taking Harri seriously; at a glance, she seems to be. She listens attentively, as if it were the first time, to what she’s saying, which has little new to offer, and she asks the same questions to show that she’s interested, as if the whole thing were a routine. Now what she wonders is what the Iberia guy is going to say to the man who’s going to admit that it was his bag that broke on the aeroplane, assuming he ever manages to find him. Harri looks at her as if she hasn’t understood the question. He won’t have to say anything. The guy from Iberia will give Harri his phone number, and she’ll be the one to call, and then she’ll repeat more or less what she wrote in the book: she’s the woman who helped him to pick up his books, he offered her a book called Montauk, with a beach and a lighthouse on the cover, but she hadn’t dared to take it, and now she regrets it.

  Lynn asks how she thinks the man will react.

  Harri looks irritated and asks if Lynn doubts he’s going to remember her.

  She says she doesn’t, she didn’t mean that.

  Now the dreamer, Harri, admits that she’s thought about hundreds of possibilities for when she meets up with the man from the airport, and Julia shivers imagining that she’s going to tell them all of them. Does Harri realize that? Of course she does, she tells them right away not to worry, she isn’t going to bore them with her imaginings, and they both ask her, beg her, to tell them, Lynn with particular passion, perhaps repentant because she had the same thought. Harri doesn’t want to tell them anything, they don’t take her seriously. Julia would love to tell her that she’s not at all interested in the airport adventure and would she please keep it to herself, but for the sake of peace, and hoping to introduce some humor into the conversation, she asks Harri if she’s considered, among her different theses, the possibility of disappointment—they finally get to meet up, and, for some reason, the man disappoints her. For instance, what if he says “hola, muñeca”—the Spanish equivalent of “hey, baby”—when he sees her? Harri is not amused. She shakes her head—as if thinking, “You poor fool, how could you possibly understand?”—and finally answers by asking whether she thinks she, Harri, would go to such lengths to find a man who looks as if he would be the sort to say “hey, baby.” Harri looks genuinely hurt, and Julia has to say once again that she’s only joking. How does she imagine the meeting? She uses all her effort to look as if she’s really interested. Harri does not answer immediately. She looks at her sharply, inquisitively, but doesn’t seem wholly convinced by what she sees, answering without much enthusiasm that she thinks he must be shy. She says that when she imagines it, that’s the option that keeps coming to mind, again and again. The man comes up to her and says “Hi”—no hey, and certainly no baby—and he’s shy and not very expressive. And she would be glad if he turns out to be like that. They sit in silence for a long while, until it becomes apparent that she doesn’t want to say any more about the man from the airport. Although the link is only indirect, they start talking about the Basque character, with Harri’s last remarks as their starting point. Are they really so cold? Lynn is very interested in the subject, because she’s a sociologist, of course, and Julia tells them what she just read in the book about Ravel: On parle de ma sécheresse de coeur. C’est faux. Et vous le savez. Mais je suis basque. The Basque themselves accept the cliché. With pride, in fact; it isn’t a shortcoming—it’s elegant moderation.

  An anecdote about the Basques’ proverbial miserliness when it comes to affection is the one the famous linguist Mitxelena used to tell. After spending eight years at war and in prison, when he got back home, his mother said, “So, you’re back then?” Nothing more than that. She tells it for Lynn’s benefit, knowing that Harri is familiar with the story. According to the linguist, he didn’t need to hear any more than that to understand that his mother loved him a lot and to know how glad she was to have him back. Lynn laughs. A sad laugh that expresses sorrow rather than disagreement. She says that sometimes you need to hear more than that, you need to hear that someone loves you. There’s a short pause, as if they’re embarrassed to go on talking. Or you feel the need to express your own love but you have to suppress that desire in order for the other person not to feel uncomfortable. Lynn says all of this without removing her apologetic smile. Of course it’s not for her to say, but she thinks that Basque men might be inhibited when it comes to expressing their feelings. Perhaps they’re too reserved.

  Then Harri says, “So he’s one of them, too, is he?”

  Lynn goes as red as a tomato.

  “Don’t be naughty.”

  Something Julia didn’t mention when she was telling the anecdote about the linguist coming back home after the war: though her own mother, just as Lynn’s put it, is inhibited when it comes to expressing her emotions, Julia couldn’t stand it if she were more open in that sense. She remembers that her mother used to say “don’t be silly,” seemingly angry or uncomfortable, whenever her father was acting affectionately toward her. One day her father wanted to carry her mother up the stairs in his arms, but she didn’t let him; Julia must have been very little, and she thought that her mother was being mean.

  Harri, on the other hand, doesn’t mind telling them that her husband is a true Basque but is nevertheless very open and affectionate, even too much so, and she’s beginning to find him somewhat cloying. But then she adds that she’s not really sure, she doesn’t know if the same behaviour would irritate her coming from som
ebody else. Sometimes Julia is moved by how transparent Harri is. Then Harri opens her green leather briefcase, and the clasp makes its usual dry sound. She’s just remembered that she’s brought back the English translation of Montauk that Lynn lent her. Before giving it back to her, she apologizes for having spoilt one of the pages by writing a message on it for the man from the airport. She thought about rubbing it out with an eraser, but in the end she left it as it was. It’s on the dedication page, written clearly and expressively: Fui tonta rechazándolo en el avión. Espero que me des otra oportunidad. Translation: “It was silly of me to refuse it on the plane. I hope you give me another chance.” And then her cell phone number.

  As she flips through the pages, Lynn says that she prefers it like that and it’ll make for a great memory. Julia knows what she’s up to, she’s looking for the passage in which the couple is leaving the hotel and Max regrets the girl finding out that he’s just paid twice her weekly wage for the two nights they’ve spent there, and not the other way around, as it says in the Spanish translation.

  It couldn’t have been any other way: “It irritates him that Lynn, who made the booking, knows more or less what he is now paying for their overnight stay.”

  Lynn says once more that she has to tidy up her apartment and that she has to go to the store first to get some beers and something to eat. So they can deduce she’s going to have a visitor. “Come here,” Harri says to her. She hugs her tightly around the waist. Lynn has her eyes and mouth wide open to say that she’s strangling her. She’s breathless. Harri says, “Ikusten? You see? There’s no pleasing you two.” Then Lynn says that they’ll understand her eventually and hugs her back, but without touching her body.

  She asks them if they know the tale about the porcupine. They don’t. She says it’s a German fable. One cold winter’s night, a group of porcupines all decide to sleep together to keep warm. But their prickles make it impossible for them to sleep, and the next night, they move away from each other. It’s terribly cold, and they move together once more. The porcupines have to move around like that from one day to the next until, finally, they find the right distance in terms of manners and decency.

  Lynn has just disappeared up the stairs when she comes back down a few steps again and tells them, “Don’t forget to stop in at the bookshop when you go to the university so you can meet Martin’s friend.”

  She almost forgot to take her copy of Montauk.

  The Montaigne quote reads like this in English: This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one.

  Even so, on page 136 it says: This book was written in good faith, reader, and what does it keep concealed? And why? Julia thinks it would be interesting to know Lynn’s version. The Lynn from Montauk.

  When they’re alone again, Harri asks her about “our boy” again and whether he’s writing. Julia doesn’t know what to say. The only thing she can think of is that his character has jaundice and spends a lot of time in front of the mirror looking at his own decay. Finally she answers that she thinks he is writing. “You know how it is, he doesn’t say much.” They talk about the Basques’ famous reticence and, once more, draw the conclusion that there are all sorts. Although the train they hear leaving the stop is only the 19:02, Harri says they’d better get going.

  But then, later, they have too much time. In Ibaeta, being a fairly newly built area, like any other recently developed district in any other town, Julia doesn’t mind sitting at the bar’s outdoor terrace as Harri suggests. She doesn’t like sitting outside in places where she thinks people she knows might walk by. Obviously she’d rather go into Martin’s friend’s bookshop, but Harri doesn’t seem to remember about it, and without knowing why, she doesn’t dare to suggest it. She doesn’t want to show any particular interest and has been hoping for Harri to suggest it herself. In fact, she’s very surprised Harri hasn’t suggested it, because she’s a person with a lot of curiosity, in fact she’s something of a gossip. She feels ridiculous when it occurs to her that Harri might have a tendency to steer her away from other men in order to make sure she sticks with Martin, but that’s what she thinks.

  Hitz bookshop. Hitz is Basque for “word.” From where Julia is, on the other side of the roundabout, she can only see its door and its single window on the corner of the squat white building that houses it. She doesn’t know what to order and asks for a shandy. Harri orders a gin and tonic; she says it tones her up.

  Harri likes outdoor bars. She says they’re good places to go. Julia remembers how enthusiastically she spoke about Bilbao’s—apparently, she spent a lot of time sitting at different ones, hoping the man from the airport would walk by. Julia wonders if she really did do that.

  Harri enjoys sitting there in the sun with her eyes closed. They don’t say much. Julia keeps the bookshop door in sight—it hasn’t opened once since they’ve been there. Which isn’t long, in fact. Harri sits up in her chair, perhaps because the sun has gone behind a cloud, and asks if she’s going to go back to work at the regional government office. Julia is almost sure she is but says she doesn’t know, in order not to say that she wants to split up with Martin, even if only professionally.

  “I’d like not to have to work.”

  “What would you do if you won the lottery?”

  She’s never asked herself that common question. She’s never dreamed of having money or thought about the possibility of living without having to work. But recently she has allowed herself to fantasize: Write a history of the Basque Country for young people in the style of Gombrich’s Short History of the World; translate Frisch’s Fragebogen, his questionaires, into Basque, his Verhör, his interrogatories, in other words, and Montauk, perhaps; organize the notes she took while translating Bihotzean about peoples’ attitudes toward violence and do more work on them; and write about writing, about writing in Basque. Take a trip to Cuba.

  Harri would be astonished, of course, to hear that she has ideas about writing. Martin is the writer. Julia’s sure that if she told her about her plans, she’d tell them to Martin, and then she’d have to put up with him teasing her.

  Young people come and go, most of them with shoulder bags. A girl on a bike, riding it with style.

  Julia says that if she won the lottery, she would go to Cuba, to which Harri says, “Honey, it’s degrading to have to go all the way to Cuba just to have a little fun.” She laughs at the joke. But it’s a fantasy she has no trouble telling her: She’d go with Zigor, she’d like to look for the old black gentleman that used to work as a servant for one of her great uncles. Apparently, he knows how to sing “Gernikako Arbola” and even say a few sentences in Basque, too. Her grandfather’s brother is dead now, but he used to own a restaurant in Havana, a place called Centro Vasco, which is still open although it’s now state-owned. The old black gentleman must be very old by now, if he’s still alive. She knows that half a dozen years ago, a journalist visited the Centro Vasco, he met him there, and when he said he was from the Basque Country, the black man spoke to him in Basque—and also sang him “Gernikako Arbola”—but unfortunately, the journalist didn’t understand him, because he didn’t speak Basque himself. The black man told him about how her great uncle used to send him to the pilota court with messages in Basque, which he would learn by heart in order to deliver them, and he would bring back the replies using the same method. The black man didn’t know what the messages meant, he just passed them on like a parrot, although he did still remember some of them. What were they about? Were they to do with bets? Was he just asking them what they wanted for dinner after the game? So why did they use Basque? Julia doesn’t know, and she’d like to find out.

  And what would Harri do? She shrugs her shoulders. She pushes her empty glass to the middle of the table and says, “I’ve got an appointment with Abaitua tomorrow. Do you mind coming with me?”

  They don’t t
alk much on their way to the university. Julia decides to accompany Harri there and then go back to the bookshop, if only for just a brief minute, and even at the risk of arriving late for the roundtable talk. She’s curious to meet this friend of Martin and Abaitua’s. They give each other two kisses goodbye. Harri puts her hand on Julia’s cheek, “Take care of him.”

  Hitz bookshop. It looks like some local neighborhood stationery shop, and the volumes on display in the window make it look like a second-hand bookshop. There aren’t that many books, either, and a beautiful model of a sailing ship takes up a large portion of the display window. So because of that, it also looks like a shop specializing in maritime matters. But even though The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Moby Dick and Alberto Fortes’s Memorial de a bordo are there, there’s also Escoffier’s My Cuisine and an encyclopedia about watercolor techniques. Her attention is drawn to In the Face of Death, by one Peter Noll, because its subtitle is Funeral Oration by Max Frisch. So she has an excuse she can confess to for going in.

  Inside there’s only a girl behind the counter; she lifts her head from the book she’s reading when a bell hanging from the door rings as Julia opens it. There’s a curtain behind the girl, separating the storefront from the back. Julia tries to spend time looking at the shelves, and she has the sensation she’s looking around the books at somebody’s house while dinner is being made. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry. Beneath the Wheel, Hermann Hesse. Bakakaï, Witold Gombrowicz. Balizko erroten erresuma, Koldo Izagirre. Botoiletan, Antton Luku. Bluebeard, Max Frisch. Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville. Baudelaire, Jean Paul Sartre. There’s no sign of movement behind the curtain, and it’s getting late. A failed mission, though not completely—at least she’s come across something about Frisch that she wasn’t aware of. The phone rings, and the girl answers it before taking Julia’s money. She says, “I’m sorry, Kepa’s in London. Please call back next week.”