Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  The Maupassant translator is a man with a beard and a deep voice, with the tender, melancholy look some Basque men have in their eyes. Julia likes his explanation, it’s very practical, he talks about several specific passages and the difficulties involved in translating them. He chooses a paragraph, compares it with the students’ versions, and they talk about it. The problem is that they keep going beyond the text’s linguistic characteristics and talking about the contents. A problem only in relative terms, in any case, because most of what’s said is interesting.

  “Soudain Jeanne eut une inspiration d’amour. Elle remplit sa bouche du clair liquide, et, les joues gonflées comme des outres, fit comprendre à Julien que, lèvre à lèvre, elle voulait le désaltérer.”

  A young girl, probably the youngest in the group—Julia is the oldest, of course—doesn’t stop talking, even though she blushes each time she speaks. She says that some of the things in the book are strikingly daring, “this part about quenching his thirst lip to lip,” for instance, in a novel that’s otherwise said to be “une peinture remarquable des moeurs provinciales de la Normandie du XIX siècle”—an exceptional portrait of provincial customs in nineteenth century Normandy. And this, as well as making everyone laugh aloud, livens up the debate.

  At moments like this, everybody has something to say. The French, now they really knew how to have a revolution, nobody else guillotined their kings; and the men make ironic remarks about French women’s famous brazenness; and then the women point out that people are the same the whole world over—”en todas partes cuecen habas”—which takes them back to linguistic matters. In Basque, you say irin adina lauso leku guztietan—flour is just as smooth in everyone’s house—or etxe guztietan laratza beltz—the cauldron chain is equally black in everyone’s house. Suggestive interpretations of the line from the famous song that has Bartolo asking Marixu where she’s going looking so beautiful—“Maritxu nora zoaz eder galant hori”—for example, the idea that Bartolo’s girlfriend might have been a reader of Maupassant. They all laugh. They wonder if every generation thinks it’s invented sex: a) because parents keep quiet about it, hide it, and repress their children; and b) because children find their parents’ sex frightening or revolting.

  Julia works out that Maupassant—whose mother was a friend of Flaubert’s, and maybe something more than that, too—was a contemporary of her great-grandmother’s. She knows that her great-grandmother was once a messenger for the Carlists—apparently they used women for such tasks because they raised fewer suspicions—and she took messages between Otzeta and Oiartzun. Around forty miles over the hills. Julia did get to know her grandmother. She was a very loving woman who combined a belief in magic—she had blind faith in the lamiak, the river nymphs of Basque myth—with the darkest, most frightening parts of the Catholic religion. She remembers well that once, when she was very small—but as always, she doesn’t know what exact age—and she and her grandmother were coming down from Etxezar to Otzeta, her grandmother, with a shawl on her head and a missal in her hand (which, now that she thinks about it, she might never actually have read, she might have been illiterate), suddenly stopped and sniffed the air the way animals do and said there was a smell of burning oil in the air, and that it must be the souls in purgatory asking for help. She knows that when she tells that story, people think she’s exaggerating, but it’s the pure truth. She also remembers that her grandmother told her that one of her uncles had seen the Basque goddess Anbotoko Dama herself, brushing her hair with a golden comb, completely convinced that it was true and that she was passing on that conviction. After her came her mother, and then it was herself. The first person in the family to read Maupassant.

  It’s probably the bright light in the carriage that makes everybody look tired. Whenever she takes the train, she looks around to see if anybody is reading. She’d rather sit next to them. Rainer Maria Rilke: Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. There’s nobody. She hasn’t opened the book she just bought, either, she’s waiting to open it greedily at home. She keeps herself entertained by wondering which of the people around her looks as if they might quench their thirst by putting their lips against somebody else’s in the way Maupassant describes. She glances at a man, neither young nor old, neither ugly nor good-looking, who then looks back at her, and that forces her to take her book out and start reading the first page she opens to. “¿Qué es lo que más se ama en una mujer y por qué se enamora uno de ella?” it says—What is it one most loves about a woman, and why does one fall in love with her?

  She has the impression that her journey to the rational, modern world has been long and difficult, that she hasn’t been offered any shortcuts, that moving forward in order to overcome obstacles has been hard work for her compared to others who’ve had their parents’ and ancestors’ shoulders to stand on.

  Fragebogen: Would she have been different if her mother had read Maupassant?

  As soon as she gets home, Martin tells her he’s found somebody to look after his father. He seems happy. He appears to be quite excited as he tells her that, contrary to his normal custom, he was going to catch the train in Gros—he’d gone to Kursaal to buy some tickets for his sister—when who should he bump into but Abaitua, who was there with quite a full-bodied young woman. He was going to walk past them discreetly, without saying anything, but Abaitua said hello to him, and he had no choice but to stop. He had the impression that Abaitua wanted to justify what he was doing with such a striking-looking girl, and he started explaining so that he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. He introduced the girl, and it just so happens that she’s a nurse specialized in geriatrics and looking for a new job. She seemed like a very nice person to him, and he said he’d call her to arrange things. He’s sure she’ll take very good care of his father.

  Julia had forgotten about the map of Sicily. Now she remembers it as Martin looks, perplexedly, at the wall where it previously hung. She says she tore it down accidentally—she has no idea how such an accident might have happened—it got ruined, and she’ll buy him another one. Then, mostly so that he won’t say anything about it, she goes straight on to tell him that she went to Kepa’s bookshop but he wasn’t there and that she’d bought a book because the epilogue was written by Frisch. When he asks her what it’s about, she tells him what she read on the back cover: the author had been a friend of Frisch’s—a famous professor of law in Zurich—who refused treatment when he was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder, because he preferred a dignified death to gaining a little more time. During the nine months he remained alive, he gave a daily dictation of his reflections on death and dying, the world, and himself.

  Martin, of course, is interested in the subject, and the interest he shows so obviously, especially compared to the scarce attention he normally pays her and which she finds so hurtful, makes her want to provoke him. Using the book as an excuse, she talks ironically about poor people who think they have something original to say about death. Something she’s been wanting to say to him for a long time: if displays of narcissism are pretty laughable in general, those of people who are inspired by foreseeing their own deaths seem particularly pathetic to her. Unfortunate people, mesmerized by the nobility of their own thoughts; saddened about how their absence will affect other people; worried about what will become of their corpses, whose cold touch they can feel as they draw their fingertips along their oval faces, like his character did when looking at himself in the bathroom mirror the last time she checked to see what he was up to, just over a month ago. Martin looks at her with his blue eyes wide open, a look of fear on his face that moves and frightens her. She tells herself it’s impossible for him to know that she goes onto his computer, in order to stick to her intention not to confess it to him and to stand up to Martin’s stare. They stay like that for a while, perhaps for quite a short while, but it seems like a long time to Julia, and finally Martin, destroyed, says, “You’re probably right.” That makes Julia feel sorry,
but it’s too late now.

  She tells him what she thought about the bookshop, how it’s quite special but doesn’t look like it’s a particularly successful venture. Martin says he doesn’t think Kepa is any good at business. She thinks he says it with regret. Then he turns the television on. So, it’s Marie Lafôret time. She doesn’t have to look at her watch to know that’s what time it is, she’d even say it’s marked on her biological clock at this point.

  Max Frisch’s funeral oration: “Our circle of friends among the dead keeps growing.”

  He used the same idea in some of his other writing. Fragebogen: “Möchten Sie wissen, wie Sterben ist?”—Do you have any friends among the dead?

  After Marie Lafôret, Julia sits next to him on the sofa to keep him company. Actually, it’s so that he won’t feel guilty for watching such trash, because she’s occasionally thrown it in his face: “How can you stand seeing such garbage?” In any case, what he usually says seems to be true—after the first few minutes, he becomes saturated and doesn’t pay much attention to what’s happening on the screen. He also often says we spend time in front of the television in the same way that our ancestors used to watch the fire—the light attracts us, and it gives us an excuse to think our own thoughts in silence.

  The two of them are sitting in armchairs, each with their arms crossed, looking at the screen. The remote control is on the coffee table, in the no man’s land between the two chairs, and neither of them is using it, not even to find something else when the commercials come on. Julia would say their situation looks pretty pathetic, and it reminds her of a scene Martin described long ago. After his father had an operation, he and his mother went to the private hospital to take care of him. Apparently, his father was asleep and his children were all sitting, their arms crossed, watching the television, just as the two of them are now, not having anything to say to each other. All sorts of things were happening on the screen, but Martin didn’t notice any of them, until one of the announcers said, “And now we’re going to see an unforgettable film, one that broke all the taboos,” and he realized he was seeing the opening credits for Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. Martin had seen it before, and he remembered the scene in which an enormous penis, framed so that it’s taking up the whole screen, ejaculates and then the sperm slowly moves down like lava on the slopes of a volcano. He says he allowed himself to be ruled by fate. He could have changed channel, saying, “I’ve seen this film, and it’s revolting,” but he didn’t. And he doesn’t know why. Even though the very idea frightened him, he wanted to see how it would affect his mother. The film started, the scene with the large, erect penis letting out an endless stream of thick sperm, and his mother didn’t say a word. He’d heard her shout things like “por Dios, quitad esa porquería”—meaning “for God’s sake, turn that trash off”—at much less before. He didn’t say a word, either. They both carried on watching indifferently and sat there in silence until the film came to an end. Not a single word. What was she thinking? Why didn’t she shout at him angrily and tell him to turn it off? Why didn’t she faint? That’s what Martin wondered, completely dismayed by the experience. Obviously, the son was wondering whether what his devout mother had just seen might not be new for her.

  Why did he make his mother go through that, and what exactly did he learn from it all?

  Martin’s been nodding off for a while. It happens to him more and more often.

  Drops of urine at the foot of the toilet. From time to time, she’s ventured to tell him that he should be more careful, but normally she keeps quiet, because she knows any mention of physiological matters makes him uncomfortable. She could say what Beauvoir wrote about Sartre in La cérémonie des adieux: “Il ne faisait jamais allusion à ses fonctions naturelles et s’en acquittait avec la plus soigneuse discrétion”—he never mentioned his bodily functions, and carried them out with the greatest of care. Once, after she mentioned something about it to him, he replied that from then on, he was going to pee sitting down, giving up the only thing men do with more dignity than women: peeing standing up, the masculine way. But that didn’t last long. Julia didn’t like him sitting down to pee, it was obvious he was giving up a natural way of doing things, so to speak, for her sake, and that made her feel guilty, especially after reading Werner’s caricature of the subject in one of his novels, where he tells the story of a disappointed man whose wife makes him sit down to pee and then suddenly, “after four years of submission,” he realizes that mean-spirited demand could be grounds for divorce. So whenever she draws his attention to drops of urine around the toilet, which isn’t all that often, and he replies humbly and hurt that he’ll do it sitting down from then on, she always ends up saying he doesn’t have to take any such extreme measure, just be a little more careful, that’s all. She’s the one who always ends up having to apologize.

  When she goes back to the living room, he’s no longer sitting in front of the television. She looks for him on the lower floor, but he isn’t there.

  He’s in the bedroom. There’s very little light, he’s sitting on the side of the bed, and when he realizes she’s there, he asks her to keep quiet by putting one index finger on his lips and pointing at the ceiling with the other. The murmur of a man’s voice reaches them from there. “They’re up there,” says Martin, and Julia shouts, “What are you doing?” surprised at her own anger. But Martin doesn’t react, he just looks at her, his hands resting on his knees, and she feels as if she’s the castrating mother who’s just caught her son masturbating. “What are you doing?” she repeats, now trying to sound nice, and she lifts her head up to look at the ceiling. She doesn’t understand the words, but it’s clearly Lynn talking now. Then the man, in a lower voice, and Lynn laughing.

  There’s still some light coming in through the window. The light is dying, but it brings out the trees, the houses, and the far-off hills—they all look as if they’ve been drawn on the same level, with no depth, as if they were all part of a theater set. They’ve put music on upstairs. Julia recognizes Bob Dylan’s “When the Deal Goes Down.” Lynn likes it a lot, and she gave a copy to her, for no apparent reason, a few days earlier. They hear them on the left-hand side, where the upstairs living room is. She works out that the upstairs house is not much wider than the room she and Martin are in at the moment.

  She envies Lynn’s laughter.

  Martin is still sitting on the side of the bed. His face is hardly visible, just the reflection of the light in his eyes. “You can hear everything they say,” he says, pointing at the ceiling again, his head cocked to one side in what looks like an effort to make out who the man is, but Lynn’s voice is clearer. She tells the cat off—“Enough for today, Max”—and it seems to jump onto the floor from somewhere high up, they hear a quick thud as it lands. They both listen out during the silence that follows, until the girl’s wild, loud cries begin, which they hear with absolute clarity. Julia finds them terrifying, frightening. The shame of listening to other people’s intimacy mortifies her, but she doesn’t want to make any sort of gesture that Martin might find offensive, and so she holds a hand out to him and is going to say that they’d better go downstairs, when he pulls her roughly toward him and lays her down on the bed. She lets him, because otherwise he would feel offended, or hurt, or both at the same time.

  But the knowledge that Martin’s seduction is prompted by Lynn’s cries puts her off. That’s the way she is, the slightest trace of perversion turns her right off. It’s obvious she’s a puritan. She lets him do it to her, remaining passive, until she thinks her attitude is mean and she regrets it, even stroking him where she knows he likes it, and Martin breathes heavily on the dip in her neck in gratitude.

  She’s never turned him down. Martin did once, and she thinks it was the only time she ever explicitly offered herself to him, but he did it in a fairly nice way. “We men have a less complex mechanism, but it’s more fragile,” he told her. She didn’t press him, s
he didn’t want to find out any more. In any case, the reasons she doesn’t take the initiative in bed date from before that. It started almost at the beginning of their relationship, in Faustino Iturbe and Flora Ugalde’s first episode. Faustino was unnerved by Flora’s clumsy insinuations while still wrapped in her bathrobe after a shower, and he found the smell of her body gel particularly off-putting. Of course, he mentioned the brand of gel, and, naturally, it was the one she always used. The one she used up until then, that is.

  Sometimes, without Martin asking her to, she lies face down on the bed and lifts her buttocks up to offer them to him, because she read somewhere—could it have been in Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of our Time?—that neurotic people like to do it from behind, and she thinks that he may be repressing that desire.

  They don’t hear the man’s voice often, but it’s modulated, whereas Lynn’s isn’t, even though it’s loud at times. The voice of somebody who would like to shout but can’t, somebody about to fall down a cliff, and the man’s cries blend together with her broken voice, and they seem to Julia to last forever, she feels her heart beating wildly. When there is silence again, she only just manages to stop herself from laughing.