Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Sometimes, as he walks past the ICU, he thinks he’d like to lie down on a bed right there. The atmosphere is calm, the lighting is low, the slow beeps of the various electronic devices make it even more peaceful; a murmur of voices is all you hear, and the only thing you have to take care of is your own breathing. When he tells the head of the department this, his reply is that the ICU isn’t always as peaceful as right now, he should come back when there are people running around during emergencies and shouting hysterically, when the alarm sirens don’t stop ringing out. “We had four just this morning”. His face expresses his regret. Four deaths. Four cases that will do nothing to improve his statistics. Death, at the end of the day, is a professional failure for doctors.

  Abaitua asks after Teresa Hoyos’s husband, but his colleague doesn’t dare give a prognosis.

  Teresa Hoyos is sitting in the ICU waiting room. There’s another person there, too. An older woman who’s staring down the corridor. He’s in the bay farthest from them, and he observes them through a gap in the blind. Teresa Hoyos is reading a book. She’s dressed in black—a blouse and pants, and light, open shoes, which are also black. Shoes that are almost like slippers, to be more comfortable in the hospital. He thinks about going to say hello but doesn’t feel up to it.

  It’s the second time Abaitua has walked past the library. Lynn is in there. He knows that because of the chubby resident, who told him when he walked past him in the hallway, as if he already guessed he was looking for her. Finally, he ventures to stick his head around the door. Lynn smiles at him, and he guesses she’s said “hi.” She’s wearing a pistachio green dress with a zipper running from top to bottom on the front of it.

  He thinks, just for a moment, about opening her dress. It’s short and rises halfway up her thighs when she sits down. Her peach-colored down shines in the sunlight. As does the braid of steel smokestacks he can see through the window, pushing out thick smoke that dissipates only very slowly in the blue sky. He’s often wanted to find out what type of smoke it is, but he never has. He thinks he’s heard that white smoke isn’t harmful. The nearby hills. He tells Lynn their names: Adarra, Onddo, and Aballarri, but he isn’t sure which is which. He tells her about his hikes, stopping for a break at the small megalithic site at Mulisko Gaina, where he still sometimes feels like one of the successors of the people who first placed those stones there, and where his feeling that he’s part of the surroundings becomes much stronger. He tells her—even though he admits it’s nonsense—that from time to time, he thinks he’d like to give himself up to the melancholy that identifying with that landscape inspires him to feel.

  She asks if he’ll take her there one day. Of course he will. They could drive to Besabi that very afternoon, but he prefers to say that he has to have lunch with Loiola, even though it isn’t true. That had been his intention, but the boy called to say he couldn’t make it because he had to go to the US consulate in Bilbao. He was determined to speak to him once and for all about taking security precautions. He had that idea in mind, and so, before hanging up the phone, he told him to be careful. “What do I have to be careful about?” his son asked him, but he responded evasively “Everything—driving, life . . .” He didn’t think it was something to talk about on the phone.

  “So we won’t see each other again until tomorrow.” Abaitua doesn’t want their meeting up to become a habit. So he says that’s right, he doesn’t think they’ll see each other before that, and she shows her disappointment by shrugging in such an exaggerated way that it’s comical. She says she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to last that long. Then, after looking toward the table where the librarian is sitting, she puts her finger on her lips to ask for silence, like the nurse on the poster, and whispers that she knows a place.

  Surprised by his own daring, he follows her down the stairs to the basement. Somewhere he’s never been before. They only person they walk past in the long corridor is a single blue-coverall-wearing man; he’s pushing a trolley full of bags of clothes. There isn’t much light. They only thing they hear is the continual sound of machines, perhaps a pump, and the atmosphere is gloomy, almost sinister. After looking carefully left and right, Lynn opens the only door without a sign on it and takes him into a space that’s barely as wide as his dressing room at home. The dim light inside it comes from the neighboring room through a gap at ceiling level. There’s white clothing on the metal shelves that run along the three walls. Abaitua teases her for knowing about the place, and Lynn teases him back by saying that he’s the only doctor who doesn’t know about it. They hold each other and kiss while leaning against the door, she smiles happily seeing he’s getting an erection. Impressed too, he’d say. He’s astonished by the heat of his own desire. It’s easy to open her dress. She, on the other hand, has trouble taking his pants off, first the belt buckle, then the catch inside the waistband, and she seems to be losing her patience. He doesn’t know if she really is. She says “shit!” But when he tries to help her, she hits his hand away. “It’s like you’re wearing armor.” And Abaitua has his doubts again about just how annoyed she actually is at his lack of foresight in choosing pants that are so difficult for her to get off—and she really wants to take them off—but just in case, he tells her seriously that he’ll never wear these pants—which she’s pulling off his ankles at last—again.

  He’s really turned on. About to lose his balance, he grabs onto a shelf with both hands. There isn’t space enough to lie down. When he hugs her, she whispers in his ear that she’s getting turned on. He gets the same message from her swollen labia, open, lubricated vagina, and erect clitoris. When she reaches down to his penis, her cold hand makes him cry out. She whispers “Shh!” in his ear, but he can’t keep from moaning. He has to cry out—he needs to. He could shout, he’s never felt so full of desire. He doesn’t mind covering the hand over his mouth with his saliva.

  He falls down on his knees, sobbing, and she goes down with him, asking him to stop the laughter he’s unable to silence, because they can hear voices on the other side of the wall, at least those of a man and a woman. He has trouble breathing, he has to open his mouth to breathe and manages to tear her hand away from his mouth using considerable force. Now she tries to silence his cries by putting her mouth over his, happy about the amount of pleasure she’s giving him, but that only livens his flame, and she strokes his face, covered in sweat and saliva, whispering that they’re going to be heard, but he doesn’t care. That’s the main thing he’s feeling—he wouldn’t mind if the door opened and the whole hospital saw him fucking this girl.

  Lynn wraps her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, and he holds her up with one hand on her back and the other on her ass. He doesn’t think he’d be able to hold Pilar like that.

  Kepa’s call from London. He’s been book hunting and is very pleased. Among other things, he’s bought a facsimile of the first book on obstetrics ever published in Great Britain, back in the sixteenth century. Another one about medicine in the Middle Ages. He says they’re very interesting books and seems to have read them already. He tells him about various passages and gives a lot of details. Apparently, at one time, in order to induce labor—because there was no oxytocin back then—they used to beat women, literally, with whips. He suggests Abaitua should look into developing the technique. Or, otherwise, the variant used by a German empress who, in order to make her own labor process easier, had twenty men whipped—also literally—during the dilation and delivery phases, and two of them were whipped to their deaths. Abaitua says he’ll have to tell him all about the various techniques when he comes back, because it doesn’t sound like he’s finished. He doesn’t seem to have any awareness that talking on the phone costs money. “OK, OK, I won’t disturb you anymore.” Abaitua feels guilty and asks him if he’s made any good deals. He answers that he’s on the trail of a very important discovery, about which, for obvious reasons, he can’t say any more over the phone.

  The
stairway down to the river is made of gray granite. The last two steps are covered in very thick, almost black moss. Several balusters are missing, and only one of the four fruit basket-shaped iron capitals that once decorated the first and last pairs of shafts are still in place. Some small violet-colored flowers are growing there. It reminds him of an expression in Montauk: “obstinate nature.”

  Ignoring everything he sees to the left and the right and only looking forward, he could almost mistake the part of the baluster that’s still standing, and the vegetation dangling down over the river and lying on its surface, for a boat on Lake Como, though one in very poor condition, that’s for sure.

  They’re coming from the parking lot. They are around a dozen of them, he recognizes Pilar among them immediately, because of her beige suit. And Arrese, too, and Orl. He thinks they must have had lunch at Miramon. He finds it very strange to see Pilar talking with other people without realizing that he’s there. Without any connection to him, without him, in the middle of her own life. She takes the arm of somebody whose face he can’t see, and they move away from the group to do something in private, to explain something—that’s what it looks like. The others go in, and Pilar and the person with her are the last to follow.

  At one time, he used to wait for her on occasion on one of the benches at the entrance to the parking lot. Never at the clinic itself. He always had the impression that she was glad to see him. Even the times when she would come out with the young surgeon—when she realized that he, Abaitua, was there, she would quickly say goodbye to the young surgeon and run to greet him. He never had the sensation that she was put out by his turning up there.

  Once, from the same slope he’s on now, he saw the two of them come out of the building together, as on other occasions, and instead of walking up to her to greet her, he hid behind the high voltage shed. The pair walked down the stairs and over to a VW Beetle, talking in a lively way as they went. They carried on talking for a while, each from opposite sides of the car’s hood, and then they got in and left together. That night, she told Abaitua about him without him even having to ask her. He was a good kid, a little naïve, but charming, and she was sorry that her brother-in-law wouldn’t let him try out the new surgery techniques he wanted to.

  Something else he read in Montauk: “A man who does not notice that a woman has come to him from another bed is no truly amorous man.”

  Going around the blocks of houses and along the riverbank, he reaches the train stop in less than ten minutes.

  Lynn is in the garden, bending down behind some plants with a watering can in her hand, that’s what it looks like to him. She’s wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and blue denim overalls. Suitable clothing for gardening. She seems to take everything she does very seriously. She’s frowning and has her serious child look on. He sees her from up on the old road, sheltered by the reeds. He doesn’t hide himself. If she were to see him, unlikely though that is, he would say hello and then tell her the first thing that came to mind—Loiola cancelled their lunch; he left the clinic to go for a walk . . .

  She gets up, leaves her flowers, and greets the writer, who’s just appeared in the doorway, by taking her hat off. He’s wearing a bathrobe and is holding an open book in both hands. They speak—mostly it’s the writer speaking—and it looks like they’re talking about flowers, because they point at them from time to time and lean over to look at them. Lynn is just as tall as Martin. Her hat hangs down from one hand, and she holds her other hand up to shield her eyes. Her copper-colored hair shines in the sun. He thinks she really is beautiful, and he likes thinking about how he’s embraced that body, drunk from her breasts. He could go up to her into the garden and kiss her right on the mouth, to the writer’s astonishment. And Lynn would laugh. “But what is this!” That’s what she said in the hospital laundry room. Che passione! He finds the idea amusing.

  He walks back the way he came and decides to go as far as Okendotegi to kill time. When he gets back, if she’s still speaking with the writer, he’ll go home.

  Due to his weak but persistent intention not to see her in the afternoon, they never set up their dates beforehand. But he always phones first to say he’s coming, so as not to just barge in on her. And also to make sure that she’s alone and will open the tower door for him, which doesn’t have a bell, so that he won’t have to go along the glass gallery. And to give her the chance to say that they can’t meet up, if need be.

  While he waits for her to pick up, he imagines the cat lying on the green travel blanket on the sofa, looking at the telephone ringing on the triangular coffee table in the middle of the room. He wonders what he would feel if she didn’t pick up, or if she told him she couldn’t see him because she had friends over. He’s ready for that and doesn’t think he’d mind too much. He doesn’t want to see her all the time, either, and he doesn’t always tell her the truth. Perhaps being turned down would hurt him a little bit, his pride would be hurt. He’s thought more than once about the fact that the day will have to arrive sometime, the day when they, like Frisch and the Lynn in the novel, will say goodbye and promise to send each other a postcard once a year, both knowing that they probably won’t.

  He sometimes fantasizes about the idea of seeing her holding hands with another man, with the young man she really should be with, the man she’ll have children with, and when that scene comes to mind—it’s rather abstract for him, probably because the man has no face—he doesn’t feel sad.

  “Hi.” Happiness in her voice. His son had to go to Bilbao, so he’s free in the end and felt like stretching his legs, and so on. He’s in the neighborhood and could come by if she wants to make coffee. She tells him to come right away. He sits down at the train stop to delay himself a little. Not too long, because it’s not a very agreeable place and he doesn’t have anything to read, and when it comes down to it, he doesn’t mind if she finds out he was lying.

  Lynn sticks her head out after opening the door completely. They do not give each other a kiss. It isn’t a habit of theirs, perhaps because they don’t want to feel like strangers when they greet each other with other people around. What’s more, as soon as she opens the door, the cat lies down at his feet, offering its gray, almost white belly for him to pet. It starts purring immediately, making a noise like a saw, like some device that starts up as soon as you press the button. Lynn, leaning against the wall, watches him, glad he gets along well with the cat. “The doctor’s got great hands, doesn’t he, Max?”

  She squats down to join in petting the cat. “You’re insatiable, Max.” Abaitua takes his hands away, so that they won’t brush against hers. He knows that if they touch, their fingers will link together, they’ll hug, and, holding each other, he’ll lead her to the sofa and, once there, quickly take her clothes off. Sometimes they find themselves naked on the sofa as soon as he puts his foot in the door, without even speaking a word. That youthful energy is a fine memory for him, to look at it one way, but he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for her to let him always have his way, he doesn’t want her to think he’s some horny old man whose only reason for seeing her is to satisfy his sexual drive, for her to think that’s the only thing about her that interests him.

  Now they’re standing up again, face to face, and she asks for his jacket. He gives it to her, and she caresses the cloth after folding it. She says it’s soft. He bought it in London a long time ago, in one of those glass-fronted galleries near St. James’s. Sometimes he remembers that type of thing. They stand by the door as if they were each waiting for the other to make the decision to finally go in. Lynn’s changed clothes. She’s taken her overalls off and is wearing a short dress with flowers on it, it’s made of something like silk and has large vents on either side. Liberty pattern. He thinks she wears it more often since he told her he likes it. He tells her again, and she thanks him. He’s always thought that particular form of politeness is too much, thanking others for praising something you’ve bough
t, or somebody you’ve invited to a meal in a restaurant for praising the food or the good service—as if you had something to do with it. It isn’t part of his own culture, certainly. He tells this to Lynn, and she argues that what you’re thanking people for is appreciating your good taste in choosing things. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?” Many people have said that to him, but Lynn seems to find it amusing.

  He feels good like this, the two of them just talking. Just as in the meetings they both attend, he’s able to observe her measured gestures—she moves her hands more, her arms less so—and how she chooses her words with care, apparently unaware of his itching desire, which he’d like to keep in check because otherwise he’ll feel guilty afterward and run away.

  So they go on talking, each at either end of the sofa. Even the clumsiest observer would see what they are, because while he is correctly dressed—only his jacket, which he’s hung on the back of a chair, is missing—she’s barefoot, and her flowery dress comes halfway up her thighs. An older man visiting a young woman, going through the necessary ritual of talking about whatever before getting down to other things. He also thinks he could be imagined to be a parent visiting his daughter. In fact, he’s often thought that they could be taken for father and daughter, an idea that probably isn’t very healthy.

  Iñaki.

  When her questions are genuine ones, when she really wants to ask them, and actually wants to find something out, she normally says his name first. “Iñaki, what do you think about it?” Tell me is another expression she uses. “Tell me, what do you think about it?” As to why she always asks him in English, he thinks it’s so he won’t find her questions so direct.