Her question now: “Iñaki, how do you say ‘home birth’ in Spanish?”
He thinks she’s asked him before what he thinks about home births. He isn’t against them but doesn’t approve of promoting them “artificially” either. If, for some reason, there were a lot of demand for them, he wouldn’t disapprove, but the system would have to be adapted to deal with it—the telephone and ambulance emergency services would have to be adjusted—in order to offer the best conditions for birthing. Why does she ask?
“Somebody told me.”
He thinks it’s another way she has of bringing up a subject, first mentioning a purely linguistic side to the topic she wants to discuss so that when they get into it, it seems to be a logical continuation.
To cut a long story short, if there is a story, Julia’s family used to have a baserri called Sagastizabal, much of which has now been lost, taken over by the Elektra electricity plant, and one of her cousins wants to recover part of it and use it for growing ecological products. So far, he’s done up the old shed, planted apple trees, and built planting boxes. The thing is, his spouse, an indigenous woman from Peru, is pregnant and wants to give birth at home, because according to her traditions, it’s a way for her to become part of the new family home. That’s what she’s understood. As far as the Sagastizabal man is concerned, apparently he wants to combine respect for his Peruvian spouse’s superstitions with his son’s right to have the safest possible conditions for birth. So Abaitua suspects that Lynn has volunteered to sound him out about delivering the baby in a farm shed in who knows what sort of conditions in order to respect some useless, outdated cultural tradition. Suddenly he’s angry that Lynn has accepted this role as intermediary and, above all, that she’s made their relationship public knowledge. Surely she doesn’t think he’ll go supervise a birth in some farmhouse shed, he says, making no effort to cover up the fact that he’s angry. She says no, that it hadn’t even occurred to her.
She already knows what he’s like when he gets angry.
Forcing herself to smile, she asks what sort of morning he’s had.
It’s been quite a hard day. The change of subject reminds him of the vasa previa. He considers telling her about it, telling her about his annoyance at not being able to reach the birthing room earlier, saying that if his diagnosis had been quick and correct, a quarter of an hour would have been enough to save the child’s life. He wouldn’t like to give her an incomplete explanation by covering up the reason why he got there late. But even so, as a way of apologizing for his bad mood, and with Lynn curled up on his lap and asking him to tell her what happened, he can’t think of anything better than to tell her about the events in the birthing room, though without much enthusiasm. He realized what was happening right away, as soon as he saw the woman, something the resident from Otzeta wasn’t able to pick up on because of his lack of experience. Now he doesn’t know which of the two feelings is stronger: his sorrow for the parents who’ve lost their child—real sorrow, he has no need to fake it—or his sorrow at the death itself, the young guy’s first, knowing how horrible he must feel about it. He thinks he can be sincere with Lynn about that, he doesn’t think she could interpret anything untoward from his telling her about this doubt.
He also mentions to her—seeing how moved she obviously is by what he’s been telling her—that he decided to take the young guy with him to inform the father about his child’s death. It was something very sad to see and, in a way, beautiful. It was very touching to see the two young men embrace. So much so that he found it hard to keep back his tears. Lynn has the same difficulty as she listens, her eyes go shiny and she says “pobrecito”—poor thing. Abaitua doesn’t know who she’s saying it about. And he doesn’t ask her. Poor him, too, having to admit his own cowardice. Suddenly the urge to open his heart to her, tell her how it all happened, without omitting the fact that he’d meekly let Arrese drag him into his office. When, in order to lessen the resident from Otzeta’s sense of guilt, he told him that there’s a long chain of responsibility behind every mistake, he felt the urge to admit what he’d been hiding—in other words, the fact that he himself was the main culprit. He doesn’t know where that urge comes from—perhaps it has something to do with his Catholic upbringing—and it’s an urge he distrusts somewhat, because it would also be a way of behaving aggresively toward Lynn, a way of testing to what extent she would be able to stand seeing the real him.
But then he would have to tell her why he’s afraid of Arrese, and about Teresa Hoyos.
Instead of revealing all his shortcomings, he decides to come clean about another issue, which, in fact, was where this whole thing started, and so he goes back to the story of the Peruvian woman in Sagastizabal. He admits, without trying to excuse himself for it, that demands and requests made by people from the Third World, not to mention their proclamations about their identity, make him uncomfortable. He has sometimes wondered why and thinks it may be connected with the structure of his character, which is intolerant, when it comes down to it.
It also ocurrs to him that the fact that culture tyrannizes the individual, (and it’s easier to see the speck, not to mention the beam, in your brother’s eye than it is in your own), that fidelity to sacred traditions is a form of submission, and that pride in one’s own culture may be simply pathetic, forces him to question his own fidelity to his parents’ culture and wonder whether being rooted in something, being attached to something, might not be overrated, might be no more than an underground version of beating around the bush, as somebody once put it. Confronted by extreme fanaticism of a foreign variety, he is forced to ask himself whether he has the right not only to impose his own traditions, whether genuine or invented—that’s the least important part of it—but whether it’s legitimate for him to even bother the majority of people, who are not part of his culture, with them. In other words, resisting new minority groups’ exotic needs unavoidably brings with it a questioning of the reasonableness of his feelings about his own origins. And perhaps he should be grateful for that lesson, which breaks his heart in two. That’s definitely too extreme a way to put it, but they’re the only words he can find to say it. He has to make a joke. Their own voices fall quiet, embarrassed by the anachronistic voices of others come from afar, and in fact, when he sits down underneath the Eteneta menhir, they only speak to him now about the decay of the landscape.
But Lynn laughs and says that at least they’ll be speaking about it to him in Basque, and he answers “of course,” even though he isn’t sure. Because Unamuno’s is one of those voices (and he, too, is an ancestor of his, when it comes down to it), but even though he used to try not to listen to it, it hurts him less and less.
Lynn hasn’t heard of Unamuno. She knows of Baroja, because of Zalacaín el aventurero—Zalacaín the Adventurer—which Julia gave her to read. She remembers a sentence she particularly liked: “Mi patria es la montaña”—my homeland is the mountainside. That reminds Abaitua that one of Baroja’s characters said somewhere that he would love to be descended from a humble Pyrenean shepherd. Which he himself almost certainly is. He is almost without a doubt descended from a shepherd who came down from the Pyrenees after the glacial period and settled in Otzeta. As Unamuno said, a people who arrived at culture late on. He was practically the first in his line to come down from the mountains, and it took him two hundred years to assimilate the universal values of the French Revolution. And because of that, in contradiction to his feeling of belonging to a small people and their small culture, he’s a late convert to and fundamentalist of the Age of Enlightenment. It’s part of the character of those descended from shepherds to be fundamentalists in everything. He hates cultural relativism, the idea that all cultures are flowers of different shades on a field of the same color, just as much as he hates the ecological fundamentalism that holds that everything in nature is wise and good.
Lynn isn’t in favor of cultural relativism, either. She doesn’t thin
k traditions should be tolerated if they go against fundamental values, but it must be admitted that cultural traditionalism does have positive sides to it, as well. Then she talks to him about the virtues of tolerance and the failure of cultural integration policies—Abaitua doesn’t agree with them, either—and the richness of diversity, the advantages of interculturalism compared with cultural diversity, and so on. Very little he didn’t know already, but expressed with a degree of clarity and precision he himself is incapable of. He’d forgotten that she’s an expert on the subject and is embarrassed by his own attitude, so typically male, of feeling himself qualified to speak about anything at all in front of women.
The record finished a long time ago now.
“Culture is stronger than life and stronger than death.” The quote—she’s forgotten who the author is, but it’s long, and by the way it reads, it could be a poem—refers to the untameable power of culture, culture being something that can lead men to slice themselves open with swords, to refuse sex for life following a vow of chastity, and a whole stream of strange things she doesn’t fully understand, and finally—after making a gesture like somebody closing a picture book and giving Abaitua a soft kiss on the forehead as if he were a pouting child—she adds that it’s that which makes an unfortunate indigenous Peruvian woman want to give birth in a farm shed just five hundred yards away from a hospital. She smiles and then holds his chin and kisses him again.
“My intolerant old man.”
It isn’t the first time she’s called him old. On the dunes at Pyla, she called out from a distance, “Hey, old man.”
Obviously, he has become an intolerant old man, and one who’s come to the conclusion that that particular virtue—tolerance—much like elegance, is easier for the rich to nourish than it is for the poor. And as he’s told her before, he was poor until recently. This descendent of a shepherd from Otzeta has only just left religious fundamentalism behind. He’s seen people cross themselves as they go past churches; seen them run to kiss the cords of every Capuchin, Franciscan, and Carmelite that walked by, and there were a lot of them; had a deaf priest hit him on the head for speaking too softly in confession (speaking in a normal voice would have meant that everyone in the church could hear about his sins); he’s seen frightening Holy Weeks, heard furious sermons, dies irae, dies illa . . . sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night, frightened by nightmares about burning for eternity. He’s been humiliated, threatened, punished, scared, sexually abused, and mistreated by friars, and although the damage done is irreparable, just when the tyranny of the Church—his church—seemed to be at an end, new fundamentalisms and superstitions belonging to other religions appeared on the scene, new superstitions that are sure to rekindle the intolerance of the religion he was brought up to view as the one and only true one. Only somebody who has recently left poverty behind hates poverty more than the poor do. But Lynn is old money and can afford the elegance of tolerance, to feel sympathy for the poor. Even so, he thinks it’s a paternalistic type of tolerance, it seems a bit dumb to him. He remembers what Claudel said about there being special houses for tolerance: “La tolérance? Il y a des maisons pour ça.” He’s always thought it a good joke, but it isn’t funny after having to explain to her that a “maison de tolérance” means “a house of ill repute” in French. And instead of laughing, Lynn says she understands.
A little later, she wonders whether it isn’t more a matter of patience than tolerance. Holding the cat against her naked chest, her head leaning down toward her right shoulder, her face half hidden by a curl of hair, and Abaitua, just like every time he sees something that moves him, feels he’d like to draw her. The Virgin of Patience. He supposes she must be right, but he doesn’t have that virtue. He’s impatient, as well as being a xenophobe.
“An ugly word.” She asks the cat, but looking at Abaitua, if it thinks Abaitua can really be a xenophobe. “What do you think, Max?” The cat looks at him, too, as if proud to be in its mistress’s arms. Now Abaitua has to defend himself from an accusation he’s just cast against himself. He is xenophobic, but only a little. Now she looks at the cat while she talks. “But that’s not serious. Is it, Max?” Apparently, Lévi-Strauss said a little xenophobia is a good defense mechanism. She thinks that protective reflex, which has its origins in social biology, shouldn’t be confused with racism, thinking that we are better people than our neighbors or foreigners. The most important thing, she says, is how we treat each person. It’s a question of whether we see a person or an outsider when we see somebody from another place.
She asks if he doesn’t agree. She lets go of the cat—it jumps down heavily—and takes ahold of his hands. He has his back against one arm of the sofa, and she’s sitting between his legs, facing away from him. She wraps his arms around her and holds his hands on top of her belly. She’s sure that if he were to come across the Peruvian woman, he’d try to help her. And she can tell, from the way he holds her hands tighter, that he’s felt her urge to move away.
She turns around and smiles at him. “Would you like a coffee, or anything else?”
He jokes and asks if she knows how to make anything other than coffee, and she pretends to get angry. He watches her filling the French press from the doorway. The kitchen is clean, perhaps too clean, in fact. That’s what Kepa said when he was there. He doesn’t want to become part of the daily life of the house, he’s trying to avoid that. Kepa, on the other hand, walked all over the place and opened the fridge, the closets, and the drawers as if he were in his own home. It’s true that he was busy making the dinner, but then, looking from the doorway just as he is now, he had the impression, even though he’d just made love with Lynn on the sofa, that Kepa was becoming more intimate with her than he was.
The writer’s voice, calling to Julia from the floor below, silences them. “Julia, Julia,” the voice calls loudly, which makes them guess she’s on the ground floor. “Martin da . . . it’s Martin,” says Lynn, obvious though it is, perhaps because it’s something she knows how to say in Basque, and that gives him the chance to say he thinks Martin is a strange guy. He’s been wanting to talk to her about him. It gives him the chance to tell her about his concerns over the fact that Martin has hired María Amor—indirectly and unwillingly, to put it one way—to take care of his father. Lynn laughs out loud; she already knew that María Amor was a prostitute when he started talking. She asks for details about how it all happened, and somewhat relieved by Lynn’s laughter, he gives them. Some days earlier, in Gros, as he was leaving the dentist’s, he came across María Amor—more or less bumped into her, in fact—and he asked her out of politeness how things were going with her; she started telling him about her life, saying she felt really bad, degraded, and wanted to stop being a prostitute and all those things some prostitutes say—others say it’s a dignified profession and compare it with nursing—but she seemed especially sincere to him for some reason, although he found it pretty uncomfortable speaking with her on a street corner, but then again it wouldn’t have been any better inviting her to go to a bar. There he was, listening to María Amor with great patience, when he saw the writer a couple of steps away. They gestured hello to one another, but the writer didn’t move, just stood there waiting for his conversation with María Amor to finish, but she, too, became aware of his presence and stared at him, so Abaitua had no choice but to take a step toward him and introduce them. He introduced Martin as a writer and María Amor just by her name. He was about to say she was a nurse and let him think what he would, but he didn’t feel it was right to do that, above all because he would have realized what she actually was as soon as she started talking, that was why he had only said her name to introduce her, and she added that she liked people to call her Maite. That was new. And then the writer apologized to them, fairly formally, for having interrupted their talk and said he had a serious problem because his father needed someone to take care of him twenty-four hours a day and he was having trouble fin
ding a good nurse to fit in at his home—he explained that his mother and sister were unusual, difficult women—and on seeing Abaitua, he thought that perhaps there was some sort of list of professional caregivers at the hospital and that he might be able to give him the name of somebody trustworthy. Abaitua was absolutely amazed that Martin should stop him on the street for that reason, and he was about to get out of it—he didn’t know anybody, and he wouldn’t have dared to expose anybody to him even if he did—when María Amor clapped her hands together and said that he, Martin, had been sent by the Virgin of Mercy, protectoress of the Dominican Republic, herself, because she was “una enfermera especialista en viejitos”—a nurse specializing in old men—and she had just been telling the doctor that she was looking for work, and the writer, delighted, asked for her telephone number so that they could arrange a meeting. Abaitua didn’t know what to do. The Dominican woman gave him two big kisses and walked away—she, too, was pleased—and he almost went after the writer to explain the confusion, but he left it at that, thinking it would be easier to sort it out over the phone, but later he found it more and more difficult and didn’t know how he could possibly explain it to him and just hoped that the writer wouldn’t end up getting in touch with María Amor because there must be plenty of other women available for looking after old people.
Lynn’s laughter makes him feel better about it again—when it comes down to it, the whole thing’s comical. It’s a good idea to let prostitutes look after infirm old men. Her laughter ends up being a bit excessive. She doubles over and says, “I can’t believe it,” again and again, and he has to wait for her to calm down, that’s how funny she finds it all. He thinks they must be able to hear them very well from the floor below, and imagining the writer wondering what Lynn is laughing so much about makes him laugh, too. Lynn has fun imagining how the story might end, and she laughs even more as she pictures the possible scenes, and that goes on for a while, until she asks him if she can tell Julia, so that she, too, can have a good laugh at the idea of a whore being hired to work in Martin’s parents’ house. He doesn’t have to say he thinks it’s a bad idea, it’s obvious from his expression. She promises she’ll keep quiet and tries to reassure him, using the same argument he himself already arrived at: being such a showy woman, it isn’t very likely that Martin could ever think her a good fit for his parents’ home, and he probably just took her number down out of politeness.
Martutene Page 63