Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  It must be late, although it’s still light outside. The top of a tree—he doesn’t know what type of tree it is, but it doesn’t have many leaves on it—is swaying around in the wind, and the sound comes in through the gap in the sash window above the sofa, which isn’t very agreeable. He isn’t what you’d call particularly handy, but he thinks he would be able to repair it if he had a screwdriver.

  Lynn has that screwdriver. She gives it to him and kneels on the sofa while she watches him fixing it. He thinks she’s happy that he, the man, is taking care of repairing something in the house. Domestic life. He manages it halfway, changing the position of an iron fitting that had been preventing the blind from coming down completely. But she congratulates him for having solved the whole problem, even though now, because the crack is smaller, the sound of the wind coming in is even shriller. They’re both kneeling naked on the sofa and looking out through the window. The meander in the river, the clinic roof and its almost empty parking lot, the reeds, the mooring place, and the mastless yacht, which looks as though it’s been shipwrecked.

  Lynn asks him what he’s thinking about.

  About the boat. He once hoped to repair it, too, but has never gotten around to it, partly out of laziness, but also because he didn’t want to ask the old man for his permission. So when Loiola told him that he wanted to repair it enough to be able to take it to a shipyard in Pasaia and that he had his grandfather’s permission to do so, he was glad, but at the same time disappointed, because he’d been left out of it. When Loiola started using his motorboat without asking him first, he had mixed feelings: on the one hand, he was glad his son had taken to the sea, and on the other hand, he found it frustrating that he had done so in secret. One of the other people who used the mooring told him that his son had been going there along with some friends of his, but Abaitua had already realized from the way the motorboat was moored. Why did he pretend not to notice? Answering that question was the most difficult thing for him when the police interrogated him. How could he say that he felt fulfilled by his son using the motorboat and that he wanted the boy to tell him about it himself, because it would have been a way for him to free himself from an old regret. The police, understandably, asked him the same question time and again. Why hadn’t he done anything when he realized that the boat was being used secretly? Why didn’t he do anything to find out what the boys were doing on the old yacht? How was it that he didn’t show more of an interest in what his son was up to? What kind of father was he? They were hours of great anxiety, and he was very worried about the consequences it might have for them. He broke down. The police interrogated him with some degree of respect but also made it clear that the atmosphere could change completely depending on his answers, and in fact, he felt the urge to tell them the most terrible things he could think of, even if they were completely irrelevant. So he told them things that would have been more appropriate on a psychologist’s couch, saying he felt incredibly happy on the afternoon he first saw, because of the way the moorings were tied up, that his son had been going out to sea, thinking it meant he had gotten over an awful thing that he, the boy’s father, had made him go through on a fishing expedition when he was a child. It was one morning when the seafaring conditions were excellent, and they saw a school of mackerel almost as soon as they got past the breakwater, and the fish went for everything they threw at them. He kept on reeling them in, fired up because the mackerel were biting, and that brought out his primitive instinct, he kept on casting out and hauling them in, and his son, meanwhile, was sitting next to him, bent over a tangle of lines he was trying to undo. He ordered him to stop that and use his rod, he’d grab another one for himself, but Loiola tangled that one up, too, and he got angry at his son’s clumsiness. They were going to lose the fish. He shouted at him that he was useless; there he was, standing and surrounded by bloodied mackerels that still hadn’t stopped jumping around, covered in blood himself. The boy started sobbing and mumbling that he felt sorry for the fish, which was the last straw for him. Beside himself, as frustrated as he was angry about that sign of weakness, he started throwing the mackerel overboard, not worrying about cutting his hands on the fins, furious, swearing, until he became exhausted by what he was doing. And then he saw himself, surrounded by mackerels, their white bellies shining in the sun, and the child with a tangled up line in his lap, crying. Then he realized that he would never forget that scene, and neither would his son. If there was one event in his life he would never be able to get out of his mind, that was going to be it.

  Lynn says she’d like to meet his son. It isn’t the first time she’s said that. He finds the idea of seeing Lynn and Loiola together frightening and attractive in equal measure. They’re almost the same age. She offers to help Loiola if he needs contacts in the States. She asks if he’d like to go to Nevada.

  No way. Abaitua would rather he went to Georgetown, or any other Jesuit university. It would be pathetic for him to decide to go to the States and then take shelter in a Basque community there, if there is such a thing. They talk about Nevada. Since neither of them have ever been there, they talk about what they’ve heard. Abaitua isn’t at all moved by the survival of a Basque community that’s supposed to be protecting his identity there. He isn’t really sure of his opinion, but that’s what he says, perhaps in order to be consistent. Having expressed his reticence when it comes to immigrants remaining ensconced in their cultures of origin (to the extent to which that means refusing the local culture), he doesn’t think he can praise his compatriots for holding on tightly to their own. People tend to be highly contradictory about that. The Spanish don’t want to be invaded by English, but then they seem pleased that more and more Spanish is being spoken in Times Square. He thinks that Basques—except when it comes to missing certain things, particularly the gastronomy—tend to integrate quite well, and in fact, he doesn’t feel particularly sympathetic toward the cultural synthesis between Basque shepherds and barbecue-loving, Republican-voting cowboys that gets showcased so often in Basque Television documentaries. He has no doubt that he has more in common with educated people from Madrid or with Parisians than with that Basque community in Nevada. He’s never admitted as much, and he thinks it’s terribly scornful of him, but because he can say anything to this American girl who’s sitting there listening to him so attentively, he follows his urge to go further and says that he has less and less in common with his friends from his summers spent in Otzeta as a child—each time he sees them, their fingers as thick as blood sausages, they ask him, in their village Basque, which becomes cruder year by year, if he couldn’t use an assistant.

  (Lynn, who doesn’t seem to want to contradict him, says what they both already know: there are going to be fewer and fewer people with singular identities. In the future, it will be normal to be like her, someone from New York who feels Basque. She says this in Basque, and quite good Basque at that.)

  They hear the writer calling out to Julia again. Julia doesn’t answer him, or they don’t hear her because of the train going by, one of the ones that don’t stop there. Then there’s silence as Lynn breathes over his moist belly. “Maite zaitut,” she whispers, “I love you.”

  He doesn’t find sperm revolting, at least not as much as Lynn thinks he does; she thinks he’s more of a prude than he really is. From what he’s read, finding sperm revolting, like not wanting to ejaculate, is because spilling the seed means the death of desire. It seems logical to him. While Lynn pretends to provoke him by playing with his fluid, he expresses more revulsion than he really feels. He isn’t uncomfortable about her playing with his penis, which is tired and soft, though he does feel the need to excuse himself, so he apologizes for his situation by using a Spanish cliché: “Dura lo que dura dura”—a somewhat vulgar adage that basically means “love only lasts as long as it’s long.” The expression cracks her up, and her loud laugh, which must be heard throughout the building, goes on for a long time, until she tires. Then, seriously,
she says that it isn’t true, it’s a complete lie. She continues repeating it while she kisses his belly.

  Now Lynn has her head resting on his shoulder and her hand on what is still, fortunately, his flat belly. He smells her skin, intense and sweet at the same time. The coffee cups and milk jug shine on the small triangular table. The glass in the frame of a painting on top of the closet is shiny, too. She says she has to show it to the writer, she thinks it might be valuable. An antique, she says. Abaitua doesn’t think it is. Everything looks old to Lynn. She didn’t know it was Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Apparently, bliss being ignorant, she thought it was the Immaculate Conception, and he has to explain to her that the Immaculate Conception is usually depicted in a white tunic and a blue shawl with shafts of light coming out of her hands—or, at least, he thinks so—while Our Lady of Mount Carmel, on the other hand, is dark-skinned and has scapulars dangling from her hands. She doesn’t know what scapulars are, and he explains, more or less. And, of course, she teases him for knowing so much about virgins.

  Inevitably, he remembers that there was a large painting of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the wall across from his bed in his grandparents’ house in Otzeta where he was sent to stay in the summers. She hovered over several souls in purgatory that were surrounded by flames and had expressions of fearful suffering on their faces, their hands clasped together and begging her to take them out of there and up to heaven. Things were always very strict in his grandparents’ dark house, he would miss his mother a lot, and because one of the suffering souls in purgatory looked very much like her, the picture made him sad and he’d have trouble sleeping. What he tells her seems to really move Lynn, she sits up on the sofa and puts her arm around his shoulders—just like Our Lady of Sorrows around the recumbent Christ—and she kisses his eyes and says poor, poor thing. It’s the first time anybody has ever comforted him for that childhood suffering, and he feels that an old sorrow has been laid to rest. Poor little thing. Abaitua has realized that Lynn likes him to talk about his childhood; whenever he tells her about any memory from the distant past, he sees how moved she is when he looks in her eyes. He wonders if that might be what he most likes about her.

  He isn’t sure if it was John Paul II who abolished purgatory, so to speak. He read somewhere that the Catholic Church inventing purgatory, somewhere between heaven and hell, was its most profitable innovation, opening the way to a highly lucrative market in indulgences. The disappointing thing for him was that the abolition of purgatory didn’t make him feel any better. It was as if he’d already been through it.

  And even so, he finds it strange to say that he isn’t a Christian; perhaps he is, to an extent, because officially he’s still a Catholic. It seems his atheistic convictions aren’t strong enough for him to go through all the administrative steps involved in officially declaring his own apostasy. In any case, he doesn’t like the word apostasy. He isn’t a dogmatic atheist or rationalist; atheist fundamentalists seem almost as mean to him as religious fundamentalists—people who, in their humble arrogance, believe they can solve everything just by arguing that two and two are four.

  It’s pretty easy to explain how he gave up religion. Come a certain moment, he decided that being a Christian was too difficult, and he gave up trying. Then, after taking that first step, and as happens always, the easiest thing was to keep on going. He gets on well without God. He seldom feels any need to think about the meaning of life or the universe. On the occasions he’s tried to read about astrophysics, cosmology, black holes, stellar infinity, and such matters, he feels truly anxious, sincerely feels the danger of falling into madness by getting sucked into unfathomable voids. As far as religion is concerned, it was never a consolation for him, though it had been a source of sadness and suffering with regard to both life and imagining death. He thinks he was an emotional boy, sensitive, to put it tactfully. He had a bad time at the religious boarding school he went to. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt as miserable again as he did at that school, though he can’t reproach his parents for it, because they thought they were doing what was best for him by sending him to such an expensive place. It wasn’t cheap, and because of that, he had to put up not only with being mistreated at school but also with hearing his mother say how much they were sacrificing on his behalf. He has to admit that some of his classmates didn’t seem to have any trouble with that type of education; they took in the friars’ threats of eternal flames, in addition to the terrible illnesses they would suffer beforehand, without being overly worried by them, and they’d carry on masturbating happily, even though the consequence if they, the masturbators, were caught by the friar on night duty was that they, along with everybody else, would be dragged out of bed and forced to run around the playground in their pajamas in the middle of winter so that they’d be too tired to give in to the temptations presented to them by the devil.

  Pilar is astonished that he suffered so much at the friars’ school, and from what she says, she didn’t have such a bad time at her boarding school with the nuns. She often says she finds religions aesthetically attractive—prayer books with covers in mother of pearl, silver rosaries, tulle veils, medals, lighting candles and offering the Virgin Mary flowers, singing in processions and passing around piggy banks to collect money for poor Chinese families. When she went to confession, for instance, she used to decide which sins to confess to, making sure they were ones the chaplain would like, including some things that weren’t even sins, things like breaking a promise not to eat sweets all week. She found the sinister side of it fun, too. For instance, sometimes she would wear a spiked belt, out of a strange sense of curiosity—she only wore it very loose, of course—and because the nuns liked her wearing it. She never worried about receiving communion after eating a large breakfast or even, in fact, after committing a sin, which was something—something no short of sacrilege—that he wouldn’t even think about doing, even now. He knows what it is to have sat alone on that long bench while the others lined up for communion, thus making it very obvious that he’d committed some sin after going to confession the night before. Why were all those wretched masturbators able to ignore all the cruel threats and take the blessed sacrament in their two hands with their heads bowed and he couldn’t?

  He thought it was amazing that when he bumped into old schoolmates, many of them, though not all of them, had happy memories of the place and made light of all the cruelty and mistreatment and abuse they’d been subjected to (“We used to call Brother Aniceto ‘Mittens,’ because he was always copping feels), and he found it impossible to understand that they were now sending their own sons to the very same school, even though they had other options, saying that a bit of discipline would do them good.

  It’s often the ones who used to play soccer. He preferred drawing, he was introverted, and the friars didn’t like that. He guesses he wasn’t very quick-witted, either. He remembers that once, in class, a friar had given them what seemed to him to be irrefutable evidence of the existence of God. He drew four trees inside a circle. The fourth had grown from a seed from the third. Right. The third from a seed from the second. Right. The second from one from the first. But who made the first? The unavoidable answer was that it had been God. He thinks it’s Saint Thomas’s second proof, the proof from efficient cause. He, Abaitua, wasn’t intelligent enough to ask who created the creator of the first tree. He didn’t think of the question until he knew there was no answer to it. Which was after he was quite a bit older, he thinks.

  He was probably also quite a bit older at the time when he found himself still worrying about the mysteries of life. He has a vague memory that a friar—perhaps the same one who demonstrated God’s existence—told them about the birds and the bees. He doesn’t know how old he was then, but he’d reached the conclusion on his own that parents had children because they ate the same food. Apparently, he thought that his parents eating at the same table was more significant than them sharing the same bed. Sometimes he comforts h
imself by thinking about how he came up with that theory at quite a young age, an age when the others weren’t even thinking about the issue, and about how that must mean that he was a bright, thoughtful kid. But in fact, it must have been a much later thought process, because he also remembers the arguments he came up with to counter his theory—why did some people not have children even though they ate together, and the other way around, why did some people, even though there were only a few of these cases, have children even though they didn’t eat the same things, or even eat together—and this leads him to think that he must have reached some degree of maturity by the time he came up with the idea. So he had been an inward-looking boy who didn’t have anyone to ask questions of, and those religious dopes, many of whom used their long arm of authority to hit the boys or stick their hands down their pants, didn’t help him much. “Poor little boy,” Lynn gently whispers to him again, and he feels he could easily start crying.

  As if coming out of deep, silent depths, he gradually starts hearing noises coming from around the house again—the echoing sound of a television, the hum from the fridge, the whistling sound still coming in through the window—and yet he’s sure he hasn’t been asleep. Did Lynn just make those cries of pleasure? He tells her he’s been far away, and she tells the cat, “The thing is, we’re too noisy, Max, they must hear us all over the neighborhood.”