Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  It’s because they’re identical, as Pilar often says.

  And there’s no doubt about that. He gets irritated when he sees his own flaws in his son—weakness, irascibility, laziness (he knows that he’s lazy even though nobody else sees it in him, he’s probably learned to hide it over the years)—and he can see them clearly. And his son, too, is aware of all those flaws.

  Add the fried bread chunks at the very end.

  His son sniffs the air and says it smells good—a lovely way to say hello. It’s a pity, he says, after lifting up the lid and inspecting the squid, that he can’t stay for lunch. Abaitua tries to cover up his annoyance at hearing this by keeping quiet, but he can’t bring himself to continue cutting the bread and puts the knife down clumsily, and of course, his son notices. He thought his father already knew, because he told his mother this morning.

  Abaitua excuses her by saying that she must have forgotten, she’s had a lot of work recently. She’s been feeling nervous about operating in Bordeaux with Giraud. “Boy, she really is busy.” He says this as he goes into the room that he still considers to be his, although he doesn’t use it, and Abaitua is sure that he’s taking a quick look at what is now his mother’s room as he walks past it, probably checking to see if they’re still sleeping separately. What will he think of that? His father doesn’t know how to make his mother happy? He isn’t capable of leaving her? Does he despise him for that? Abaitua is sure that young people today are clearer about these things and aren’t such hypocrites. His son’s come to get some clothes, as he does sometimes. He usually takes some books and records, too, some of them Abaitua’s, but he doesn’t mind that. He’s glad to be able to pass on some of his tastes in music and books, but it’s to his son’s credit that he’s receptive to them. He has to admit that young people today have fewer prejudices than they did back in his day, they’re more eclectic. They don’t usually look down on things as he used to.

  He asks him how things are going at school.

  Does he want another bag? The one he’s brought with him is almost full. He says he doesn’t but still doesn’t stop taking things out of the closet. Abaitua leans against the doorframe as he watches him. He couldn’t be more damning about his university. From what he says, it’s clear he does have reasons to be unhappy, but Abaitua finds it irritating to have to listen to him being so critical, so negative; with that sort of attitude, he’ll never be able to get anything good out of it.

  Just to give him an idea: there’s a lecturer who doesn’t know that Newton wrote Principia Mathematica. Loiola stares at him, and Abaitua, not knowing whether it’s because he isn’t as surprised as he expected him to be or because he wonders what he’s doing there, staring around his room, decides to go back to the kitchen.

  There are big gray bits of onion in the squid sauce. He doesn’t know what to do with what he’s made.

  While he cleans up the squid ink that’s splashed onto the kitchen surfaces, it occurs to him that he could have been having lunch with Lynn, but he doesn’t find the thought annoying.

  Now it’s his son who’s looking at him from the doorframe. He’s a little taller than him, just by an inch or two. He asks him what he’s going to do that afternoon, as if he were worried about leaving him alone. He’ll use the time to study, he says, letting him know he likes to keep up to date in his profession. He always says study, never read. Then they’re both quiet. Because there isn’t much time, Abaitua doesn’t know how to bring up the future. The bag at his feet is full, and any moment now, he’ll bend down to pick it up and say he’s going; Abaitua is both afraid of that and wanting it to happen. Loiola says he’ll come by for dinner next week. Some day his mother’s free. “Because she’s working so much lately!” Talking about his mother’s work again: Apparently, the operating theater’s productivity is up by a hundred and twenty percent; apparently, two new services are going to be set up; apparently, she’s managing to keep the vultures at bay. It’s clear that Pilar tells him about her job and that he’s proud of her taking charge of the clinic and trying to save the old man’s work. Loiola looks at Abaitua with concentration. He wants to know whether he, too, is proud, and he says she’s working very hard and in very difficult circumstances.

  Abaitua’s interested in the circumstances. It occurs to him again that those vultures, as Loiola’s just called them, would be just the sort to drop a dead body on Pilar’s operating table, but he still keeps quiet. He doesn’t say it, in order not to frighten him, but also to avoid making the objective of saving the clinic not sound overly epic. To say something, and for his son to see what type of people they are, he starts telling him about the case of the baby with choanal atresia, and it’s too late by the time he realizes that his son must be wondering what he’s going to do about it.

  He doesn’t ask him anything. “What bastards,” he says, and he leans over to pick his bag up.

  What could Abaitua do?

  Loiola’s going. He goes up to the cooking pot and smells it and says he’s sorry he can’t stay to eat. He clasps his father’s shoulder and says, “You’re a great cook.” Abaitua asks if he wants to take the food with him. “Glad to,” he says, if he doesn’t want it. He puts it in a tupperware container for him and says it’ll be better the next day. He also gives him a jar of tuna and a bottle of white wine from the fridge.

  Although he’s said he’s leaving at least twice in the last minute, he’s still standing there by the kitchen door with his bag in his hand. “Are you really going to spend all afternoon studying?” Abaitua has the sensation once more that his son doesn’t want to leave him alone, and he has a sudden surge of energy as he realizes he could tell him that he might spend the afternoon making love with a woman who isn’t much older than him.

  Is he proud of that? Sometimes, even though he knows it’s dumb.

  He pushes Loiola toward the hallway, saying he has to go once and for all. He’s bigger than him, but also a bit softer than he was at the same age. He pats him on the back. It’s been years since they gave each other kisses, he doesn’t know how many years or why they stopped doing it. Now he finds being close to him repulsive, doesn’t like his body odor, and supposes he must feel the same. “We should go out fishing one day before I go to America.” Mentioning America gives him the chance, before he gets into the noisy old elevator, to tell him that he must make his decisions freely, without being conditioned by anybody or anything. “Think about yourself, your happiness, without any ties,” he shouts at him as the glass door closes. “Don’t worry.” The boy smiles at him with one hand on the button, waiting for the iron grille to close. “In any case, in order to be happy, I have to be loyal, too.” Behind the heavy iron bars, it looks as if he’s in a cell. Abaitua doesn’t know if he’s joking, but he smiles again and waves goodbye with his hand, and the elevator goes down. “Nire amaren etxea defendituko dut,” he mutters once it’s out of sight, switching the Gabriel Aresti poem around to say “I’m going to defend my mother’s house” instead of “my father’s.”

  He wishes the station were bigger, like Austerlitz or Victoria Station, and he’d like to be able to get lost among the crowds, but he has to make do with what he has. There are no more than twenty people in the vestibule, and the newsstand is closed. He could call Lynn to make sure she’s at home, but he doesn’t. He likes the feeling of uncertainty, and if he knew she wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have any reason to catch the train. Nor would he like to be completely sure that she is at home; then he wouldn’t have to decide whether to call or not. Although he knows it’s no use, a voice inside him says he shouldn’t. Inevitably, he’ll call her from Martutene, and if she isn’t in, he’ll go for a walk in the area. He’ll go to the spot with the rushes along the little road that runs through the apple orchard—the living room window and bedroom are visible from there. In fact, he doesn’t really need any more than that, he doesn’t think he’ll be overly bothered if she doesn’t pick up the ph
one. It’ll have to happen some day, she’ll have something to do and he’ll hear her telling him she can’t see him.

  “Train to Brinkola.” Taking a local train is something new for Abaitua, and he finds it amusing that he feels like he’s setting out on a journey. He’s impressed by how tidy the train is. Lynn’s told him about that; she’s a great defender of trains. She normally praises their punctuality, too. An old woman is having trouble dragging her big suitcase in and doesn’t seem to trust the boy who’s trying to help her lift it off the platform, maybe because he’s got green hair. The boy holds onto the suitcase and the old woman onto his shirt; they both almost fall over.

  He sits next to the window. There aren’t any E pericoloso sporgersi signs on this train warning passengers not to lean out the windows, among other things because you can’t open the windows.

  A boy of around ten sits down next to him, and his father, who sits across from him, has to tell him to talk more quietly. They look very much alike. The child tells him, or shouts at him, rather, to tell the story about when he stole the shotgun. “Aitá, tell me about when you stole the shotgun.” It’s the second time he’s asked him, or commanded him, rather, and the father says he’ll tell him later. It must be some sort of exploit he’s already told his son about and doesn’t want to repeat in public. Abaitua never told his son many adventures, just a few things that happened at sea and that he exaggerated a little. As far as shotguns are concerned, he remembers that he used to be allowed to use an air rifle back in Otzeta. All men in Otzeta hunted birds. He tried his hand, too, firing at the birds but never hitting them. Until one day when he saw a robin perched on the branches of a walnut tree. He got it in his sights, fired, and hit it. He still remembers how it fell down like a stone. He clearly felt happy about his achievement, because he picked it up and went running to show his grandfather. He was surprised by his cold reception. He told him that robins did good things for them, ate insects, and that was why they shouldn’t be shot. He didn’t exactly tell him off, but he did say it to him very seriously, and he still, after so many years, hasn’t fully recovered from his feeling of guilt. He remembers it every time he sees a robin.

  The boy is eating pumpkin seeds and throwing the shells on the floor; his father says nothing about it.

  He finds the journey very short. One of the advantages of taking the train, and one to really take into account, is that it removes the danger that anybody going into or out of the clinic on the old road might see his car sitting there in the only parking space that’s usually empty, which is right next to the iron railings and quite visible.

  From the train stop, there is no sign of her being at home. He goes over the walkway, taking the risk of being seen by anybody who might be in the garden. But there’s nobody there. The idea of calling her from that very spot makes his heart race. She usually says “hello.”

  No, he hasn’t woken her up from a siesta; no, he hasn’t interrupted anything; no, it’s not an imposition on her at all. How could he think such a thing?

  Like somebody stopping by for a visit. He knows he looks ridiculous like that, killing time in the living room looking at books while Lynn is in the kitchen making the coffee. There’s a framed photo of the two of them in front of the bronze statue of the angel holding the soldier with the broken sword in Bordeaux. He likes seeing it there but also finds it a bit worrying. If somebody comes there, they’ll ask her who the man is. What will she answer?

  When she comes in with the coffee things clinking together on the tray, he can tell by the way she looks at him that she’s wondering what he’s doing standing there “as if he were stopping by for a visit.” He thinks she must realize he finds it difficult to be at ease there, and he’s sorry about that. “Make yourself at home.” But he can’t shake the idea that he’s like a man showing up at some sort of pied-à-terre he keeps for secret rendezvous. He isn’t comfortable seeing himself as an old man visiting a young lady, and he doesn’t like the idea of keeping a bathrobe and a pair of slippers here. She tells him to relax, takes his jacket to a closet in the next room, which she uses as a study, and, when she comes back, takes the photo out of his hands. He’s very good-looking in it, but a little too serious, she says. And she takes him to the sofa. What a great time they had in Bordeaux, she says as she drops onto the cushions. And more than anything else, she’s proud of having dared to knock on his door. Because he mustn’t think she’s in the habit of knocking on men’s doors. She frowns comically.

  But he did the most difficult thing, he took the first step. He was the one who took the initiative of asking her along for the trip. They play at arguing. It’s less of a risk for a man. When it came down to it, he’d given her a completely innocent offer: a polite invitation to a foreign sociologist to go on a trip with two friends. On the other hand, there’s only one way to interpret knocking on a man’s door at night. It’s Abaitua who protests now, reminding her that he’s a doctor and that she pretended to be sick. He remembers it very well: “Doctor, I’m not feeling well,” she said in a theatrically weak voice. He tickles her, and she rolls over.

  “How did I encourage you?”

  He likes remembering the first several times they met, when nothing seemed to suggest they’d ever make love, but he finds it hard to share those memories in response to her implicit desire for him to do so. And if she asked him, he wouldn’t know at what precise moment he became interested in her. For instance, he hardly remembers if he thought she was good-looking the first time he saw her; he knows he thought her bright and well educated. He isn’t one of those old men who always goes for young women. In fact, when he called her, it was for company, to avoid Kepa and himself boring each other. It was in Bordeaux itself that something lit up, in that boutique where she called out his name to ask whether the dress he can see her wearing in the photo looked good on her. He says he doesn’t know how it happened.

  But she remembers it very well, all the details, even what he was wearing the very first day. Now she’s gotten used to seeing him dressed a certain way, but at that point he looked incredibly elegant to her. She was expecting a lot from him because of what Harri had told her, and Julia, too, saying how interesting he was, but right then she saw quite clearly that he was the man who held the key to her happiness. She only had to look at his hands, listen to his voice when he went up to Harri to ask her so softly about her health, to know how sweet he was. “Of course.” She puts her hands together and turns her head with a gesture of resignation, as if she were talking to a third person—all right, she could see that he was a man who was tired of life and that she wasn’t going to find it easy making him happy, but seeing him so tender and in such need of tenderness, she understood right then and there that her greatest adventure was going to be trying to get him to be happy. It was bad luck meeting as they had—he was already quite old—but finding the love of your life isn’t something that happens to everyone. She makes a brief, comic gesture of regret when she says that, and he tries to silence her by covering her mouth, asking her not to tease, not wanting to believe her, and she protests. “You don’t want to believe me.” Is it really true that nobody has ever told him how tender he is?

  A very short, fast train goes by; the sound of its whistle, however, can be heard for a long time to the west of the house. Lynn looks up, perhaps wanting to see the time. Her head is resting on the arm of the sofa, and she has one hand raised to pet the purring cat on top of it. Abaitua finds it amazing how uninhibitedly the cat requests pleasure. There must be people who are a bit like cats. Lynn turns toward him with the inquisitive look of knowing that somebody’s thoughts are far away, and he tries to come up with something in case she asks what he’s thinking about. What comes to mind is the image of the parents of the baby with choanal atresia.

  But Lynn hasn’t asked him yet what he’s thinking about. She kneels down in front of him and takes ahold of his belt. She finds it hard to take off; it’s new and isn’t v
ery flexible. As usually, the sociologist’s fingers have problems with the inside catch, but he doesn’t help her, he just watches what she’s doing. She takes his pants off seriously, without saying a word, as if she’s just made an important decision; she always concentrates at moments like these. Half nurse, half undine.

  An undine who no longer has to say “just relax”; he’s learned to let himself go. He’d prefer not to be naked just yet.

  Lynn gets out of his arms—“I have to go to the toilet,” she says—and he moves his knees to let her past. He misses her warm skin. The cat jumps off the back of the sofa onto the seat, and from the seat onto the floor, with what seems to him to be a heaviness inappropriate for a cat, and follows its mistress down the hallway. Lynn turns around. “You see how agile he is?” knowing he’s going to laugh. She has a multi-colored, striped shawl on her shoulders, which makes her nakedness look peculiar. He thinks she isn’t very modest, much less so than the Lynn in Montauk, at any rate. The Lynn in Montauk tells the writer that she had a puritanical upbringing, and he thinks she makes the writer leave the room on one occasion so he won’t see her in her nightgown.

  And one night, she tells him they can’t make love. “Not tonight.” Lynn’s never told him “we can’t make love.” He doesn’t remember her period ever having been an obstacle, and that makes him reflect that it’s been some time since she had her last one. He’ll have to ask her. They aren’t very communicative about the subject, but she shouldn’t be careless when it comes to amenorrhea.

  From inside the bathroom, she tells the cat she doesn’t want it in there with her. You’re distracting me here, Max. He hears the cat scratching on the door and calls it, but it doesn’t come to him. Now he hears running water in the bathtub and wonders what she’s doing. He imagines the bathroom with its small hexagonal white tiles, the copper tubes on display, something like an old-fashioned hotel, clean and full of light thanks to the large window that looks onto the garden and forces him to crouch down because there aren’t any curtains. The cat’s gone back to scratching at the door, and it cries out again, making a sound not so different from that of the trains as they run past into the distance. It reminds him of the cries of the cats in heat out on the patio at his parents’ house that used to make him so nervous as a child, it was like the crying of children being tortured, and along with that, he remembers the crying he heard in the hospital corridor earlier this morning. He opens his eyes, not wanting to think.