Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Lynn runs back along the hallway, hugging herself as she does, shaking her head, panting because of the cold, and she curls up to him. But she really is cold, her feet are frozen—she asks if he minds as she rubs them against his legs—and he feels cold dampness between her legs and a faint smell of soap.

  Another train. Because of how long the sound lasts—he counts almost thirty seconds—he thinks it’s a freight train, one carrying cars; he’s seen that they’re the longest. Lynn says that because of the cadence it has, which is much more continual, it must be an express. He’d bet her something, but he doesn’t feel like getting up.

  The cat is curled up between them and begins purring automatically when he starts to pet its neck. “What hands, eh, Max? Anyway, that’s enough for today.” She throws it onto the floor. Now it’s her turn.

  The cat stares at him as cats usually do. It gets onto a chair and finds a good place to curl up on top of his pants—Lynn doesn’t see it—but he doesn’t mind getting hairs on them today, because Pilar isn’t going to be at home when he gets back. It’s sitting there upright, its forelegs extended, its tail wrapped around its body, as if posing, aware of its own beauty. He tells Lynn that Max is beautiful; he knows she likes hearing that, and it’s also to pay it back for having treated it badly earlier. It really is beautiful. Its eyes shine like agates in the darkness. Lynn knows a lot about cats. It isn’t exactly true that they can see in the dark, but they can see in what we think of as total darkness. He likes the way she says that—“In what we think of as total darkness.” She explains how the reflective layer of proteins and zinc crystals, which form a type of triangular mirror behind the retina, work, and then she gets annoyed when she realizes he knows what the tapetum lucidum is and he’s just letting her go on talking.

  “Zertaz pentsatzen?” She asks him in Basque what he’s thinking about, with almost no accent, her knees against his ribs, hands on his shoulders and the shawl over hers. In that position, too, her breasts stand proud. About using the iris in diagnostics. Yesterday he saw a woman a naturopathic doctor had diagnosed with uterine cancer and the man was now treating her for it. But she had no such thing. Lynn says it’s incredible, leaning back against the sofa again. He doesn’t know if she’s referring to the naturopath or to the fact that he’s said he’s thinking about using the iris in diagnostics.

  They’re both quiet, close against each other, looking up at the ceiling. Lynn takes his hand to show she isn’t angry. She says she knows why he’s sad, and he denies her premise—he isn’t sad.

  She doesn’t listen to him.

  He’s sad because of what happened to that baby, she heard about it, the neonatology resident told her about it this morning at the Bretxa Azoka. Abaitua denies it. He’s decided not to worry about other people’s mistakes and negligence and to do his own work as well as he can. He’s told her that many times. He also says that he’s told her he doesn’t want to talk about the hospital, he finds her complaining depressing. He’s all too aware that if he looked into most clinical stories, he’d find evidence of negligence, inattention, and oftentimes even negative intent. And since she’s mentioned the resident, he tells her that what the fatty she had coffee with this morning is really upset about is that there’s soon going to be a selection process for his position and he’s not going to get it, because he doesn’t fit in with the people in charge at the moment.

  Like a jealous man.

  She wraps him in her shawl. It’s soft and gives off a lot of heat. The tassels around the edge are shinier than the cloth itself. She tells him Martin gave it to her when Abaitua says how soft it is in order to avoid thanking her for caressing him. It’s very good quality, she says, looking at the label, “Seventy percent pashmina, thirty percent silk.” She’s proud to own such a fine item. Of such high quality. (It isn’t the first time he’s heard her saying that Martin’s given her something of great quality, and he thinks that he, too, should give her something.) She explains what pashmina is—after he promises he doesn’t know—while she ties and unties the tassels on the edges of the shawl. And once more, he remembers the couple underneath the poster of the woman breastfeeding, the father looking at his empty hands, the woman stroking the white shawl on her lap. “Breastfeeding is an act of love.”

  She’s leaning sideways against him, her head on his shoulder, a position Pilar wouldn’t find comfortable. He opens his eyes when he realizes she’s looking at him and then closes them again. Now he’s the one who’d like to know what she’s thinking.

  She asks how to say tender in Basque. “Samur.”

  Samurra zara. You’re tender.

  He believes her when she says he’s a tender man. Believes that she thinks that. She asks him again if nobody has ever told him that, and he says no. How could he say yes? What’s more, he doesn’t think anybody ever has said that to him.

  He likes hearing it.

  Her breathing is slow and regular, but he doesn’t think she’s asleep. Her loose reddish hair, half-open mouth, slightly swollen lips, slightly reddened face (he wonders if that’s because of his stubble), her very white body, and her long, thin fingers crossed over her belly remind him of Ophelia floating among the water lilies. He envies her being so relaxed, so calm. It’s the image of a woman who has just experienced pleasure, and he’s proud to have given that to her, as if he possessed a gift.

  “You drive me crazy.” Those words, and words like them, make him feel uncomfortable when she says them to him, with a trace of despair, outside of moments of pleasure. She tells him again he has to believe her, and he can’t or doesn’t and gives her the impression he takes it all as a joke, saying that all Lynns are gerontophiles—it’s a joke he often uses—and she gets angry. Or she pretends to get angry. He isn’t sure.

  He says she just looked like Ophelia among the water lilies.

  What do I look like now?

  She puts the shawl over her head and turns toward him. She puts her right hand into the shape of a cup and takes it to her left breast, her head tilted slightly to one side, and squeezes her nipple hard with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. Her gesture of pain is hardly visible, and then a small drop of milk comes out. He doesn’t dare to tell her that she shouldn’t do that. She smiles sweetly, holding her areola between her forefinger and middle finger, softly this time, and sits up slightly, moving it toward his mouth.

  The cat stretches out on the back of the sofa and sniffs at them.

  “Leave us alone, Max,” Lynn says, looking angry.

  “You leave it alone.”

  He takes ahold of the sides of the shawl and pulls them tightly together, immobilizing her. She doesn’t try to break free, looks at him seriously, as if she’s seen that he wants to ask her something. He doesn’t know how she’s guessed. He’s already asked her if she takes antidepressants. He doesn’t understand why she would need them, much less tricylicals. He asks her again, and she says she doesn’t take antidepressants but she should take cyanide. She frees her arms and pulls him down by the ear to her belly. He imitates the cat and sniffs at her scar. He asks her if she’s had any other illnesses apart from false appendicitis. What is this? An anamnesis? Lynn asks. Now she takes him by the ear again to draw him away from her belly. He tickles her. It’s a very ugly scar, really ugly work; he himself does wonderful stitches. She knocks the hand stroking her scar away with a gesture of repulsion. “You see, Max? He finds me ugly already.”

  He talks to her about the bursting of the ideal image. Someone’s told her the joke before: Men don’t leave women because they look old and ugly; they need to see them looking old and ugly so that they can bring themselves to leave them.

  He says he thinks she’s very beautiful, and Lynn looks at the ceiling in silence. Her eyes shine in the half-light.

  Lynn’s questions. She wants to know if he’s ever thought about testing her skin temperature while they’re making love, checking
the color or the texture of her skin, smelling her fluids or examining their density as a doctor would. She hopes he’s never thought of doing anything dirty like that. She lifts a finger up to her nose in threat. She wouldn’t forgive him for something like that. She wants to know if any woman has every complained to him about that, his hands touching them not as lover’s hands but as expert hands.

  He laughs, he’d have to think about it but doesn’t think so. And the other way around? The other way around being has he ever felt eroticized while practicing medicine. This question is serious, even though she asks it with a humorous tone. He defends himself by saying it’s still too common a fantasy. Playing doctor. A few idiotic acquaintances still ask him from time to time if he needs an assistant. But neither the women nor he play games at work.

  From time to time, some woman tells a risqué joke while standing next to the examination table, and while sitting on it, too, but he’s never felt eroticized, as she puts it. She looks at him with incredulity. She’s often had that fantasy. She goes into his office and answers all his intimate questions and then, when he tells her to get onto the examination table, he makes her wait there with her legs wide open, listening to the sound of the metal instruments on the glass table and imagining him heating up the speculum. Now it’s her turn to laugh. She’s sure some other women have thought the same thing.

  From time to time, some women flirt a little, doing all they can to give him a glimpse of some particularly seductive lingerie. That has happened to him. And some women wear too much perfume, but he thinks that’s more out of embarrassment and fear than the wish to be desirable. Perhaps it would be interesting to research women’s attitudes and behaviors on the examination table. As far as feet are concerned, there are women who can’t stand revealing them and, at the opposite extreme, women who never leave their socks on, thinking they look ridiculous naked but with their feet still in socks. It’s something that goes beyond the feet in themselves, something unconnected with whether they’re pretty or ugly, or something not entirely connected with that. In any case, he still sees some very ugly feet, feet that have suffered inside shoes and haven’t been properly looked after, but not as much as before. Elegant, very fine-looking women who have feet like birds of prey.

  Lynn stretches her legs out in the air. She doesn’t mind her feet, they’re not bad, the only thing being that sticking-up big toe. She lets them drop. She accuses him of having changed the subject to feet; what she wants to know is whether some scheming whore has ever seduced him in his office. She urges him to talk by pushing a finger into his ribs. Then he immobilizes her by holding onto her wrists. He doesn’t have anything to tell her.

  Teresa Hoyos’s feet are long but not bony, not too thin, either, her toes are well looked after, her nails shiny. They’re very beautiful, and she knows it. She wore Roman-style sandals even before they were fashionable, those ones that show off the whole foot. He thinks she even adapted her hairstyle to match her feet—a Cleopatra bob with straight hair. Very black hair, dyed now, of course. He thinks she must have broken her nose at some point and that it never set well, he’s never asked her, the bridge was a little asymmetrical, but that imperfection fits in very well with the rest of her face, particularly her lips, which are almost as thick a black person’s.

  He feels the urge to talk about Teresa Hoyos, to tell her about the stupid, squalid incident he had with her. More than a need for inner relief or a need to exorcise his guilt, what he hopes is that a pronouncement from a generous judge will make the whole thing seem less important. He knows that Lynn won’t be as severe with him as he himself is, or at least not as merciless as Pilar. Once, when he told her about something that happened to him in the way these things often get told, attributing it all to a third party with “I heard about this one gynecologist who . . .” or some other similar comment, her first disdainful words were “What a pig!” It’s true that he hadn’t been able to explain any of the attenuating circumstances, because then she would have realized that he was talking about himself.

  Does he not care that Lynn might despise him? He doesn’t think that’s the issue.

  She lifts her head from his shoulder, apparently wanting to know why they are sitting there in silence, and he turns his head away from her on the pretext of wanting to pet the cat. He prefers not to look at Lynn when he tells her that he hasn’t always been an honorable man. Quite a dramatic sentence to start off with. So, he’s talking about Teresa Hoyos, who’s around ten years younger than him. She was attractive, sweet, and timid, nervous, although he’s not quite sure what he means by that; sometimes when they spoke, her voice would break, and he thought it trembled a little. He used to see her at the private practice he’s long since given up. He enjoyed being with her, and because of that, he would spend time talking with her after her medical examination, just as he did with other patients who were also friends. He doesn’t think he really desired her. He found her pleasant—her voice, that way she had of speaking as if she were frightened, her perfume, her distrustful, evasive attitude that held something mysterious behind it. Perhaps it was just that—he found her vulnerability attractive. He isn’t sure.

  He thinks it never even occurred to him to try to see her outside the office. Saying anything to her would have been unacceptable, because she was so vulnerable, but above all he thinks she didn’t really desire him. It was nice to see her at the office, that was enough for him. He used the trick of giving her more appointments than she strictly needed. Of course, he tried to justify what he was doing and used an argument that was not very convincing—every time her test results came back, she was always within the theoretical limits for anemia. He examined her for several years, without ever increasing the frequency of her gynecological explorations, always remaining highly professional with her, never overstepping the mark, never taking their post-examination chats toward any dubious subjects of conversation. He paid her a compliment about her skin on one occasion. He said it to her quite simply, but it seemed to throw her off; on another occasion, he left his hand on her knee for what seemed like a long time to him. He never praised her feet, which seemed so beautiful to him, or touched them. There’s no reason for gynecologists to touch feet. But once, one day when she didn’t have an appointment—she had called to ask him to see her because her pelvis had been hurting for several days—and he doesn’t know how or why, perhaps because he was seeing her outside the normal schedule, he went too far. Everything started normally, he asked her about her symptoms, told her to undress—normally, he insists, without any obscene intentions either then or when he helped her into the gynecological exploration position—but suddenly, when he sat down in front of her, between her wide-open legs, he was taken over by the desire to put his naked hands into her vagina. And that’s what he did. No more than that—he put his index and middle finger in and left them there for a second. Nothing more than that. Fearing he might be painting too depraved a picture of himself, he repeats that it never happened again and that if he did do it, it was more out of affection than in search of any type of pleasure for himself, but he wishes he’d taken her hand rather than putting his fingers inside her. Every abuser’s line, he thinks. But he has no idea whether Teresa Hoyos realized; it’s impossible she could have told the difference by how it felt. She probably noticed he wasn’t wearing gloves, didn’t hear the slap of the latex, which is normally done very obviously so that patients feel safe in the knowledge that they are in clinical, aseptic surroundings. Nothing at the time gave him the idea that she was uncomfortable, particularly uncomfortable, he means, more nervous than on other occasions, and they said goodbye, as usual, after making a new appointment.

  He suffered over it. He was depressed at having done something so dirty, and even though he told himself that nothing had happened, he never managed to convince himself it was true. At best, the difference between himself and the most repulsive of abusers was only a matter of degrees, it wasn’t that he’d done a
n essentially different type of thing, and he felt despicable, foul. That was just the beginning of his punishment. He wouldn’t say he started to forget about it as the days went by, but he did start to think that, to an extent, it was more of an impure thought than a case of abuse—and in any case, it was something he would never allow himself to do again—and he came to believe that it was no more than an ambiguous incident, barely perceptible, even for the person who had suffered it. However, she called a few days before her next appointment to cancel it. Not to change it—he found that out almost immediately; when the nurse suggested another date, Teresa Hoyos quite simply turned it down without saying why. And that was when the real torture began for him. That cancelation proved something he already believed—he was to blame for a cowardly incident, because the woman was aware that she had been abused.

  So Teresa Hoyos did know that he was some sort of pervert. Did anybody else know? Was he going to become one of those doctors that colleagues tell jokes about at dinner parties? He couldn’t really imagine Teresa Hoyos talking about intimate matters in public, and at the same time, what she had to talk about was, in objective terms, very little. But there the fact was—she left his practice, and he didn’t know why. He thought about all sorts of possible explanations, some of them as absurd as the idea that she was prejudiced against him because she thought he was a Basque nationalist. Because he’d heard that she began espousing opinions like that after ETA killed her father, a logistics officer, a man who’d been about to retire, that she’d become radical in her politics, staking out extreme Spanish nationalist positions. That could be what was behind it, he thought. A few months later, however, Arrese himself proved what an absurd notion that was; himself an open, proud Basque nationalist, he let him know that she had come over to his practice. Abaitua remembers well that he told him he knew she had been a patient of his; he said she was very good looking but also pretty strange.