Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Although he’s concentrating on business, he hasn’t forgotten about their plan to go to La Rochelle for a couple of days. The idea is to try out an amazing schooner he plans to cross the Atlantic in later on. Abaitua doesn’t believe it at all really. He knows that the father of one of his friends is the owner of a shipyard in La Rochelle, because he’s met him and even sailed with him, but the story Kepa’s telling is too perfect to be true. His friend had built the schooner of his dreams, because there isn’t much work at the shipyard, and on seeing it, one of those Americans who are loaded with money decided to buy it. Kepa’s friend has to deliver it to some port in Florida, and needing a crew for the voyage, he’s asked him to go with him on the trip and to find somebody else to come along who would be prepared to take part in the adventure, as well. Abaitua, who doesn’t fully believe him, has fantasized more than once, since Kepa suggested it to him, about going to America in a real sailing ship. But before that, the plan is to go to La Rochelle and sail around for a couple of days—a plan that seems much more plausible. Abaitua doesn’t have any trouble with dates now that he is, as he usually puts it, “a suspended doctor.” Kepa, on the other hand, has to solve “the problem of his mother.”

  The old lady’s sitting down in the kitchen, deep in her task of rubbing two bits of old bread together. Small pieces of the bread are falling onto the table, almost crumbs. She stops what she’s doing for a moment to look briefly at the newly arrived man. “Juan,” she says to him. Then she tells him, “Ya ves Juan, todavía estoy viva”—you see, Juan, I’m still alive. She looks at little bit like La Pasionaria, dressed in a black dress, a woollen shawl of the same color, sharp eyes that look as if they’ve suffered a lot, white hair with nicotine-colored stains combed back into a bun. Abaitua suspects that the severity in her eyes is partly because she’s outside reality, but she smiles when he asks her what she’s doing with the bread. “Migas para los pajarillos”—crumbs for the birds, she says. She still has a good set of teeth.

  She has a urinary tract infection, which she often suffers from, and perhaps a bit of a temperature. She smells of piss. First he takes her pulse, and then, while he listens to her chest, to give the impression that he’s doing something, Kepa gets things off his chest by telling him more or less the same things as always. She spends all day heating up café con leche, forgetting that she’s just had some. She drinks gallons of the stuff and, because of that, spends the whole day urinating, and not always in the bathroom, less and less there, in fact, and she refuses to use diapers. But that’s the least of it. The worst thing is the danger of her having some accident with the gas and blowing the whole house up. There’s quite a high risk of her flooding the place, too, because she also insists on cleaning everything she sets eyes on. So he can’t leave her alone for even ten minutes.

  He’s seen that antibiotics don’t have any side effects on her and the only thing he can think to do is to give her amoxicillin. Abaitua doesn’t know what to answer when he asks him, “But how long can she go on like this?” In any case, he doesn’t think that what Kepa suggests—taking her to the ER—is the solution. They won’t admit her, probably, and even if they did, it would only be for a couple of days and only to torture her with the same useless tests they’ve done on her so often, and then the Haloperidol might really knock her body for a loop.

  Kepa’s challenge: What would happen if she refused to go when they discharged her, if she refused to be taken home? Abaitua is sure that this idea, too, is a fantasy, but why does he keep on thinking about it if he knows he’d never be able to go through with it? Or would he? He asks him, and Kepa just replies that he feels suffocated. He can’t go away even for a weekend, the check he gets from the city government doesn’t help much, the girl he’s hired for a few hours a week is costing him a lot of money. His mother starts heating up coffee again, and Kepa goes back to moaning that she could have an accident at any time. Finally, Abaitua gets fed up. He asks why he doesn’t try to teach her to use the microwave, and Kepa doesn’t like the question. Just write the prescription already, he replies sharply.

  “So, more amoxicillin.” There’s obvious mockery in his voice as he reads back the prescription. What was he expecting, Midazolam 30 mg? Abaitua knows that Kepa could get ahold of something to cause irreversible sedation, and that he could get his GP to issue the death certificate without ever seeing the corpse. And of course, Kepa even knows a few of those doctors who smile beatifically whenever death is mentioned to them. They’ve talked about it before. It’s possible that this woman who is now so engrossed in rubbing two bits of old bread together might express a desire to die when the moment comes. Probably, in the not too distant future, it’ll be just as routine to finish off people who’ve reached the stage the old woman has as it now is to give children trivalente vaccines. They may even come up with some lovely ritual to regulate the practice, like nomadic tribes in the desert; Kepa says they used to leave dying people with enough water for the caravan to be able to move away and not see their actual deaths. He always mentions anthropological curiosities that speak in favor of euthanasia, as if he had to convince him. They’ve discussed it. Abaitua has additional reasons for being prudent in this particular debate; he can’t help asking himself if he, as a doctor, would be prepared to take on the responsibility for putting an end to a human life. The difficulty is distinguishing between life and human life. Faced with useless suffering, in which there is no hope, Abaitua has no doubt, and he’s taken action when he’s had to. But he has the impression that people often make decisions too easily when it comes to whether it’s worth it for sick people, even terminally ill people, to go on living. His experience makes him cautious, even when it’s the sick person asking for an end to their life, because that request may be influenced by variable personal circumstances, particularly by depression, or by situations that might be changeable. He’s aware that his objections are shared, as Kepa often reminds him, by those who describe themselves as being “pro-life” whenever abortion and euthanasia are mentioned but who—due to their own comfort, negligence, and ignorance—don’t mind putting their patients at risk. But that’s what he feels. He also thinks that people who are in favor of euthanasia or assisted suicide—as he is—often simplify the question, and they’d be more prudent about it if they considered the possibility of having to make such decisions themselves.

  Before going to get the amoxicillin, Kepa asks his mother if she wants to go to the bathroom. He isn’t very affectionate, and he uses the first person plural in the way doctors usually do with their patients. “Shall we go to the bathroom and pee?” But when Abaitua hears him talking inside the bathroom—how to sit down, how to hold on—he sounds more pleasant.

  She’s sitting down again, her arms forgotten in her lap, hands in her sleeves, her knees together; her black dress goes almost down to her feet, which are in black slippers. As if she were sitting by the front door of her house in Cadiz, whose name she is able to recall when Abaitua asks her. She knows that she isn’t there, and she knows what season it is, too, but not what day of the week it is, or the month, or the year. When he shows her his watch, to find out if she can say what it is, she laughs. Why’s he asking her that?

  So he asks her why she’s making bread crumbs, and after looking at him with mistrust, she says it’s to give to the birds—“para dárselas a los pajarillos”—as if he were pulling her leg by asking her such questions. She says she feeds them at midday. “Lots of sparrows come, and two robins. The robins have their own windows, one goes to the kitchen and the other to the bathroom, each one has its own territory. They’re cheeky, and they fight a lot. Do you know what people call them here?” Abaitua pretends not to know. “Txantxangorris.”

  She continues calling him Juan. “You were really lucky in the war, Juan.” He asks her why. “Because you got wounded so early on.” He isn’t sure whether or not to follow her lead or try to find out who she’s confusing him with, and finally, he tel
ls her he wasn’t even born when the war was going on. So she asks him how old he is, and he tells her. She stares at him, as if to decide how he’s looking for his age. For just a moment, her eyes are fully alive, paying full attention. Then, as if unable to understand, they lose their sharpness. He asks her if she’s sad, and she says she is, quite sad. The reason: her memories of the war, the dirty war, the bad life Pedro had as a result of the war. She talks about the terrible thing that happened to Pedro. Abaitua knows that Pedro—the old lady always says “poor Pedro”—was Kepa’s father and that he volunteered for a CNT battalion when he was seventeen. “Pobre Pedro,” she says—poor Pedro. “It would have been better if they had just shot him.” She talks about “aquello que le pasó”—the thing that happened to him—as if he knew all about it, and Abaitua wouldn’t understand her if he didn’t know that when Franco’s soldiers captured enemies, they made them execute people from their own side. Apparently, that was what happened to Kepa’s father, and it ruined his life. Kepa told him that his father took to drink. She tells him that he drank to forget. After drying her eyes with a cloth, she lays it out on her lap and delicately folds it, passing the back of her hand over each fold. Her story is short and to the point. Pedro used to say that he wasn’t brave enough to kill himself, and he started drinking to forget. It got worse after the war, because he was afraid that somebody might know he had taken part in the firing squads. Somebody from their village or around there. But apparently he himself was the one who talked about it. He used to go from bar to bar to get it off his chest, telling everybody about his drama, how many people he’d killed after hearing them shout “¡Viva la República!”; but the day after, he would forget that he had admitted to it. “That’s why we came to Vasconia,” she explained, using an old Spanish name for Euskadi.

  When Abaitua asks her if she only has bad memories, she asks him, surprisingly, to specify if he means from the war or just in general, and after he tells her he means in general, she says she has a few fine memories. She laughs out loud, and Abaitua sees that she doesn’t have any wisdom teeth or premolars.

  “Pedrito, hijo, cuánta guerra te doy”, she says—what a lot of trouble I cause for you, Pedrito, my son. She lifts up a hand to stroke Kepa’s cheek when he hands her a yogurt for her to eat with her antibiotics. He tells her to quit trying to sweet-talk him—“Déjese de zalamerías.” It’s a shy, rough answer, a strange mixture. Abaitua thinks she’s embarrassed about having called him Pedrito.

  They agree to meet up another day to talk about the trip to La Rochelle. Kepa’s suggestion is that they go up the coast as far as Nantes. There are different routes drawn in red and blue on the map he spreads out on the table. He has photos of the schooner, too. It’s a really beautiful sailing ship, at anchor but looking ready to go, as if only waiting for some wind.

  When Kepa says that it’s outfitted for six people, Abaitua gets the impression that he’s holding back from saying that they could ask Lynn along, and that impression grows as he keeps quiet while Kepa points to his mother and says, “I can bring her along with me. At least she’d be able to make us all café con leche.”

  Abaitua doesn’t want to mention Lynn, although he’s not sure why. Something to do with Pilar, but he doesn’t want to think it through. He tries not to take their relationship as a given fact, even with Kepa, though it’s obvious he’s fully aware of it, and when he asks after her all of a sudden, as if he’s just thought to wonder how she’s been doing, Abaitua blurts out that he hasn’t seen her for a while. Kepa asks him to say hi from him.

  But the truth is that she’ll be waiting for him at home at seven. “At seven o’clock,” she’d said, pointing her index finger upward as if to say that he’d be in for it otherwise. When she opens the door for him, she’ll be wearing her green dress that goes down from her neck to her knees.

  As he puts his phonendoscope and tensiometer back in his briefcase, the old lady gets up to say goodbye to him, and Kepa says it is time for them to have a bath. Abaitua smells piss again when he gives her two goodbye kisses. He’ll come back to visit her. She tells him to come whenever he wants to, and her son, a towel over his shoulder as if he were a boxing coach, says he’ll have to see himself out and sorry for not going with him to the door. But then he does go with him. At the door, Abaitua has the sensation that he’s running away and feels the need to apologize—Loiola’s leaving for America, and they’re going to say goodbye to him.

  Kepa smiles. Tell him we’ll visit him when we sail across the Atlantic.

  His eyes are very dark and full of sincerity. Abaitua gives way to temptation and puts his hand on his shoulder and squeezes it. If crossing the Atlantic isn’t enough for them, they can keep going all the way across the Pacific, he says.

  What he doesn’t say is that he understands him feeling suffocated in the situation with his mother, it’s all right to want to be freed from that weight, but it has to be done in the right way. He’ll try to find a place for her at the home. Kepa nods. Abaitua is already on the ground floor when he hears Kepa say what he apparently didn’t dare to say to him face-to-face—he’s glad he had the guts to stand up to the hospital mafia.

  When he reaches home, he’s surprised to see Pilar’s car parked in front of the garage with the keys in it, as if she were going to go out again. In the entryway, she herself confirms it. She seems to be in a hurry and carefully asks him, with that imploring look of hers he knows so well, to be nice, which allows him to deduce that Loiola has already arrived. There’s been a change of plan. She speaks to him as she goes from one room to another looking for something, and he, in the living room, looks over the mail that’s arrived. A letter from the doctors’ association. They threaten to suspend him for at least two years and for up to twenty. The news doesn’t startle him, and when Pilar stops running around and looks with curiosity at his reaction on opening the letter, he tells her it’s nothing, just an invitation to a conference. He doesn’t know if she believes him, but she doesn’t ask him anything else. As far as the change of plans is concerned, she tells him that Urrutikoetxea called to say he was happy to talk about the assisted reproduction program and that when she told him about Loiola’s plans to go to Harvard and that he was flying to Milan out of Loiu tomorrow and from there to New York, he said that he happened to be with a lecturer from that very university and why didn’t they come up early so that they could all have dinner together. The lecturer is a very pleasant woman, and it would be useful for Loiola to have her as a contact. Loiola thought it was a good idea. He’s going to spend the night in Bilbao, and that way he won’t have to get up early the next morning and drive to catch his plane. Pilar doesn’t know what she’s going to do, it will depend on how much she has to drink at dinner and how tired she is, but she’ll probably stay with Loiola. She says all of this quickly and naturally, even happily and with a lively air, to an extent, but without giving any impression that she might like him to go, too, which would have been natural, because it’s he who’s friends with Urrutikoetxea, and he finds it all quite frustrating, even though he has a date with Lynn at seven o’clock. What’s more, he’s sure it hasn’t crossed Pilar’s mind that he might want to go to Bilbao, and still less to have dinner with them, a dinner party at which the matter of what happened at the hospital would definitely come up and at which he would have to explain what his current situation is, and he knows that’s why she doesn’t suggest it to him. And the truth is, if she did ask him to go with her, he would refuse flat-out, and not just because of Lynn, who he could give any number of excuses to. Just thinking about traveling makes him nervous. Spending the night in a hotel. What would they do with Loiola there, ask for a room each? Impossible. Even the best option—having dinner without any wine and then coming straight back—would mean being together alone for a whole hour. It could be the moment he’s been waiting for, the moment to talk about their life, but as always, he’d rather put it off.

  “Where are you?�
�� she calls to him, asking him to come to the bedroom, as if they’d never quarreled. He’s here, he says again, and he goes to the bedroom and stands by the door. She’s put on a gray skirt and a white blouse, which she hasn’t done up yet. The skin on her neck is a little loose, and her lips are thinner than they once were, but he thinks she’s still beautiful. It’s the thought of a moment, like a spark, the image of something that can’t be specified, something he finds attractive. He doesn’t want to think about it and takes a step backward involuntarily. Pilar stops doing her blouse up and looks at him with sharp eyes, as if wanting to read his mind, and he worries she may actually do it.

  While they’re in the living room, she takes the towel off her head and shakes her wet hair in a movement that always makes her look young; she talks about the projects she’s working on, and he envies her enthusiasm. Organizing the assisted reproduction service; the menopause treatment center; a well-run prostate unit. The future. The prostate unit’s all arranged; she needs Urruti to help with the assisted reproduction project; and she herself is the best person to head up the menopause center. She doesn’t seem to be joking, and she looks at him seriously as she says, “I really mean it.”

  She gives him the towel and asks if he wouldn’t mind putting it in the dirty laundry basket.

  Smelling her perfume. Out of curiosity, he lifts her towel up to his nose. It’s essence of violet with a touch of cinnamon, but he’s ashamed of himself and throws it into the basket.