Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Loiola’s looking through an old box in the junk room. What’s he looking for? He turns around to say hi. He likes looking through old things. A red Requeté beret with a lieutenant’s star, yellow pompom and all—he puts it on. It even looks good on him. Suddenly he looks like his maternal grandfather, or perhaps the beret just reminds Abaitua of him even though he never saw him wearing it. He says it suits him and then Loiola takes it off. “He was a real fascist, wasn’t he?”

  Abaitua wouldn’t say he was a real fascist. Sometimes his son seems to him like a child who always wants to hear the same story. He’s tried to explain it to him hundreds of times. He doesn’t think the word fascist is right for him—he believed in traditional values, he was religious, and he thought that Spain wasn’t ready for democracy. England was, Spain wasn’t. There are several medals in his boxes, faded leather folders, discolored hand-written letters tied up with bits of ribbon. They’re the old man’s relics, which Pilar hasn’t dared throw away. He used to have two pistols, but Abaitua knows that he took them to Eibar one day to have them decommissioned. Yes, he thinks he wasn’t a bad man. In some areas, Abaitua’s father, who was on the other side of the war, was more reactionary. His father was authoritarian, intolerant, and racist by nature, more than Pilar’s, but by chance, he’d been on the right side of the war. If his leaders had chosen to join Franco’s “crusade,” as they called it, he would have blindly obeyed them and fought against anarchy and disorder just as he actually did fight in favor of freedom. He tries to explain it to his son, even at the risk of shattering his perception of his other grandfather, whom he idolizes. It was he, Abaitua, who gave him that perception, proudly telling him of the deeds of the dignified losers at Intxorta, while Pilar, as though ashamed of her own father, listened on in silence. He remembers that shortly after they met, she told him, “My father fought with Franco during the war,” almost challenging him, the admission taking a weight off her shoulders, he thinks.

  Loiola rubs a medal against his chest to polish it. He says it looks like gold, and it probably is.

  “What are you going to do now?” For a moment he feels as if they’ve swapped roles and now he’s the son, about to start his degree in the States, worried about what type of lifestyle his father’s going to have. “Ama says . . . Ama believes . . . Ama thinks . . .” He’s surprised by him mentioning what his mother says, believes, and thinks all the time. When do they speak? Apparently, she’s proud—even though she hasn’t told him so—that he stood up to Arrese and Orl. As Loiola says the words, he looks at him, as if wanting to see how he reacts to them. So what are you going to do? He answers that he doesn’t know, but he’ll probably take advantage of being out of a job to cross the Atlantic in a schooner, so one day he may turn up in Boston on a sailing ship. He tells him about Kepa’s plans as if they were his own, and his son listens politely but starts asking him questions as soon as he can. “What are you going to do about the hospital?” He pretends not to understand the question, so he frames it more specifically—Isn’t he excited about his mother’s plans? He answers that he doesn’t know what her plans are. “You know full well.”

  He has to think about it. In any case, he’s going to write to him, and he hopes he’ll write back, tell him what he’s up to. They’re standing facing each other, an arm’s length away. He feels that a serious, uncomfortable atmosphere, which he was hoping to avoid, has been created, and he’s afraid of being moved by it, but Loiola bursts out laughing when he realizes his grandfather’s medal is stuck to his chest. He makes the fascist salute, and Abaitua lifts his hand to knock his arm down. He doesn’t know what to do and feels the need to say something clear to him; precisely, he thinks that if he says something to his son right now, it will stay with him for ever, just as he remembers saying goodbye to his father on the platform in Hendaia when he went to Paris for the first time. A memory in black and white. A friend of his father’s had driven them both to Hendaia. He got onto the train—which must have had a plaque reading è pericoloso sporgersi—and stuck his head out of the window. They, his father and his father’s friend, the owner of the car, were on the platform. They didn’t know what to say to each other and didn’t say anything, just waited together for the train to set off. They heard the guard’s whistle, and his father looked at him as if wanting to say something, but it was his friend who said with a firm voice, “And don’t forget you’re Basque.” He’ll never forget it.

  He goes up to the boy to take the medal off him and says he’s prepared a special speech for the occasion, but it’s an after-dinner speech, it’s solemn, it has to be delivered in a certain atmosphere, and so it’s no good for a junk room. So he’ll spare Loiola it, given that his son doesn’t have much time anyway.

  “Ama insisted,” he apologizes.

  The poor kid doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.

  It’s going to be quite a frustrating farewell. Abaitua nods toward the door when they hear Pilar’s voice from above telling them that it’s getting late, but the boy doesn’t move. “There’s something I’d like to know,” he says seriously. Abaitua sees he’s nervous and realizes that he is, too. What does he want to know? He wants to know about when he found his friends with the boxes on the boat and he told him to call the police—had he actually wanted him to call, or had he just wanted to give them a scare? He doesn’t hesitate and says that he wanted him to call the police, that it was what had to be done. Why does he ask? He answers that he’s always thought he must have misunderstood what he wanted him to do.

  Abaitua isn’t sure whether his own father embraced him at the Hendaia station. He thinks he didn’t, but even so, he’d say he was an affectionate man. He and Loiola do embrace each other, perhaps a little clumsily, although they don’t give each other a kiss.

  Have a good time, he says to him, enjoy life. What else could he tell him?

  Pilar empties her bag onto the table to look for her keys. Loiola reminds her that she left them in the car. Abaitua had forgotten that, too. “This head of mine.” Pilar slaps herself on the forehead and holds the boy by the chin. She smiles at him. “What on earth am I going to do without you?” Her smile looks happy. It’s the only smile Pilar has—she doesn’t know how to fake smiles. She’s incapable of using her zygomatic bone to lift her cheeks up and wrinkle her eyes. When she smiles, it’s because some spark has touched her orbicularia oculia, a muscle that can’t be moved voluntarily; according to Duchenne, it only serves to express emotions of the soul. It’s a miracle that seldom happens, but it always moves Abaitua when it does.

  Before leaving, Pilar asks him what he’s going to do, as if sorry to be leaving him alone. He’ll read for a bit, and then maybe he’ll go out for a walk.

  Lynn is going to be waiting for him at seven on the dot, wearing her green zipped dress that goes down to her knees, and nothing beneath it.

  He stops at the bottom of the slope, across from the train stop, because at that moment, Martin’s opening the iron gate, and he waits for him to walk across the garden. He can go back or hide behind a sycamore tree a couple of yards to his left, but he doesn’t, out of dignity, and also because anybody looking out from the house would be able to see his movements. Because he’s the only person on the slope, it’s probable, not to say inevitable, that the writer will realize he’s there if he turns around to close the gate. Which is what happens. He opens the gate, turns around to close it, and when he recognizes him—Abaitua thinks he’s recognized him, even though he doesn’t give any sign of it—he doesn’t close the gate but stays standing there looking at him, undoubtedly waiting for him to come across the thirty or forty feet between them. It had to happen some time, and now that it has, he doesn’t much care. Even so, he decides that he’s going to greet him when he reaches the gate, say whatever comes to mind, and then carry on along the old path up to the clinic, as if he hadn’t come to see Lynn. It’s ridiculous, since the writer and homeowner must already be very well awa
re of their relationship, but he’s not worried about that. He doesn’t want to explicitly recognize it, sanction it, so to speak, by walking across the garden with that man who, what’s more, he likes less and less, among other things because he gets the feeling he keeps tabs on everything that happens in the house. By now, there’s no doubt that he’s waiting for him there, and out of politeness, he feels obliged to quicken his step, even though he stops a couple of yards away from the gate to make it clear that he has no intention of going in, less so now that he’s remembered their last conversation in Gros, when the Dominican woman offered herself as a nurse to look after his father. He’s thought hundreds of time about calling her to beg her never to use his name when looking for work, but he hasn’t done it.

  He calms down a little when Martin, after dryly saying hello, talks to him about the weather. The summer’s over. Yes, the temperatures have really dropped. The writer tells him he thinks autumn weather’s perfect, because it gives him a feeling of melancholy and that, he says, is a sweet sensation. Abaitua, too, likes the woods in autumn. He takes advantage of the comment to say he’s going for a walk, nodding toward the path up the hill, and the writer looks in that direction with great attention, as if he were looking for something specific. Then, unexpectedly, he mentions the old sailboat. “It’s still there.” They can’t see it from where they are, only a little bit of the river’s visible from here. He agrees it’s still there, but avoids taking any responsibility for it. He doesn’t know what they’re going to do with it. His wife’s family’s things. That’s what he means, he doesn’t know what they are going to do with it. The writer looks at him with his lively blue eyes. He wants to make clear that it doesn’t bother him. The thing is, there’s a group of boys that go there, and they’ve started messing around on it again. It would be a good idea to take care of it. Abaitua promises “he’ll make sure they know about it,” without saying who will, and almost says he’ll go take a look himself, it’s just as easy for him to go one way or the other, but just then, the writer suddenly lifts one hand up to his forehead as if he’s remembered something important, in the same way Pilar just has, and tells him he has to thank him for helping him find a nurse for his father. Apparently she’s very sweet and affectionate. He says it without a smile. Although his report is positive, it doesn’t reassure Abaitua, who’s about to clear the matter up when Martin starts talking about the problem of old people in society today. Abaitua just stands there watching him bring his lips together, open them again, and stretch them all around as he trots out one cliché after another about ageing demographics, and all the time, he thinks, Lynn’s there waiting for him as she promised in her green dress and without any panties on. Literally without any panties, and instead of finding it funny, it makes him worry. It’s the second time he’s had a specific date with Lynn. The first was when they met at Portaleta, and this is the second, at the house. At seven o’clock, she’d said to him, and he can still see her finger pointing upward, half nurse, half undine, and he can see on the writer’s watch—which he keeps catching glimpses of as he lifts his hands up to his forehead in that typical gesture of his—that it’s half past seven now. Ever since leaving home with plenty of time to arrive punctually, he just keeps bumping into people. So Lynn must already be bored of waiting for him, there in her zipped dress that goes down from her neck to her knees, because that’s how she said she would come out to meet him, at seven on the dot, with nothing on underneath, and he’d have to open the dress very slowly when he arrived. That was her fantasy, the one he had to make come true because she guessed right about what the next train to go by was going to be when they were walking back from the Peruvian woman’s birthing, and gambling debts are sacred.

  What the writer is worried about is the fact that his family responsibilities are stopping him from working, from concentrating. And when it comes down to it, he’s got plenty of resources. What must it be like for other people? He brushes his hair back from time to time. It gives Abaitua the chance to see on his watch that time’s moving on.

  He doesn’t dare lift his glance to check, but he thinks he’s just seen Lynn in the top window and that she’s even signaling at him. He feels trapped by this man rattling off commonplaces about the unavoidable final destiny of humanity, feels like an idiot, unable to arrive for his date, and now even his date itself seems idiotic to him. Waiting for him without any panties on, which excited him as soon as he woke up in the morning and remembered about it, now seems just like complete nonsense to him, something out of one of those French novels where the girls ask the men to guess what color panties they’re wearing and declare they want to see their willies—“Devine de quelle couleur est ma culotte” and “je veux voir ton zizi” and such like. He feels himself blushing, and the writer realizes.

  Even so, in the end, the writer asks him if he doesn’t want to come in, but he nods vaguely toward the clinic and says he’ll finish his walk. A stupid way out, in any case. Now he’ll have to wait a good while, in case the writer sees him on his way back, so that he can say he really has been out getting some healthy exercise.

  When he reaches the reeds, he asks himself why he felt he had to keep up appearances. Why didn’t he admit he was going to see Lynn? Why does he have to pretend? He can see a good part of the house from where he is, there’s nobody at the windows, or in the clinic parking lot, either, which he sees surrounded by a metal fence, and right now it looks like a prison yard. He’s tired of waiting. He really doesn’t care if Martin or Julia realize what ridiculous manoeuvres he’s been on, and he goes back in the direction of Lynn.

  She meets him at the door wearing her moss-green dress with its zipper at the front running from top to bottom. She pretends to be angry, frowns, puts her hands on her hips. What’s he been up to, she demands to know. She’s been here for two hours, with no panties on, and in danger of catching cystitis, and what’s more, more people have knocked on her door than in the entire rest of the time she’s lived there. The postman’s come, the water meter reader, the gas canister delivery man’s been twice, and she opened the door to all of them, in the best of moods, thinking it was going to be him, and she’s sure they all realized she was waiting for somebody and not wearing any panties, and all for what, when he finally does arrive, he starts petting the cat and not paying her any attention. She’s clearly trying to be comical, and she manages it, but Abaitua, who has the cat at his feet begging to be petted and who can’t bring himself to deny its request, finds it a caustic type of comedy, and he feels ridiculous.

  The dress gets stuck, he has trouble opening the zipper, and then he embraces her naked body. Lynn laughs and says it’s too late now.

  He doesn’t want tea, coffee, beer, or wine, but says yes when she suggests putting some music on. She has traditional tastes in that area, although perhaps she’s choosing music she thinks he’ll like. She seldom puts Bob Dylan on, even though he’s her favorite singer. Abaitua knows because she’s told him, and he was inconsiderate enough to say that he didn’t like him. He doesn’t understand what the man’s saying with that nasal voice of his.

  Fly Me to the Moon is playing. He likes it—and let me play among the stars. She often plays it; she has a compilation of twenty different singers doing it. Tony Bennett, Anita O’Day, Astrud Gilberto, Blossom Dearie, Diana Krall, Dinah Washington . . . The same song again and again, endlessly.

  From the sofa, he can’t distinguish the names or the authors of the books on the shelves, but he knows what they are. City of Glass’s view of New York at night. Wise Children’s crossed legs. Flaubert’s Parrot’s colorful parrot next to a black-and-white old woman. To the Lighthouse’s lighthouse and umbrella. He can’t see anything on the cover of Montauk, because the light coming in through the sash window is reflecting on its protective cellophane cover, but he could draw the beach and the two deck chairs, the lighthouse in the background. He likes that cover. It brings him memories of a beach in Cadiz you can see the Tra
falgar lighthouse from, wild and abandoned. There, too, the sand goes all the way up to the grass, and Pilar and he used to go to that boundary where the two meet, because she liked the sand—above all because she hated the bugs in the grass—and he, on the other hand, prefered the grass. He now has the impression that they were happy back in those days. They’ve often made plans to go back there.

  Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. It’s Frank Sinatra singing now.

  Lynn tells Max not to be so tiresome when he gets on the sofa and begs to be petted—“Don’t be such a bore.”

  But they’ve never gone back. They also made plans to go to Milan to see one of Modigliani’s paintings, part of a private collection, because the woman in it looks a lot like Pilar. From time to time, he’s said that he has to find out where it’s on view exactly so that they can go and see it, but he hasn’t. Out of negligence, and also because he knows that deep down, Pilar doesn’t like things like that very much. She grew to accept that the woman in the painting looked like her, even that she looked like her a lot, but she’s suspicious of him being so enthusiastic about it. In fact, she’s always been suspicious of his sounding enthusiastic, and of his expressions of emotions, they seem delirious to her, and she’s reluctant to go up, probably afraid that it will mean having to come down afterward. He thinks that’s why she reacts as she does. Perhaps the most Pilar wants, with him, is to share a peaceful daily life.

  He cannot imagine Pilar suddenly saying one day, “Listen: I love you.”

  Lynn gets up from the sofa, runs to the stereo on tiptoes, and remorselessly takes Peggy Lee off; “please be true” are the last words she sings. Music gets in the way, spoils her concentration; he thinks she said that to him on some occasion, and in any case, it’s obvious. When she comes back, she slips between his back and the sofa. Now she’s behind him, and she puts her legs around him to embrace him. He lets his body slide downward until his head is on her belly, and she leans over her and strokes him with her hair. There’s a clear expression of pain on her face, and she complains, “It isn’t coming out now,” as she squeezes her nipples. He takes ahold of her hand—she doesn’t have to do that. How many times has he told her?