Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Sometimes she tells him exactly what she wants, demands it, with a determination that seems rough in a girl, and on those occasions, the sex is short. He could look at her without any inhibition whatsoever, because she doesn’t seem to be seeing anything. Her eyes are literally white, her body curved and shaken by spasms, suddenly possessed by an explosion of disorder, and he’s in awe, as he would be if witnessing a storm at sea that you can only gaze upon in amazement, and he wants to hold her body, which is receiving all that pleasure, to embrace it, to be able to feel that need to explode that’s moving, without being aware of his presence, toward some seashore where, on emptying its strength, it searches for him like a spent wave, calling his name, still sobbing.

  In Montauk, Max Frisch writes about all women being similar in “the moment of greatest pleasure,” but he doesn’t agree with that.

  “What is it that you do to me?” “You drive me crazy.” “I can’t take all this pleasure.” She says these things that always make him feel uneasy, and to get her to be quiet, he says she can’t fool him—three out of four women fake their orgasms. Usually with the best of intentions, to increase their pleasure and their partners’ pleasure, but it’s a put-on. She presses her shoulder to his chest and leans on him. Why doesn’t he believe her? Why doesn’t he want to believe her? And she moves off him again.

  He doesn’t answer her.

  And in any case, being a gynecologist, you would have thought he’d be an expert.

  What are you thinking about? He’s hardly done anything all day, and even so, as is usual in him recently, he has the sensation that things are happening to him all the time. He feels sorry when he thinks about how he’s just said goodbye to his son, who he probably won’t see for another year. He’d thought for some time about what he should say to him when the moment arrived, but he knows it’s too late to pass anything onto him.

  The northeast wind blows up. The sound of thunder out to sea, the wind moaning through the closed windows, the panels in the sash windows trembling.

  She asks him, for the second time, how he would define an orgasm; he says he didn’t hear her the first time. It’s true, he didn’t. “An orgasm consists of involuntary contractions of the perineal muscles, the vaginal, womb, and Fallopian tube muscles, and the anal sphincter.” Lynn sits up again and hits his chest with her elbow, saying its “horrible,” but that doesn’t stop teacher Abaitua from reciting his knowledge at top speed: “The erectile vascular tissue under the clitoris is activated by parasympathetic impulses.” Until she puts her hand over his mouth.

  He protests—it was her question.

  Abaitua gets up, using both hands to try to put the window in place. Outside, everything is gray, apart from the train stop’s white wall. He sees himself about to leave for Paris once more, his head sticking out of the train window and his father’s friend calling out “and don’t forget you’re Basque.” A piece of advice that couldn’t be made any shorter, tied to an implicit body of thought by the conjunction at the beginning. That order was as heavy a weight on his conscience as apodictic commands such as “thou shalt not kill.” A good Basque, the friend had meant to say—hard working, noble, keeping his word, honest to himself and to the group, which is always more than the individual. And not to forget what we inevitably are. A weight of identity from which he has never felt completely free, which he couldn’t free himself of without feeling guilty. He doesn’t find it easy to talk about it. He did discuss it once, with a friend he bumped into in the washroom while they were both at a dinner party in a restaurant. So it was a toiletside conversation, like the ones where homosexuals used to reveal their sexual identities. Abaitua sounded his friend out while they were cleaning their hands, asking whether he was bored of being Basque. There had recently been a terrorist attack. They talked until another customer came in. His friend told him it had been more of a wrench for him to stop being a nationalist than it had been to leave the Church and, later on, to get divorced from his wife. Like many others from his generation, this friend had once been a priest.

  Abaitua never studied at the seminary, but he hasn’t spent his whole life boasting about that fact like some other people do, as if they’d been close friends of Voltaire’s. When it came down to it, in many cases the real reason for not answering the call was a weakness of the flesh—that or they were just too foolish or lazy to be recruited. The same was true of people who spoke out against the armed struggle. Many people had never held a pistol in their hand not because they were convinced anti-violence militants or because they had moral objections, they just didn’t have the audacity to put their lives at risk.

  He’s always found the wind disturbing. He isn’t comfortable there at one end of the sofa with Lynn resting her head on his shoulder. She’s falling asleep, she slowly opens and closes her eyes from time to time, and although he’s tempted to stop her from falling faster asleep, in order to avoid being left alone with his thoughts, he keeps still and feels her cold, damp skin. He stretches his arm backward and picks up his jacket from a chair there to cover her with. She thanks him without opening her eyes and curls up against him. Shortly afterward, the cadence of her breath tells him that she’s left him for sleep.

  Pilar said “I fell asleep” the day she came back home in the morning and sat on the edge of the bed. She couldn’t have said anything more hurtful. Since then, every time he remembers that sentence, he realizes that his pain and frustration and anger were more because she’d fallen asleep with another man than because of the fact that she’d copulated with him; she’d been able to let go of herself, confident and relaxed, and with him out of her mind.

  Lynn stretches her lips to smile when she realizes he’s looking at her. “I hope I don’t snore,” she says, sitting up, and Abaitua teases her and says that she does, making a gesture of resignation that he doesn’t know to what extent he’s exaggerating. “You’re losing your ideal image,” she says with regret. He didn’t use to hear her snore, and soon he’ll think she’s ugly. A new gesture of regret, after which she covers her face with both hands, and Abaitua takes her by the wrists to move them away. He tells her to stop fooling around—“No hagas el ganso.” She doesn’t understand what he means, and he finds telling her tedious, above all because he doesn’t want to use the words bird or clown in his explanation. She puts his jacket on while waiting for him to explain it to her. Then she gets up and tiptoes to the stereo to turn it on.

  She asks him again if he wants anything—tea, coffee, beer—and he says no once more.

  Sarah McLachlan’s Angel is what they’re listening to now. “Fly away from here.” He likes being able to understand the words and finds it strange they’re about flying. He thinks about making a joke—first fly me, and now fly away—but it’s not appropriate. When she asks what he’s laughing about, he says he’s listening to the song and he likes it a lot.

  The sky’s still clouded over, but now the shafts of light breaking through are very clear, and they brighten up the room. Matisse’s engraving, a mirror, in which he can see Max, and the shine on the books at the front of the shelves, which varies depending on their positions and the material they’re made of.

  “In the arms of an angel / fly away from here / from this dark cold hotel room.”

  The photo of the two of them in front of the Gloria Victis statue is too far away to be able to see what position its wings are in. He remembers the composition—a soldier holding a sword in his left hand and his right hand open and reaching up to the sky, the angel holding onto him by his thighs—but he couldn’t say what position the wings are in. He doesn’t know if they’re completely open. The stupid need to clear that point up takes ahold of him, and he tries to get up to grab the photo, but she doesn’t let him. What does he want? He owns up to it—he can’t remember the position of the angel’s wings in the photo of the statue in Bordeaux, open or closed. Does he really not know? Abaitua is amazed by the expression of sorr
ow in her voice and on her face when she asks him. What position does he think they’re in, she asks, holding his face in both hands so that he’s looking at her and not at the photo. It’s no game. Her voice makes it clear that the situation’s nothing like when she challenged him to guess what type of train the next one to go by would be. She lifts her chin up to ask him to answer, but he doesn’t dare. He doesn’t understand why the answer should be so important, but he knows it is, and afraid of not getting the answer right, he keeps quiet.

  “Oh my God.”

  She covers her face with her hands again and murmurs “oh my God,” twice. Then she looks at him in silence, with the same expression of sorrow and disbelief. What position does he think they’re in? She holds his hands when he tries to get up once more and smiles to encourage him to answer. He can’t remember. He’s impatient now as he shakes her hands, which are holding him down. She tells him to imagine the position the wings are in if he can’t remember. “How do you imagine them?” He realizes that the answer is important to her for some reason and wants to avoid the question, but she doesn’t give up—“Tell me, how do you imagine them?” He dares to say that he thinks the angel’s effort to hold the fallen soldier in its arms is more apparent than the strength of its wings. And in any case, he’s sure it isn’t flying, it’s walking, and so its wings must be facing downward, or almost. Not completely open, in any case.

  “Oh my God.”

  He sits up and looks at her face to check that she’s not joking. She isn’t. Her eyes are wet. What’s wrong with her? She mumbles that she doesn’t know, it’s just a feeling—“una corazonada.” She lets go of his hands. Or “una descorazonada, más bien”—or more like a letdown feeling. The effort of saying the words makes her seem more pathetic. She lies back and seems to tell him, with a wave of one hand, to get up and grab the photo to see just how wrong he is.

  There’s no question that the angel’s wings are open. And pointing upward, too, the right one parallel with the ground and the left one almost vertical, but he thinks he could defend the idea that, in general, the weight of the vanquished soldier is more apparent than the angel’s ability to fly. But he doesn’t do that, fearing it would be throwing salt on Lynn’s wound, disappointed as she is at his having imagined the angel’s wings facing downward. He could get angry about her becoming sad as a result of such a banal thing, a very womanly thing to do, it’s true, making a mountain out of a molehill, the tendency to seize on words, silences, gestures, forgotten birthdays, and similar mistakes and interpret them negatively. But he can’t do that, either. He’s aware that however absurd her method of arriving at it may be, she’s reached a diagnosis: he’s a lost case.

  “Let me be empty / and weightless and maybe / I’ll find some peace tonight.”

  “You know?” she asks with a sad smile. He keeps quiet and, already standing up, puts his pants on. “You know?” she asks again. She takes his jacket off and wraps herself in her striped shawl. Finally, he asks her what it is he should know, sounding tired. She stretches her lips out again, as if they were stinging her.

  “Oh, nada,” she replies—nothing.

  They stay sitting on the sofa for a while, leaning against each other, she plays with the tassels on her shawl, and he, wearing only his pants, pets the cat, which is purring on the floor, with his bare feet.

  She asks once more if he knows, but this time she doesn’t wait for an answer and goes on to say that the first time she saw him, at the hospital, he seemed lonely and resigned. That caught her attention, and she let herself wonder about it. Why was a man who seemed so attractive, bright, agreeable, and gentle lonely? Why was he resigned, if he gave off such intelligence and energy? He was playing at being a skeptical old man. She was incredibly glad when he called her to go on that trip with Kepa. Perhaps there’s no such thing as eternal happiness, she says she thought to herself, but it was a great chance to spend a weekend in the French Basque Country. But destiny took them to Bordeaux, and he took them to look for this one plaza because there was a marvelous statue there that they just had to see. She was suprised by how pleased he was when they found it, but she thought she understood it once they were standing in front of the angel holding the vanquished soldier with the broken sword in his hand. She lifts her head up as if to make sure that he’s listening. It was like a premonition for her. Does he understand?

  Abaitua doesn’t believe in premonitions.

  “I made you fly. A little bit,” she says, smiling, holding her index finger and thumb slightly apart to show him, but it’s clear she’s fighting back the urge to cry. He wonders what he’ll do if she starts crying, while instinctively putting his feet into his shoes, something she could easily interpret as his wanting to get away. He stays sitting there, fighting against that very urge, and keeps petting the cat lying at his feet, to avoid her eyes. He can’t stand the silence but fears even more the words that might break it; an old feeling of anguish takes ahold of him, takes him back in time to when, as a child, his mother used to tell him to explain himself, upset because he’d disappointed her in some way, in some clumsy way, and she’d say, “Haven’t you got anything to say for yourself?” He used to hate that, with a child’s selfish hate, and he’s still fighting against it.

  What could he say?

  If only he could love her. Abaitua remembers that other passage in Montauk when the old writer says that he doesn’t love Lynn and that he’s glad he doesn’t. This isn’t the same situation. He thinks he’d like to love her the way she doubtless loves him. Because he has no doubt about that. She’s happy when he is and sad when she sees him worried. That interest in what he says or does, as if it were the most important thing in the world, is what he’s seen in her. He believes her when she says she loves him. He also believes her when she says she’s crazy about him. Now he knows that love does exist, at least Lynn’s love, and he can’t help wondering if anybody has ever loved him like that, and whether he’s ever loved somebody like that. Whether he’s able to love like that. It’s true that he wishes he could allow himself to be carried away by her, that he’s sometimes felt that her love might be able to make him fly and get him out of his dark, cold room.

  He’s relieved and feels that his punishment has been lifted when, suddenly, as if coming out of a heavy, long silence, and in a completely natural way, perhaps just a little upset, she tells him that her friend Maureen will be back soon. “One of these days.” Abaitua had forgotten all about her. But her eyes question him again as she says that she’ll have to take her in and the two of them will have to find somewhere else to get together, at least for a while. So it’s only a momentary respite, because he doesn’t know how to respond to this, either.

  Leaning against the wall, Lynn watches as he does up his shoelaces—he tightens them so that not even a millimetre of the tongue is visible and tucks the ends of the laces in, as his father taught him.

  “Is somebody waiting for you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “You’re never going to stay over, are you?”

  Her back is right against the wall, but her feet are quite a way from it, as if she were going to slide down and sit on the floor. It’s something she sometimes does. Her arms are hanging down, still. Abaitua’s tempted to answer her direct question with a no, and when she asks him again whether he’s never going to stay, he finds he has no problem admitting it.

  She asks if he would rather they not see each other again.

  Even though he feels the urge to address the matter directly, now that he has the lancet in his hand, the look of sorrow on her face holds him back. She guesses this and whispers that there’s no need for him to worry, she isn’t going to cry, and to buy himself some time, he says, “No se trata de eso”—it’s not that. A precarious exit, he knows she’s going to ask him what he means by that, and he’s ready to explain that he’d rather stop seeing her for a while but not forever; he needs some time to spli
t up with Pilar, live alone for a while, and then decide what to do with his life without being conditioned in any way.

  “Tell me.”

  She asks him to tell her if he’d rather they not see each other any more. Her voice breaks and gets sharper, but there’s still a reproach in it: “Tell me: you don’t want us to see each other?”

  He says, in English, and facing up to the challenge, that that would be best. Without beating around the bush. He doesn’t add that it’ll just be for a time, doesn’t take refuge in the excuse that he needs some time to think. She looks at him. Her trembling lips are dry, there are drops of sweat on her forehead, dark areas around her eyes, her face is pale. Some strands of hair have gotten stuck in the side of her mouth, and she tries, unsuccessfully, to brush them aside with her fingertips. She looks at him with sadness, and he holds her gaze, resists the urge to stretch out a hand and try to free her hair, and decides to be firm, unwavering, like when he has to deliver a negative diagnosis, suppressing his feelings of pity, not giving any impression of a hope that’s unjustified by reality. Indecisiveness can cause more pain than ruthlessness.

  “That would be best,” he repeats, turning toward the window, through which the branches of the trees can be seen blowing around in the wind. Then she looks at him again and raises a hand to her forehead, as if trying to shield her face from the light and be able to examine his face better. At least tell her, she says, that it’s not because he’s old and doesn’t want to force a life with no future on her or something stupid like that. He says no. He remembers that the old novelist in Montauk mentions a life with no future. He says no, and she, after looking at him for a few seconds to check that he’s telling the truth, turns toward the window and says, “Because that would be stupid.” She tries to take the strands of hair from her mouth once more and doesn’t quite manage it, and he has to stop himself again from holding his hand out to help her.