Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  When Martin’s sister walks past on the other side of the French windows, she has the feeling that something’s gone wrong; she doesn’t normally appear at that time of day without announcing her arrival previously, nor does she normally look so down. The first thing she thinks is that something’s happened to their father, and even as she prepares herself to hear that, she thinks that had it been her in that case, she would have phoned right away. In any case, those two women always like bothering them with things that turn out not to be so serious in the end. “Has something happened?” she asks as soon as she opens the door to greet her, with her still some distance away, but she doesn’t answer. Not even as she crosses the threshold. All she does, and in a manner very much like her brother, with that same look of exhaustion, is to drop down onto the sofa and say “something dreadful,” at which Julia deduces that it isn’t anything as terrible as all that.

  “Where’s he got to?” she asks, after inspecting the living room for dust, and when Julia asks her again if something’s happened and goes on to tell her that her brother’s in the formal library, she just lets her know, in a whisper, that something unimaginably scandalous has happened, something she can’t even talk about. But what she does tell her is quite funny: her mother has refused to go on living with her father. She’s categorically demanded he leave the house before nightfall tomorrow and has called a lawyer to get divorce proceedings going as quickly as possible. The way she tells it is funny, too. Her eyes—the same blue as her brother’s—wide open and her lips closed, almost murmuring her words from a small, twisted opening at one side of her mouth. A caricature of secret-sharing.

  But it’s clear she doesn’t want to deprive her brother of the right to know first. “Is he writing?” She nods toward the end of the hallway as she asks, and Julia answers that he is.

  She starts to feel tired. She supposes that her respect for the writer’s isolation is more a matter of affectation than real respect, as is the case with Harri, who starts walking, whenever Martin locks himself in the formal library, from one side of the living room to the other on tiptoes, like some kind of long-legged bird, pretending not to make a sound but without stopping talking, her neck hunched down toward her shoulders, pretending to speak in a low voice and yet perfectly audible from everywhere in the house, including the library. Even though it’s pure hypocrisy, sometimes Julia’s offended by her show of only interrupting the writer’s work when forced to and then having no trouble stopping her from working without the least consideration.

  “Sorry to interrupt you,” she says to her brother with a tone of great suffering, as he comes into the living room in his bathrobe like a ghost, tightening the belt and wanting to know what’s going on. He’s unable to hide the anxiety his sister’s unexpected visit has caused him, but he also tries to show indignation at being drawn from his sacred task. Countless times he’s told them the anecdote about the writer—he knows he’s French but can’t remember his name—who instructed his housekeeper not to interrupt him before lunchtime no matter what happened, not to knock on his study door until exactly one o’clock; however, when the housekeeper receives the news that the writer’s son has died, she thinks it’s important enough to make an exception, knocks on the study door, and tells the writer, who replies by asking her how she dares disobey his orders—she should have waited to tell him the bad news at one o’clock. Martin usually tells the story with a touch of humor but also, Julia believes, in order to express admiration for the French writer and proclaim respect for his sense of vocational duty.

  “So what’s going on?”

  Brother and sister face-to-face. His sister is one of those people who enjoy giving bad news—she enjoys being able to hurt Martin, who is very easily wounded in any case—and it’s clear she wants to put off the moment of saying what she’s come to tell him. There’s a flicker of malicious pleasure in her clear blue eyes, which appears at the same time as a look of foolish shock comes into her brother’s identically colored eyes. “Que tu madre se quiere divorciar de tu padre.” She tells him this—that his mother wants to divorce his father—in Spanish, because it’s a serious matter. She uses the possessive and the second person singular, as she always does when talking about their parents’ problems. “Ni más ni menos,” she adds—there you have it. And then she keeps quiet to see his reaction. In the same way that Harri says “¿Qué te parece?” And then, when Martin says he’s not in the mood for jokes, she says she’s being serious and that it’s not a new problem, although until now she hadn’t said anything, not wanting to worry him. She repeats that it’s nothing new, moving her hands around in the air several times, although his mother has started complaining more and more since he began wetting himself. She found it unbearable, and still does. Having to live with somebody who wets the upholstery is revolting, and she, his sister, sees that, too, but his mother finds it especially difficult to put up with, because she’s convinced that what’s happening to him is connected with his excesses from years ago.

  But ever since “his” nurse—the one Martin chose—has come into the house, things have gotten noticeably worse. Apparently, his mother didn’t like her from the start, and not because she was Dominican but because she spends the whole day walking around singing and moving that big behind of hers. She finds her affectionate nature irritating, her continually stroking the old man’s hands and calling him my love—“mi amol”—in that Caribbean accent, whispering little things in his ear and then both of them laughing for no apparent reason. His sister says she doesn’t know where he found her. Martin defends himself with dignity—Abaitua recommended the nurse, and as his sister said herself, it isn’t a new problem. He tries to play it down. He says Dad’s always been affectionate with women—“He’s always paying this one compliments,” he says, pointing at Julia—and as for Mom, she’s been dementedly talking about his father’s problems having come about as a result of his sexual activities for some time now.

  His sister shakes her head again and again, in a way Julia finds exasperating. She doesn’t think their mother’s demented, and she thinks she’s made a firm decision this time. Apparently, after what’s happened, she’s been insisting that she already forgave him once and that she’s not going to forgive him again. She refuses, emphatically—“taxativamente”—to live in the same house as him and has said that she’ll lock herself in her room for one day and one night and wants him out by the next day. “Ese individuo y esa puta” are her exact words—she wants both that man and that whore out of her house.

  If they don’t want to take the radical step of putting him into a home, which she wouldn’t think dignified—that, at least, is her position, she says with a hand on her chest—they’ll have to find a place for his father and his caregivers to stay. She says it while looking around the room, like somebody noticing where the furniture is in order to consider possible changes.

  Martin admits he doesn’t understand anything, now looking really rattled. Like a child, he shrugs his shoulders and tucks his hands into his bathrobe sleeves. Julia can’t deny that she feels sorry for him, but it’s sorrow mixed with tedium, and a bit of revulsion, too, which he realizes when he sees her looking at his thin legs, and so he covers them up, embarrassed. His sister, on the other hand, is very happy and smiles toothily, like a witch, unable to hide what she’s feeling, and once again accuses Martin of being partially responsible, he having been the one who came across this—she pauses a moment and waves a hand in the air—incredibly attentive nurse.

  It’s clear that things could get bad—Martin stands up, infuriated, and says that it’s his fault for not being able to just tell them all to get lost—and Julia, to stop that from happening, tells her to quit making accusations and tell them exactly what brought this all on, asking what it is their mother remembered having apparently once forgiven their father for.

  When she and their mother got back from shopping, they couldn’t see their father or the nurse anyw
here, until finally, they thought of checking in his bedroom, and that’s where they found them. Obviously, Martin and Julia want to know what they found them doing. After a few seconds’ silence, his sister says they were “en una actitud cariñosa”—in an affectionate posture—and she links her fingers together, meaning that she doesn’t want to tell them any more than that. So they have to ask for more information in the way that priests used to, and she answers them with euphemisms, saying it wasn’t anything in itself, nothing big, but it affected her a lot, because it was the same scene they had witnessed as children and which had been so traumatic for her.

  She talks to her brother with sincere feeling for the first time, saying she’s glad that he didn’t have to see that again. She says she was about to faint when she saw the nurse sitting on the edge of his bed wearing a slip of their mother’s, light salmon colored with delicate swiss lace on it, and the old man standing up beside her—like this, she says, making a gesture to describe each movement—with one hand, his left hand, on her right shoulder.

  “The nightmare,” Julia blurts out, and his sister slowly nods. “The same scene as forty years ago.” They remain in silence. Julia has to wait a few seconds to get her voice back before asking what scene she’s talking about. Martin needs a lot longer before he asks the same question. “What scene?” With that idiotic expression he has on his face sometimes. His sister, unable to believe it, asks if he doesn’t remember. She seems to be having fun with him again. Their mother, going against her usual practice—because she never used to tend to them herself—got them out of bed very early and made them get dressed without having breakfast. She dressed Martin herself, because he didn’t know how to, and then took all three of them to a house on Urbieta Kalea. A sixth floor apartment that’s currently for sale, across the street from the cathedral, and as narrow and long as a tube. Their mother had the key, and the four of them opened doors into empty rooms, one after another, until finally, in the third or fourth room, they found them, the young woman wearing a slip, sitting on the edge of the bed with her torso and head leaning over—she imitates the position—and their father wearing a dark suit and standing with a hand on her shoulder. “Ahí tenéis a vuestro padre”—there’s your father for you—their mother shouted, pushing them into the room, and just then, the cathedral bells started pealing and making an incredible din. The girl was Martin’s nanny, a girl from Otzeta, sweet and pleasant, who he loved more than anybody else as a child.

  His sister asks if he’s forgotten it. Martin appears to have gone dumb and nods. She seems to find that funny. How could he have forgotten something like that? Something as awful at that. Si bouleversant, so shocking. She also remembers that Martin was sick that day, or at least had a bit of a temperature, and even though the maids objected, their mother still got him uncaringly out of bed, probably because he was the apple of his father’s eye and, because of that, she needed him as a witness. He was always sick, she tells Julia, pointing at the anguish-ridden writer with an expression of resignation.

  Apparently, their mother suspected that their father was being unfaithful to her, and when she found out about the apartment, she made a copy of all the keys. She also tells them that she recently took advantage of the apartment being for sale to visit it and find out if the bells really were as noisy as she remembers, and she thinks they weren’t. Everything seems more intense when you’re a child.

  Julia feels calmer. Finding out what’s been behind his sleepless nights and so many bad moods makes her incredibly happy, and she’s astonished that Martin shows no sign of being moved by it all. He stares at the wall, as if he were looking for a specific point on the map of Sicily, shaken up, she imagines, until he starts nodding and saying, “I remember, I remember,” seeming angry, wanting to shut his sister up because she insists on describing the scene again: furniture of poor taste; a girl with nothing especially interesting about her, young, almost a child, with light-colored soft hair and two or three curls going down to her neck; and their father with his hand on her shoulder as if he needed support, dressed in black from head to toe, with no hat on. She laughs. She thinks it’s funny now, but in fact it was frightful, she’s always blamed her mother for having used them like that to humiliate and punish their father. She thinks the poor man was wounded forever after the experience.

  Martin keeps on looking at the map of Sicily, rubbing his hands together behind his back as his sister looks at her nails, half pleased and half moved, Julia thinks, to have managed to render her brother speechless, or because, for once, she’s had something to say. Brother and sister stay quiet for a while, and Julia doesn’t think she can be the one to break the silence. She waits for something to happen as she moves toward the window and looks out. The two cats are preening themselves by the statue of the angel, which is still pointing with its broken arm at the sky—in spite of the forecast of rain, there are no clouds—and the usual pair of warblers are in the bush and seem to look at each other attentively when it’s their turn to sing. She counts up to six blackbirds—that is, if they are blackbirds—pecking at the bed of pansies.

  Julia would like something to happen.

  Suddenly Martin’s sister cries out, “But hey!” and claps her hands together. “I forgot, I have some good news, too!” She’s spoken with their sister in Paris, who’s told her that her Catalan friends have decided to cancel their trip, so there’s no need to make the booking at the María Cristina. Pleased to be able to give him such good news, until she’s then frightened to see the effect it has on her brother, who’s put out once again. “What, they’re not coming?” he stammers, his face as pale as if he’d just been bled, one hand resting on the wall as if he were faint. His Paris sister hasn’t taken the trouble to call him, she hasn’t even had the consideration to tell him directly. Doesn’t she know how much trouble he went to to make the booking?

  His sister tries to play it down—she’s sure the people at the María Cristina won’t mind canceling the booking. She looks at Julia, hoping she’ll back her up, but Julia decides not to pay any attention. Now it looks like all the blood’s gone to his head—his face is red, his eyes look as if somebody’s strangling him and they’re about to pop out of his head. How can he possibly cancel something that he only managed to secure through a favour from Zabaleta and with the help of the mayor himself? What can be going through their minds? Julia knows that any attempt to make it seem less important—which is what his sister is doing—will only make matters worse, so she decides to go to the kitchen on the excuse of needing to empty the dishwasher. But when she gets there, she feels an incredible lack of energy and sits down at the marble table, which is like a tombstone, a big, thick one. She sees that the juice from half a lemon is staining it. She throws the fruit into the sink at the other end. She misses and doesn’t make any movement to pick it up off the floor.

  She listens to them talking. Martin’s sister keeps on trying to play down the situation, trying to calm her brother. Martin is shouting that they always mess things up for him. They don’t let him concentrate on his work. He has to get a novel finished. They go on for a long while like that in the living room, Julia in the kitchen, and his sister, sobbing, says that she, too, is kept from living as she would like to, saying that she had to leave home just to be able to complain about the problems there. She goes into the kitchen before leaving and, in tears, says to Julia that she doesn’t know how she puts up with him.

  Then, after his sister leaves, Martin stays in the living room for a long time, and Julia sits in the kitchen.

  “What do I do now?” He says it with deeply felt desperation and without turning his head away from the map when she approaches him. At first she doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, and then she’d rather not understand. She lets the hand she’d lifted to put on his shoulder fall. She, too, looks at the map. She doesn’t remember anything about Messina. Some things about Palermo. She had a hard time persuading him not to go to
Corleone. She remembers the difficulty they had paying a parking meter in Catania, its incredible fish market, and a bad restaurant in its beautiful square. Miles and miles in their Opel rental car, and she found the seat uncomfortable. Syracuse: restored churches, and mansions full of tourists like themselves, an incredibly hot weekend. “Do what about what?” she asks him, tired. “What do you think? About the booking at the María Cristina,” he answers, amazed, and angry about having to explain it to her. She tries to add a touch of humor, “In any case, don’t cancel the delivery of the flowers and the book to the room.” Who knows, maybe with a bit of luck they’ll find their way into the hands of some film star who’ll be unable to sleep and start reading it and like it.

  If looks could kill.

  Seeing him sitting there with his elbows resting on his thighs, his hands pushing what little hair he has left toward the back of his head, murmuring to himself, she remembers the first night they got together, leaning against the railings on Pasealeku Berria. When Martin’s glasses fell into the sea, she, having drunk a little, cried out, “Glasses overboard!” He wasn’t amused. She was surprised at the time—and now she realizes that she was disappointed, too—that just as they were about to have their first kiss, he got so bothered about losing some glasses, and she was about to throw hers in, too, to iniciate a little lovers’ ritual for them to laugh about together, but she didn’t in the end. She just made as if she was going to throw them in, but she didn’t yet realize that his not being able to see the funny side of the mishap was a bad sign. She just felt ridiculous, like somebody who can’t tell a joke.

  Now she doesn’t take the trouble to repeat that his sister’s right and that the people at the hotel would be perfectly accepting if he called to cancel, or to point out to him that the manager probably wouldn’t even realize the rooms weren’t being used as long as they were paid for. She tries to imagine what she would say if Martin were suddenly to tell her that he’s going to use all his influence again to get a table at Arzak for the two of them to have dinner there together and that later, after having a few drinks in the hotel bar with all the film stars, they were going to make use of the king-size bed originally booked for those Catalans who had no idea what they were missing. She isn’t sure. In any case, he doesn’t say anything. He lifts his head up when the phone rings again and tells her not to answer. And then he hides himself in the formal library once more.