She’s disappointed, that’s the word. She’s always hoped that finding out what was behind his nightmare would transform him. In fact, more than hoping that would happen, she’s fantasized about the idea that becoming conscious of his subconscious would make his neurotic symptoms disappear, as happened to Gregory Peck in Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. Recuerda—meaning “Remember”—was the title they’d given it in Spanish. Julia is convinced that the need to fill the gap in his memory is what’s behind Martin’s desire to write. He wrote to remember, to cure his neurosis, and paradoxically, that very neurosis was what often stopped him from making progress with his writing. Once he recovered his memory—which she thought would happen through writing—he would overcome his neurosis, become a happy man, feel free to either carry on writing or not, to go to Sicily or stay in Martutene. She’s lost that hope completely.
It’s raining hard. There’s no doubt it’s just a shower, because the sky’s still bright. The cats seem to have taken shelter in the woodpile, while one of the blackbirds continues pecking under the magnolia. She watches it for a good while, sitting on the step by the entrance, listening to the rain, breathing in the air with its smell of wet soil. She remembers Lynn again. During another rain shower, she took her blouse off and danced something like ballet, barefoot on the grass, around the one-armed angel. Shyness stopped her from joining in as she wanted to do. She remembers her with her chin resting on her arms crossed on top of the piano—she looked like a little Irish girl who could only just reach up to the piano—while she played Satie. “Après la pluie.” Her accent like Jean Seberg’s when she read Montauk in French. How happy Lynn was when she told her she planned to translate Frisch’s Fragebogen into Basque. “I’m happy, so happy.” Her thousand ways of saying I’m happy, so happy. When she told her she was in love with Abaitua, for instance.
I’m happy, so happy.
To start crying, she need only remember a picture of herself as a child, a photo in which she’s wearing a white dress with organdy bows on it.
Alea jacta est. When cuckoos sing, rains turn to spring.
She’s sitting in front of the piano again. She likes the stool high up, like pianists from Eastern Europe, to be able to play energetically like Liszt. She hardly ever feels free to play when she’s not alone, perhaps because he’s seldom asked her to play when they’re together. Maybe even never. The sheet music for Ravel’s Concert for the Left Hand, adapted for both hands, is sitting on the music stand. She remembers Lynn had trouble understanding why playing it with both hands is difficult. And there’s a copy of the Boléro too, which he bought with the threat of using it to accompany Lynn’s hot love sessions with Abaitua. And despite it all, she can’t help laughing when she starts pretending to play it without touching the keys. C B C D, C B A C C A C B G. She knows she’s going to miss the old Petrof.
Her sheet music and dictionaries alone fill up a bag she can hardly lift. Then she tiptoes up to the first floor. In fact, she isn’t quite sure why she takes the few clothes she has in the closet out and throws them onto the bed. She doesn’t even have an appropriate suitcase to put them in, but it’s comforting to do things that would fit in well if she had to write the end of a novel. She picks up the bag and says, “I’ll come back later for the rest of it.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and waits for him; she knows he’ll come up sooner or later and wants him to find her as she is in order to save on introductory explanations. Time goes by—she doesn’t know exactly how long—without any trace of the writer. Downstairs there’s complete silence. Upstairs, on the other hand, on the ceiling, she can hear Maureen’s steps. She’s come in without Julia realizing. Her steps are heavy and rough compared to those of Lynn, who used to walk lightly, almost always barefoot, so different. Julia gets up and listens with attention to Maureen walking around. She can clearly hear her opening and closing the closet and the drawers. And her nasal, authoritarian voice as she speaks on the phone. Julia only understands the odd word when she speaks near the window. “I tell you”; “absolutely.” “Come back,” she says twice. Julia wonders if she’s talking with Lynn.
It’s cleared up. There are some boys pulling ropes to bring the boat to the old mooring. They’re younger than the ones back in the day, they don’t look more than fifteen or sixteen. Years have gone by since then. Martin used to spend hours and hours watching them, wondering what they could be up to, complaining that they were on his property but incapable of taking any measures to deal with the situation. Like telling Abaitua about his suspicions, for instance, because it was his son who asked for his permission to move the pontoon to make it easier to work on the boat. He used to look straight past them when he came across them, or just not say hello.
Now a man from the clinic side shouts at them to stop mucking around. At first they don’t obey him, but they give up after around three minutes more pulling the rope to no effect. A large white car—similar to Abaitua’s, if it’s not actually his—pulls out of the clinic parking lot. It goes very slowly along the old road and, after crossing the bridge, goes even more slowly toward the house. She’d have to run to the balcony on the other side of the house to see whether it parks next to the iron gate or takes the main road.
She can hear Martin on the other side of the formal library door, decidedly, ceaselessly typing on his computer in a way that’s unusual for him. After wondering for a while whether to go in and tell him that she’s leaving or not, in the end she can’t summon up enough courage to do so. She has two books to take back to the university library, and even though there’s still a lot of time left on them, because she has nothing better to do, she decides to take them back before forgetting about them. Just as she reaches the iron gate, she sees the white car start up and head off toward Donostia. Without knowing why, she tries to memorize the number plate.
The train’s on time. In the empty carriage, she starts thinking about why it could be that Lynn isn’t giving any signs of life, apart from her allergy to the phone and her perpetual problems with keeping her battery charged. She completely rules out what Martin thinks, which is that this time, too, she’s gone off with Abaitua, because she’s almost sure she’s seen him. She thinks it more probable that Lynn’s fled from Abaitua rather than gone with him. When it comes down to it, she wants to believe that her being an independent woman, she has every right to go wherever she wants to go, but she doesn’t manage to convince herself; surely she should have let her know something by now. She makes a firm decision not to let Maureen escape the next time; if necessary, she’ll break down the door to ask her where Lynn is. She doesn’t want to think about it any more for the moment.
She almost misses her stop.
The bookshop in Ibaeta’s closed. On her way back, she walks past the outdoor terrace where she sat with Harri and decides to stop and have something to drink there. She isn’t sure if she’s ever sat at an outdoor terrace by herself. It’s empty, and the waiter, who recognizes her, talks about what a bad summer it’s been. He asks her if she doesn’t go to the beach, she looks pale, and she asks him, with a sense of humor, if he thinks she looks bad. Absolutely not, the guy replies, ashamed of himself, and trying to make things right, he says he thinks she’s a very interesting woman. “A very interesting woman.” She doesn’t want to follow his lead and ask what he means by that; she doesn’t feel like talking, she closes her eyes, and all she wants is for the sun to stroke her face. He’s a nice guy, and he must be bored. He sits down at a chair at the next table, facing her. He talks on and on about various topics, and she finds it hard not to pay attention to him.
A phone call at just the right moment. It’s Zigor. He says he can’t find a T-shirt he wants to take to Otzeta with him. She says she’ll come home. Since the waiter’s disappeared, she can sit on the front edge of her chair, lift her face up, and close her eyes. She thinks about Martin and wonders what he’s writing. It’s curious what’s happened to him since he me
t Marie Lafôret. She doesn’t have any doubt that he has in fact met her—he did actually buy a beret at Leclercq—and that they exchanged telephone numbers and have sent text messages to each other since; although the way he describes saving her number isn’t something Martin would normally do. He would have had to write her number down on a piece of paper, he wouldn’t have been up to using the process he describes. She feels put out and irritated while she wonders how far they’ve gone. But not excessively so.
It turns out the sun really does get on her nerves.
She looks toward the bookshop once more, still a little phased by the sunlight, and sees a large, dark man carrying a stack of books under his arm. She sees him from behind. He has thick curly hair and is wearing a shiny green guayabera and loose white trousers—a carefree, tropical style. She doesn’t have any doubt that it’s Kepa and wonders whether wanting to come across him is what led her to sit down at this outdoor terrace in Ibaeta. She pays for her shandy—asking the waiter as she waits for her change whether she looks any more suntanned to him now—and then crosses the street. She doesn’t go straight into the bookshop. She decides to walk around the block and rehearse meeting him. “You must be Kepa, Martin’s friend—Abaitua’s, Lynn’s, and everybody’s friend, from what I’ve seen.” Then she’ll tell him that she’s worried not to have heard from Lynn, she keeps calling her and she doesn’t answer, and has he heard from her?
The little bell at the top of the door rings as she opens it. The shop’s empty, and quite a while goes by until the same girl as before comes out, says hello, and without asking her what she wants, sits down on the other side of the counter. She seems to be used to people looking around the shelves themselves rather than asking for what they want. And so Julia looks around, making time.
She has the impression she’s spending a long time looking around the books. No other customers come in to make her presence stand out less, nor does the man wearing the green guayabera and white pants. Finally, she tries to choose a book so that she can go up to the counter and, as she pays, ask the girl if Kepa happens to be there; but she finds it hard to choose one. She already has the books she’s interested in and isn’t interested in those she doesn’t already have.
When the girl looks at her from over the top of the book she’s reading, Julia really feels that she’s been there too long and is ashamed to think the girl may take her for one of those people who waste the workers’ time in bookshops without actually intending to buy anything. But she wants to wait a little longer, buy some more time, and see if the man, who must be in the back room, comes out. So she takes out her phone to call Martin. It’s a double strategy. She’ll say that she’ll be back after lunch—she’s feeling guilty about putting her dictionaries into a bag and taking her clothes out of the closet and throwing them onto the bed—and ask if he knows anything about Lynn, not because she thinks Martin may have heard from her but because when the man in the back room hears her ask, she figures he’ll want to know who’s speaking.
But he doesn’t come out.
She decides to go straight up to the counter and ask the girl. There are several piles of books on top of it that almost hide her from view. Julia picks a book up. It’s a copy of Zalacaín el aventurero, an old Austral edition—the girl points out it’s second-hand—and on the dedication page there’s a drawing done in different-colored ballpoint pens. It’s of a young man wearing a red beret, blue pants, and a white shirt and socks, he’s walking, there’s a black-and-white dog behind him and, in the background, some green hills. She likes it. It’s quite naïf and reminds her of some of the drawings by Caro Baroja. She asks the girl if it’s for sale, it would make a nice present for Zigor. “Of course,” is all she replies. “With the drawing and everything?” “Of course,” she says again, this time shrugging as if amazed by her question. “Kepa does them,” she then adds, and Julia thinks she says it to explain the book being priced at just five euros.
She gets over being too embarrassed to ask the girl to wrap it up as a present—it’s another way of buying time, too—and, while she does that, not very skilfully but making a good effort, Julia suddenly dares to ask after Kepa. He’s just left and won’t be back until tomorrow.
The girl says, “You almost walked past each other at the door.”
In the end, her mother and sister have decided to go to Otzeta and have lunch there. Julia isn’t in a very good mood; she’d wanted to talk about things with Zigor, about the project he’s working on about the war. She knows the feeling she has that they’re taking her son away from her isn’t fair—she’s the one who’s always asking them to help her out with him—but she can’t help it. She’s going to miss him, even though it won’t be more than a few days. She’s sad, and it’s obvious Zigor notices, which she likes, but at the same time, it’s an impulse she’d like to be able to control. That’s why when he asks her if she’s going to have lunch alone, she feels obliged to say no, she’s going to have lunch with Martin.
The T-shirt Zigor needed hasn’t turned up. They’ve looked everywhere, and now, as a last resort, while she looks in the closet in her room, just in case—sometimes she wears his T-shirts around the house—she tries to convince him that he shouldn’t be so inflexible, he should learn to let things go, not get obsessed, one T-shirt’s as good as another, all with that insistent, didactic tone of hers that she’s incapable of avoiding, even though she knows that it does no good and that what really counts is her example, which is a true case of obsessive behaviour.
Eventually it turns up. She shows it to Zigor as if it were a flag of victory, but he, lying on his mother’s bed, doesn’t lift his head, which is buried in a book. Julia knows the book. George L. Steer’s The Tree of Gernika, which was put away somewhere and he must have found when looking for his T-shirt. “It’s really something,” he says as he shows it to her, and then he reads her the start of the book, which she knows by heart. “The Basques, who are the subject of this book, are a religious, hard-drinking people who have no time for blasphemy, and who live in the mountains to the southwest of the Bay of Biscay.” He asks if he can borrow it, and she says of course he can. She’s never denied him a book. “But don’t believe every word.” He waves his hand as if to ward off tedium. “For instance, I don’t know if I really believe that bit about not having time for blasphemy. We’ll talk about it when you’ve read it.”
She’d like to tell him how important it was for her to read the book as a child. She’d like to talk about that. The idealization of the Basque soldiers, the author’s exaggerations about their courage and noble behaviour, which made what her parents told her about the war seem understated, and while she may have had reason to distrust what they told her, because they themselves were involved in it all, there was nothing to make her doubt an Englishman who had been an eyewitness, above all considering he was a correspondent for The Times. What she would like to tell her son is that now, when people are talking about the right to disinter the corpses that were buried by the roadside before the war, and during and after it—and every side, reds and blues, right-wing and left-wing, they all had, to some extent or another, brutal things they’d rather hide—she still believes that whatever idealization there may be, there’s no reason to feel ashamed of the Basque troops, and she’s proud of that. A pride she has no reason to feel—children are neither to blame for nor to be credited with what their parents did. But she does want to pass that feeling onto her son, and she’s sorry, in a way she wasn’t when she was young, that the old patriots have left that source of pride—the fact of having lost well, in the right way—behind them. But then his grandmother comes in and says they’re late and her brother-in-law’s been waiting in the van for half an hour.
Zigor gives his mother a hug.
There’s nothing to eat in the house. She chops up an onion to put in an omelette, but takes the frying pan back off the heat as soon as she dumps it in.
She takes her shoe
s off and lies down on the bed, fully dressed.
Zigor’s gone and forgotten his wretched T-shirt.
She finds Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet on her bedside table and looks over the sentences Martin has underlined.
“Je n’ai jamais vu un enfant sans penser qu’il deviendrait un vieillard, ni un berceau sans songer à une tombe”—I’ve never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. Julia does the opposite—when she sees an old man, she thinks about how he must have been a child once, curled up in the arms of a young mother.
“Qui sait? Tu me remercieras peut-être plus tard d’avoir eu le courage de n’être pas plus tendre”—Who knows? You will thank me later, perhaps, for having had the courage not to be more tender. Had he been thinking of her when he underlined that?
“Etre bête, égoïste, et avoir une bonne santé, voilà les trois conditions voulues pour être heureux: mais si la première nous manque, tout est perdu”—To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
“L’ignoble me plaît. C’est le sublime d’en bas”—I like the ignoble. It is the sublime debased. That’s the quote Martin wasn’t able to remember when he was trying to tell Lynn why he liked trashy television. On the same page: “Tous les grands voluptueux sont très pudiques”—All the most sensual people are very reserved.
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