Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre seul et calfeutrer toutes ses fenêtres, de peur que l’air du monde ne nous arrive”—To live in peace one must live alone and seal one’s windows lest the air of the world seep in.

  “La patrie, c’est la terre, c’est l’Univers, ce sont les étoiles, c’est l’air, c’est la pensée elle-même, c’est-à-dire l’infini dans notre poitrine”—The motherland, is the earth, the universe, the stars, the air. It is thought itself, that is, the infinite within our breasts. She tries to memorize it to tell Zigor.

  There’s no underlining in the last letter, Martin almost certainly stopped reading by then, and every time she reads it, it seems increasingly cruel.

  “Madame:

  J’apris que vous vous étiez donné la peine de venir, hier dans la soirée, trois fois, chez moi. Je n’y étais pas. Et, dans la crainte des avanies qu’une telle persistance de votre part pourrait vous attirer de la mienne, le savoir-vivre m’engage à vous prévenir que je n’y serai jamais. J’ai l’honneur de vous saluer.”

  I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in. Yours.

  Julia thinks about how her mother will react when she tells her she’s going to stop seeing Martin. And how is she going to tell Zigor?

  Once more, she wants to know what’s going to happen with Marie Lafôret. She thinks it’ll be the story of the man in front of the mirror’s last love, the one he’ll choose to be with him until death. Because it’s clear that death is what it’s all about.

  She has to buy a present for Zigor’s birthday, the book doesn’t seem like much to her. She doesn’t know whether to tell Martin and then take her things, or the other way around. She’s tempted by the second option, which will put off the difficult moment, but decides on the first, because farewells in the afternoon seem harder.

  The house is the same as when she left it. There’s no sign of life. She remains standing in the living room for a while waiting for him to come in; he must have heard her arrive. She cleans two plates and a teaspoon, and she’s not sure if they were in the sink earlier or not. Then she goes up to the formal library door and hears him writing on his computer.

  She goes up to the bedroom. There are no sounds from the upper story, from the penthouse. She sits on the edge of the bed and waits for him. The suitcase is open at her feet.

  She gets up when she hears him looking for her on the ground floor, takes the few clothes that are still in the closet out of it, and starts throwing them onto the bed. She does it instinctively, not wanting him to find her doing nothing, and also because it’s going to be the easiest way to start the inevitable conversation—he’ll ask her what she’s doing, and she’ll answer that she’s going, she can’t take any more—but suddenly she wonders whether it isn’t just a little too theatrical, childish, in fact. So she’s hesitating, holding a white dress with red and blue spots, which Harri gave her, on a hanger in her hand.

  What she would least like would be to go through the old scene again, Martin wrapped around her legs begging her not to leave him—she doesn’t want to have to go through that again. She hears that he’s looking for her downstairs and then, shortly afterward, the creak of the staircase. He walks silently along the hallway, as if wanting to catch her by surprise or not wake her up. He stares at her from the doorway. He also looks at the pile of clothes spread out on top of the bed, then at the open closet, and then back at her. He doesn’t ask her what she’s doing, just shows her a pile of paper; she figures it must be around fifty pages. Now he sits down on the edge of the bed, with the pieces of paper on his lap. “I’m finished,” he says, without excitement, using a tone not very different from the same one he might use in any other situation, as if she were looking for something, any old thing, the dictionary he’d borrowed from her, for instance, and he were using the same tone as now, “I’m finished,” as he handed it back to her. It’s astonishing that he doesn’t show any sign of happiness or pleasure. All she can do, on the other hand, is show as much surprise and happiness, or something like it, as she can muster.

  “You’re completely finished?”

  He smiles. That happy, mocking smile that looks so good on him, and which he uses less and less. “I had no choice; I had to finish it.”

  He looks at her in silence, and she doesn’t know what to say. She finds the idea that he might read it to her tiring. He used to always do it, more than anything else to hear himself, she thinks, and to make sure that the text would be well received, because he reads extremely well and his voice makes what he reads better, knowing how to underline the parts that work particularly well and pass lightly over what doesn’t work so well; but for Julia, listening to him became torture, because she was so anxious that he would notice some inappropriate gesture of hers. He would lift his eyes from his papers from time to time, and when he looked at her like that, she used to be afraid that he might see her not looking as moved as she should be, or might think she was laughing at the wrong moment. In short, she was afraid of disappointing him. Even so, when he waves the pages in the air and asks if she wants him to read to her, she whispers of course she does. But he, playfully, says, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to,” and laughs, dropping backward onto the clothes spread out over the bed. “I know you hate it.”

  Then—with his feet on the floor, his knees bent, his bottom resting on the edge of the bed, and the sheets of paper in his hands on top of his body—he turns and looks into her face. She’s still standing up by the window. “I’ll spare you the torture,” he smiles again. Then he sits up. After what seems like a moment of reflection: “The thing is, I have to read aloud to see where to put the punctuation, and I always feel like I’m off my rocker if I do it alone.” He’s looking at her seriously, without any trace of irony. He offers her the pieces of paper, which she takes. “You read them.”

  Now it’s Martin who’s standing up by the window and Julia who’s sitting on the bed with the pages on her lap. The Man in Front of the Mirror. He has the palm of one hand on his forehead, pulling his hair backward to measure how far his baldness goes. She starts turning the pages over. She’s familiar with most of the text, except, perhaps, for the last dozen pages or so.

  “The sky is full of sun now. Sun that invites you to live. I say this without any bitterness.”

  Martin, turning around from the window, says, “I’d rather not be right here if you’re going to read it,” and she, relieved, puts the pages down by her side. “I get nervous,” he adds. He suggests they have some tea.

  Even though they have to walk across the living room to sit down on the sofa, he doesn’t notice that there are two bags full of her books in the middle of the room. Or that her half of the table’s empty. They both remain silent while they wait for the tea to be ready. And then, when Julia serves it, she asks, “What was that thing about tannin?” but he doesn’t answer. “Where on earth is she?” He’s talking about Lynn, of course. Silence once more. “I’m sure the fat one’s kidnapped her.” Silence. “She’s a lesbian, and she’s in love with her. Don’t you think?” She manages to keep quiet while he interrupts the silence with various vacuous comments; she wants him to ask her why she’s not saying anything, and at the same time, she’s afraid that he will. When he finally does, she wants to answer tactfully, and that’s why she uses his name. So she says, “I can’t take any more, Martin, I’m leaving.” She thinks he looks at her quite confusedly, and maybe he’s understood that she’s simply going home just as she has almost every other day recently, and so she says once more, in a drier tone, that she can’t take any more. Martin spends the long silence that follows scratching his fingertips along the glass table, as if writing on it, until suddenly, like a child fearing he’s going to be told off for marking it all up, he quickly closes his fist
and tucks it into his sleeve. A freight train goes by, one of those long ones carrying cars, and then there’s silence again.

  Julia picks up the two bags full of books and puts them in a corner. They’re too heavy for her to be able to walk out with any dignity, so she decides to tell him that she’ll come by for her things soon and finish correcting his short story in about a week. She manages to do that and sound natural, and she interprets the silence that follows as meaning that her having made the decision to leave is a relief for him. “Sometimes the stronger of the two doesn’t have the strength to leave, and the weaker of the two has to.” She doesn’t know who said that. “Let’s talk about it. Don’t leave like this,” he says finally, and she agrees. “We’ll talk, but right now I have to leave.” Neither of them makes any sign of moving when the phone rings, not even to see who’s calling, and they let it ring, both staying as they are. When it comes down to it, it’s the end of a long relationship. “Stay for a while,” he insists, and she says no, she can’t. It’s Zigor’s birthday on Monday, and she has to get him a present. He lifts his hands to his head and says he’s forgotten all about it.

  “Buy him something from me. I’ll give you the money.”

  So why did he mark the thirteenth on the calendar, then? She’s more hurt by him forgetting Zigor’s birthday than she is by any other type of negligence; he knows how grateful she is when he gives her son a present, more than her son himself. And that mistake, if that’s what it is, seems even bigger to her now. She’s reminded him of the date a hundred times, because she set it as her deadline for going back to work. And even so, he’s forgotten. So what was the point of marking the day on the calendar? To pay homage to the forty Requetés who took Donostia on that same date? She’d like to ask him that, but it doesn’t seem the right moment for sarcasm, and she’d rather not get into a session of mutual reproaches. She picks up the bags of books, to underline that her decision to break up the relationship is final. He looks at her without making any sign that he’s going to help her with them, and although she would like to take her things with her right then, she realizes once more that she wouldn’t even be able to make it as far as the iron gate with them. Not, at least, if she wanted to keep her dignity intact, and that’s why she puts them down on the floor once more, this time leaving them under the coatrack by the door. It seems like the best place to her. Then, just to say something, and even though it’s not yet six o’clock, she tells him the shops are going to close soon, and Martin asks her once more to get her son something from him. “To tell the truth, I’ve been having some really bad days lately,” he says to excuse himself, rubbing his face between both hands.

  “You always manage to make them bad.” He looks at her as if he hasn’t heard, with a sad smile on his lips, but then cheers up immediately. “At least I’ve finished this,” he says, straightening up, placing his hands wide open on top of the pile of papers. He picks them up and goes toward the door, which Julia has opened.

  “You’re forgetting these.”

  She takes the sheets of paper and puts them in her handbag, wondering whether to remind him that she’s going to come back for her things, making it clear that the breakup’s final. She doesn’t. She sets off along the gravel path until she hears his voice. “It’s full of mistakes.” Nothing more than that. But then, when she starts moving again, she hears him once again. “I hope you’ll go through it for me.” She nods, and he says, “It’s Faustino Iturbe’s goodbye.” They stay like that for a moment, Julia lost in thought by the flowerbed, and Martin at the top of the stairs into the house; she waits to check that he’s not going to say anything more before starting off again. She has to walk slower than she would like to, because her feet sink into the gravel, and when she turns back at the iron gate, he isn’t there any more. Although the three cats have followed after her meowing, they never cross beyond the boundary of the property.

  There are only a few minutes before the train’s going to arrive, but she can’t resist the temptation to pick up the story again, wanting to find out what happens between the narrator and the television presenter who met by chance at Leclercq on Narrika Kalea, after having left off reading at the point where he receives a second short text message from her, which says “Hi, are you still there?”

  Even though living under the shadow of death has killed his libido, she’s not only beautiful, and more beautiful in person than on screen, but also an unquestionably bright woman—she got a couple of his ironic remarks right away and laughed at them—and as can be seen from her message, she’s an uninhibited, open person who only deserves one reply: “Yes, I’m here, I can’t wait to see you.” What makes him hesitate is the idea that if they agree to meet, he may not feel able to keep the truth from her, to hide from her the fact that he’s seriously ill and only has a short time left to live. How would she react to that? He wants to know, but not enough to risk making her feel sorry for him and, at the same time, risk putting her in a difficult, uncomfortable situation with a half-dead man “sunk in the abstraction he slips into time and again.” On the other hand, he wouldn’t have the energy he’d need to go out with her and behave as if nothing were happening, making an effort to be full of life and make her laugh, which is what women like. So he doesn’t dare answer her message, and it hurts him to think that Marie Lafôret may take him for a rude or arrogant man.

  He tries to forget her message, even tries not to watch the program she presents. He likes to think that one day she will understand his silence, although he isn’t sure to what extent that will be a consolation for him. It will be, to some extent. In any case, there are some things he has to sort out before he loses all his strength. He has some possessions. He finds out that his personal situation moves his lawyer and his notary less than it does his doctor. He has some pretty interesting reflections about that. After a few days, he’s tempted to glance at the message again, and when he looks for it on his phone, he realizes he’s erased it. And he doesn’t have Marie Lafôret’s number, either. It’s a complication resulting from having changed phones. His old one wasn’t working well, and while he’s stopped buying long-lasting objects, for obvious reasons, it wasn’t a good idea for him to be without a phone, and so he decided to get a new one.

  It was the girl at the phone company who took charge of changing the chip from his small old phone to the new one, and she put the broken old one into a big box for recycling. When he realized that Marie Lafôret’s message and number had disappeared, he went back to the shop, where another girl told him that the information might not be stored in the chip, it might be in the telephone’s own memory. He got her permission to look through the box of old phones for recycling. There were hundreds of them. He took them all out and looked at them one by one until he found his. He’s indignant, he gets angry, he complains that they didn’t give him the information they should have. “In all probability, there’s somebody I’ll never see again in my life because of you people,” he shouts at an employee, who doesn’t understand the scale of his indignation. He doesn’t go so far as to say “a person I love,” leaving it at “somebody.” “So the incompetence of Euskaltel interfered in my decision. It’s true I could have called the television station, but I was reluctant to—I’d have had to call the telephone operator, give my name, be filtered through by who knows how many secretaries and assistants. Although it wasn’t objectively impossible, it was an additional obstacle that inclined the balance in favor of my doubts and against getting in touch. I went as far as looking up the station’s telephone number, but not as far as using it. I didn’t go any further. It seemed to me that losing the number was more than just a sign of the clumsiness of the people at Euskaltel—it was also an undeniable sign of fate. I stuck to seeing her on the television screen, but that made me gloomier still, because I thought she looked sad, and I felt it was because of me, because I hadn’t called her, but I didn’t have the energy to get the relationship going again. I thought it was bette
r to break it off there rather than let it become something, and I stopped watching her program, too.”

  It was all pretty disappointing.

  She can’t continue reading on the train—the old lady next to her asks if it’s still a long way to Donostia and then doesn’t keep quiet, talking about just anything, out loud, not specifically to her, but in such a way that she feels obliged to listen to her. She must be around seventy, her hair is dyed blond, she doesn’t have any lips, there’s a little heart painted in bright red in the middle of her mouth, and she keeps turning around to the man sitting next to her and fiddling with some detail of his clothing. She tucks the collar of his shirt into his V-necked sweater, straightens his tie, folds his sleeve over, and the hard-faced man lets her do it. Now she takes a piece of thread off his pants and says, “There’s some blonde after you, and it’s not me,” and she says it for Julia to hear, for her to laugh at the joke. In fact, the uninhibited woman’s hypercritical attention and perhaps slightly scornful pretence in looking after the man, and his reaction—between a frown and fright—remind her of a description Martin wrote of an outpatient waiting room. Women taking care of their silent husbands, treating them in an exasperating way to calm them down, as if they were children, telling them off for the things they did or didn’t do that made them get sick, sharing all the details with everybody around them: “it started happening to him two years ago”; “they can’t find out what he’s got.” They’re from the province of Ávila, but the town they live in is close to Cáceres, and they’ve come to Tolosa to visit one of their sons. Julia would have guessed they weren’t from here, not only from their voices and clothes and appearance in general but from their faces, too. And just like every time she thinks about people who are from here versus people who aren’t, she isn’t proud of herself.