Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  I cried, all joking aside, because it took a lot of effort to write every shitty line of it, and because the flue in the library chimney was blocked. I thought you might find it hard to do if you ever had to, as we’ve discussed, and I know you would have kept your promise. You believed me when I told you that was what I wanted, and the loyalty you feel toward the will of the dead is stronger than your faith in how important my literature might be for the world. To an extent, I think I found it humiliating to see how quickly and undoubtedly you accepted my request. But not much. I know well that what you feel for me goes beyond what the value of my work might be, and that that would be the case even if any of it were up to Kafka’s standard. But now, come to think of it, I wonder whether—to the extent to which you’ve come to hate this obsession of mine that’s kept me so distant from life, and from you, too—I might have stolen what would have been for you the pleasure of seeing that obsession’s pathetic harvest burn. I don’t think so. If one of those vultures that appear to open dead writers’ drawers before the coffin lids are even closed over the authors’ dead bodies ever turns up, you can feel free to tell him that we watched my novel and diaries turn into ash in the flames together. That’s the truth: I like the idea of leaving a trail of smoke in people’s memory, of making myself eternal in the way Kafka apparently wanted to—didn’t Virgil himself want to burn The Aeneid?—adding my modest flame to everything that got burned in the library at Alexandria, Aeschylus’ tragedies, Carlyle’s The French Revolution, and Gogol’s Dead Souls, “leaving blank pages so people can dream about the stories that could have been.”

  There are still loads of people milling around the María Cristina Hotel and the Victoria Eugenia Antzokia—the theatre where the film festival is held—and walking past the bench Julia’s sitting on. People talking, excited at the prospect of the night ahead, some walking so close that she has to tuck her legs in to not trip them, cigarette smoke and names from the world of cinema left floating in the air. “She’s not as good as Natalie Wood in Splendour in the Grass,” somebody says. She immediately remembers: We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind; / In the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be. She had to translate it into Basque in that workshop with the young semi-poet who’d been left nameless, and they were unable to find a good equivalent for “sympathy,” which is always badly translated. In the primal sympathy. Understanding each other, reciprocity, communion, sharing feelings, true, but especially sharing sadness and anxiety. A young man with glasses on stops to look at her, as if wanting to ask her something, and she realizes she’s started crying without caring one bit, “obscenely” abandoning herself to tears, as Martin puts it, letting the tears fall down; she feels them going down her cheeks.

  It seems a film’s about to start; somebody says, “We’re late.” People seem to be in more of a hurry, some are now running in their hunger for stories, with no time to lose, and a few look at her as they go past, wondering who she is, as if wanting to know what her story is. A woman sitting on a bench with a manuscript in her lap. She hears sentences in Catalan and in English. “A woman crying.” She wonders what she would answer if somebody—one of the journalists, critics, filmmakers, or script writers with Zinemaldia accreditations around their necks—stopped and came up to her to ask her why she’s crying. So why is she crying? Because of Faustino Iturbe’s death, and because Martin will stop writing because of that death, and because she’s had a lot to do with all of that. Because it’s an ending. Putting her books, sheet music, and the first articles of clothes she happened to grab into bags was no mere gesture, no mere cry for his attention—not at all, her wish to leave him was firm, in fact, wish isn’t even the word, it was an absolute need, but now she realizes, after reading that epilogue in the form of a letter, that there’s no going back from it, and she feels an incredible vacuum, an awful feeling of pain. So she’s crying because she’s alone, completely alone, she doesn’t have a house, Zigor is about to be fifteen, and she’s started getting old, at best she’ll be condemned to translating The Official Gipuzkoa Bulletin into Basque for the rest of her life, and she doesn’t have anywhere to play the piano.

  So they’re selfish tears.

  The street lights have come on, flickering, fine gold-colored light opening up in the blue dusk. She’s calmer after crying, and before heading off, she decides not to let herself be taken over by feelings of self-pity and guilt again and, once and for all, to separate Faustino Iturbe and Flora Ugalde’s lives from her real life, as Martin always used to ask her to when she reproached him for using their intimate moments to base his stories on.

  It isn’t by chance that she sits down across from a young woman reading a book in the half-empty carriage. She normally sits next to or, if possible, across from somebody reading. With a few exceptions—apart from backpacking English or American boys—they’re mostly women, and young, like the reader sitting across from her now. She doesn’t know exactly why she does it. She thinks it must be to make sure she gets agreeable company, people of her own style, and in any case, people who are quiet. The girl can’t be much more than twenty, and of course, she’s a student. Julia gathers that from the folder on her lap, probably full of notes, and the book she’s reading is on top of it. She’s reading with great concentration and hardly looks up when Julia sits down; her hand is raised in readiness to pass onto the next page. Julia can’t see what the book is, the cover’s resting against the file. That’s another habit of hers, wanting to see what her neighbor’s reading, and it’s led to angry looks from time to time. Some readers protect their intimacy fiercely. Even so, it usually isn’t hard for her to see what book it is, because it’s normally a current best seller. She rarely has the satisfaction of seeing that it’s a classic—once, she sat down in front of a young woman, almost a girl, very pretty, and when she saw she was reading Montaigne’s Essays, she almost wanted to hug her—or one of her own favorite writers, or a book in Basque. The book titles are usually a disappointment. The girl closes her book and looks at Julia for a moment—without actually seeing her, Julia thinks—with a slight smile on her face just before turning toward the window. She closes her book from right to left, and even though she keeps her short-nailed fine hands on the back cover, Julia sees she’s reading Martin’s Maitasunak eta penak—Love and Sorrows. It’s a worn-out copy with a library label on it. Julia’s incredibly glad and feels an irresistible wish to ask her if she likes it. She doesn’t know how to, and when the girl looks away toward the window, probably because she’s seen Julia looking at her, she decides to be direct “Do you like it?” she says, leaning toward her, almost whispering, in a confidential tone, and the girl says she does, not seeming surprised by the question, underlining her response by nodding. Then, showing Julia the cover, she asks if she, too, has read it. “A long time ago.” She doesn’t know why she mentions that. “And did you like it?” Yes, she says, and she, too, nods. She liked it a lot. The girl says it was a recommendation from her literature teacher, but that they don’t always hit the mark in terms of her taste. So it’s the teacher’s job to guess students’ tastes, not to help them to develop their own? The girl laughs. They’re at Txominenea already, and Julia is anxious to know what she thinks about the book, wants to know more, what exactly it is that she likes about it, and why. The girl, on the other hand, looks calm and relaxed; she’s obviously not getting off at the next stop. She smiles when she says it’s incredible how well the author understands women. “Doesn’t he?” She adds with conviction, “The way he knows women’s souls.” After an initial moment surprise, her eyes wide open, Julia instinctively covers the mole on her neck, so that the girl won’t connect her with Flora Ugalde, about whom the girl says, “Sometimes she doesn’t seem very understanding”.

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Sometimes she’s very hard on him. She doesn’t realize that creative people suffer a lot.”

  “But he’s pretty mean.”
Julia’s talking about Faustino Iturbe, of course. “What do you think about him when he puts Mercurochrome in the lavatory to frighten Flora and blackmail her emotionally?”

  “I don’t know. But he loves her, and maybe he feels she’s distant.”

  Unfortunately, they’re going past the prison, and Julia’s not going to have time to give her own point of view.

  “You know the expression in Spanish about how some love kills—‘hay amores que matan’—of course?” she has no choice but to summarize as she stands up.

  The girl nods.

  “That’s true—there’s no future for the couple. But it’s a fine book—sad, but very good.”

  They don’t have time to say any more.

  When Julia gets off the train, she only takes two steps, just enough to move away from the edge of the platform. She lifts her hand up to say goodbye to the girl, who does the same thing. They never told each other their names, but she hopes, as she sees the palm of her hand pressed against the window while the train begins moving away, that they’ll run into each other again. She’s amazed to feel that it’s as if the train has suddenly taken away the anxiety she’d been feeling in her chest. Instead of crossing the road, she goes straight up the slope toward Martin’s house, wanting to see him as soon as possible, not leaving it for tomorrow as she had intended. The cats come up to the iron gate to welcome her. They meow as they rub against her legs. “Without getting tied up in words,” as Martin wrote. She doesn’t have to think twice about opening the iron gate. The shutters are closed, but that doesn’t put her off. You know what? She’s decided that’s going to be the first thing she says to him when she sees him. And he’ll stare at her, distrustful, his blue eyes sticking out. She laughs as she thinks of it, and she realizes that happiness is what she’s feeling now. Just that, “You know what?” she’ll ask him. She laughs as she remembers how just a while before, she was thinking of getting out a pen and paper to write a script for her meeting with him. It wouldn’t be the first time. In a course they took once at work, they were told that you shouldn’t go into a meeting without a script, and still less so without being very clear about what your objective is. Usually when she speaks with Martin, she knows what her objective is, knows more or less, even if not completely, what she wants to get out of it, but now she knows how to start, and she says to herself that that’s the most important thing and that it’s better this way, with a conviction whose origin she isn’t quite sure of, and that firm belief makes her quicken her step, almost run, to start their encounter as soon as possible; she wants to see Martin, she has a light heart as she goes through the garden. (The garden, in fact, doesn’t look that bad to her, rather the opposite—there are pretty areas of flowers, thanks to Lynn, in the middle of all that elegant decline.)

  Where on earth is Lynn?

  At some places in the gravel, there are parallel tracks from the suitcase the fat American woman dragged along it.

  Splendor in the Grass. It turns out she does have an objective: whatever decision they finally come to, she wants the memory of their affection to survive. But for that to happen, first of all she has to ask him “You know what?” And then, as he looks at her with his eyes wide open, distrustful, and probably afraid, she’ll tell him what happened on the train, that she saw a girl reading a book, catching her at that precise moment when we finish it, close it, and get that lost, dreamy look in our eyes. The girl was very pretty, and the book was Loves and Sorrows. And she thought what she’d just read was sad, but very beautiful, too. Those are the words she’s going to use, sad but beautiful, or perhaps sad and beautiful would be better, or maybe sad and moving; extremely moving is the way to describe The Man in Front of the Mirror, and she’s quite sure that this work—she doesn’t want to call it a short story—is the end of a period and, at the same time, announces his revival as a writer. She’s sure that after this introduction, they’ll be able to organize the matter of splitting up in the most amicable way possible.

  She’s determined to make him see that above all, the most important thing is for him to keep writing.

  She only has to push the door to open it, it’s still unlocked. Inside there’s a slight smell of burning. There’s nobody in the living room, and her bags are still next to the umbrella holder. There’s nobody in the kitchen. Complete silence in the hallway apart from the clock’s ticking and the sound of her steps on the floorboards. At the foot of the staircase, she doesn’t hear any sound from the upper floor, either. She goes back toward the entrance and then tiptoes along the hallway to the formal library. It’s the second time in a short while that she’s been reminded of Murders in the Wax Museum. That moment when the girl scratches the head of the figure that looks like her disappeared friend with her index finger and a bit of real skin comes off. She tells herself she’s just frightening herself, like a hysterical child, and moves forward in the half-light, trying to walk normally. Although there’s no sign that there’s anybody inside, she’s startled to think that Martin could be in there. The short whistle of a train passing through the station without stopping. She waits with her hand on the doorknob for a few seconds, holding her breath, listening to the silence that’s spreading out, the ticking of the clock once more the only thing she can hear, but now it seems quicker to her, in time with the rapid heartbeats she feels in her throat. Finally, she decidedly opens the door and finds complete darkness and a strong smell of burning. Then, after turning the light on, she finds herself surrounded by clouds of smoke circling slowly upward from the fireplace to the ceiling. Most of the doors to the drawers in the lower part of the bookcases are open. There are sheets of paper all over the floor, magazine cuttings, white and colored index cards—most of the colored ones are mauve and green. A few photos. There are ashes in the fireplace, which she has never seen in use and probably doesn’t even have a working flue, burned black sheets of paper, slightly twisted, and irregularly shaped bits of white paper that haven’t been fully burned. Thick piles of paper at the sides of the fireplace that seem, at a glance, to be printed on, giving the idea that something has stopped him from completing his burning. She recognizes a photo of herself when she was young, sixteen or seventeen, hugely amplified, on the blue embossed leather table he uses when he shuts himself in to write. It must be eight by twelve inches. She’d forgotten about it. The original photo wasn’t a very good quality one to start with, and it’s become hazy with the amplification. She’s wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a corduroy suit, walking along a path in a pinewood toward the person taking the photo. She looks clumsy. She has a book in her right hand, and she’s holding a guitar by its neck in her left hand, leaning forward as if ready to hit somebody with it. Although the photo’s taken from in front of her, you see her face in profile, partly covered by her hair, as if she were trying to escape the lens. It shows her clumsiness, her shyness, and the fact that she’s reserved, and her beauty, too. It’s years since she last saw the photo, the original of the one amplified here, and she doesn’t recognize the place where it was taken, or even remember who took it. Picking it up, she sees a small Villa Flores envelope below it, the one that young man sent to her office along with the roses on her birthday. Not that many years have gone by, but it seems to her like something from a long time ago. Her workmates teased her, wanting to know who’d sent the flowers, the name of that young man who she doesn’t know what to call, who she soon grew to hate, even though he wasn’t to blame, because she suffered so much as a result of that short relationship she had with him. “I feel you alive in this springtime you’ve brought back to life with me.” Still now, even though her mind says she shouldn’t, she feels guilty for having accepted the caring, pleasant company of that romantic, sentimental young man who, like her, had the afternoons free, for that disagreeable situation that was best not mentioned. Martin knew only too well how to punish her for it. “Oh you, friend of the sun, loyal, more loyal than anyone to your red moon instinct.” He used to
laugh as he recited it. “Oh you, friend of the sun,” he used to call out. “Did you really need this trash?” Flora Ugalde had begged him on her knees not to be cruel, not to spoil her story. Perhaps she herself begged, too. She doesn’t want to remember.