Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “She made Frisch suffer a lot.”

  Kepa, sitting on the edge of the bed now, is struggling to take off one of his shoes. She sees something on his face again, a moment of embarrassment, which leads him to explain, “It’s really tight.” And Julia replies that as far as she’s concerned, he can strip naked if it makes him more comfortable, hoping to make him feel more at ease. Not a very appropriate thing to say, but fortunately, Kepa doesn’t take her at her word. As if he hadn’t heard her, he says once more that Marianne made Frisch suffer a lot.

  “And vice versa, I think.”

  In any case, what do they know about Marianne? That she doesn’t go to New York with Frisch, because she’s afraid of flying, but that later on she doesn’t hesitate to get a plane to meet up with her lover. That she inspired Frisch’s most beautiful writing on the subject of jealousy. Some of which tears you apart. That she has her extramarital affair, sure that Frisch, like everyone around them, is aware of it and doesn’t mind. As well as being unfaithful, that seems a little naïve to Julia. They have to bear in mind that they only know Max’s version, a man humiliated by being the last person to know that his wife is sleeping with his friend. But he’s so sincere. He doesn’t try to excuse himself, he’s as demanding and bitter as ever: “A man who does not notice that a woman has come to him from another bed is no truly amorous man.”

  Kepa’s feet are wide, like those of a fishermen used to walking barefoot. He has hair on the knuckles of his big toes. “There’s no denying the similarity between Faustino Iturbe and Frisch.” He lies down on the bed, and lifting himself up on his elbows and heels, he bounces several times on the mattress to test it out. It really is a “heavenly bed,” he says happily, and Julia instinctively moves backward until she bumps into the desk. When it’s too late, she realizes he’ll take her for some silly woman running away because she’s afraid he’ll suggest she lie down next to him. He sits on the side of the bed again.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  She’s tempted to ask whether he means Faustino Iturbe or whether he’s really talking about Martin. But she prefers to avoid the subject and continue talking about the film, even though she doesn’t have much to add—that woman they see crossing 46th Street after they’ve said goodbye, with her blond hair, unquestionably dyed, and those boots that give you the creeps, has nothing in common with the Lynn she imagined when reading Montauk.

  Kepa laughs. Apparently Noll says in his book that the things you read in Montauk would be of no use for getting to know the real Lynn. The real one’s movements seem happier and softer to him, and perhaps the old man’s dreams have changed her into what he wanted.

  Julia is astonished, confused more exactly, even though she’s not sure where her astonishment comes from. She checks that he’s talking about Words on Death. Sure enough, he’s talking about the book she bought in his shop that says on the cover that it includes Frisch’s reflections on death, probably to sell more copies. She doesn’t dare tell him she bought the book in his shop, prey to a senseless fear that he’ll guess she’s been trying to meet him. She’s astonished that she never realized Lynn appears in the book.

  “It’s toward the end of the book. It sounds like you didn’t finish it.”

  It doesn’t sound like a reproach at all, but Julia still feels guilty when she stops reading a book before the end. She tells him the truth, she didn’t finish it, because she feels she has to explain herself. It isn’t exactly that she didn’t like it. She admits that Noll’s almost happy stoicism with regard to death is admirable, the way he calmly goes on skiing and visiting his friends, his desire to squeeze the last drops out of life, even though she doesn’t much like the narcissism with which he approaches death, preparing his own funeral, that desire to be the center of attention and all the rest. To tell him the whole truth, she would have to say that she couldn’t stand reading all the way to the end, because it made Martin examining his own fictional death in front of the mirror seem even more pathetic. But she just explains that Martin was more interested in the subject than she was and took the book from her when she was about to finish it. She stopped where Noll’s clogged-up lungs start to make it hard for him to breathe.

  So she never found out that Frisch’s friend—by that time seriously ill, in great pain, and breathing with enormous difficulty—very much enjoyed spending four days at the house Frisch had in Berzona. “He spends the whole morning writing and then scratches everything out and rewrites most of it, leaving short forms with lots of gaps which the reader has to fill in, that economical form so typical of his later work.” Noll’s words, which Kepa recites by heart. It was during this stay that he said that the information in Montauk wouldn’t help you to get to know the real Lynn. Alice, to give her actual name—the Lynn in Montauk’s real name is Alice Locke-Carey. Julia never knew that, either. He describes a very moving scene in which Frisch and Lynn—or Alice—are having a small disagreement while washing the dishes. This is how a third party sees them: Frisch showers her with praise, and she treats him with affection, happily. Suddenly she embraces him from behind and answers Noll’s question by saying that she feels a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

  ALICE IN WONDERLAND, not ALICE IN THE WONDERLAND.

  So Max and Lynn’s story does not end, as they had agreed it would, with a kiss on the corner of First Avenue and 46th Street and with their promise to send each other a postcard if they remembered. Kepa looks at her in amazement, shocked she didn’t know that. Max, breaking their agreement, went back to New York and looked for her, but never found her. As Julia knows from Montauk, when he went to her office, the black woman at reception said, “Lynn is no longer with us,” and he understood that she had died. But that had happened in ‘74, shortly after the weekend they spent together in Montauk. Kepa tells her that after he got divorced from Marianne, the two of them met up again, and lived together, too, going back and forth between New York and Switzerland until ‘84. They split up when he was seventy-three—when he still had seven years left to live—and Lynn, or Alice, was forty-one; she was the same age as Marianne when he and she got divorced.

  “And does our Lynn know all of that?”

  “I imagine she does.”

  “So why hasn’t she ever told me?”

  It’s clear Kepa is enjoying bringing her up to speed. There’s a third book of his memories besides 1973’s Berliner Journal—Julia knows about that one, its publication was forbidden until the centenary of Frisch’s birth, and she mentions it so that he won’t think she’s dumber than she is—which is a series of notes going from the start of ‘82 through to April of ‘83. Entwürfe zu einem dritten Tagebuch was its title, Notes for a Third Diary. Frisch had torn it up, but his secretary found a copy. Its publication was controversial in Switzerland, Germany, the States, and France, too. The arguments against: Is it legitimate to publish notes that add nothing to the writer’s work and that he himself tore up? In favor: How could you not publish a text by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, even if it isn’t a masterpiece?

  That’s not the subject regarding the book that Julia’s interested in at the moment. She wants to know what it’s like, what this Entwürfe zu einem dritten Tagebuch talks about.

  He says it’s a sad book, it probably isn’t a masterpiece, but it does have traces of Frisch’s best work; the cold, short beauty of his desperate sentences moves you. A man who shakes sentences the way you shake a broken watch, who doesn’t feel obliged to do anything, who believes he doesn’t owe anything to anybody in this world, who is increasingly frightened by his lack of affection for his friends, his lack of concern over public matters, and his own increasing freedom. In short, that’s what makes somebody old, not needing to use a walking stick.

  But what does it tell about?

  His life in New York, Zurich, and Berzona. His sad, complicated life, especially in New York, where he bought a loft with Alice, to share
with Alice, who is no longer Lynn. He doesn’t like the States, because for Americans freedom is a synonym of power. The risks of the human race disappearing as a result of nuclear war frightens him, even though he has no future himself.

  He talks about death. He describes Noll’s visits: when he tells him about his mortal illness and asks him to be the one to read the prayer at his funeral; their conversations about suicide; the time in Egypt when he was about to die. Their afternoons at Luxor admiring the sunsets and drinking whiskey. Their trip back to Switzerland in the small medical plane that came to collect them. Frisch’s points of view, which, without contradicting his friend’s affectionate Socratic perspective, are incredibly precise and display his usual sharpness. Kepa says you can laugh at some passages. He gives some examples: in the back seat of a taxi on the way to the airport, Frisch clings onto his friend to stop him from falling over. The Arab taxi driver, seeing what’s happening, drives around the potholes in the road with the greatest care. Too slowly—a funeral procession gets in front of them, six men carrying an unvarnished coffin in the middle of a singing clan. Frisch isn’t sure whether Noll realizes. The driver, who is becoming impatient, points at the coffin bobbing up and down. “Dead, look, this man dead.” He says it three times, and then: “Look for your friend.”

  And so on, and so on.

  A lot of despair.

  He knows the sentences in German:

  Hänge ich am Leben? Am I attached to life?

  Ich hänge an einer Frau. I’m attached to a woman.

  Ist das genug? Is that enough?

  But what does it say about Lynn?

  Kepa says that what he picked up on about the relationship between Alice-who-is-not-Lynn and Frisch isn’t very similar to what Noll says.

  Alice reads paperback-pageturners—that could have been expected, since Lynn reads books about dolphins—and what little she knows about Tolstoy she learned from a movie, and she hardly knows anything about Shakespeare. On the beach, surrounded by young men, the subjects she is moved by are of indifference to him, so no conversations take place. She gets angry, because Frisch sits in a rocking chair smoking cigars instead of helping to decorate the Christmas tree. She does crosswords. She goes to self-help groups and relationship workshops that are vegetarian and alcohol-free. She’s traumatized by her childhood, and when he’s on the other side of the Atlantic, she sends him cassette recordings of herself sobbing as she tells him about her problems with her daddy. She’s lazy. When they’re in Berzona, Frisch walks through the forest every morning to buy fresh-baked bread and then, back at home, lays breakfast out on the terrace, while she’s still asleep. She thinks that he admires the Soviet Union because he doesn’t love the United States—“You hate my country”—and one day she asks him what he’s ever done to make the world a better place. It’s a hard question, Frisch concedes, although she doesn’t know everything he’s said and written throughout his life. He sits there, drunk like Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and when she asks for her coat, he lets her go. The next morning, it’s he who apologizes.

  Lynn wird kein Name für eine Schuld.

  Montauk, 1974.

  Wird Alice der Name für eine Schuld?

  In other words:

  Lynn will not become a name for guilt (Montauk, 1974).

  Will Alice become a name for guilt?

  So they talk about Lynn, half nurse, half undine, about this Alice Julia knew nothing about. They talk about Frisch, about the man who Noll once said wouldn’t die as long as he had problems with women. In any case, Alice wasn’t the last, there was at least one other woman, called Karin, Kepa doesn’t remember her last name; after the writer died, she spoke at the memorial service held for him at St. Peter’s in Zurich.

  Julia is glad that she’s going to be able to read more things by Frisch. It reminds her of that vacuum she sometimes feels, that feeling of grief at knowing that on finishing a certain book, she won’t be able to read anything more by that writer, nothing new, nothing she hasn’t already read. She tries to explain to Kepa that she feels guilty because that feeling of loss is often deeper for her than that left by real people who are no longer in her life.

  He looks at her in silence. What is he thinking about?

  He smiles before answering. What he’s sad about, he says, is that he isn’t going to get to read any more about Flora Ugalde. When he was with Martin, he asked him about his novel, and his answer was that he was going to make it Faustino Iturbe’s last. He thought he meant he was going to stop writing. Apparently he also asked him about that, but Martin didn’t answer, he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Julia doesn’t think Martin will ever stop writing. She tells him and immediately realizes that Kepa might think that’s what she wants, that she wants him to stop writing, and she doesn’t want him to suspect that. She remembers a sentence from Katherine Mansfield’s journal—“I’ve discovered that I can’t write and live at the same time.” She would like him to be happy and doesn’t think writing helps him to be. And she tells that to Kepa.

  “I don’t think writing makes him happy.”

  “And would he be happy if he stopped writing?”

  She doesn’t think he would be then, either. Needing to write is probably an acute symptom of his unhappiness. Maybe he writes because he’s unhappy, or to find out why he isn’t happy, and maybe if he were, he wouldn’t write. She usually thinks that if he were happy, without the neurosis that suffocates him, his imagination, too, he would be free to write and enjoy moving, funny stories. He could; he’s demonstrated that he’s capable of it.

  She tells Kepa she doesn’t want to talk about Martin.

  Let’s talk about you, then.

  Lynn’s told him she’s translating Montauk and Fragebogen into Basque, so Julia has to specify that she’s only doing some passages from Montauk, only the passages she likes best. She’s ashamed he’s been allowed to get the wrong impression. She isn’t a professional translator, she’s always said that. As far as the questionaires are concerned, she translates a few of the questions from time to time, because they’re short, and because translating something is the best way to read it.

  Wieviel Geld möchten Sie besitzen? The fifth question in the sixth questionaire, the latest one she’s translated: How much money would you like to have? She sits down next to him on the bed, and he moves away from her a little. So he’s quite shy. She remembers how on that outdoor terrace in Ibaeta, Harri asked her what she would do if she won the lottery. She doesn’t know why she tells Kepa what she didn’t admit to then—she’d like to have a small monthly allowance, enough to pay her rent and not much more, enough to get by without any difficulties—she’s the mother of a young boy—and enough to allow her to work on what she wants to. To work on literary translations at her own pace, for instance. And to write, too. She’s thought of writing a story about the Basque Country, like Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, drawing on the things she tells Zigor about at night. Having more time to read. Taking piano lessons. So she tells him about her projects, or rather her desires—things, in fact, that she hasn’t shared with anybody else. Like a child writing a letter to Olentzero, the Basque Father Christmas. She also tells him the only thing she did tell Harri, that if she had enough money, she’d go to Havana with Zigor, an adventure she’s always wanted to have.

  Why does she blush all of a sudden? Kepa says with excessive enthusiasm—which somehow reminds her of Zigor—that he thinks it’s an excellent plan for an adventure. Harri had teased her about that, as had Martin. He used the anecdote—as if he’d heard it from somebody else—to joke to people that it was the most complicated excuse he’d ever heard for a woman going to Cuba to find herself a nice mulatto man. The people listening always laughed. She has to overcome the urge to cry as she remembers it.

  “It’s a good plan,” says Kepa, and to cover up the fact that she’s upset, Julia gets up and takes
a couple of steps toward the balcony. She blows her nose, facing away from him. When she turns around, he’s still sitting on the edge of the bed, obviously awkward. Julia’s ashamed of being so upset, she tries to smile, and says, “You’re the one who really has a plan, having a suite ready in the María Cristina to bring me to.”

  He smiles, too. He’s leaning forward, his hands to either side of him on the bed, as if he were sitting on the edge of a dock and gazing at the water beneath his feet. That’s the image it conjures up for Julia. He tells him what Lynn already told her about his circumstances: he lives alone with his mother, who’s lost her marbles and spends the whole day cooking the same dish over and over and drinking endless cafés con leche. And some things she didn’t know: once, several years ago, he came home to find his mother reading a book. It was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age, some South American edition he’d left out on the kitchen table. His mother hardly knew how to read. She used to look at magazines, the newspaper from time to time, but he doesn’t think she’d ever read a book. But that day, he found her leaning over the table with the open book in front of her. She didn’t realize that he was there, her back was turned to him, and her hearing was already poor by then. He went up to her from behind and saw that the finger she was using to help her read was on the line about the Ammassalik Inuits of Greenland. The Inuits had the habit of committing suicide when they thought they were becoming a burden to the community. He read, too, over her shoulder, to the rhythm of her slowly moving finger. The old people would announce their decision publicly one evening and then, two or three days later, get into their canoe and paddle away from dry land, never to return. One disabled man, who wasn’t able to climb into a canoe, begged to be thrown into the sea so that he could die quicker. His children obeyed him, but his clothes kept him floating on the surface. The daughter he loved most said to him lovingly, “Dad, put your head in, that’ll make it quicker.” He took the book away from her. It’s hard for him to explain his reaction exactly, but that’s what he did, and perhaps even a little roughly. They stayed in the kitchen for a while, silent. They were alone. His mother had both hands open on the table where the book had been, her head hanging down. Then she started crying. He thought they were tears of relief, silent cries he found moving rather than sad. He’d never seen her cry before, not even when his father died. She asked him to take her to an old person’s home—she couldn’t ever throw herself out a window.