Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  As her caregiver, the writer interrupts occassionally to add information, even correcting her at times, as she answers Abaitua’s purposeless medical questions, but then, when he can think of nothing more to ask her, there’s an awkward silence, and Martin takes ahold of the tray with the glass and medicine box on it—now he can see what it is: Buscopax—and says he has to go and do something, though Abaitua doesn’t understand what. Then, when the writer closes the door behind him, she takes his hands and starts talking to him softly, completely shaken up, as if she were afraid of not having time to say everything she wants to. “I kept wondering if I was ever going to see you again. Will I die without seeing him again? Will he never let me show him how I do kokotxas? Will we never celebrate Peru’s first birthday? Will he ever hug me again? Did my stupid letter make him angry?” She asks one question after another, without giving him the chance to answer. Without him having to say anything. When she stops, he doesn’t know what to say.

  And then he says, “I’m sorry.” She smiles and says he’s not to blame.

  “I should have realized,” he says, “I should have done something.”

  “You did.”

  She touches his cheek lightly with her right hand, looks toward the door, and with a confidential tone that seems to be intentionally or even comically exaggerated, says that she thought the milk coming from her breasts was because he aroused her so much; after all, he made her feel so many things she had never, ever felt before with anybody else, so it hadn’t surprised her all that much. She thought it was her essence, the essence of love, the nectar of love, her juice. She liked it coming out of her, it helped her to dream that she had a child of his.

  “It turns out it’s called galactorrhea and it’s caused by a tumor. When they told me, I thought, ‘How vulgar, and I made him drink that.’ I asked if the liquid could be poisonous, and fortunately, they said no.”

  “I’m sorr y.”

  “I’m pulling your leg. Couldn’t you tell how happy I was whenever I saw you? How could you think I was on antidepressants?”

  When Abaitua says “I’m sorry” for the hundredth time, she slaps his hand, as if telling a child not to do something. But then she says he’s not to blame at all. Perhaps only for being too gentle, but she realized he thought her “nectar” was worrying. And she didn’t say anything about it to him, because when she found out, she didn’t want him treating her like a patient. “Can you understand that?” Making him feel like he had to visit her just because she was sick. In any case, they told her it would be sorted out in a couple of days. She didn’t choose his wife’s clinic herself, it was just the one on her insurance policy, and initially, she was going to be operated on by another doctor. She says it was destiny. “Fate.”

  Fate in Basque: patu, or zori. Lynn confuses zori with txori, meaning “bird.”

  “She” is Pilar.

  She isn’t to blame, either. It was an accident. He shouldn’t think about it; nor should he think that what’s happened is a punishment. “Because I know you’d be capable of thinking something like that.” Now she looks anxious. Her lips look so dry to him that he feels thirsty. He asks her if she wants a little water, to lighten the atmosphere a little, and she shakes her head.

  They’re almost in the dark. The noise of a train, probably a freight train; in any case, it doesn’t stop.

  “You know what?”

  Her voice sounds lively again. “She’s beautiful.” She says it with conviction. She’s very beautiful. After repeating her half-comic gesture of looking at the door, she asks him to come closer with her index finger. “Now I know why you like her,” she whispers. “Because you do like her, don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, she says once more that she knows why he likes her. He finds it annoying listening to her talking about Pilar and starts to move away from the sofa, but she holds him back. “Her smile,” she says, looking into his eyes.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  (Shortly earlier, in the car, Pilar said that Lynn was a “wonderful woman,” and he almost replied, “A wonderful woman who had the great misfortune to come between us.”)

  “Tell me.”

  He isn’t sure whether Pilar said “wonderful woman” or “wonderful girl.”

  “Tell me, I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Faced with his silence, she opens her eyes wide, covers her mouth with one hand, and waves the other in the air like a child, saying, “She’s got a bit of a vengeful streak, though.” And then she smiles. “It’s a joke.” He can’t help smiling, too.

  The writer opens the door enough to put his head in. “Maureen’s coming,” he warns them, which sounds like “it’s time” to Abaitua, and he gets up off the sofa automatically. “It’s like he just said the supervisor’s coming, isn’t it?” She laughs, which he’s grateful for. He wants to leave. So he’s standing up, not having any idea what to say, and the writer, thinking he’s given them enough time to say goodbye, opens the door the rest of the way. This time he comes in. He picks some books up off the floor and puts them on the bookshelf—Abaitua sees that the photo Kepa took of them in Bordeaux is still in the same place—then he goes over to the sofa, picks up a cushion from behind Lynn, puffs it up, and puts it back again, tucks her legs into her pashmina shawl properly, looks around the room as if to make sure that everything is in place, and then tiptoes out.

  They’re in silence, he’s standing in the middle of the room, and she’s lying on the sofa. For a long time. It seems like a long time to Abaitua, at any rate. Finally, it’s Lynn who talks again. Something she’d been wanting to ask him and kept on forgetting. She reminds him that in Montauk, Max says that when he married his first wife, they went to live in an apartment building where there was a neighbour lady, called Haller, who was paralytic and couldn’t get out of bed. Abaitua nods, he remembers her; he’s relieved it isn’t a personal question. Apparently his wife often sent him to the woman’s flat to ask to borrow things like some salt or a can opener, but he always waited by the door. The idea of seeing a paralytic woman made him feel queasy. He could see the entryway, a closet, a piece of carpet; he knew that the woman could hear his voice, but he never went in to greet her. One day, when he went there to ask for some spare fuses, the caregiver insisted he come in, but he gave an excuse, fled, and never went back. His wife, though, had—she had a close relationship with the woman, especially after having her first child, and was always going over to her house. It was from his wife that Max found out that he actually knew Mrs. Haller—they were in the same class in their first year of elementary school, and he realizes she was the first girl he ever fell in love with.

  In Montauk, Max says that Mrs. Haller became paralytic in childbirth, and Lynn always wanted to know how that could have happened, she’d been meaning to ask, but she kept forgetting whenever she saw him. She would always forget everything. A weak smile. She’s been wondering these past several days whether he would be braver than Max and come to see her.

  “And here you are.”

  Abaitua doesn’t know if it’s really the right moment to tell her that paralysis can be caused by obstetric factors. He’s still standing up. “Like a dummy,” as they’d say in Otzeta.

  “I was convinced I wasn’t ever going to see you again.” She pauses for a moment. “In fact, it’s been quite hard getting you back here.” She smiles again. “But you have come.” When she makes an effort to sit up, her shawl gets in a jumble and her feet and calves get uncovered. He knows it’s pure imagination, but they look thinner to him. Feet with no strength.

  She tells him to go. Fly away from this dark cold room.

  “It’s better if you don’t bump into Maureen. She’s a good person, but she doesn’t think very much of you; she blames you all. The damned Basque.”

  She holds her arms out to him, and he bends down to give her a kiss. “You smell so good,” she says, as she hangs onto his nec
k. For a moment he has the feeling that she’s going to put her legs around his waist, as she used to. He can feel her weight.

  Going along the gravel path, he comes across a chubby woman wearing a white raincoat that goes down to her knees. She’s the very picture of an old-fashioned midwife. He thinks she must be Maureen. “Hola,” he says, and she, after openly looking him up and down, mumbles something he doesn’t understand. He has a hard time getting out onto the road, because of all the people walking from the train to the stairs. The sound of the hydraulic system closing the doors and the train moving off. He waits for it to disappear from view before setting off toward the clinic.

  When he reaches the jetty, he hears a sound, the same one again and again. It’s a metal drum floating like a buoy, banging up against the mastless sailing boat. The mooring line on the stern has come lose. He remembers that back on that day, the tide was much higher, and when he went to speak with the boys, he was only able to get as far as the laurel bushes. A lot of mud. Now he can’t do anything to tie the mooring up again.

  He almost loses a shoe as he gets back onto the path. His feet are numb, and he still has a ways to walk, through all that traffic noise, getting splashed by the cars. He feels extremely tired, but also free from something he can’t put his finger on. That sometimes happens to him, as does the opposite—he’ll feel anxious and have to look inside himself to find out why. When he reaches the clinic door, he sees another car’s lights coming on. He knows it’s Pilar’s car. He wonders whether she’s come out just then by chance or whether she’s been waiting for him. He doesn’t mind, he’s not worried, he’s not afraid.

  It’s sad that he’s not afraid, because it means he’s lost all hope. Lynn once said something like that. He doesn’t know why he’s just thought of it.

  It’s her. She lowers the window as he walks up to her. “How is she?” she asks him. Abaitua’s answer is that she’s as well as she can be.

  EPILOGUE

  On the escalator, an old man wearing something like a guayabera is complaining that architects nowadays pay more attention to the way buildings look than to what they’re used for. Julia has the impression she hears somebody saying something like that every time she comes to Loiu Airport. The man, who’s a couple of steps ahead of her, turns around and looks at her, as if waiting for her to agree, and even though she tries to pretend she’s not listening, she ends up smiling when she remembers something another old man once said: “I’m opposed to the death penalty, except for architects.” It was Eric Rohmer’s verdict, Martin had underlined it somewhere, and she’d copied it into his quotes archive.

  She waits in line at the café and, when it’s her turn, realizes she doesn’t want anything.

  She’s on the raised walkway that runs all the way around the terminal, and the arrivals halls, a floor lower down, can be seen from it. The travelers on the plane from London will arrive at gate number eight in half an hour. She feels more relaxed after finding the place. She wanders along the walkway and watches the travelers from other planes arrive. You can see each gate’s luggage conveyor belt in its entirety, but although somebody standing where she is could keep a watch on every piece of luggage going through, she isn’t sure they would be able to monitor every single one of the passengers at times when the hall is very crowded, especially people who don’t go up to the belt. Some travelers don’t seem to realize that there are people looking down at them from the walkway, but others do look upward, and some raise their hands to greet the people waiting for them. There aren’t so many people on the plane that’s just arrived, they look like tourists who’ve come from somewhere warm, and they’re standing around their luggage belt, which is moving but without any baggage on it yet. Julia wonders what people like her—standing to watch at the glass with their heads all tipped slightly down like penguins—look like to the people below. She decides to go downstairs.

  She checks the status of the plane from London on the arrivals board once more. On time. She doesn’t know if Kepa’s going to be on the plane, he’d only said he was going to come back at midday on Friday, but she’s taken the risk of coming to wait for him by surprise; she hopes it’ll be a good surprise. She’s glad she’s given way to her senseless impulse, but she’s getting more and more nervous as the arrival time approaches.

  She doesn’t need her glasses to see that the woman at the newsstand with her back to her is Harri. It’s easy to recognize her; they bought the jacket she’s wearing with the dragon embroidered on the back at Fancy in Donibane Lohizune together. She must have come to meet her daughter, and Julia would rather bump into anybody else but her. She’ll have to tell her that she’s waiting for Kepa and then, as if that weren’t enough, look ridiculous in front of her if he doesn’t show. She wonders whether it would be better to go back to Donostia—when it comes down to it, Kepa isn’t expecting her, so he won’t miss her—but she’s also annoyed at having to give in. She’s imagined what would be a surprise meeting for Kepa a thousand times since she first thought of it, and although her exaggeratedly prudent nature has not been able to completely ignore the possibility that it might be disappointing, she imagines it as something happy and agreeable. Above all happy. What’s more, it would save her so many words. She was glad that she had been moved to make the straightforward decision to come and wait for him, and now she’s annoyed about having to give up on it. Having to relinquish giving Kepa the present of being there for him. Her first impulse is to turn around and hide among the people in the cafeteria, but Harri’s going to see her sooner or later; even at Heathrow it’s difficult to avoid people who are waiting for the same plane as you.

  It doesn’t take long to confirm the inevitable. She hasn’t yet gotten the glass of water she’s ordered when she hears, “What are you doing here?” A happy voice. Exactly what she expected Harri to ask her. Taking her cue from the final call for passengers to Málaga that’s just gone out over the PA, she invents a bachelor uncle from Otzeta and says he’s traveling to Torremolinos on that flight and she’s just dropped him off, slightly embarrassed by how easily she’s lying. “And what about you?” After seeming to hesitate for a moment, she says, “As you can see, I’m waiting for the man from the airport—same old story.” Then, after laughing at her own joke, she says Harritxu’s coming back from London. Julia doesn’t think she looks bad, she’s quite tanned and, maybe because of that, looks blonder, too. They have to move apart from each other to avoid being bumped into by some boys who are playing around. When they get back together, Harri says she’s really come to pick up her daughter. She doesn’t seem especially moved when she tells Julia that she called Harritxu to tell her all about her sickness, and to tell her that she needed her. She wants Harritxu with her. And to give the girl a useful experience, too, for her to see how her mother is facing up to the disease, to the unmentionable, because nobody talks about cancer. “¿Qué te parece?” she says, raising her chin. “Mother and daughter picking out wigs together and all that.”

  For the first time since she’s known her—and it’s been years—there’s an awkward silence between them, and Julia looks for and can’t find the words to break it. Inevitably, she considers the possibility of asking after Martin, while Harri’s saying something or other, and finally, nothing else occurring to her, she asks, “What about Martin, is he writing?” It’s the first time she’s asked the question she’s had to answer a thousand times. She’s never felt the fact of not being with him any more so clearly. “Is he writing?” she says once more, and Harri answers that she isn’t sure, she thinks he’s trying to. “He’s doing really badly,” she whispers, and Julia feels a burning inside, thinking she’s talking about his health. “What’s wrong with him?” She’s relieved when Harri says it’s his dreams. He’s still having nightmares. Apparently, he keeps on having the same nightmare—a text disappears down the drain letter by letter, fast, and he doesn’t have time to identify a single word, and the few he does hold onto don�
��t mean anything. Words he doesn’t understand from an unknown language. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” She smiles.

  That seems to have put Harri in a good mood again—she must have been thinking that Julia was angry—and she starts talking about Martin nonstop, about his plans. Apparently, he really is going to Sicily now, not forever, but he is going to spend some time there. She tells him all about a house he’s going to rent, not actually in Syracuse but close by, because she’s seen the photos online; it’s an old house, but it has great views. But Julia realizes that Harri’s just talking for the sake of it. She lets her arms fall to her side and cocks her head. “Honey, he loves you and really misses you,” she says with despair in her voice. Julia doesn’t want to know anything about that, she wants to tell Harri that everything’s over, but she doesn’t, because Harri takes ahold of both her hands—she forgot how strong she is—and says, “You know what?” She doesn’t have a chance to ask her what it is she’s supposed to know. “He had dinner with Marie Lafôret.” Harri lets go of her hands and takes a step backward, apparently to get a better angle to see the effect of her words on her. Her eyes really are wonderful, even more wonderful than they look on the television, but she’s a sad woman. She’s separated—it’s strange, she says, how men find it easier to abandon beautiful women—and has a broken heart; she’s worried because her son is a punk and she regrets having brought him up so freely. She’s shown him photos of her son, and even of her dog, which has epileptic fits.