Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “He loves you.”

  Arrivals. Llegadas. Iritsierak. There’s an unspecified delay on the flight from London. Harri complains about Martxelo. He made her leave home too early, because he always goes everywhere an hour too soon. She thinks it’s a sign of ageing. But she loves him. She tells Julia that she’s decided to love him—she says it completely seriously, without joking—because he’s a good person. She’s decided to give in, to give up on her dreams, and using those sad words—giving up—doesn’t worry her. She wants to try to get the most out of what she has, to become more settled. She’s reached a certain age, she has cancer—it’s no time for crazy adventures. She shakes her head as energetically as usual after saying this. “You know what?” she touches her arm, as if she’s just remembered something important, but then says nothing more. She looks around as if she’s just decided she’s going to tell her about it later, like a television presenter before a commercial break. “Let’s have a coffee first,” she suggests.

  She’s come to the airport so many times, thinking that fate would give her the chance to meet up with the man. She admits it as soon as they sit down, before ordering their coffees, perhaps with a little nostalgia, Julia thinks. Although she’s decided to forget about him, she still comes across him in her dreams—last night, for instance. Dreams in the sense of fantasies, she explains. What’s more, learning the man’s name has given her a basis of reality for coming up with more varied fantasies. “What?” Julia blurts out, not having understood her. Harri smiles knowingly. “Like Archimedes—give me a fulcrum, and I’ll move the world.” The man’s name is a fulcrum, and thanks to that, her fantasies seem more real. She smiles knowingly once more, which Julia detests. What does she mean she knows the man’s name now? Harri nods with an air of mystery, she’s been wanting to tell her, she says, holding onto Julia’s hand on the table, as if asking her to calm down. Her vulgar way of creating suspense once more. That way some people have of enjoying their own storytelling drives her up the wall, even more so with this particular story, which she’s never actually believed. She’s about to tell her that she doesn’t care what her fantasy man’s name is. But she doesn’t, of course. She listens patiently to Harri’s explanations about how the man having a real identity has affected the way she imagines their meetings, even though she’s not at all interested in what she’s saying. In fact, the only real difference is that now, when she imagines running into his open arms, she can say his name, that’s all. The man asks her how the guy at the airline managed to find his name, and she cries as she tells him everything she had to go through.

  “Do you think he would understand that?”

  Julia doesn’t even have time to open her mouth before Harri replies to her own question—she thinks he would, “although you never know with men.”

  While Harri speculates about men’s ability to understand things, Julia tries to decide what she will do if Kepa arrives. She considers pretending it’s a chance meeting, saying she came to see off her bachelor uncle on his way to Torremolinos and then stayed to keep Harri company.

  “Are you listening to me?” says Harri.

  Harri leans down to meet her eyes. And Julia, wanting to show that she’s been paying attention, repeats her last sentence: “You decided not to meet up with the Iberia guy if he called you.” Harri specifies: she wasn’t even expecting him to call, but he did. In fact, it was on the same day Abaitua told her the lump in her armpit was malignant. She slowly empties her cup and scoops the foam up with the tip of her spoon. It was that, in fact, that coincidence, that made her think that looking for the man was part of her fate, and that was why she agreed to see the Iberia guy again when he called.

  She says she spent the whole afternoon crying in front of the mirror. “And as if that weren’t enough, it was raining.” She went to the hotel, and he was waiting for her in the vestibule, not inside as on other occasions. She supposes she must have looked terrible, completely soaked and with eyeliner all over her face, because she always puts a lot of it on whenever she goes to meet up with him. When she arrived, quite late, he took her by the arm and began to lead her to the elevator, but she firmly broke free and told him she’d had two mastectomies since they last met up. When he looked at her strangely, she clarified that her two beautiful breasts had been removed. Apparently, he went completely pale, not knowing what to say; he took a step backward and held out a piece of paper he took from his inside jacket pocket, and after saying “here’s what you wanted,” he practically ran out of the hotel.

  “¿Qué te parece?” She screws her eyes up to try to see how her story has affected Julia, who thinks the whole thing’s crazy. She doesn’t know what to tell her and, referring to how badly the Iberia guy reacted, says it’s unbelievable; but Harri misunderstands her and, after making an angry gesture, raises her voice and says harshly that it’s really hard to hear a friend say she doesn’t believe her. She says she doesn’t deserve that. Julia, before Harri can make a big scene, tells her she’s misunderstood her, glances around to see if anybody’s looking at them, and notices somebody who looks familiar to her at the exit, in front of the announcement screen, the figure of a tall man wearing a dark suit. It’s Abaitua. She tells Harri, then tells her not to look, because she’s begun turning around. He’s wearing a white shirt and no tie. Julia doesn’t want him to see them, nor does Harri; after all that’s happened, she wouldn’t know what to say to him. Julia thinks the same thing. Too many things have happened recently to be able to talk about the weather if they bump into each other. He looks in their direction without seeing them, searching for a voice that’s calling to him from one end of the bar. It’s a soft voice that sounds amused as it calls out “Iñaki” twice. It’s his wife, who holds up a newspaper to get his attention. She’s wearing a tight sleeveless yellow-and-green patterned dress. She’s beautiful, even though you can tell her age. There’s no skin hanging down from her raised arm. An elegant woman. She stands very straight on her low-heeled shoes, but she’s not at all stiff; quite the opposite—she looks relaxed. Abaitua walks toward her. An elegant man. When they meet, she moves her head to one side and says something in his ear. They both laugh. Looking at them, Julia tries to remember something she once read about the unfair way some couples treat people who interfere in their life as a couple, but she can’t. Harri stands up with that air of solemnity people get when they’re not looking anywhere in particular, and Julia does the same.

  Going up the escalator to the gallery once more, next to Harri this time, she remembers Lynn the last time she saw her—in the garden, sitting on a deck chair, with the shawl Martin gave her laid over her legs, and petting Max, who was curled up on her lap. She shares the sadness the memory brings her with Harri—when she arrived, Lynn brought them happiness, and they’ve made her wretched, they’re to blame somehow. Harri tells her not to be stupid.

  Arrivals. London-Heathrow flight IB 5545 is flashing on the panel. At first it’s easy to keep track of the travelers from above, but as they gather around the luggage conveyor belt, Julia discovers she was right—it does get harder. And now it’s obvious that the view of the arrivals lounge is actually very limited. It must be easy to make out the people who know they are being waited for. Above all if the passengers themselves go over to the windows to look for their reception parties, and wave their hands and jump up and down so that they can spot them, as Harri’s daughter is doing now. She’s sure that if Kepa’s on this flight, she’s going to miss him and her trip will have been in vain, but her annoyance subsides when she decides that she’ll call him to tell him about it, instead, and that he’ll most likely find it funny. “Isn’t she pretty?” says Harri. And she is. Julia last saw her not so long ago, but she looks more mature to her now. She’s wearing a white shirt, a red tie, and a tartan skirt that goes halfway down her thighs. She looks like a boarding school Lolita. Her mother moves away from the window and leans against the wall. “Poor child,” she says. It looks
as if she’s about to start crying, and Julia has to move closer to her. She takes her in her arms. She feels pity for her, because she’s never seen her so upset, so much in need of protection, unable to hide her feelings behind irony. Harri sobs with tears and tells Julia she doesn’t want her daughter to see her like this. They spend a long time in their embrace, leaning against the wall while people walk past them. Some discreetly pretend not to see them; others look at them with pity or curiosity. Julia feels better after hugging her, although it makes her want to cry, too, thinking about how she’s never taken Harri very seriously. She says her daughter must have come out by now and they have to go and get her. “Now she’s going to have to see me without any hair, and with a catheter or god knows what,” she mumbles, childlike, as she dries her eyes with the back of her hand. She blows her nose. And then smiles.

  When Harri walks off, Julia goes up to the window, hoping to see Kepa. There aren’t any passengers down there, though there are still a couple of suitcases and a bag going around on the conveyor belt. She feels the need to watch them make it all the way around the rubber strip and disappear, to see if they’ll come out again, and that’s what she does. For some reason, the sight of those two lost or abandoned suitcases and the bag, coming out and disappearing again—who knows where they’ve come from or when they’ll get to wherever it is they’re supposed to be going—attracts her immensely. It seems allegorical to her.

  Harri calls her and runs over. “What are you doing?” She’s back to her usual self.

  Both of them in the bathroom, side by side and looking into the large mirror. Harri’s putting some eye drops in, and Julia’s waiting for her. She thinks it’s more obvious that she herself has been crying than it is that Harri has been, and she regrets having put on eyeliner that morning to look prettier, because now, as she takes it off, she sees that her eyelids have gone red. Harri, apparently looking for some reason to feel optimistic, says, “Hey, you look worse than I do.” She’s finished fixing herself up, and she really does look beautiful. She puts her sponge back in her bag and makes a sign that she’s remembered something. “I didn’t tell you. Do you know what the airport man’s name is?” After a short silence: “Pedro Ruiz. ¿Qué te parece?” Julia asks what on earth she’s supposed to think of it, but then she starts laughing. “It is funny, isn’t it?” Harri says, making a gesture for her to get a move on. “Or pathetic,” she adds, “depending on how you look at it.” Losing her dignity, tainting her honor, putting her family at risk, and all for somebody called Pedro Ruiz—the most plain, boring, and Spanish name imaginable—who she’s only ever seen once. “¿Qué te parece?” Julia replies that it seems like a novel, knowing that’s what she wants her to answer. “Isn’t it? I keep on telling Martin he doesn’t know how lucky he is to know me.”

  “There she is.”

  The girl’s waiting for them seated on a suitcase, surrounded by several bags. They hug. She asks them where they’ve been. “Luckily, that man over there helped me.” Julia looks in the direction she’s just nodded and sees Kepa lighting a cigarette in the taxi line.

  Departures. Salidas. Irteerak. Iñaki Abaitua is looking at the departures panel, waiting for the noise of the numbers and characters spinning around to stop. They still haven’t announced the Milan flight. Pilar says, as he sits down next to her, that they’ve come too early, and that gives him the chance to tell an anecdote his mother always used to tell whenever they were getting ready to go somewhere when he was a child: once, when his father was going to Donostia, he got to the station so early that when he realized he’d come out without a handkerchief, he thought he had plenty of time, went back home to get one, and ended up missing the train. All because he’d gone too early. Now that he himself has grown old, even older than his father ever got to be, he still remembers his mother getting angry at his father’s strictness. On one occasion, when he was a child, when he thought she said something without thinking it through, he said to her, “think before you speak,” to which she replied, “I’d be in a fine state if I had to think each time I spoke.”

  When he repeats anecdotes, which he admits he does more and more often, Pilar doesn’t tell him she’s already heard them—he’d prefer it if she did, for her to say, “You’ve already told me that one”—but her effort to pretend she’s listening, while not actually paying attention, is obvious. He realizes that she’s not paying any attention now to the one about his grandfather missing the train because he got there too early—she denies it when he says that she’s not interested, and says that if he wants, she can repeat back to him everything he’s just said—and he thinks she looks quite far away, gazing down at her phone in her hand. She looks very far away. When he asks her if something’s wrong, she gives him what she would like to be a smile.

  Lynn enjoyed his stories, laughed at them out loud, sometimes even too much, and that made him very happy. Things an old man believes. Pilar could rightly argue that she would have time to get bored of them, too, if she had to listen to them as often as she has. He asks her again if something’s wrong. Normally she says no, even if something’s obviously wrong. Now, she doesn’t meet his eyes, and he thinks she’s wondering whether or not to trust him with what she’s mulling over, and leaning over the phone in her hand once more, she tells him that she’s still got her father’s number in her contacts. This morning, she’d been about to erase it—because it starts with A, for aita, “father” in Basque, she misses him whenever she goes to look for anybody’s number and sees his at the top of the list, and in any case, it’s not any use to her now—but she hadn’t in the end. When she saw it there on the screen, she was tempted to call it instead of erasing it—it rang, and then she heard his voicemail, his voice, saying he couldn’t answer the phone right then and to please leave your name and number. She looks at him again and seems embarrassed.

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  He could tell her that the same thing happened to him last night with Lynn’s number, except that he didn’t dare make the call, for fear of hearing her voice.

  Pilar’s concentrating on doing the sudoku in the newspaper. She’s finished the one classified as easy and has a few squares left in the difficult one. It’s something she used to do in private, ashamed to do them with other people around, as if it were some kind of dirty habit. Now she does them anywhere.

  “It’s a small world.” It’s the third time he’s heard that since he sat down, and the previous two times, he added that Bilbao wasn’t all that big, either. This time, he doesn’t say anything. It’s two nurses from the hospital, on their way to Tenerife. He introduces them to Pilar and says they’re on their way to Milan. “Milan?” one of them says in astonishment. As if there weren’t just as much justification for taking a plane to Milan as there is for going to Tenerife. He can’t decide whether or not to tell them that they’re going there with the pretext of seeing a painting by Modigliani, and Pilar just shrugs in reply. He gets away, saying he has to buy something at the newsstand.

  It’s too late to be able to hide himself from Zabaleta, who’s standing just a few feet away looking through the magazines. He sees him, too. He doesn’t say how small the world is, but rather the opposite: “Well look at that, of all the places in this big old world . . .” He doesn’t seem very happy to see him. He, too, is going to Tenerife, to a conference. He says he’s not particularly interested in it but admits he takes every opportunity he can to get away and be able to walk around freely without worrying about anything. He shifts his eyes and head from side to side, “You know what I mean.” Abaitua nods, of course he understands. What comes to his mind: on the one hand, that it’s unfair for Zabaleta to live under threat of death, and on the other, that he’d love to tell Zabaleta he’s betrayed the field of medicine and become a political mercenary. When he asks him where he’s going, Abaitua says to Milan with Pilar. A little getaway. “Not Rome, not Florence—Milan?” he asks, as if astonished. He doesn’t tell
him, of course, that they’re going with the intention or excuse of seeing Modigliani’s painting. To Milan, that’s all.

  “It’ll be good for you both,” he says, in a voice that doesn’t match the expression on his face. Abaitua sees once again that his large teeth prevent him from seeming completely serious when he says things.

  “Bearing in mind everything that’s happened to you.”

  Abaitua pretends not to hear him and goes along the shelves looking for any book other than the ones usually for sale in airports, trying to get away from Zabaleta; but he follows him and even holds onto his sleeve. “What a tragedy, I can just imagine what you must have gone through.” Abaitua looks him straight in the eye and tries to forget what he’s said, focusing on figuring out what he really means. Zabaleta looks right back at him, and Abaitua thinks he sees a spark of happiness in his eyes. He takes a deep breath to keep calm. “No, you cannot imagine,” he says. He remembers Pilar, standing in front of the broken mirror, both hands resting on the basin, her face turned toward him, saliva dripping out of her mouth, saying in a whisper more broken than any shout, “I’ve destroyed your lover.” Sitting on the toilet with her face in her hands, muttering “kill me, please kill me,” again and again and again. He’s convinced that if he’d grabbed her throat and tried to kill her, she’d have let him. “You cannot imagine,” he says once more, and for some reason, Zabaleta takes a step backward. He bumps into a display stand, makes it shiver in the air, then bumps into another one, and finally, a bunch of books fall onto the floor. “Too many books in the world,” he jokes, bending over to pick them up. Abaitua bends down, as well. The two of them are face-to-face, picking up the books, and Zabaleta finds it funny and giggles. He leans toward him and almost whispers, in an unnecessarily secretive tone, that the nurse old man Amezua was carrying on with has left him and that his wife won’t let him come back home, either. “So now he doesn’t have the young one, or the old one, either,” he says, showing his teeth.