Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Contents

  Cover

  COPYRIGHT

  MARTUTENE

  PREAMBLE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  SECOND PART

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Hispabooks Publishing, S. L. Madrid, Spain www.hispabooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing by the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Copyright © 2012 by Ramon Saizarbitoria

  Originally published in Spain as Martutene by Erein, 2012 First published in English by Hispabooks, 2016 English translation copyright © by Aritz Branton Revision and copy-editing by Cecilia Ross Design © simonpates - www.patesy.com

  ISBN 978-84-944262-7-8 (trade paperback) ISBN 978-84-944262-8-5 (ebook) Legal Deposit: M-28335-2016

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Instituto Vasco Etxepare.

  MARTUTENE

  A neighborhood in Donostia, between Loiola and Astigarraga, on the southern banks of the Urumea, whose name comes from a half-timbered baserri farmstead where the El Estanco bar is now. A group of businessmen originally set it up as a luxury residential area and leisure park. The first small mansions were built in 1906, and little by little, important families from the city and exiled French royalists went to live there. Armenouille is one of the few houses remaining from that period. The bullring was opened in 1908—the first covered one in Spain—and the Berlin Philharmonic played the opening concert. Basically it was a multipurpose area, a glass-roofed “plaza for public festivities,” not very successful, and it was destroyed in 1923. The amusement park—American Park, also called Kursaal—was opened in 1910 and had excellent facilities, for instance its roller coaster, although its most famous attraction was the 985-foot-long cave. However, even though the developer, Celestino de Batioil, organized a fake “appearance” by the Virgin Mary, which increased the number of visits in the short term, the park was not as successful as it needed to be and was closed down in 1912 for financial reasons. Because it was easy to get to by tram, it continued to be a place for regular people to spend the day or celebrate special occasions, and in 1929 the gardens, named Campos Elíseos after the Champs-Élysées, were opened, though the name does not reflect the transformation the neighborhood was to undergo; this is undoubtedly much better represented by Martutene Prison, which opened in 1948. Nowadays, the neighborhood is highly industrial—the well-known Industrial Park 27 is there, home to numerous small- and medium-sized companies—and it is also a residential area, with apartment blocks and villas that have survived from that period, and several baserris and cider houses. Large-scale infrastructure projects will soon reach the neighborhood to start off the twenty-first century: the Urumea highway, high-speed train lines, and the third Donostia beltway, among others.

  PREAMBLE

  Julia remembers the day she met Martin. She remembers the first day she spoke with him, rather; they’d known each other by sight since forever. They met during that first conference on literary translation; Martin was one of the translated writers who’d been invited to participate. Although she hadn’t signed up for the conference, Harri also turned up and managed to get into Martin’s session. Martin started by saying that he found it difficult talking in public but that he’d had no choice but to accept the invitation—the director, whom he’d long been friends with, had really insisted. And he apologized—bearing in mind how little talent he had for public speaking, he was going to read a text, even though he knew that would be boring for everybody.

  His text, as well as not having much to do with the subject, was also too tightly packed to be easily listened to; but it was by no means boring. Often—too often, he would say—you start with the description of a scene that comes to mind: a young woman without a face, wearing nothing but a pale-salmon-colored petticoat—it was shiny, perhaps made of silk—was sitting on the edge of a high, old-fashioned bed, and next to her, standing up, there was a man—his face, too, was not clearly visible—wearing a stiff, dark suit, with one hand on the young woman’s shoulder. He knows, because of the woman’s youth, soft neck, and healthy body, that her face, which is invisible in the half-light for some unknown reason, is beautiful.

  However, the man’s face is invisible because he’s hiding it behind a mask of a black bowler hat and a green apple, like in Magritte’s famous painting; but his constitution and formal clothing give the impression that he’s old.

  Without knowing why, what you see there—and in fact that’s all there is to see—is a strange picture, it creates enormous anxiety, and then a bell starts ringing louder and louder and closer and closer, it’s deafening, and he breaks into a sweat, seemingly terrified.

  So the picture is deliberate delirium. It comes back to him so often that when he wakes up in the morning looking a wreck, nobody ever asks if he’s slept well but, without beating around the bush, whether he’s had his nightmare again.

  On the day Julia met him, he gave a basic description of that nightmare, without going into details, to demonstrate that any starting point can be used to get to the bottom of something, and then he talked about the habit they’d had of following people around for fun when he was a child. Apparently, they would choose someone walking along the street, just like that, by chance, or because they looked mysterious, mean, wicked, or evil to them, and then walk behind them in the hope that they might lead them to some secret meeting, perhaps a secret date, or maybe somewhere where something dramatic would happen. Sometimes they would lose the trail, when their subject took a taxi, for instance, or they’d get bored and give up, like you give up reading a boring book, but normally they had fun doing it, at least it was more fun than wandering aimlessly around wondering how to spend the long hours of those wearisome childhood afternoons.

  Then he started a long, complicated explanation that was quite difficult to listen to, it had to do with the psychological factors behind some people’s tendency to write and tell stories about themselves or about others. He appeared to be more bored by his reading than his listeners were by listening to it. His voice was monotonous, flattened, his mouth sounded dry (it made Julia feel anxious), but even so, he didn’t touch his water (as she found out later, it was because he didn’t want anyone to see that his hands were shaking), and all of a sudden, he started to read really fast, as if he wanted to get to the end, but because the text was very long, it still took him a while.

  She felt sorry for him. After reading his sheets of paper, he quickly folded them and put them in his jacket pocket and thanked the listeners for their patience, in a broken voice, although they hadn’t been all that patient, moving around in their seats and coughing a lot. He looked really depressed (Julia heard him say “nevermore”1 as Harri dragged him away from the table), and she felt more like hugging him than congratulating him (the latter being what the circumstances demanded), like consoling a child who’s forgotten his poem at his school’s end-of-the-year performance. Alberdi, on the other hand, spoke as if he were with a group of children eager to hear some stories. He talked in a deliberate, measured way and looked around at people with a smile of pride
, in control of his own ability to seduce others, and there was something perverse in that smile. She found him revolting, as revolting as Martin was attractive to her, standing there by her side as if he weren’t there at all, calm now that his trial was over. And she was even more indignant during the debate, when Alberdi, in a pedagogical, amused tone, added nuances—that was the word he had used—to many of Martin’s explanations and also denied that some of them were right.

  His friendly, soft, and humble manners did not hide what he thought of himself. When he said he had a new parable to explain the idea better, people moved around in their seats to get more comfortable, and in the silence that followed, in which you could have heard a pin drop, he started to talk about the railway cattle cars that had transported Jews to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Büchenwald, trucks in which, because there was no extra space on the floors to leave bodies, the living had traveled side by side with the dead as they crossed Europe.

  Martin was to say later, when the two of them were alone, that it wasn’t a new use of the example, he knew that Azúa had used it in his Dictionary of the Arts, but for Julia, as for the rest of the listeners, it was a previously unknown resource and an appropriate contribution.

  It is true that Azúa talks about it is his Dictionary—the captives in each car chose a person and lifted him or her eight feet up off the floor to the ventilation holes in the roof, in order for them to relay what they could see from there. Those chosen, having spent days and even weeks locked up, had to get used to the blinding light and boiling heat, and the others had to give those they raised up with such effort some time to get used to their new conditions. However, they didn’t all manage to acclimate, and not all of those who did were able to complete their task well—some of them were too precise and got lost in small details; others, on the contrary, talked about what they were seeing in a disjointed way, without establishing connections, making neither head nor tail of anything; others looked at things too personally, linking everything to their own experiences—and so they only lifted up those who were capable of making them feel what was essential for them, those who could make them feel like part of the world of the living and like they belonged to that world, at least for a few seconds.

  Martin mentioned Azúa’s parable about cattle cars full of Jews on their way to Auschwitz and Dachau again when they went to a bar to have a beer after the round table debate finished.

  She remembers him with a serious face (she still has her doubts about how serious he was), describing himself as if he were the watchman the other travelers are lifting up to the ventilation slit, knowing they can’t hold him up there for long. He tells them what he sees, sights that stop him from sleeping, there’s cool wind on his face and hot, blinding sun in the clear sky, he looks at fields of wheat he’ll probably never see again. He was that frustrated observer who, even after being brought down from the ventilation slit and exchanged for someone who did the job better, carried on telling his inevitably detail-filled story, surrounded by the few unfortunate listeners around him.

  Narrating the cause of the trauma. Freud and the narcissistic injury. It led to a long conversation. Alberdi having left—saying that he had to get up early the next morning and that, contrary to what many people think, writers are condemned to lead an ascetic lifestyle—there was no longer a single conversational focus to pay particular attention to, and everybody felt free to talk.

  Martin talked about people’s tendency to tell stories that are of no interest to anyone else, stories told by the person involved, often helped by drink loosening up any emotional control: experiences at boarding school; things that happened during military service and, of course, during the war; what took place in the birthing room—especially before epidural techniques were used. He talked about how people can reach a state of disinhibition in which even the most withdrawn will fling open their shirt or blouse, which they would never do, under any circumstances, if it weren’t to show off some irremovable scar there.

  Julia herself got up the courage to say that every year, she used to walk from Errenteria to Lezo with her mother to see the Holy Christ Chapel full of ex-votos, walking sticks, and, more than anything else, crutches, and there were always beggars seated all along the way, moaning and making mocking gestures, with deformed torsos, paralyzed, ulcer-ridden, displaying their revolting stumps. Her mother, apparently, had been devoted to the Holy Christ, but Julia hated him, because of the terrible moments he put her through.

  At gatherings like that, sometimes the conversations multiply, and although you would rather listen to someone else or even say something yourself, you feel forced to remain engaged with a particular person, as if he or she were in the water and about to drown, holding a flailing hand upward to demand your attention.

  There’s always someone next to Julia to bore her to death, someone she doesn’t want to listen to, who looks at her to ask her to turn her attention to them, and she normally does listen to those tedious kidnappers—not because she feels sorry for them, but because she lacks courage. That’s what she thought of when she realized she was only talking to Martin, and when she apologized—“I’m boring you to tears”—he reassured her politely. Her memories were very interesting, he said, and they were just right for illustrating the attitude of certain writers, such as himself, being able to offer shy people who sometimes come up to you, like dogs smelling the garbage and then indifferently going on their way once more, stories that may be made up or are perhaps taken from here and there, somewhat seasoned to meet the demands of convention, but which always come from within oneself, from deep within, a treatment of our own pain which we then serve up.

  “All bad writers are pathetic, but even more pathetic are those belonging to the group I myself form part of,” he said. Even so, he’d rather have this role than that of some Scheherazade trying to keep an old Persian man content. She’s heard him say that quite often since then. On that first occasion, she would have liked to have told him that she really enjoyed reading his stories, but she didn’t dare, partly because she didn’t want him to think she was being obsequious, but above all because she didn’t know what she would answer if he asked why she liked them, and because she was afraid of not being up to talking about his work.

  They spoke alone for a long time, protected by the imaginary circle that people leave around a couple getting to know each other. The others looked happy speaking ill of Alberdi; it seemed as if all those who hadn’t left with him hated him. They talked about his false modesty, that cloying sweetness of his, his bland, easy literature that delighted undemanding readers. Martin didn’t want to get involved in the character assassination. All of a sudden, he said, “What do you like?” And she answered that she liked novels about writers and films about the cinema. She tried to explain what she meant, the famous Ricardou quote came to mind, and although it was the only thing she knew about Ricardou, she couldn’t resist using it. “Le récit n’est plus l’écriture d’une aventure, mais l’aventure d’une écriture.” And she even gave into the temptation of saying it in French, or was daring enough to do so, depending on how you look at it, and it was obvious that the writer was affected, in some way, by the quote spoken in his beloved Flaubert’s language.

  “How true that is,” he agreed, and he regretted not being able to remember the quote by Miguel de Unamuno, which Julia herself now knows, about how the truly novel thing is how a novel is written—“Lo verdaderamente novelesco es cómo se hace una novela.” She’s since learned how frustrating it is for Martin to have a quote that would help to define an idea on the tip of his tongue and not be able to recall it.

  In any case, although he didn’t say that memory is the fool’s intelligence, he did say a couple of things in praise of poor memory, or taking the shine off good memory, and it was then that Julia first heard about Beckett’s essay on Proust, which she now likes so much that she always has a bilingual edition near at hand. “Only those without memory can
recall.”

  She loved that sentence. Then she felt obliged to ask him what he was writing, without knowing how much he hated being asked that. Harri did know, and said to her, “Hey, you can’t ask him that,” without caring that saying so made it obvious that she’d been sitting right next to them and listening in the whole time. She remembers that he said “a novel” after a long silence that made her think he wasn’t going to answer at all, making her regret having asked the question. “In any case, a novel,” he confirmed. It was going to be his first one. She could tell how frustrated he was by not having been able to write a real novel until then, to be no more than a writer of short stories. To his annoyance, Professor Lourdes Arregi had defined him as a “writer of short stories and novellas” in her book titled Euskal idazleak plazara, or Published Basque Writers.

  “A novel in which nothing happens.”

  At the time, Julia didn’t know the real meaning of Flaubert’s statement and took it to be a witticism used to avoid talking about the plot of the novel he was writing. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said, regretting her indiscretion. But Martin did tell her some things about his hypothetical novel, even though she couldn’t pay much attention to them, due to her nervousness. And now Julia doesn’t know if what Harri says, happily and laughing aloud, is true—she says he mentioned the story of a couple whose lives come together when they meet at an airport terminal.

  It’s true, Harri says, he mentioned his intention to start the novel with a chance meeting at an airport. Although that chance encounter was, inevitably, of no great depth, it was to prove decisive for the couple. Julia doesn’t believe it. But what she does remember is that he said “any excuse to show off the scars” while opening his jacket and holding his arms out theatrically, and that, after laughing (she thought he wanted to show that he was joking), he took care of the bill for all the unpaid food and drink—including Alberdi’s and that of the people who had left with him—and that she wanted to know what that sarcastic and very attractive man’s secret was.