She says she remembers it all very well, and even though the man offered her the book again—“It’s for you”—she paid no attention and stood back up again when a flight attendant—who seemed more like an English nanny—curtly asked them to take their seats. She tells the man she can’t accept the book (a dumb thing to say), and when he holds the book out to offer it to her again, she says that she doesn’t read English (another dumb thing to say—he could take her confession as a sign of ignorance, and really, who doesn’t read English nowadays if they’re reasonably well educated, and in fact she does read English, even if not novels, because almost all the papers she reads at work are written in it). But that’s what she tells him, before going back to her seat, pushed on by the line of impatient passengers.
They didn’t speak any more after that. She heard his voice from a few rows behind her before they took off, and she thought she heard him changing places to let a couple that was split up sit together. He asked for a whisky during the flight, and the flight attendant laughed when he said something, and he often laughed, too, the happy, relaxed laughter of a healthy, sensual man, in no way over the top or vulgar, instead open and frank, and it made her want to be by his side and share his cheerfulness even more. “¿Qué te parece?”
Apparently, there by herself, flying over the clouds, she realized that she didn’t laugh very much. She didn’t want to arrive, she was dying to smell the man again—she closes her eyes to remember: pipe tobacco and perhaps a touch of mint, wool, and the scent of his own skin—and she decided that when they landed, she would stand next to him at the baggage carousel, if only for that purpose, to be able to smell him again, and to give him the chance to ask if anyone was waiting for her, just in case he wanted to suggest sharing a taxi to Bilbao, or to anywhere else in the world. She fantasized about that possibility, and while she did so, she really hated Martxelo, because he was going to be there. She wished again for something to happen to him, even an accident, as long as it gave her the remote chance of getting next to the unknown man. “Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before, not even with you”—she pointed at Martin with her chin—“such a violent attraction, so physical. Don’t you believe me?” She lifted her chin up again. “I swear to you, I hated my boring husband, I hated my stuck-up daughter, I’d have freed myself of all previous affection, I’d have freed myself from all ties and gone off with the man if he just made me a sign.”
This time she doesn’t finish off with her usual ¿qué te parece? She gets up as if she’s going to leave but then remains standing in the middle of the room, with her back to the windows that look out onto the garden, and Julia can’t see her face, which is turned toward Martin, who’s also standing up, at one corner of the bookshelves. With her arms hanging down and slightly outward from her body, she holds her hands open for a moment in a way that reminds Julia of the some miraculous virgin, and after a silence she doesn’t dare to interrupt, while Martin for once keeps quiet, Harri says again, “If he made just a single gesture, I’d have gone off with him.” There’s another long silence after that, long enough to hear a freight train going by, and then she speaks again. “I can’t think about anything else,” she says defeatedly, with one of her characteristic gestures to emphasize her despair, as if she were shaking her hair dry after coming out of the water, and she reproaches them for not believing her. “It’s not true, we do believe you,” Julia says, encouraging her to go on, and after having them beg her awhile, she starts again, without having lost an ounce of her enthusiasm for the story, saying that at the passport control desk at the airport, there wasn’t any way for her to go up to the man, because he was accosted by an elderly couple who’d ridden next to him on the plane and wanted to ask him their tourists’ questions. Apparently she did manage to get parallel to him, because there were two lines, but, unluckily, he was stopped at the control desk, and she had no choice but to continue on to the baggage carousel and hope to see him there, but she waited for him in vain, even as her single large suitcase, the only one left, went around several times, and then she saw her husband, with that dumb face of his, drawing a circle in the air with one finger, trying to tell her that she was missing it as it went by again. She saw the man again in the arrivals hall. There was a peroxide blonde waiting for him. She wasn’t very attractive, in fact she was pretty ugly, and despite having dyed hair, she was as pale as milk, almost an albino; she doesn’t remember what she was wearing. They greeted each other without much enthusiasm, and almost the first thing the woman asked him was why he was carrying so many books. She and Martxelo weren’t particularly affectionate toward each other, either. She cares a great deal for him, she says as an aside, as if she were trying to excuse herself, “he’s a good person,” but her blood was already boiling, because he started straight in on her, saying how she was so absent-minded that she’d let the suitcase go around three times right under her nose and hadn’t even recognized it and that he wanted to get out of there as soon as possible because he’d parked the car illegally so as not to have to pay in the lot, the stingy bastard. (Doctors tend to be stingy, because they get used to having their labs pay for everything.) Even at that moment, she felt sorry for the man who’d traveled with her, because his wife seemed so ugly, so disagreeable, and so un-feminine. She saw them as they were leaving, and she and Martxelo were, too, a few steps behind them, surrounded by people greeting and hugging each other, many young people returning home from English courses abroad and their whole families coming to welcome them, and then suddenly the man and his partner turned around, came face-to-face with them, and Harri couldn’t stop herself from saying hello to him. She would have liked to have told him that she wanted to see him again, that you never run out of chances in life—too many things to say in a single look, she admits to Julia, who is moved by her wide smile—but apparently the man pretended not to realize, perhaps afraid of how the peroxide blonde might react if he paid any attention to her. Harri, on the other hand, felt that she was being penetrated by the woman’s frightening, curiosity-powered glance. Who was she to say goodbye to her man, she was obviously thinking, and Harri didn’t try again, decided to walk on without looking back, sure that the blonde would be asking the poor, unfortunate man where he knew her from, but in the end, she couldn’t help herself, and her eyes met his—he, too, had looked back over his shoulder. She can’t explain exactly what he wanted to say, but he lifted one hand up, holding the tips of his fingers together. It seemed to be a sign of his shame, suffering, and decline. This wasn’t the happy, contented, pleasant man she’d seen at Heathrow, and she was sorry about that, just as sorry as she was angry about her husband, who started pulling her leg as he massaged her shoulders as he usually did to be affectionate or sweet—“Well, well, well, I see you’ve made a friend on the trip,” and other such stupid comments—and then impressed upon her that they really should go and find the car, until finally she said she’d wait for him there with her suitcase and her bags. And so she was standing there waiting when the couple turned up again, the woman first and the man two or three paces behind her, pushing a heavily loaded trolley. The man stops next to the first taxi and lets the woman continue walking toward the parking lot, but then she realizes that she’s walking alone, and she stops. She turns around and says—or, to be more precise, shouts—at the man, “What are you doing?” He’s standing at the open door of a taxi and has already put his things inside it. “I’m sick of you,” he replies in a quiet, calm voice, and while the woman shouts awful words at him, he gets into the taxi, and as he reaches his arm out to close the door, their eyes, “his and mine,” meet again. She would have had time, she says, to get in and sit next to him, but she didn’t do it, of course. She slaps her thigh as a sign of regret. Now, she’d do it. “I’m going with you,” she’d say to him, without batting an eye, but at the time, once more, her courage failed her, or perhaps the thought of doing so never even seriously crossed her mind because she was no longer in London, she was in
Loiu. And then Martxelo pulled up in his newly cleaned car. He told her that he’d cleaned it in her honor, and as he turned on the ignition, he asked if she’d met that man in London or if they’d known each other from before, with a jokey tone that didn’t hide his jealous nature, to such an extent that she had to tell him that he was annoying her. And yet in London she had really missed him, so much so that she had decided to come clean with him when she returned and, in general, try to be more open and affectionate with him.
Leaning down over the coffee table, playing with the packet of cigarettes, Harri takes one out and holds it between two fingers, as if she were going to light it, even though she doesn’t smoke. She holds it beneath her nose and smells it. She’ll never forget the voice, and the smell, of the man she’s fallen in love with. She says she’s sure she changed his fate completely, which is why she now feels connected to him. This is what she says to Martin and Julia, looking from one to the other with a disconcerting smile on her lips that is halfway between happiness and regret.
Finally the sun breaks through the clouds and shines brightly. And with that, the neglected garden regains some of the remains of its fertile beauty after the pleasant rain, although the only things invading it are the tenacious calla lilies. A couple of hydrangeas have appeared; once bright-blue, they are now a dubious pink and could stand a little fertilizer and pruning. The pansies that Martin planted along the path leading down to the river haven’t flowered—the fault, he says, of the birds, which he hates. Paying no mind to the couple of alley cats that have taken over the lawn, the sparrows and a few thrushes—which are as big as pigeons—peck at the grass.
There are no curtains on the wide windows. Julia took them down long ago—they were very dirty and she wanted to clean them, which she did, but she hasn’t yet found time to iron them. Because of that, light now pours into the room, cheering it up, even though it already has a lot of light thanks to the functional, Scandinavian-style furniture, in contrast to all the other rooms, where there is still furniture from Martin’s grandfather’s time—heavy, dark, rustic stuff Julia finds oppressive despite the fact that, apparently, it’s all very valuable, especially the formal library space itself—an enormous old-fashioned book room housing a sort of alcove, with a divan, that Martin locks himself in, saying he’s got writer’s block. In general Julia likes the house, because it’s comfortable, because the garden—which she wishes were better looked after than it is—provides her with a nice view while she works, and especially because there’s a Petrof grand piano there; she likes it so much that she’s even thought at times that it’s the last thing attaching her to Martin, apart from the remains of their past love, and that it’s precisely because their relationship has no future that she’s trying to break her connections with the house. That’s why she’s stopped taking care of the garden, which she used to tend to with such enthusiasm, which she had fixed up so beautifully back when she used to make use of little breaks from work to water plants and pull up weeds. Harri brought it to her attention some time ago, before she realized it for herself, telling her that she was sorry to see the garden so neglected and adding, “it doesn’t look like the woman of the house is very in love,” which she said as if it were a joke, though she was actually speaking seriously. And Julia had remained silent. She was a little embarrassed, and certainly astonished, to learn that her sentimental situation was so clear for all to see.
And now, as is so often the case, Julia once again doesn’t know what to say. Harri turns toward her and complains again. “You two don’t take me seriously,” she says, in a normal, unexaggerated voice this time, and she doesn’t know what to say in reply. What could she possibly say to her? That she finds her sudden rush of love believable, that what she reveals about her relationship with Martxelo is sad, that her idea of suggesting a story to a writer with writer’s block is pathetic? “Of course we believe you,” Martin says, using the plural. And then, getting up from his armchair, “a very promising start of a story,” meaning that she has already inspired him plenty. He, too, has fair hair, but not much of it, and what little there is stands on end. He’s wearing a yellow and black striped robe, he still buys them at the same college he was sent to as an adolescent like Harri’s daughter, and he’s got on his old Church’s shoes, without socks. He looks unkempt, as he tends to recently. The tenant could appear at any moment, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for her to find him like that, he says, straightening his robe before going up the stairs. Harri, too, is going to have to leave soon, because they’ve brought forward the round table talk on biostatistics she’s attending. Harri has brought some of the traditional pantxineta cakes Martin likes so much and which she tends to bring for her afternoon visits, and they’re sitting on the coffee table. Julia decides to make tea, which is what they usually drink with them.
The kitchen, too, is quite old, although it is not the house’s original one. It’s large, like an old-fashioned kitchen, has a long wooden table in the middle, a storage stove and cooker with a large oven, and a modern glass-ceramic hob, which they use every day, on what used to be a sideboard. She boils the water in the kettle; the teapot, which is stained brown in many places, especially the spout, she finds revolting. She would very much like to get a new one, but Martin, who particularly likes old things—and who also has a puritan, bourgeois guardian’s tendency to make things last—would not approve of her doing so. She follows the established norms for making tea. She pours boiling water into the teapot and swirls it around to warm it, she scoops in the tea—a spoonful for each of them and one for the pot—and waits five minutes exactly, making use of the time to wash the dishes Martin’s got piled up in the sink. With the faucet off, she can hear voices from the living room, just a murmur, as if they were whispering in the covered-up way they do whenever her back’s turned. It used to drive her crazy, but it doesn’t anymore.
When she goes back to the living room, the writer’s looking extremely elegant. A beige polo shirt and flannel pants of the same color, buckled dress shoes that are as shiny as a mirror, and a raw silk Loewe jacket with leather details on the lapels, cuffs, and pockets. Almost all being worn for the first time. The jacket is beautiful, although it’s at least a size too big for him. Julia told him that the day he bought it, but apparently he couldn’t exchange it, because he was already wearing it. Harri thinks the same thing, it’s beautiful, she says, but she can’t understand how he could buy such a loose-fitting jacket, to which he, unbuttoning it to hide the bagginess, replies that it’s a habit he got from his mother, buying things large in order not to grow out of them.
When they served the tea, a controversy that was not new came up: Do you add the milk to the tea, or put it in the cups before the tea? Harri brought it up, not knowing that the week before, Martin had emptied the teapot into the sink in anger over that very same question. Julia was sure that she had read that the milk is added to the tea, although she didn’t remember why, while Martin thought it was the other way around. The outcome was an argument about the matter, and in order to find out who was right, first Martin and then Julia looked for Five O’Clock Tea, but neither could find it, and Martin accused Julia of not putting books back on the shelves and hiding them, an accusation she couldn’t accept, not after spending so many hours cataloguing the books, and she really got angry. Because they are still taking stock of the damage caused by that quarrel, Julia curtly says that she doesn’t know. Harri’s theory—Harri’s always all science—is that, by simple logic, the tea has to be put in first, being the indispensable, main ingredient, to which the additional ingredient—milk—is added, she says, and what’s more, it’s also the easiest way to control the mix and make sure you don’t put in too much milk. She also mentions an aesthetic reason: the wonderful braid of clouds that the cold milk forms in the hot tea. Martin, always the aesthete, had used the same dumb argument for arguing that the tea should go in first. But this time, in a completely shameless way, he says that it’s the other
way around, although he doesn’t remember why. In other words, first the milk and then the tea. “That’s right, isn’t it?” He looks at Julia, as if wondering whether there isn’t much difference after all between the two options and one could live with putting either the tea or the milk in first. Martin the peacemaker. They talk about doing it both ways to choose which one they like best, and Julia’s furious, because Martin, who finds it so difficult to give way on anything, is now so flexible and ready to reach an agreement, and all because the penthouse girl is about to turn up and he doesn’t want her to walk into a bad, sulky atmosphere. It made her want to tell Harri all the details of their quarrel—even more than Martin’s angry, childish character, what she really hates about him is his ability to pretend that he can control himself when there are other people around.
Martin, who’s so mean when it comes to expressing affection, rests a hand on Julia as he says, with a smile, that they can live with the doubt about what comes first, the milk or the tea, and Harri joins him by saying that it would be a different matter if it were the chicken and the egg, at which they both laugh. Probably a way of them saying that she’s being hysterical about the whole thing. Julia decides to leave, even though she usually sleeps there on Thursdays and has done so for some time now. She says her mother’s gone to Otzeta and she doesn’t want to leave Zigor alone. She doesn’t know why she thought of saying something that’s not just a lie but also an implausible excuse, because not having her mother at home’s never been a reason for not staying—her sister lives next door and her son spends almost all day there with his cousins. She thinks that Martin’s glad she’s decided to go, that he’d rather be alone to be able to receive his tenant properly. Harri reads his mind—“We’ll leave you alone with your playboy girl”—and she stands up and grabs her green leather briefcase. It’s getting late, and apparently the students in her grad course tend to be demanding.
Martutene Page 3
