Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  He hasn’t told anyone about his fears. For one thing, because he wants to believe that there’s no basis for them. In other words, other people, including the police, didn’t see any reason to be worried, and he didn’t dare to bring it up with them, in case of what they might say—there were certainly people with more serious reasons to be worried—and he also didn’t want to worry his family unnecessarily. He thought they could figure it out together when he explained his idea for their son to go and study in the United States, but Pilar thought it was an excellent idea from the very beginning and didn’t mention any suspicions she might have had, and against all expectations, the boy also liked the idea, so Abaitua didn’t have to use personal security as an argument to convince them. Of course, the boy could have been worried, as well, could have had dark thoughts in his mind and, like him, be keeping them quiet.

  It isn’t Pilar’s steps he hears in the hall, it’s a neighbor’s maid and the two children she’s taking to school. She says they’re late and have to be quick. Abaitua looks at his watch—he really is late. Pilar’s delays make him angry; more exactly, what makes him angry is knowing that he’s waiting for her because she can’t leave the house without putting on some lotion from a little jar the size of a thimble. Thinking that gets him sweating again. He steps into the car and decides to turn the air conditioning on, just as the girl who the young man is waiting for appears. He pushes the seat back for his legs to fit in comfortably and adjusts the mirror. He turns on the ignition. That precise moment, when you turn the engine on, seems the most dangerous to him, probably because it’s a sequence that appears in so many films—the car getting blown to smithereens as the victim turns the key.

  He’s often wondered if bomb victims hear the explosion, and he’s also talked about it with a coworker. He once asked a female Civil Guard officer he operated on after she’d been caught in a bomb explosion. Apparently she hadn’t heard it, or, at least, she didn’t remember it. If it came down to it, it was a consolation to think that hypovolemia is sweet and that receptors, when affected by extreme pain, shut down. These are morbid thoughts that fly around his head like butterflies trying to decide where to land. He won’t let them. But he still finds it hard not to go through with his obsessive ritual: first he rubs his hands together, then rubs his knees before putting the ignition key in and remaining still, with his hand on the key, while he counts to three, closing his eyes as he turns the key. Even Pilar’s realized. Eventually she comes running out with her bag and a small case. He adjusts the rearview mirror better. His symptoms of anxiety have disappeared, but he needs to take deep breaths and dry his hands on his knees. Then, after waiting for a group of satchel-carrying children on their way to school to pass, he starts the engine at the exact moment in which Pilar opens the back door and throws her bag and small case in. She sits next to him as she does up the buttons on her blouse. She usually finishes getting dressed in the car. She’s had to go back up again to turn something off or close a window, which is how she justifies being so late.

  He slows down almost to a stop as they approach the newly installed speed bump and goes over it in first gear, very slowly, and he realizes that Pilar is looking at him; she’s amazed that he’s been in such a hurry and then drives so cautiously. The reason is that it’s occurred to him there’s no reason for limpet bombs to go off when you turn on the ignition, the way it happens in movies. He’s read somewhere that it’s more usual for the explosion to take place after several miles, after breaking, on a bend, or just like now, because of the shaking and movement produced by going over a speed bump; there’s normally a small vial of mercury that acts as a tilt fuze and completes the circuit.

  He knows that the politician Eduardo Madina went more than five miles before the bomb that was stuck under his car went off, and if the explosion only hit his legs, it was because he had long legs and so, like him, he had the seat pushed way back. The traffic is moving slowly, and it’s not because there are many vehicles. Pilar usually complains that drivers in small cities are over-cautious and clumsy. She thinks that of her husband. Someone honks at him, and it’s obvious that Pilar is nervous; she pulls up the neck of her blouse, takes off her earrings, and puts them in her closed fists as if she were getting ready for a fight. But when she whispers “you’re lost again,” her voice suggests tiredness rather than anger.

  They realize too late that the one-way Arrasate Kalea is now one-way in the other direction, so they have to take the parallel street and go around once again. This new mistake is too much for Pilar, and she asks him to drop her off anywhere, the notary’s office is close-by, but he ignores her, accelerates, and—daring and obstinate—takes the wrong way out of De Euskadi Plaza, crosses the new bridge, determined to take her right to the door. But it’s not a very good decision, because the neighborhood of Gros is like a rattrap. The first turnoff is a no-entry, and the traffic stops him from getting into the lane to take the second turnoff. He smacks the steering wheel, which makes the horn go off, and continues, fast, up Mirakruz Kalea, getting further and further away from their destination, while Pilar keeps silent, and the only sign that she is frightened or disapproves is that she holds onto the handle above her door. Abaitua doesn’t know where he’s going, and at this point, he couldn’t care less. After speeding past several street openings, he thinks that he wouldn’t mind having a bomb stuck under his seat that was going to explode and blow him to smithereens, and he keeps his speed up until he has no choice but to stop, because a crane is maneuvering in front of a huge beveled building that cleaves the road in two like the bow of a large ship. On the top floor, where the sandstone façade is covered with cheerful green tiles, lives a neurosurgeon who Pilar works with and who used to be her lover for a time, Abaitua doesn’t know how long. He didn’t ask her. He has to bend down to be able to see the long balcony through the windshield, and he makes his rubbernecking obvious. He wants Pilar to know that he’s looking at her lover’s home; unlike him, she’s seen the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, because she used to spend whole afternoons there, and at least one night. La notte.

  Pilar turns toward the window on her side in order to show that the building is like any other for her, and Abaitua is absolutely sure that both of them know what the other is thinking. “They’ve opened a new bar,” she says, without turning her head. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  He’s going slowly now, and the flow of traffic forces him to turn left toward one end of the Gran Vía. He is relaxed, feels quite good; after all the excitement, his adrenaline is back to normal, and that makes him feel at peace. He doesn’t know how to control himself, and when something goes wrong, he cannot help wanting everything to go to pieces, and that attitude has even put him in danger of having serious problems in the operating theatre (he cannot forget, among other things, the time when he was doing a hysterectomy using what was, at the time, an innovative technique—laparoscopy—and even though he was having serious problems getting pieces out, he carried on regardless, wrong though he was, and was about to throw the morcellator away. The head nurse’s eyes stopped him from doing it, with an expressivity that she would never have been able to put into words, letting him know that he was acting like an ill-behaved child. Since then, remembering that look and breathing deeply while counting to ten has helped him to calm down, but not always, not when outside the nurse’s jurisdiction, outside the hospital.)

  “Don’t go over the bridge again.” A calm but firm voice. She has her jacket and bag in her lap and her small case in her left hand, with her right hand holding onto the door handle. Her face is rather pale, and on her left eyelid there is a small bit of white lotion from the little jar. He doesn’t tell her. They go back along the Gran Vía toward the place they were a quarter of an hour earlier, and he stops in front of the monument to Iztueta, in obedience to Pilar. She just says “see you later,” and he goes toward Frantzia Pasealekua. She’ll have to walk across the bridge and a
lmost all the way along the hiribidea. At least ten minutes to be added to the previous delay.

  Abaitua goes up the steps to the hospital two by two. There are people finishing their cigarettes in groups and alone. Some of them are wearing white coats. A young man wearing a nightgown, his thin legs showing, is sitting in a wheelchair, connected to a tube, and with a melancholy air, he, too, is smoking. The hallway is done in green-streaked black marble, with decorations and inscriptions in the corners reminiscent of a mausoleum, an example of institutional bad taste, resources used on superficial things instead of matters of urgency, all in order to look like a rich country. He moves faster toward the inside staircase, almost starts running to avoid the visitors who are waiting to catch him as he goes past the gift shop. The Spanish and Basque words for “chapel”—CAPILLA-KAPERA—at the top of the two wooden doors are bigger than the names on the signs at the entrances of some of the public hospital’s wards. A woman wearing a white coat crosses herself as she steps out. He thinks she’s a cardiologist. It looks like she’s just consulted God about some difficult case.

  By the time he reaches the surgery area, he’s wearing his own white coat; without realizing it, he is walking very upright, which could look arrogant, but it’s no more than a defensive gesture. There are many patients waiting for him, he’s afraid of looks that may be reproaching him for his late arrival, and he stares at the door. You can tell by the atmosphere that there are people thinking our taxes pay your wages and looking at their watches. At one time, that would have been unthinkable; attitudes toward doctors have changed a lot. Although Abaitua is in favor of relationships between doctors and patients becoming more equal, he regrets his role becoming so proletariat. He thinks the resident doctor he has to do his appointments with looks aged, although he’s still very young. That could be because he’s overweight, or because he’s quite bald, and perhaps because the glasses he wears look old-fashioned to him. His watch, too, makes him look old, with its thick gold—or gold-colored—chain, and Abaitua sees him check it, too, after greeting him. He doesn’t like him, and he doesn’t apologize for making him wait. And he asks him in Basque if he’s used the time to go over today’s cases and, following the nod he receives as a reply, whether he’s found anything particularly interesting. “No especialmente”—not particularly. He understands a bit of Basque but never speaks it, not a single word, not even agur to say goodbye. Abaitua, in a manner out of keeping with his usual self, takes a radical approach with him and speaks to him in Basque as much as possible. They’ve argued—not too often, of course, they are not on the same professional level—because the young doctor thinks that Basque is taken into account too much when it comes to awarding jobs in the public health system. Abaitua doesn’t know to what extent it should be taken into account, or if the extent to which it is taken into account at present is appropriate, but he doesn’t come across many doctors who speak Basque well—it’s above all those doctors that don’t speak the language well who think that Basque-speaking candidates who pass the public health service entrance exams pass them specifically because they’re Basque speakers even though they have little training in other areas, and that non-Basque speakers who fail, in spite of knowing a lot about medicine, fail because they don’t know Basque—and in the end, people prefer a non-Basque-speaking doctor to take care of them. What he finds more offensive is that a knowledge of Basque being part of the selection process is the only aspect of the entire system that gets into the newspapers, the only thing that is fiercely debated; nothing much is explained about the way requirements and duties of the positions on offer are apparently altered, or how exam papers are leaked to friends or fellow party or union members. Even so, he has to admit that he sometimes uses Basque as a sort of punishment with that aged-looking fat young man. And it’s specifically because he’s fat. He isn’t proud of the feeling of distaste he has for people with disagreeable physical appearances—he finds watching fat people eat to be repulsive, for instance—he knows there’s a bit of intolerance in it, but he can’t suppress it, as much as he’d like to.

  This time, when the other doctor explains that he prefers operating on patients to seeing them in the consultation room, he replies in Spanish—“No te gusta la medicina, entonces”—saying that if that’s the case, he must not like medicine very much. He says he finds it more exciting—“más excitante.” Abaitua isn’t surprised; he probably preferred operating, as well, when he was young. It’s where a doctor can feel like God, the giver and taker of life. But in fact, there are few things he hates more than the mythical status and glowing admiration granted to surgeons. Whether they admit it or not, there are doctors who use the pleasure of surgery to hide the fact that they don’t have the courage to face patients without putting them to sleep first. Some surgeons have always run from the risk of identifying with pain and, because of that, don’t want to look outside the area bordered by the green cloth; red flesh, bloodied and depersonalized, is all they want to see. He’s read that idea expressed much better somewhere or other and so, in order not to do a disservice to whoever the writer was, doesn’t mention it. He admits he isn’t much of a teacher. That’s led to problems for him, and not just with the aged young man; he’s also had them with his son, especially before. He doesn’t know how to summarize something without turning it into a caricature, and he thinks it’s because of this tendency of his that his points of view often throw people off—they think he’s being ostentatious—and that, in general, he has trouble being taken seriously. On the other hand, the fact that fatty yawns so much (in a completely open, natural way, quite unimpeded by any social customs or norms), makes him exhibit more self-control than usual when speaking to him. He’s cynical and sarcastic with him, which he isn’t with other people; he’d rather be extravagant and eccentric than a bore. Pilar has sometimes told him that he’s a real drag. It’s because of his obsessive nature, of course, and when they’re not angry with each other, he likes to bring up things that he’s not very sure about, in order to try out his ideas on her, like someone learning to play the piano and trying out the same passage over and over. He’s sorry he’s done that. At the same time, he admits that recently, almost everything makes him think of some other story or quote he feels to be relevant. Just like with his father. Every time he used to say “and speaking of that . . . ” they’d shield their heads with their hands, as if protecting themselves from being stoned to death. Now he’s really sorry that he didn’t listen to him more often and with greater attention. Too late, he realizes with sorrow. Now he only knows the headlines of those stories, gists as short as the taglines on movie posters: Uncle Joxe, his father’s brother, who was shipwrecked on a frigate in the Buenos Aires estuary; the adventures of his brother Imanol “The Tiger” Ibarluzea on the pilota courts of Cairo, Shanghai, and Chicago.

  He doesn’t mind the nurse saying “one day you’ll lose your head as well” when she gives him one of the many pairs of glasses he forgets around the ward as she hands him the day’s medical records, but he does mind fatso, who’s slumped down in his chair mumbling “estragos de la edad,” putting his forgetfulness down to the ravages of age. Unfortunately, it was he who opened the door to that lack of respect by mocking himself too often. He supposes that nowadays, not keeping up an image of feigned wisdom—which seems ridiculous to him—brings with it the risk of not being taken seriously. Nowadays young people interpret gestures and words literally. He—probably due to some sort of complex—is incapable of not putting up a wall of modesty that rather than covering up his own shortcomings actually increases them, and likewise incapable of not downplaying his gifts, but they aren’t capable of distinguishing false humility.

  The young doctor, almost lying down in his chair, has a file in front of him and remarks that this one hasn’t got a chance—“Esta lo tiene crudo.”

  Another cultural difference he sees compared with how things were in his day is people’s attitude toward those who hesitate before making d
ecisions. Doubts used to be held in higher esteem. Young girls liked young men who had lots of doubts, who talked about the uncertainty of their faith, their existential problems, anxieties, and insecurities. That really has changed. Doubt has become a synonym for weakness and lost its value. It doesn’t go down well in the age of monthly gym memberships. Nowadays women prefer strong, muscular, secure, daring men with clear objectives. Surgeons whose hands don’t tremble. And many poor young girls confuse psychopathy and perversion with security and daring. And he ruminates: “Fantasías de la época”—these are the fantasies of the times. This last musing reminds him how the young doctor didn’t know that Pío Baroja, author of Fantasías vascas, had been a doctor, and that he still has to put together that list that he’s been wanting to compile of doctors who gave up medicine for writing in search of a better world.

  The nurse calls the first patient. He’s told her several times that shouting out patients’ names isn’t a good thing to do, and he doesn’t want to tell her every day. It’s clear that she thinks it’s the normal thing to do and that she doesn’t understand why he doesn’t approve. It’s the patient’s first visit. He still gets a bit nervous when he sees a new patient—what is the person whose first and last names he’s just heard going to be like, what will he or she be asking for? He’s proud that he can tell women’s ages to within a few months. He figures that the fat woman on the other side of the desk from him—whose bulging eyes could be a sign of hypothyroidism—is forty-two, and she tells him she’s thirty-seven. In fact, someone less skilled would have said she was over fifty. She complains. Stomach distension the week before her period. General bloating. Intense mammary swelling. Occasional hyperesthesia and pain. Emotional tension and nervousness. Insomnia and irritability as a consequence. Problems with her husband and children in turn. At work, too. She doesn’t know when it started. She’s always had it, she says in Spanish—“de toda la vida.” Her physical examination is normal. Her uterus is swollen, but its shape and texture are normal. He sees that the elastic in her panties has left deep red, almost purple marks on her. He tells her to get dressed. When he asks if she puts on weight after her period, she says she does, more than a dozen pounds, and seems to think that information may help him to arrive at a correct diagnosis. Nobody believes her when she says she doesn’t put on weight from eating too much. Apparently her husband tells her that people who don’t eat don’t put on weight. It is obvious she’s sad that people don’t believe she’s sick. Her husband doesn’t—he thinks it’s all in her head—and nor do the doctors she’s seen.