After a time, things will get better, but he doesn’t say what he’s really thinking, that he’s done the right thing in leaving that ugly, bitter woman once and for all—her hands come to mind, white, fat, pudgy hands, with dimples on the fingers; they’d look like a nun’s if it weren’t for her long nails exposing her pathetic wish to look like a femme fatale—and that he’ll soon see the silver lining and be amazed at having put up with her for so many years.
No, says Kepa, there’s no going back. That strong, dark-bearded man with traces of dampness beneath the curly hair that goes down to his eyebrows, his noble stare fixed somewhere above the hill in front of them as he says he’s always loved her a great deal, still loves her, but they were unable to live together and he had no alternative but to leave. As someone once said, sometimes when the stronger of the two can’t do it, it’s the weaker one who has to take the leap and make the decision to walk away.
Apparently, they’ve begun separation procedures. He’s given up his rights to the apartment—he doesn’t want to keep anything—and found another in Morlans, where he’ll live with his mother until he finds a place for her in a home, because he thinks the time for that’s come. He says his old mother living with them had conditioned the relationship, but he doesn’t think that’s why they’ve broken up. “What do you think?” Abaitua says once again that he shouldn’t make his decisions too quickly. To start with, he doesn’t trust the elegant, generous attitude of some men when they give their wives the house when they leave; he thinks it’s a consequence of feeling guilty, a way of getting away more quickly and easily. He might regret it later. He’s sure that if he’s had problems fulfilling all his financial duties before, from now on it won’t be any easier for him to run a household, look after his mother, and somehow or another lead an orderly life.
For the moment, at least, Iñaki Abaitua feels more relaxed, because the man who’s left home hasn’t collapsed, but Kepa doesn’t seem to be too happy with the help he’s getting, so he decides to invite him to have lunch at Arbelaitz in Miramon to make himself feel less guilty, although, in fact, he’d rather go home to see Pilar. When they quarrel, he feels more acutely the need to be with her, because he thinks that the more time they spend together, the more possible it is that the miracle they need to solve their situation will occur, that one of them will say the saving words or make the saving gesture. It occurs to him, although he doesn’t like the idea of using his friend’s misfortune, that telling her that Kepa’s split up with his wife—“Have you heard Kepa’s left home?”—could open the way for them to talk about their own situation. Mentally, he tries out different ways of giving the news: with sorrow; in a neutral register; perhaps playfully—“You know what? Kepa’s told the old mule to get lost!”—since Pilar doesn’t like her much, either. But he can’t imagine her reply, or, more exactly, the options he imagines aren’t very encouraging—“Oh, really?” raising her eyes from her Sudoku, or without raising them; “It was about time”; or, even worse, “Why don’t you leave, as well?”—and he decides to ask Kepa to lunch. He gladly accepts. Apparently, woodcock season’s come earlier than usual this year, and they cook woodcock exceptionally well at Arbelaitz. He seems more cheerful in the car, even though he’s still talking about his wife. He says she’s been very disagreeable recently, embittered. She has money problems, problems with her mother, other problems with their daughter, who’s getting bad grades at school, but, then, who doesn’t have problems. Apparently, her problems weren’t the problem. What he couldn’t stand was how jealous she’d gotten recently. She was always watching him, interrogating him, observing him, going through his pockets, and saying any negative thing that came into her mind. Until he got fed up. At the most unexpected moment and in the least appropriate place—“Which is how these things usually happen,” he says—he blew up and told her to go to hell. Fortunately, their daughter wasn’t there with them.
Now he’s talking about the breakup calmly, as if it were quite a far-off thing that had happened to someone else, and meanwhile, Iñaki Abaitua puts all his efforts into driving, because he always gets it wrong at the traffic circle and ends up at the private hospital or the TV station. When they get there, he has to go around twice to make sure he takes the right exit. But Kepa doesn’t mind him getting lost, or, at least, not so much; he doesn’t get nervous and takes it stride—“Great! We’re on another adventure,” he usually says—and he agrees with him when he says that there aren’t enough street signs and the ones there are are badly positioned. (Unlike Pilar: “I don’t believe it, we’re lost again!” Et cetera.)
He’s not going to order woodcock. They usually serve it with the head, perhaps so that the customers can be sure that they’re being given an authentic specimen of the expensive long-beaked bird, and the practice increases his sensation that they’re eating a protected species. He’d rather they left the few remaining birds up in the mountains. And the flavor, supposedly game, is very particular—unequalled, of course—but seems too sweet to him, morbid you might even say, close to the taste that human flesh is said to have. Kepa says it’s because they don’t take their intestines out when they cook them. The intestines of the lady of the woods—that’s apparently what they call them in French, dame de bois—are always clean, because they defecate every time they take flight. That’s what Kepa says. And he will order it. He’s against hunting them, but when it comes down to it, they’re dead, and he thinks the flavor that Abaitua finds “morbid” is exquisite. He rubs his hands together with the pleasure of anticipating the food, and his salivary gland is probably producing enough glycoproteins to finish off all the woodcock in the entire Basque Country. He says that their name in Basque—oilagorra, literally “deaf rooster”—came about as the result of a misunderstanding: they’re thought to be deaf, because they only take flight when their predators are right upon them. But in fact they have very sharp hearing. For the time being, it seems Kepa has forgotten about his emotional problems and is ready to talk about anything, the life of the woodcock or the evil sales strategies of laboratories.
The maître d’ and the waitresses—there are no waiters—look after them without being over attentive, treating them in an elegant and comfortable way, as is usual in most good Basque restaurants. They’re all Basque speakers, and Abaitua is grateful to be able to use Basque to enjoy such a primal activity. What he hates most is having to use Spanish in restaurants and bars—he doesn’t like hearing it at church, either—and if he had to choose, he’d rather be guaranteed that he could use Basque in those places rather than in places where he doesn’t feel so much at home, in bureaucratic settings, for instance. After choosing the wine and placing their order, Kepa rolls up the sleeves of his thick sweater, crosses his thick, muscular arms on the table, and, moving his head forward, asks if Abaitua wants to know how it all happened.
The story he tells isn’t as intimate as he had feared. He had gone to London to look for a first edition of Axular’s Gero, because a contact of his had told him that there was a copy of the classic Basque book in an old bookstore near the British Museum. It was a lead worth checking out—the last copy sold had gone for thirty million pesetas to the government of Navarre. He could sell it for a tidy sum there in the Basque Country, among other things because the public institutions would compete for it, and he thought he could buy it for much less than what he was going to get for it. He went to the bookstore and had a first look with great discretion, without asking for it directly, because he didn’t want the owner to realize, if his information was right, how much what he had was worth. He went there two or three days in a row and bought several interesting books while he was looking for Gero, among others an illustrated Escoffier cookbook and a book of poems by Cristina Rossetti with mother-of-pearl covers and gold-edged pages, which was quite expensive, he had to admit, but very beautiful indeed. But he still hadn’t found any trace of the book, and one day, when he was having a beer with the owner, with whom he’d
become friends, he opened up to him and admitted that he was Basque (until then he had made use of his curly hair and dark skin to claim that he was Greek, so that if he did find Gero, he would be able to buy it without showing any special interest and, therefore, at a good price) and that he had been looking for a book written in his old language, with no other aim than that of collecting a piece of his poor heritage. But after treating him to several pints of beer and buying more books off him, he found out that the man knew nothing about Gero, Basque literature, or, come to that, Basque itself, and even though he kindly let him look all over the bookstore, there wasn’t a trace of Axular’s book.
He was disappointed on his way back, although not completely, because the bookseller with whom he’d become good friends and who didn’t have a copy of Gero could be a good contact in the future for old import-export books (Abaitua was dismayed to hear that they were going to talk more about that later), and after spending two days in the Foyles bookstore, he had managed to find some interesting books for his store.
He slowly nibbles at the woodcock bones without any inhibition, and his fleshy lips look lustful as they shine with oil. Iñaki Abaitua can imagine the story he’d rather not hear. He’d told his wife he was going to London to do a great piece of business, he’d spent a lot of money for nothing, come back empty-handed, and she’d gotten angry. That’s more or less what he says, adding some details about Edurne’s pathological jealousy. When he arrived back at Loiu airport, she started in on him rather than asking him any questions, mumbling that he hadn’t gone there alone and that he was lying when he said once again that the only thing he’d done there had been to see the Tate and the National Gallery and that one evening he’d gone to have a look around Soho, which is more wholesome than even Gipuzkoa Plaza since Thatcher had it cleaned up, and he hadn’t spoken with any women except for checkout girls and waitresses.
Edurne is frightening when she gets going, he says. He believes him. Her dyed hair, wrinkled mouth, fat hands, lumpy, dimpled fingers, and long nails . . . She insisted that she wanted to see what he’d bought at Harrods, because he was carrying a bag from there. Some woman had given it to him as soon as he got onto the plane, when the one he was carrying—probably a Foyles bag—burst and all his books fell onto the floor. It was no good. That bag was the proof that he hadn’t told her everything about London. Perhaps she felt frustrated when she saw the Harrods bag because she thought he’d brought her a cashmere sweater, but in fact, when he told her that he’d brought her a very special present and showed her the book by Cristina Rossetti, she almost had a fit. She said that she couldn’t buy a decent dress for their daughter and there he was throwing money away on books, completely ignoring the fact that he had gone to London precisely to earn some money, for work. He interrupted his story and held his hands open in front of his shoulders, like a priest at offertory, looked at his woodcock, which was cut open sideways, to see if there was anything left to be nibbled, but all the bones were clean, and then he crossed his arms and admitted that he, too, had been nervous; what with one thing and another, he hadn’t had a smoke for more than three hours. He went up to a tobacconist kiosk, because he didn’t have a light, Edurne kept on grumbling behind him that her moneyless existence was miserable, that she had to put up with his mother and everything else, a long list of things, and by pure chance, although he didn’t realize until Edurne nudged him with her shoulder and said someone had just said hello to them, they walked past the woman who had given him the Harrods bag as he got onto the plane, but by the time he turned around, she was facing the other way and he was looking at a man with bulging eyes who was walking next to her. He knew the woman by her coat, and the man—loaded with suitcases and Harrods bags, his nose and drooping moustache looking as theatrical as his glasses—stared at him.
He says there was no way of convincing her that he’d met the woman on the flight back and that, in fact, he didn’t really know her, she’d just given him another bag when his broke, he didn’t know her name or where she lived and he’d hardly even heard her voice.
Kepa says he doesn’t even dare repeat the things she said to him. As well as being a failure, he was lazy, and a womanizer. You can’t imagine the things that came out of her mouth, and everyone at the airport was looking at them. As a simple matter of dignity, and because he couldn’t take any more humiliation, he told her he wasn’t going back with her, he’d take a taxi by himself, and she, who seemed to be so shaken up because she thought he’d been with another woman in London, said coldly that she thought that was great, he had two days to get his and his mother’s things out of the house—after that she’d leave them outside the front door.
So he’d only walked out to a certain extent. It looked like it was the wife who wanted to get rid of him. Perhaps her mother-in-law being hospitalized had given her the chance to see what it would be like to live without dependents. Kepa looks depressed once again, and Abaitua, to cheer him up, thinks about telling him that he’s been lucky, that he should be happy to have gotten rid of his miserable wife, that he’ll soon remember all the horrible things she said to him, but he’s worried about what Kepa’s going to do in his current situation and whether, with his disabled mother, he’ll be able to organize himself a bit; it looks like a tough way forward.
They both keep quiet. They’ve had a fair amount to drink, a bottle and a half of 2001 Artadi. En Euskadi, vino de Euskadi, as the advertising slogan goes—in the Basque Country, Basque wine. Suddenly Abaitua feels a rush of contentment from his full stomach and the wine. It’s because of the realization that Pilar is nothing like Kepa’s wife. He wouldn’t have been able to put up with a glum, bitter woman like Edurne controlling him for so many years. Obviously, he isn’t Kepa. He’s often thought that Pilar could do with a more Bohemian man than himself—more open, happier, not so work-obsessed, less dominated by his own superego. She would have been able to get away and travel more with a man like that. As long as there were no money problems, he thought right away. But he’s not sure about that, either. Sometimes he thinks he knows Pilar really well, and other times he thinks he doesn’t know her at all.
Abaitua isn’t going to have dessert.
The customers at many of the tables are speaking to the waitresses in Basque, but then they speak among themselves in Spanish. Like the gentry in times gone by, only speaking in Basque with dogs and country maids. Abaitua would like to know what the waitresses make of that habit; unlike the maids back then, they have a perfect mastery of Spanish, in many cases they speak it much better than Basque, and in lots of restaurants it’s the language they speak as soon as they move away from the customers’ tables. He draws the conclusion that, at least to an extent, the tendency to move toward Spanish is because there’s always someone who doesn’t know Basque and, inevitably, that obliges everybody at the table to speak in Spanish, and at the same time, because you only need simple vocabulary to be able to speak with dogs and waitresses. So speaking in Basque in restaurants is something of a ritual, like using Latin at church years ago.
Kepa is going to have dessert—the warm hazelnut cake he ordered at the start and which he likes so much. He himself, though, had trouble fastening his belt in the tightest hole that morning, and he wouldn’t be able to stand having to put the prong in the second one. His norms say that belts have to be fastened in the first hole and the loose end has to go through at least two belt loops. Pilar says he’s hysterical when he complains that he’s putting on weight.
“How’s Pilar?”
He asks him suddenly, as if he knew Abaitua was thinking about her. He should tell his friend that they haven’t slept together since he got angry when he was driving them back from Biarritz, punched the steering wheel, and they nearly went off the road. Obviously, he realized that day that he was driving her up the wall, but the strangest thing is that he doesn’t remember why. It was probably because they were bored stiff in Biarritz. He got angry because when they were
going to bed, she complained about his insistence on going to sleep with the radio on, and he said it would be better if they slept apart. He tells him she’s fine. She’s resigned herself to the fact that they’ve been shutting her out of work at the clinic, to the fact that Alzola doesn’t let her do any operations, and that all the partners are against her because she’s her father’s favorite.
“You’re really lucky.”
He doesn’t ask him to explain why he’s said that. It’s obvious—it’s because he’s got Pilar. He sees him making that typical gesture of his, rolling the sleeves of his sweater up for no reason at all. He lifts his left hand to call the waitress. It seems Kepa’s going to celebrate being single again with an armagnac and a Cuban cigar. Abaitua’s envious. He doesn’t smoke, but he does like good smokers’ rituals and the smell of good tobacco and cedar. He takes the opportunity to ask for the check, because, suddenly, he wants to leave. That often happens to him.
Kepa savors the armagnac like an expert, and it looks to Abaitua as if his lips, shiny once more, are made of elastic. When the head waiter appears with the bill, Abaitua says commandingly that it’s his treat and he’s going to pay. He thinks it’s pathetic when people who’ve eaten together put on a show about wanting to pay the bill—like children in the past who were brought up to refuse extra pocket money or candy until they were offered them three times—and their acting skills go even further and take the scene to its limit, under the waiter’s resigned observation, until the latter brings out the classic solution: “I can split the check for you if you like.” He’s in favor of splitting bills (something Basques hate very much), because otherwise the richest person, who’s also normally the most tight-fisted, comes out winning, and the person who most needs to protect his or her dignity—the poorest person, in other words—has to put on the biggest show of wanting to pay and ends up being the loser. But when Kepa says he wants to pay, he’s telling the truth; he likes treating people, he doesn’t use credit cards, and he’s always quick at pulling money out of the chaos he carries around in his pockets. Abaitua says, “I invited you, and what’s more, I’ve got more money.” He’s half serious, half joking, and Kepa has to cede to his strong reasoning.
Martutene Page 10
