He received the highest possible marks on his research, but it didn’t help to change anything. He hadn’t even said anything doctors didn’t already know. Of course they knew that only seeing patients five times during their pregnancies—that was the average—meant a higher death rate, and even if they didn’t actually know it, they did sense that leaving the simple, easy care that low-risk pregnancies required to midwives and nurses would mean losing a source of income for their private practices. They also knew that many of the children who came into the world drunk on their mothers’ sodium thiopental—in cute little maternity rooms in free-standing clinics with pretty gardens planted all around them, without any safety measures for the newly born, induced at whatever moment it was deemed most convenient—would end up being wrapped in aluminum foil and taken by taxi to a hospital to be reanimated, always arriving too late. They knew it, and some of them even denied their patients the chance of turning to a hospital, instead hiding the damage done by their own lack of pediatric assistance in little cots, blue ones for mentally disabled boys and pink ones if they were girls. He had simply put the tragedy into numbers: if all births took place at the Arantzazu Hospital (although it was nothing overly extraordinary, it was the best supplied service on offer), that would be enough to avoid one death in five and to reduce the sickness rate by sixty percent. Some of his colleagues who congratulated him for his excellent grades suspected that, but they had to amortize their investments. He understood them, but what really got him was that many of the people who accepted the status quo were fierce opponents of abortion, and of contraception, as well, and nevertheless they were condemning so many children to death or to life as vegetables. And not as an unfortunate but sadly necessary evil in the interest of helping their offspring, but in order to happily make their own fortunes.
Things have changed. Inevitably, due to cultural, economic, and demographic developments, and now the measures to stop eclampsia and fetal suffering in China, which Minkowski had so admired, seemed old hat in terms of progress. It’s always been like that. We don’t realize what healthy diets our grandparents had until we’ve filled ourselves up with sugars and saturated fat. He would have liked to be able to talk to him about all that, but he never crossed paths with him again.
“Good night,” says Pilar, sticking her head around the door. Without any special feeling, as if she were greeting someone in the neighborhood she doesn’t know all that well. She’s wearing a robe with wide blue and gray stripes on top of her white pajamas. She always wears pajamas, except on very rare occassions. He remembers her standing on top of the bed, lifting up one side of her nightdress, comically imitating a model. But he can’t picture the nightdress. It’s an isolated image, he doesn’t know what larger scene it’s from.
Port-Royal isn’t far from the Luxembourg Gardens, at least not in terms of Paris distances. He used to take a book and a sandwich and go there at midday, and that’s where he met Bárbara, outside the hospital, even though she worked in the laboratory. She was a pharmacist. One day he worked up the courage to sit down on the same bench as her. She spoke Spanish, because she had lived in Chile with her ex-husband, an engineer who’d worked for the Allende government in the copper mines. Apparently, one of Allende’s biggest mistakes had been to bring in progressive-thinking, incompetent engineers from France, who then lived in Chile like kings, in order to get rid of the right-wing engineers. She’d also lived in India and Australia. A few days after sharing sandwiches on the bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, Bárbara received him at her home, which was near the gardens in the Place Pablo Picasso, at the intersection of Montparnasse and Raspail. She had blond hair—lots of it—and lively, very shiny blue eyes. The most special thing about her appearance, what he remembers best, is her mouth. Her lips, while not thin, didn’t stand out; her upper lip was flat, with no dip in the middle, it didn’t form a bow shape, what’s called a Cupid’s bow in many languages. Her teeth were white and healthy, but her upper canine teeth were longer than her incisors, and their lower edge was straight, as if they’d been filed down. He used to joke to her that she had a perfect mouth for speaking French. He doesn’t know why he thought that. He thinks they were happy during the months they spent together, but his memory of them is faint. He remembers one time, having been invited by some friends to La Baule, when they didn’t get out of bed all weekend. Spending the previous evening in a wine shop picking out a bottle to bring along as a gift. Going down for dinner late on the second evening and having their friends start telling jokes about that famed Spanish passion, and her not liking it. He remembers that she used to put everything into salads, which she made as tidily as if she had been working in the laboratory, and that although he’d forbidden her to do so, because it embarrassed him, he’d find her washing the underwear he’d hidden away. Not much more than that. Perhaps he wouldn’t even remember her face if it weren’t for a photograph of her he keeps in a book. It’s unlikely anyone will ever find it there. Bárbara gave him the book and dedicated it on the first page “à mon amour basque”—to my Basque love. There’s no date. Though there is on the back of the photo—“oct. 72,” and nothing else. She wrote him a letter or two, which he didn’t reply to and hasn’t kept. She really is beautiful, or that’s what he thinks, at any rate. When his stay there finished, he just said goodbye to her. It was time for him to go home.
Pilar has brushed her teeth, and she’s now probably putting on different lotions in front of the mirror. He decides to wait until he hears her close her bedroom door before going into the bathroom himself. He’ll take a Noctamid, just in case the journey back to the past that turning over the pages of his research work has sent him on keeps him awake. In fact, he doesn’t like it much when he thinks back to his youth. He used to say that the two thick leather-bound volumes he’s now put back on the shelf make him feel sorry for himself, feel pity for the young man who wrote that work with such enthusiasm, putting in so much effort and sacrifice, and all for nothing. Even if he had worked on it day and night, there was nothing admirable about that young man’s feelings, that arrogant young man’s feelings; his dream hadn’t been so much to stop newly born babies’ lives from being uselessly wasted, it was more about having his contributions, his work, bring it about.
3
These are Sándor Márai’s exact words: “A woman taught me that the real writer’s disease is that which prevents the artist from obtaining satisfaction through anything other than his creative process.”
Julia has picked up the Hungarian’s book by chance and is mechanically transcribing the lines that Martin has underlined. Many are about writing and about death, and while some of them are not without interest, she’s asking herself what the purpose of telling things with such precision is, whether it’s the author listing the books he’s read or recounting his routine visits to the hospital to see his wife, who he says is fading away “too slowly.” What makes him think that anyone’s going to be interested in what time he went to bed or what time he turned off the light on whatever day in 1988? What is it that makes his experiences special and worth telling people about? She’d like to ask Martin, but he wouldn’t like the question.
Here he is. She doesn’t realize he’s there until he comes up to the table, and she wonders if he hasn’t tiptoed up to her, like a boss trying to catch a lazy worker. He’s dressed to go out, wearing his raw silk jacket and everything; it’s a fine piece of clothing, but unfortunately it’s far too big for him. She asks where he’s going and remembers, too late, and because of his look of resignation, that he has an appointment with the doctor. “Do you want me to go with you?” She knows he doesn’t; as well as jealously guarding his intimacy, she would get in the way of the need he feels to demonstrate his seductive skills wherever he goes, hospital or morgue, with any type of audience, men, women, old people, and children. But she has to ask him anyway. “I’ll go alone,” he says with dignified regret, knowing that she won’t insist. If she did, picking u
p her bag and putting on her jacket, he’d stop her in panic, saying it was a waste of her time and, in any case, she always went to her gynecologist by herself, as well.
He tells her he’ll go alone, using a voice that means that he’ll face up to adversity by himself, and after looking at his watch, he says that the young American’s coming to bring over her things—fortunately he doesn’t call her the penthouse girl this time—so he hopes to be back soon, “unless something’s up, of course.” To reduce the drama of the situation, she asks him what might be up.
Prostates have become a regular topic of conversation with people around him ever since screening tests became so commonplace, probably because the men he knows are of an age that puts them at risk, and the women he knows have partners who are, as well. They’re also moaners and cowards. It’s because of that, and because of their instinct to compete, that they mention their PSA levels so much, and, of course, the cruelest attack, having their anuses fingered, really humiliating even if they do talk about it jokingly, and she’s often thought of telling them it’s their just desserts, if only as payment for the tasteless jokes about women’s routine gynecological examinations they’re always telling, as if they were the most natural thing in the world.
When she reads Márai’s words at the end of the book—“I’m ashamed of writing now”—she regrets what she thought of him a little earlier.
Opening Martin’s computer secretly makes her feel bad, she notices the tension in the middle of her chest. She thinks robbers must feel something like that when they’re opening safes. It’s strange that she still has that painful sensation even when she knows there’s no risk of being caught red-handed. It’s because she feels guilty, of course. It wouldn’t occur to Martin that she would do that, among other things because, in theory, there’s a password for opening the computer, and also because he doesn’t think she looks at other people’s things. Most people would think of that as a virtue, not being nosey about other people’s things, but he reproaches her for it, says it demonstrates a lack of interest in others, a lack of affection. So, not being afraid of her looking things over, he leaves his index cards covered in notes, as well as the pages he prints from time to time for correcting, lying around just anywhere; she’s sure that if the computer has a password, it’s only because the IT guy gave it one as a matter of course. Not that he was a very skillful IT guy; although the computer freezes if you put in the wrong password after starting it up, Julia’s discovered that clicking Enter is enough to get it going. She finds it hard not to tell Martin what she’s discovered, especially when he talks about “his” IT guy, but she renounces that source of satisfaction in exchange for being able to check how he’s getting on with his work from time to time. No more than that, just to see what he’s working on, to know if he’s making progress, rather in the same way she likes to check on her son’s grades at school. All she really does is confirm what she already knows; Martin’s changes of mood reflect how his work’s going with great accuracy. Although she has to admit that there is another reason that encourages her to check up on him: she wants to see if he’s written anything about her, if he’s made use of anything from their private life. She can’t really say she reads anything, it’s more of a quick look to see if Flora Ugalde—the wife of Faustino Iturbe, the writer and main character of his latest stories—makes an appearance. She has some of her same physical characteristics—the most noticeable being the mole on her jugular fossa—and some of her same psychological traits in the things she says, as well; she’s becoming her twin, so to speak. In any case, what she could swear to is that she never looks at anything apart from what he’s currently writing, and of course she never looks at his mail. It wouldn’t be a lie if she said it’s because of ethical reasons, but she can’t deny that she finds looking at his intimate things revolting—that’s a very strong word for it, but she can’t think of anything more appropriate—and the fear that she might come across something that would disappoint her discourages her from looking even more. She’d rather not know.
The Man in Front of the Mirror. That’s the title of what he’s working on. The main character, a writer whose name has not appeared in the twenty pages he’s written so far, is seriously ill with a deadly disease whose name has likewise not yet been mentioned. He’s receiving treatment that will slow the disease but not cure him, and he will continue to receive it for at least as long as it can stop the illness from spreading, and for that reason, the effects of the medication might do him more harm than the disease itself. The doctors have set the length of the treatment at one year (most likely), depending on his ability to withstand its harmful effects, and at most (less likely) two years. The man, due to his pessimistic nature, fears the worst and does not believe he has the strength to face up to his own physical decay; he spends most of the day in front of the bathroom mirror (which is, presumably, where the title comes from), watching and waiting to see when some trace of the decay will show on his face. He pays special attention to his eyes’ connective tissue, because he thinks it looks swollen, like his gums, and that worries him, because while he was waiting in the outpatient center, he saw a man of around his age whose lower eyelids had flipped outward, their bright red insides exposed; it occurred to him that that could happen in his own case, which had only just begun, because of connective tissue swelling, and it could be due to the very treatment that he was taking. He has not dared to tell to his doctor about this worry, not wanting to come off as frivolous, there being more serious things to worry about. But the man in front of the mirror worries a lot about the stigmatizing effects of the process, not knowing whether it would be worth his while for his organs’ decay to halt temporarily if it means having his lower eyelids flip outward, swollen and red, and then as well as being in a terrible state of health end up looking revolting. In any case, indications of swelling have only just started, nobody has mentioned it to him yet, and besides, he’s not sure if he can blame it on the treatment. Another thing that worries him, and it is of no lesser importance, is that his hair loss is more and more noticeable; fortunately, he’s losing hair from the forehead back and not on the crown, which he checks every day with a hand mirror he holds up at an angle behind him. In one passage, he talks about a visit he paid to the dermatologist to find out if there was any way to deal with the problem. He didn’t mention his nameless disease to the dermatologist, nor the chemical treatment he was taking to counteract it, not wanting those things to be blamed for his problem. The dermatologist, who was as bald as an eagle, told him his hair density was enviable for a man of his age; there were ways of stopping him from losing more hair, but he couldn’t recommend them, and he assured him that he would not die bald. The man said he suspected that was true, there probably wouldn’t be time for that to happen, and the bald dermatologist, who looked very fit, laughed, taking it to be a witty remark. The word “bald” really bothers the man. (In the few pages he’s written, he quotes Rigaut’s “je serai un grand mort”—I’ll make a great corpse—twice).
Apart from that, the man feels well and has no serious discomfort to complain of. Due to his limited life expectancy, he lets the days go by quite freely, although sometimes the idea that the time to begin his melancholy countdown has arrived gets the better of him; to try to avoid such moments, he has taken the calendar in the kitchen down and attempts to live without knowing what day it is. Because he still enjoys eating, he takes time to go to the market and do the shopping, and he pays great attention to all the details of the food he makes. He has no other objectives. From time to time, he thinks about going on a trip, going back to somewhere he knows and visiting somewhere he’s never been (Cairo, to be precise, and with a crazy idea in mind: to stand in Giza and shout, “Twenty centuries of history are looking at you!”). But he’s never been much of a traveler (Martin often quotes that reflection of Pascal’s in which he says that mankind’s misfortune is its inability to sit still in a room, and he’s also a great admirer of Xavier
de Maistre’s A Journey Round My Room), and if that weren’t enough, he’s also dissuaded by the worry that if his health were to suddenly deteriorate, he would have no way of getting back.
The man is writing a novel, whose plot is never discussed, and he doesn’t feel up to finishing it in such a limited amount of time; in addition to that, he’s not very happy with what he has written. The reader supposes that he’d almost completely abandoned the project even prior to his illness being diagnosed, and that he sees himself as a failed writer. He writes all sorts of things from time to time, in a chaotic fashion and with no particular objective: memories, mostly unimportant events from daily life, his thoughts (“ses pensées,” in other words), and above all, “he tries on stories in the same way that some other people try on suits.” Julia suspects that the bit about trying on stories isn’t his, that he’s read it somewhere, even though it does reflect Martin himself very well. His characters, mostly men and women in relationships waiting for a story, their own story, to begin, find themselves materializing on pieces of paper, and shortly afterward, usually after four or five pages, the story ends. He has lots of beginnings of abandoned stories.
Martutene Page 12
