Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Julia decides to go back into the living room, because staying there listening from the kitchen is tiring her out.

  “Were you here all this time?”

  The young American nods very slowly—a movement that shows serious thought—for the old writer to carry on talking. She doesn’t think it’s a matter of age. The classics have guaranteed value, and that’s why she prefers them, too, she says, once more using her Spanish. She says it in a very straightforward way, as if she were saying that she prefers dark chocolate to white. She looks at Julia, with a “¿Verdad que sí?”—meaning “Isn’t that right?”—that’s intended to bring her into the conversation, worried that she may have left her out. She replies there’s no doubt about it—“No cabe duda.” She could tell her that risks have to be taken, as well, that it would be a pity to miss out on tomorrow’s classics. Or that the subject bores her, speaking out like a woman who’s fed up. They could talk about that tired old subject of whether or not reading is made too much of, whether the pendulum hasn’t swung back since their days, since her and Martin’s days, from a time in which reading was dry and difficult, a time when it was respected too much, to now, when not even the slightest hint of difficulty is accepted (of course—good things are not necessarily boring, and what’s boring isn’t necessarily good, and all that). And whether the erosion of the boundaries between literature and subliterature has favored the emergence of a standard of literature that’s good but not very demanding, and a type of narrative that flees from experimentation, and all of this, in short, as a result of culture having been made available to all. (And at this point, the composition of his audience making him feel at ease, he risks bringing up the subject of whether there is a connection between the tendency to produce easier things and the reading population being made up mostly of women.) They could also talk about immortality having been the writer’s aim ever since Romanticism idealized it, and that aim having come to be represented by social and financial success in what has become a professional entertainment business.

  And that’s just what they talk about. On the rectangle of grass beneath the magnolia tree, there’s a solitary blackbird walking from side to side, as if its back and forth pacing had become an obsessive ritual, and it reminds Julia of Martin’s endless walks up and down the gravel path, head down, hands behind his back, when he has writer’s block. Harri has her own way of describing that uncomfortable situation: trying to find the right adjective. The blackbird goes quite quickly from the tree to the path beyond it and takes three or four jumps to come back, pausing between each one, pecking away between Martin’s half-withered thoughts. It goes back and forth and makes the movements again and again, like a mechanical toy, pecking around the tree and quickly moving away. He looks like quite a happy creature, and she remembers what Harri told her about what happened at the pharmacy. Martin went in to weigh himself, because it seemed to him, for once, that he was losing weight. “That’s the good thing about cancer, you get thinner,” he said. Apparently the pharmacist, a fat, bald man the same age as him, offered him a little rhyming explanation in Spanish when he stepped up on the scale, with no concern whatsoever: “Usted como el tordo, la cara delgada y el culo gordo,” which was like saying something along the lines of “you’re just like a thrush—a thin face and a fat tush.” They laughed about it; that sort of thing could only happen in a pharmacy in this part of the world, and she’s amused as she remembers it again. It must show on her face, because Martin looks at her inquisitively. At that moment, they’re talking about how “in my day”—he repeats that expression again and again—a good writer aimed to sell five thousand copies at most in the whole of Spain, and today, on the other hand, that’s a publisher’s minimum just to break even, and their real goal’s to sell a hundred thousand. That means that as well as having a product that a hundred thousand people will be able to read, the writer himself becomes a brand image for promotional purposes and a suitable rhythm of production has to be kept up; once a sizeable readership has been gotten together, it has to be fed, so that it doesn’t forget about the author. It’s like that in all the arts.

  Has she realized that even opera prima donnas can’t be fat nowadays?

  She found it funny the first time she heard him say it.

  He should have written a short story called The Last Fat Diva, but he hasn’t. Writing or singing well isn’t enough, you have to have the right image for promoting things, know how to deal with the media, the public has to find you interesting and, if possible, like you as well. He’s bored, but he speaks to the interested young American with feigned passion. Julia’s heard him say the same thing a thousand times before without him caring about it. He’s happy to talk about himself as being disappointed, a loser, and misunderstood. It’s as if he’s looking at the world from some far-off beach that the foam of vanity and pomp can’t reach. Young writers speak about living off their writing and are not prepared, as they used at one time to be, to combine writing with being a librarian, a teacher, or a civil servant, and so they waste their time and talent writing opinion pieces in the newspapers, or commissioned books for the public authorities, or giving lectures and readings, and so in the end it’s writing, more than any other job, that separates them from genuinely literary activity. The dream of young writers is no longer to be remembered; they want success, money, and fame, a four-star chef to come and greet them at their table, they want to have a beautiful yard or a mansion on the coast where they can go to be alone and put the finishing touches on their works. In short, they want to be the type of character that’s showing up more and more in the wonderful, remote places that appear in movies. That song affects Julia in different ways, depending on her mood. Normally it bothers her. She thinks, and she’s told him as much—they’ve argued about it hundreds of times—that more or less the same things have always happened, there have always been writers of all types, and readers, as well, good ones and bad ones, smart ones and dumb ones, materialists and dreamers, and that in any case, he should do what he himself has to do and not worry about what other people are doing. His case, in terms of income, is closer to Proust’s or Flaubert’s than to that of a writer struggling to make it to the end of the month. Besides, it makes her sad when he sounds angry like that—his interlocutor might think he’s talking that way because of some frustration at not being successful, because he’s envious of others’ success, but she doesn’t think that’s true, or at least not entirely. Be that as it may, she knows he wants nothing to do with those sad clubs founded by writers who believe themselves to be talented but aren’t successful, clubs they found in order to comfort each other by criticizing success; she thinks he’s quite sincere when he says that what hurts him is seeing people with exceptional talent wasting it in the pursuit of success, seeing them getting distracted by that goal and not doing worthwhile work and instead wasting the gifts they have on other work that, because of those great gifts, is too easy for them.

  “In my day.” He doesn’t look like a man about to turn fifty, and there’s no doubt any woman would find him interesting. He’s losing his hair—a lot of it down the bathtub drain—and he no longer has the body he once did, but he looks full of life as he sits there across from the American girl, a way he hasn’t looked for a long time, sure of himself, moving his hands energetically, elegantly crossing his legs back and forth in a sort of galloping motion. His shoes, his oversized jacket, which he’s left unbuttoned in order to hide how big it is, and his enormous shirt collar all have a British sheen to them. He’d be excellent in the role of an English writer in a house in Tuscany. Julia wonders if he really is worried about posterity. What would happen if she asked him? She would only ever ask him that as a joke, and he would answer jokingly, as well, so there’s no point in doing it. Now he moves his head forward a little to listen to the American girl, encouraging her to speak, and when the girl says she gets the impression that nowadays, if anyone’s suspected of liking Ulysses, they’re expected to a
pologize for it—“Well, I’m sorry, I like it”—Julia is afraid the excitement of it all might give him a cardiovascular attack. Martin sometimes says the same thing about Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Nowadays it’s usually said that they’re very good books but completely unreadable. And it’s all right to admit that Joyce and Musil bore you without looking like an idiot. That’s fine, but you do have to work at pleasure. A free translation of a Nabokov quote, which is absolutely relevant here: the great artist goes up a slope with no clear path, and when he reaches the windswept summit, what do you think he bumps into? A breathless happy reader. And there, in a spontaneous rush, they embrace each other, and if it’s a book that lasts, they’re together forever.

  In fact, the girl isn’t being at all pedantic, and her posture is confident; she’s leaning slightly to one side, her left arm hanging behind her chair and the other resting on her lap. It’s no bad thing to be able to talk about pleasure, literary pleasure even, on their second meeting. (That’s one of literature’s important roles, giving rise to interesting conversations.) Julia doesn’t have the energy to talk about a subject they’ve so frequently dealt with, but she wouldn’t like the girl to get the wrong idea about her just because she’s keeping quiet. She should admit the truth and say that she didn’t much enjoy Joyce’s Ulysses, that she only finished it out of a sense of discipline, and that she couldn’t handle the Musil. However she’s sure that the blame, if there is any blame, is not the author’s, it’s hers.

  She decides to mention that expression about honey not being made for donkeys’ mouths—“No se hizo la miel para la boca del asno”—and she doesn’t even have to tell the girl what it means, because she already knows the saying. (“But we don’t say ‘honey isn’t made for donkeys’ mouths’ in English. ‘Don’t cast pearls before swine’ works better.”) She says she likes proverbs a lot, and they exchange a few. Echar margaritas a los cerdos—another Spanish way to speak about casting things before swine, but in this instance it’s daisies rather than pearls; and a Basque equivalent, astoari polainak—saying that something is like putting “spats on donkeys.” And for the idea that it’s worth forcing yourself up the slope so that you can bump into the writer at the top, two equivalents of “no pain, no gain”: no hay miel sin hiel, which is a Spanish saying that translates literally to “there’s no honey without bile”; and ez lan ez jan, the Basque version, which would translate to “no work, no food.” And all of this is enough for Martin’s eyes to grow angry at his amateur translator’s crazy circumlocutions, because it’s broken the thread of the interesting conversation they were having, and he says “I mean, I mean” two or three times, trying to get the attention of the American girl, who seems to be happy sitting there reciting proverbs, until she finally realizes and then she says “sorry, sorry,” also two or three times. Julia thinks about going back to the kitchen on any old excuse. But she doesn’t get up, because for some reason or other, she’s curious about what Martin wants to say, because it’s the first time in a long while that he’s looked so enthusiastic. Leaning forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, he rubs his hands together, searching for the right words to say exactly what he means. (When he said “I mean, I mean” in English just now, it seemed to her like he was feeling the pangs of some sort of profound pain, “mean” sounding quite similar to the Basque word min, meaning “pain.”)

  She’s astonished by a confession she’s never heard until now. Sometimes, when a book’s really good, he finds it difficult to go on, stops on each page, until finally he has to give up on it, unable to stand it being so good. He asks the American girl if she knows what he means, looking her straight in the eye, and seeing that look, Julia has to stop herself from saying that she, too, knows exactly what he means and it’s happened to her, as well, though more often with music, finding herself taken over by an emotion that becomes painful, feeling attacked by it, having to stop listening because she’s afraid of going crazy. “Of course she knows what you mean” slips out in almost a whisper—she’s moved by sharing that experience—but he doesn’t pay her any attention. After saying “give up on it,” and without even looking at her, he angrily raises his hand, sick and tired, fed up, as if he were throwing a book up into the air. He cannot read it, because the writer’s talent stands in his way, because finding out that he isn’t even in the same league as the other writer takes away his own energy to write.

  “Because you’re a writer!” says the young American, lifting her hands to her face in astonishment, perhaps with admiration. She’s read something similar to what Martin’s just described somewhere, it happens to many writers. Virginia Woolf almost gave up writing because of Proust. The writer didn’t know that.

  “A writer, then.”

  Julia thinks that lifting her hands up to her cheeks is a rather exaggerated gesture, and it’s very surprising, with her seeming so smart, that she didn’t realize earlier that Martin’s a writer; he’s done everything possible to let her know that he is, even lighting his pipe, which he never does. He shrugs, lets out a laugh that sounds adolescent and happy at the same time, and says that using the term “a writer” may be going too far; he writes, he tries to write. Someone who writes. A scribbler, at most. He always says the same thing, because he idealizes the figure of the writer and, because of that, thinks it would be vanity to call himself a writer, to put himself in the same category as Flaubert somehow. “Writer” isn’t a title you can earn at university. Un petit écrivain, perhaps, a little writer. He usually says it in Italian, un piccolo scrittore, ever since Julia made him read Natalia Ginzburg’s wonderful book The Little Virtues—because he doesn’t normally read women writers, Virginia Woolf being one of the few exceptions—in which she examines the writing profession with great clarity. Even though he may be a flea or a mosquito among writers, he’s gone through the same suffering and worrying as the greatest of them and shouldn’t be ashamed to introduce himself as a writer; there are great writers and more modest ones. So he says “un piccolo scrittore,” with a gesture of modesty that doesn’t hide how proud he feels about it.

  She’d like to read something of his.

  Martin leans back in his armchair, almost as if wanting to protect himself from her, when she says with great enthusiasm that she’d like to read something of his. But he writes in Basque. His arms are locked on the armchair, he’s sitting all the way back in it, he’s uncrossed the one leg he had slug over the other and now both feet are on the ground. He wants to run away and take refuge somewhere safe, at the low level that suits him; Basque, too, being a piccolo language.

  Why doesn’t he tell the charming American girl that his work’s been translated? Does he want it to be Julia who tells her that some of his writing has even been published in English, so he can make it clear that he himself is not very interested in being read? Or does he prefer to keep it completely quiet, afraid he’s not up to snuff because the girl’s said she likes Joyce? Julia knows that being aware that the people around him have read his work makes him feel uncomfortable, especially when it’s in Spanish; at one time, when his work was only available in Basque and had not yet been translated into Spanish, he could enjoy being considered a writer without having to worry about what people thought of his work, because very few of his acquaintances read, and still fewer of them read in Basque. Many people still use the language as an excuse for not having read anything of his, Julia can confirm that, they really regret not being able to read his stuff, they say when they bump into him that they don’t know enough Basque, because they’ve heard he’s about to publish something, and he’s fine with that, because he thinks they’d be disappointed if they did read his work. He usually says you don’t send a message in a bottle for the people in your own neighborhood to read. Julia is still thinking about whether to mention his translated work or not when the young American insists again in very sincere Spanish that she’d really love to be able to read his work—“Me gustaría tanto poder leerle”;
she could read him in English, but Julia keeps quiet in the end, she can’t be bothered. What’s more, there’s a train going by.

  It’s a long freight train, one of those ones that transports cars. They don’t see it, but they all keep quiet, waiting for the minute and a half it takes to go past, because it makes a lot of noise. The other trains, the high-speed and the local ones, don’t make so much noise. In fact, Julia’s used to it by now, and the sound of the trains seldom stops her from doing anything, not even from playing the piano, and she often doesn’t even realize anything’s gone by. When the last sounds of the train—almost soft as they move away—are finally lost, Martin quickly tells the young American that there’s nothing for her to worry about, it only seemed so loud to them because all the windows in the gallery are open, and as she’s seen, not many trains go by, and she’ll get used to it—like a real estate agent trying to rent out a place down by the tracks. And he looks at Julia to ask her not to betray him, which she doesn’t. That’s right, she says. What’s more, the noise trains make, he doesn’t know quite how to put it, it’s noble, evocative, much less annoying than road noise. Why aren’t ships’ sirens irritating? A train passing in the night makes you think about how far it’s going, about a meeting, things like that. She thinks Martin is looking peculiar, she looks at his alert eyes to try and find out if he’s serious or joking and can’t help but laugh. The American girl laughs happily, as well, while Martin remains serious, as if confused.

  “Do you like beans?” Martin invites the young woman to have lunch with them. It’s the first Friday of the month, and on the first Friday of every month he always makes Tolosa beans for Harri. Tolosa beans are excellent, really delicious, Martin explains passionately. And they’re very pretty beans—black, neither small nor large, just the right size, and shiny. He cooks them without any other ingredients, no pork fat, no chorizo, just some oil. Just a splash of oil. Blood sausage and cabbage on a separate plate. The art involved is knowing how much water is going to be needed, so that you don’t have to add any more, and the secret is adding some stewed onion at the end. The most important thing is to stew them very slowly, as our grandmothers used to, he says, although his two grandmothers probably never stepped into a kitchen in their lives. “Do you accept?” The young American hesitates, turns toward Julia, like a child asking for permission, apparently wanting to know whether she’s OK with the invitation. Yes, stay, she says, Harri will be excited to meet her, and the young woman accepts. Happily, she says—“pozik.”