Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Everything’s seeming complicated to him at the moment. He remembers his father’s friend Calvete and thinks about telling them the story about when he used to get drunk, but he doesn’t find it funny right now. He isn’t pleased to hear once again that he did very well in the meeting, because he dealt with the problem in just the way Arrese wanted him to; he knows the man’s proud that there’s a Basque variant of Parkinson’s disease, which is why the proteins that control the mutated genes have a Basque name, dardarin, from dardara—trembling. This protein, dardarin, whose name is derived from the Basque word dardara, meaning tremor. He’s proud that it’s special, even though it’s a damaging difference. They head straight for the stairs without waiting for the elevator. Gabilondo has to explain to the young American sociologist now, too, as she does every time she uses the stairs with someone new, that it was Abaitua who taught her never to take the elevator and that it’s an excellent way to keep fit. Going up six flights of stairs twice a day is the minimum amount of exercise for an adult. It’s also a great way to avoid contagious diseases and, above all, bad smells. And people’s dirty looks, he adds. The young American laughs.

  It seems a lot of people have decided to go down the stairs; the elevators are always full up at that time of day, and it’s hard for the three of them to remain walking side by side as they go up. After his usual doubts about protocol—in this case, whether the man should go before the women so that he doesn’t see their legs, or go behind them in order to catch them if they should fall—he finally chooses the latter option, in order not to look weak, and what’s more, he’d rather not expose his backside to them. Harri Gabilondo has a wide behind—she’d clearly take him all the way down to the ground floor if she fell, carrying him away with her—and her tight skirt forces her to walk up the steps sideways. The sociologist keeps in step with her, though she’d doubtless prefer to go up faster. At one point, she turns around, and Abaitua is embarrassed by the thought that she might think he’s checking out her ass. She smiles at him.

  She’s very glad to be able to take part in this research project, she thinks it’s a very interesting piece of work. She seems to be telling the truth. Abaitua says that he’s glad she’s accepted the job, too. He musters the courage to admit he’s forgotten her name. Lynn. “First name or last?” Sometimes he can’t tell them apart. In her case, it’s her first name, but it could be either, she says with a smile. Some people with the last name Lynnsey have shortened it to Lynn, but some people also use it as a boy’s name, and some dogs probably get called it, as well. Her Lynn might be of Welsh origin. She’s taken it to be that, because it’s the option she likes best—green, mining Wales.

  Gabilondo takes every chance she gets to lay into people. Whenever he’s with her, he can’t help thinking what bit of him she’ll go for as soon as he turns his back. Now she imitates Arrese’s ceremony of opening his handkerchief to blow his nose and then inspecting what’s come out before finally folding it carefully up again. What can you expect from a doctor who’s incapable of using paper tissues? Abaitua can’t understand why he uses handkerchiefs, either. The sociologist laughs at Gabilondo’s imitations. Being American, and so young, perhaps she’s never used handkerchiefs. He uses them and then washes them for reuse, Gabilondo says with a look of revulsion on her face. He tells her not to be mean. He says it without much conviction, not liking to criticize people, even if it is Arrese.

  “Me, mean? It’s that Martínez de Leunda who’s mean!”

  He also finds it annoying that half of what she’s saying must be difficult to understand for the young American. He asks her if she understands what Harri Gabilondo means when, speaking about Leunda again, she calls her “esa hija de requeté navarro enchufado en el fielato”—that daughter of a Navarrese Requeté rubber-stamped into his spot at the municipal impost office. Has she understood? She can’t possibly understand what words like requeté mean. She moves her hands around expressively and laughs. “More or less.” In other words, she hasn’t understood a thing. But that doesn’t stop Gabilondo from carrying on in the same vein. Although she’s quite a bit younger than him, she often says “in our day,” in order to create an atmosphere of mutual trust between them. In our day. When being Spanish was seen as pathetic and Basques were the richest, the most anti-Franco, and the most prestigious people in all of Europe. At that time, Martínez Leunda was very happy to be Basque and used only her second surname, Leunda. And now? Now that our best days are behind us, she suddenly realizes she’s a Martínez and that she’s Spanish. “¿Qué te parece?”

  Now she seems to be looking at the young American sociologist, as well, waiting for a reply.

  He decides to say that she’s not wrong about that. He, too, has seen how certain people have turned their backs on the Basque Country now that it has problems, and that fact hurts him. He’s also afraid that the rejection of violence will be followed by a rejection of nationalism, and then by an abandonment of everything that is in any way Basque, right down to the emblematic zortziko dance. But what’s more to blame than nationalism itself?

  And why is he hurt by it?

  He takes advantage of the fact that Gabilondo’s stopped to say hello to someone to change subject. “What about you?” She has an impressive résumé for her age. She also studied genetic anthropology at Columbia, which is where she picked up the familiarity she displayed at the meeting with haplogroups, mitochondrial DNA, polymorphism, and other technical ideas. It was only a graduate course, but it was enough for her to realize that science is interested in so-called “traditional” peoples such as the Basques. So it was her anthropological interest in the aboriginal population that brought her to the Basque Country, Abaitua jokes, and she replies that it was, to an extent. She’d read Dos Passos’s memoirs, in which he says “I like the Basques,” and that gave her the idea to come and find out more.

  She laughs again when Harri Gabilondo says that she gives a different version each time she’s asked what she’s doing in the Basque Country. Apparently she’s also said she came to see the San Fermín festivities, among other strange reasons. She’s started to think she must be with the CIA. The sociologist’s laugh is pretty loud, that uninhibited laugh Americans have, her mouth wide open. She’s holding a blue file folder, with elastic bands at the corners, pressed against her chest. By the way, don’t they think Arrese looks a lot like Hemingway? They never realized, but he does a bit. He’d love it if she told him that. Harri Gabilondo, of course, brings out her testosterone joke, his using it as eau de cologne, and the two women laugh. Now it’s the young American who says she’s mean, and Abaitua who says she has no idea just how right she is. And then he says what he thought of shortly before—he wonders aloud what she must say about him when his back’s turned. Answering more seriously than she intended, Harri Gabilondo swears, “Never anything bad about you.” She speaks first in Spanish, then repeats herself in English, “Es el médico más interesante y honesto que conozco. The most interesting and honest doctor I know. Do you understand?” The American says she does, and Abaitua tries to hide how embarrassed he is by the flattery. He’s about to say she probably says the same to everybody, when the nurse comes in without knocking and looks with curiosity at the three of them, one by one, then goes over to one side of the table and starts organizing prescriptions. There are already people waiting outside. The two women stand up with their plastic cups in their hands. Abaitua takes them from them and throws them into the trash can. He comes out to the vestibule with them. He knows that Gabilondo likes people to be polite to her, and he tries to treat her as she expects to be, even though her gratitude for his courteousness wears on him. “You’re a real gentleman, not like some other people.” She calls him smart and distinguished in front of the young American sociologist for the second time. They’re appropriate compliments to pay an old man, of course, but several women have spoken well of his neatness and pleasant fragrance, as a result of which he deduces that some me
n don’t take much care with their personal hygiene. In any case, he thinks that women aren’t very happy with men here in general, often finding them to be clumsy and vulgar. In Harri Gabilondo’s case, on the other hand, it’s her worry that people won’t appreciate her class that leads her to become a little vulgar.

  So we’ll see each other often, says the young American, and she seems pleased at the prospect. She has lively eyes, unwavering eyes, and he feels shaken up. And angry, too, that a mere child can make him feel like this at his age. When they’re in the vestibule and about to say goodbye, he sees Arrese going by with a group of people from his father-in-law’s clinic. Orl is among them. “Ah, having a chat, I see?” As if they’d caught them doing something much worse. Of course, what Arrese reproaches him for is not wasting time—that in itself would not be reason enough for reproach—but talking with two women. In order to get over being humiliated and, at the same time, make it very clear that he is capable of talking with two women, he tells Harri Gabilondo, when she says she absolutely must tell him her latest story about “that ridiculous oaf,” that he has plenty of time. So after making sure that nobody is going to hear her, moving her head to glance from one side to the other like a bird, she tells them something that happened to a friend of hers when she went to have a consultation with him, something that happened a couple of years ago but which she hasn’t dared tell anyone until now. While he was examining her on the gynecological table, apparently he suddenly took his head out from between her legs and said, with a very serious expression on his face, that her discharge smelled terrible. “¡Joder, cómo te huele!” Those were his exact words: “Jesus, what a stench!” Her friend, naturally, worried it wasn’t a normal smell, wanted to know if it could be cured, but Arrese answered that some discharges just smell more than others, and that boy, hers sure was one of them. Her pap smear was normal, she’d never noticed any smell, nobody had ever complained to her about it, she’d never seen anyone looking at her with revulsion, but from that day on and until recently, until she worked up the courage to go to another doctor, she hadn’t let anyone—whatever their intentions, medical or for purposes of pleasure, or for any other reason—get within half a yard of her vagina, protected though it was by tampons, sanitary napkins, and douches. “¿Qué te parece?” The women wait to see what he’s going to say, Gabilondo’s fully away that she’s told him something she takes to be very serious, and in fact the behavior—Arrese holding his nose and saying “Jesus, what a stench!”—does seem unacceptable to him. But Abaitua also finds it amusing, above all her face as she tells him the story and the astonishment he sees in her eyes, and instead of expressing anger and dismay, he can’t help laughing. The young American, too, finds it amusing, at least she smiles, but his belly laugh is definitely out of place, his reputation as an upright man is at risk, and he apologizes to Gabilondo. He doesn’t want her to think that he’s making light of the way Arrese insulted her friend. It’s just that the story’s reminded him of a joke he once heard in the operating theater—that’s his excuse. It’s his second mistake, because now, as might have been expected, they want him to tell them the joke, but he doesn’t want to, because he thinks he’s bad at telling jokes. It’s a very dirty joke, and that makes him feel ill at ease. The more he refuses, the more they insist. Who on earth can bring up a dirty joke and then not tell it, says Harri Gabilondo. No hinting at it, he has to actually tell them the joke. Seeing no other way out, he uses the good old doctor’s excuse that he has a lot of patients waiting for him. He can’t tell them now, but he will some other time. The young American sociologist asks whether he’ll give them his word as a Basque. “No question—I promise you.”

  When he goes back into his office, the nurse tells him that one of the two women has forgotten a file, showing him a blue folder with elastic bands at the corners. It’s too late to catch them, but he leaves again anyway and goes down the stairs. He doesn’t find them there. He opens the folder to make sure it’s the young American sociologist’s, even though he’s sure it is. It’s photocopies, a novel by one Max Frisch titled Montauk.

  As he walks along the corridor, he tries to recognize a young couple walking in the opposite direction toward him. The woman’s around thirty-five, and although she’s familiar to him, he doesn’t know from where, or why, as usual. They look so down that he stops to ask them if there’s a problem. She gave birth four hours earlier and was told her child had some insignificant problem on his nose, but when she picked him up to breastfeed him, he was suffocating, completely purple. The woman starts telling the story but can’t go on, and the man takes over. The child has been taken to the pediatric ICU, and the parents are worried, naturally. From what they tell him, he thinks it must be a posterior nasal aperture atresia. Babies don’t have nasal cavities and, when being breastfed, have to breathe through the nose. So they’re going to have to perforate his posterior nasal aperture. He tries to calm them down—it’s a very easy operation, and the baby’s in good hands. It’ll all be sorted out. “But we’re very, very worried. You do understand that, don’t you?” Of course he understands. He takes ahold of the woman’s hand and squeezes it with all the warmth he can. She should find that encouraging. But they just stand there in front of him, without moving, and he tells them he has to go, there’s an emergency.

  The television is turned on with the volume down. A couple, both of them around fifty years old, is sitting at a sort of school desk that has their names on the front of it. The presenter is standing next to them asking questions, and when they get one right, he makes high-flying gestures with his hands encouraging the audience to applaud them. It’s a game show, one he’s seen before. Different couples try to demonstrate that they know each other better than the other couples do. One of the partners is asked a question, which can be quite intimate, and the other must guess the answer. The woman, who looks severe and bitter, has gotten a question right and grudgingly allows the man to give her a kiss. The audience applauds. Abaitua would rather the sound were turned up, the pictures interfere with him doing other things anyhow, and he’d like to know what they’re asking the man now. Some of the questions they’ve asked in the past have been so intimate that it’s amazing anyone would answer them in public. Pilar doesn’t normally watch the show. She only occasionally lifts her head up from her Sudoku, as if glancing to check that the screen is still turned on. Abaitua thinks it’s the changes in the intensity of the light that make her raise her head. Sometimes he asks her why she doesn’t turn it off, she’s not watching it, and often she does switch it off. But mostly she says she’s waiting for the news. She loves watching the television news. He’s not going to say anything to her today.

  He’s been waiting awhile for one of them to say something, but he’s incapable of saying the first word. He’s too lazy to, and afraid, as well, he’s not quite sure. He’s afraid of what her answers might be and doesn’t feel like making decisions. He feels lazy at the prospect of packing his suitcase and afraid of being alone, and he doesn’t know which is holding him up more, fear or laziness. But being at an impasse—going neither forward nor backward—is uncomfortable, as well, having to carry on as if nothing were the matter.

  He’d like to know what they’ve just asked the woman on the television.

  Abaitua finds it especially irritating how docilely they let his brother-in-law Yago make all the professional decisions, just as long as no problems that might importune her father arise. That hurts him, and he never misses a chance to reproach her for it. Pilar, on the other hand, tries not to give him any such opportunities. She normally answers that he’s always looking for excuses to get angry with her family.

  Talking about his work at the hospital won’t put him in a better mood. He doesn’t have anything good to say about it, and Pilar doesn’t like having to listen to problems. She gets bored. He knows she thinks he’s too demanding, too inflexible when it comes to judging his colleagues, and he has the impression that she doesn’
t believe him when he tells her about the daily disasters and catastrophes that take place as a result of their negligence and lack of professionalism, although from what she sees at her own job, she shouldn’t have any trouble believing him. In her defense, it’s because of her own honesty that she finds it difficult to see dishonesty and bad intentions in the actions of others, and however terrible they may be in objective terms, when she’s forced to see facts that are objectively horrendous, she always finds excuses and extenuating circumstances. But whenever he shares things with her that are actually worthy of anger and indignation, her understanding attitude toward the offenders irritates him, and she knows that.

  When he asks her if she’s heard the latest bit of drama, she raises her head from her Sudoku and looks at him with interest. A little interest, at least, he’d say. He tells her he’s seen a young woman whose husband became infertile after being treated for testicular cancer and who, because of that, was wavering between whether to adopt a child or to have one by artificial insemination. She had serious reasons for her indecision, because she thought her husband might find it easier to accept an adopted child rather than one that she had with another man’s sperm. It’s an interesting dilemma. There were psychological and social factors behind the woman’s doubts that she was incapable of seeing beyond. She also reasoned that if her husband loved her, he might prefer a child that she had had inside of her and given birth to, but fortunately the whole issue turned out to be theoretical, because men’s sperm in these cases is usually frozen before they’re given the treatment, in case they later want to have children. So he called the oncology department to make sure, and they told him that they had indeed done that until very recently, but not anymore. When he asked why they’d stopped doing it, they said it was because they were very busy. And no, they hadn’t discussed the change with anyone first. All of a sudden, just like that, they’d simply stopped collecting patients’ sperm. “¿Qué te parece?” “It’s absurd.” The serious expression on her face says that she means it, but she doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t say they should be taken outside and shot, which is what he’d like to hear. “Absurd,” and she goes back to staring at her Sudoku.