Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  It must be one of the really tough puzzles.

  He asks again, “¿Qué te parece?” in the same way Gabilondo usually does, but without it being a rhetorical question, hoping for a reply on the same scale as the anger he felt that morning when he heard they weren’t freezing patients’ sperm any longer. The reply of a woman who isn’t so used to seeing the idiotic things that happen at the hospital. He would have preferred the answer of a furious woman, railing against people with so little sensitivity. But of course, that same woman could also have demanded of him, “Well, and what did you about it? What did you say to them?”

  And he himself didn’t get as angry as Harri Gabilondo had expected him to when she told him about what Arrese said to her friend. He remembers a joke about a personal ad placed by a woman seeking a man with anosmia for oral sex. It wouldn’t be funny if he told it, and although he’s tempted to try it out on Pilar, he’s suddenly afraid of telling a dirty joke, afraid she might take it the wrong way.

  Ten thirty, a good time to go to his bedroom. So he says he’s had a bad day and he’s tired.

  Max Frisch, Montauk. He’s photocopied the novel that the American girl left in his office. “A sign promising a view across the island: OVERLOOK. It was he who suggested stopping here.” The couple—the man who’s suggested stopping there and his friend—is walking along a rough path that’s covered with puddles and shrubs. The man’s smoking a pipe. The woman’s movements are quicker than his, she’s a bit younger than him, as well. The scenery reminds the man of other places he’s visited on the seaside. But he finds his obsessive memories get in the way. So he’s old. The woman’s slimmer than him, but not skinny, and her blue jeans are rolled up to her knees—small buttocks in tight trousers. Her reddish hair is tied in a ponytail that sways from side to side as she walks along. Right now they’re both astonished to be together.

  The man, whose name hasn’t been mentioned yet, is a foreign writer on a promotional tour of the States, and his flight back is on Tuesday. He remembers the day when he was answering the press’s questions at a hotel and he met this young woman. He helped her put her coat on, and when, out of politeness, he asked her name for the second time, she said Lynn, as if her first name were enough. When they all left, the writer realized that the girl had left her lighter behind, a cheap green one that had been lying under the lamp for a couple of weeks.

  Lynn. That name wouldn’t have meant anything to him if he hadn’t met the sociologist who’d forgotten her blue file folder with the novel in it that morning.

  The sound of Pilar’s steps. She’s moving silently but not secretively. She must have seen the light under his door. He hears her going from the living room to the kitchen, probably to check that the gas is off and to drink a glass of milk. Now she opens the cabinet they keep the shampoo, soap, toothpaste, lotions, and other reserve supplies in, because the toothpaste has run out and he hasn’t replaced it. He coughs, because he thinks she’s standing outside his door, and he doesn’t want her to come in thinking that he’s fallen asleep without turning the lights out first. Sometimes she goes into the dressing room to take some garment or other from the closet. That situation—Abaitua in bed and Pilar looking through the drawers—is increasingly uncomfortable for him, though she finds it entirely natural. She does whatever it is she has to do and says goodnight. She’s never gone beyond that. Perhaps because she’s frightened of being rejected, but above all, he thinks, because she doesn’t want to give the slightest indication of being vulnerable, of needing him.

  That day in the old Renault 12, before they were married, Pilar had held onto his arm in tears and asked him not to leave her. A pathetic image. He doesn’t know what the reason had been for threatening to break up the relationship. Sometimes one of the two says, “It would be better if we just broke up,” and not always with the best of intentions. The one who believes him or herself to be in the strongest position holding out for the other to show his or her submissiveness, like a dog lying on its back, displaying its belly. The fact is that she held onto his arm, turned toward him in tears, and said, “Don’t leave me.” He doesn’t know what type of wicked satisfaction she must have seen on his face, but there was certainly something—she’s never shown him any sign of submission or vulnerability again. But Iñaki Abaitua has never wanted anything else all his life, he only wants her to say she needs him. That she doesn’t want him to leave her.

  5

  There is not a cloud in the sky, and the sun brings out a metallic shine on the magnolia leaves. The two house cats are lazily cleaning themselves at the ankle of the angel on the old fountain. The statue’s right arm, which used to point up toward the sky, is now no more than a stump with a thick iron rod sticking out of it, and it reminds Julia of a cemetery, because she knows it’s part of a funerary sculpture that was never put up in the end. Even so, in spite of its somber origins and the fact that the piece of iron in its cut-off arm now points at the bus stop, it has its cheerful days, when its face seems to smile with the play of leafy light and the shadow cast by a streak of moss.

  The house is in silence although it’s already nine o’clock. There’s a heavy atmosphere in the living room, which is particularly untidy. There are two empty yogurt containers on the coffee table, a jar of jam, a carton of milk, and a box of Breton cookies. She gathers that the writer didn’t go out to dinner and stayed up late watching television. As he’s often done recently, in fact. She has to admit she’s a bit disappointed not to find the remains of a dinner shared with the penthouse girl. She imagines the linen tablecloth, the old porcelain charger plates, and the ugly four-armed silver candlesticks. That’s what he did when he invited her to dinner for the first time; it’s funny, but she can no longer remember what he gave her to eat.

  She wipes the bit of the table under the glass clean and picks up what she can, just enough to clear the table. The first thing she normally does is make coffee.

  The coffee’s in the refrigerator. The red mullets that he was supposed to have for dinner no longer look appetizing—their scales are dry, they’re white and matte.

  MONTAUK. The photocopies of the novel, which they had to order from the National Library because the Spanish edition is out of print, are on Martin’s desk. There aren’t any pages without underlined passages, so it’s clear he was up late reading the novel so enthusiastically recommended by his tenant. “Absolutely wonderful,” she’d called it. So he’s devoured the whole book in an evening, he who normally has trouble reading a single line, and even more so in the evening. The book cover, which is black and white, is very different from that of the English edition. Underneath the author’s name and the title are some large buildings, and a lot of people on the beach next to them. It could be a reproduction of a postcard. At the bottom, in small letters: “Montauk Manor. Montauk Beach. Long Island, N.Y.” Montaigne’s sentence, the one the man at the airport said to Harri and which was all the American needed to identify the book, is written in Spanish on the dedication page: “Lector, éste es un libro sincero, y te previene ya desde el comienzo que no le he dado una finalidad que no sea particular y privada . . .” And then the start of the novel: Un letrero ofrece una visión panorámica de la isla: OVERLOOK.

  Suddenly she seems to remember that the English version was “This book was written in good faith.” “In good faith,” not “sincere.” She can’t check the English translation, but she does have the transcription of Montaigne’s original to hand. Becuase her classification system works so well, it doesn’t take her long to find the Gallimard edition and Montaigne’s words. “C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur”—just as she thought. She doesn’t know if speaking in good faith in sixteenth-century French meant being sincere, but she’d say they’re not the same things in today’s Spanish and French. When it comes down to it, you can tell lies in good faith, de bonne foi, and tell the truth in bad faith, but you can’t tell a lie “sincerely.” Or can you?

 
OVERLOOK. It was he who suggested stopping here.

  She jumps when she hears Martin’s voice next to her. “Enjoying it?” he says. She’s astonished she didn’t realize he was there until she saw his head over the table, his neck jutting out toward the text she’s reading, and she suspects, not for the first time, that he approaches her secretively on purpose, to find out what she’s doing. He’s wearing jeans for the first time in a long while, a white silk shirt, a lightweight blue V-neck sweater, and he smells of some new cologne. Nothing to do with the scruffy man who usually appears every morning in a tattered robe.

  “I haven’t started yet. I’ve had work to do, you know.” In fact, she’s been very eager to read it, but she hasn’t been able to yet, because the American girl took her copy back, but her response is a way of reproaching him for the fact that he, on the other hand, has managed to find the time, and also of throwing in his face the fact that he hasn’t written a line in days. And a way of getting over her own feeling of shame caused by him controlling her. So she goes on the attack—“You’ve changed colognes” (no need to specify that’s it’s “for the penthouse girl”)—and the poor man takes a step back so she won’t be able to smell him anymore. “My sister gave it to me.” Seeing him so low makes her regret having mocked him. In any case, she knows the reason she’s in a bad mood is because her work’s going badly. She’s not making much progress with her translation of Bihotzean min dut—a sad title meaning “my heart aches”—but Martin isn’t to blame for that. Making an effort to control her bad mood, she asks him if he liked it. A lot. The American girl—he calls her that to show that he’s not particularly interested in her—is right. It’s Frisch’s best book, and it’s incomprehensible that it’s been out of print for so long in Spanish. She hasn’t heard him praise a book with such passion for a long time. He says something surprising: perhaps she won’t like it, but she’s sure to find it interesting. She’ll identify with some passages. He doesn’t tell her which passages, even though she asks him to again and again; he wants to see if she’ll find them herself when she reads it.

  What’s more, the penthouse girl’s come into the yard, and the writer leaves his sentence unfinished to rush out before she gets away. Sheer enthusiasm. He’s always like that when he meets new people. At first he’s extremely attentive and pays them a lot of attention, until the other person feels the need to show a similar interest in him. Then he tires of them. She’s had to put up with him in both phases, and she doesn’t know which she finds more irritating.

  There’s the young girl, who’s just taken a shower, wearing a loose-fitting gray Yale University tracksuit and sandals. She has feet to be jealous of—no corns, great toes, perfect nails, and it looks like she’s never been tortured by fashionable shoes. And to think she said she practiced ballet until recently! She looks apologetically at Julia as she sits down in the chair that Martin offers her. She doesn’t want to interrupt her work. Then, seeing the photocopies of Montauk, she asks them if they’ve enjoyed it, with her eyes very wide open, as if the answer were going to be of great importance to her. Julia’s astonished—because Martin very seldom finds nothing to criticize in the books people recommend to them—to hear him give his highest praise. He read it last night without stopping once, that’s why he’s tired now. When it’s her turn to give her opinion, she has to admit that she hasn’t even been able to start it. But it’s her fault, because she took her copy away.

  “How stupid of me.”

  She slaps her forehead with the palm of the hand. What an awful thing to do. It’s as if she’s done something really terrible, when in fact all she’s done is leave the photocopies of Montauk that she made for Julia in Iñaki Abaitua’s office by mistake. It’s not a problem, she says, she’ll read Martin’s copy, and the girl looks at her, surprised that she doesn’t realize how serious what’s happened is. It’s very serious, what on earth could she have been thinking? How will she be able to trust someone who’s forgotten an important work file? It looks like Martin finds the situation amusing. He says that if she’d read the novel, she’d realize that all Lynns are slippery characters, that they’re always leaving things accidentally in older men’s rooms to have an excuse to go back and seduce them, and the American girl’s cheeks, when she hears this, go as red as tomatoes. It’s clear from Julia’s expression that she doesn’t understand a thing, so they, members of the club of people who’ve read Montauk, explain that Max, an older writer, and Lynn, a young woman, meet in New York in the hotel room where the writer is staying while he’s being interviewed by a journalist. Max thinks she’s the photographer—there’s usually one in such circumstances—but when the journalist finishes his work, Max finds out that she is, in fact, the assistant his editor has assigned him for his stay in New York, and when everyone’s gone and the writer’s alone, he realizes that the young woman has left her lighter behind.

  Bihurra bihurtu. In Spanish, rizar el rizo. Is that “to gild the lily” in English? So when Doctor Abaitua opens the folder that this young woman called Lynn, who he’s just met, has left in his office, he’ll find a book about a love story between a man who’s getting on in years, like himself, and a young woman called Lynn, and as if that weren’t enough, the starting point is that the girl has forgotten something in the room in which they just met. These things particularly amuse Martin, he loves symmetry.

  They speak with such enthusiasm about Montauk that Julia, who has nothing at all to say, sits down at the table, as if to say it’s time for her to start working. She didn’t think it was a bad idea when Martin suggested they share a room to work in. They divided up the shelf space, taking their respective heights into account so that they wouldn’t get in each other’s way and would be able to ask each other things whenever they had any doubts. Martin, of course, could always go to the formal library if he wanted to, but he’s worked in worse places.

  “En peores garitas hemos hecho guardia.” How could you say that? We’ve had breakfast in more dilapidated sheds. We’ve warmed our bones in happier inns. We’ve worked up a sweat in worse coats. We’ve ploughed worse soil.

  The American says, “Perhaps we’re bothering Julia,” but she replies that they aren’t at all and leans back in her seat as if to prove the fact, untrue though it is.

  Perhaps the fact that they’re whispering, murmuring as if they were in a confessional, disturbs her more than if they were talking normally, and she can’t help listening to what they’re saying, because Martin’s mentioned translation. He says you shouldn’t notice the translator in a translation, but he’s there all the time in this one. “El texto chirría.” He uses the Basque verb kirrinka egin a lot. “How would you translate that?” he asks, raising his voice to make it clear the question is for Julia and then sitting back in his seat to wait for her answer. “To creak?” The American, when he repeats it, holds her hands to her ears and shows her teeth, to act out hearing an unpleasant sound.

  Traduttore traditore.

  And then, as if he enjoyed adding to the discomfort that his words have made the American feel, he looks over the pages for examples of the translator’s clumsiness. He has the habit of licking his index finger with his lower lip to help turn the pages quicker, something he can’t stop doing, even though he knows it’s not elegant. Finally, he uses his little finger to point out the words he wants her to read: “la velluda y blanca chaqueta”—the hairy white jacket. Of course, she has to read the whole paragraph to see the jacket and its adjective in context: “De cara a la opinión pública estadounidense, declaro que la vida resulta algo aburrida, y que sólo tengo experiencias mientras escribo. En el fondo no se trata de ningún chiste. Luego, cuando le sostengo la velluda y blanca chaqueta, vuelvo a preguntarle por cortesía cuál es su nombre.”

  Julia agrees that “hairy jacket” doesn’t sound very good, but she’s amazed it’s the paragraph he’s most interested in. And of course, they’d have to see how the jacket is described in the ori
ginal text, apart from being white. The American girl regrets not having the English version to be able to compare the two, she lent it to Harri, but she thinks that what the writer is holding up is a “shaggy jacket,” in other words, a jacket with long threads, but all over it, not just on the sleeves and the chest, like an Indian’s. Julia finds it fun looking the words up. After searching in a couple of dictionaries, she decides that a jacket made using the type of fabric from the rug in the bathroom that her mother likes so much would indeed be a “shaggy jacket,” which is probably zottelgjacke in German, but she doesn’t know how to say it in Basque. Peluxezkoa? Like for a stuffed animal?

  The writer thinks that the easiest way to get around the problem would be to say that Max was holding up any type of jacket. Whether leather or knitted—any type of jacket that wouldn’t sound wrong. The writer wouldn’t care about that, he probably decided to make it a “shaggy” jacket in German because it went with the rhythm of the sentence, nothing more than that. It would only need to be specified if it helped to define the character it belonged to, like a corduroy jacket in Spanish, for instance, which could go to show that a character is a member of the Socialist Party or that he’s not dressed formally. Just as long as it’s something that doesn’t sound wrong. Julia would be in agreement, she said, if it weren’t for the fact that even the slightest change she ever suggests to him he decries as betraying his original meaning. The insurmountable distance between a writer and a translator. He keeps insisting on the unimportance of the jacket’s material while at the same time making it very clear, with seeming modesty, that he himself is just a piccolo scrittore, perhaps even a crappy writer, but a writer nonetheless. The girl’s very eager to point out how important translators are, as well. Julia thinks that she’s making an effort to defend her from Martin’s slighting, and that moves her, but it also makes her a little angry. It makes her angry that although the American girl has only just met them, it’s quite obvious to her that Martin’s objective in marking the difference between them is to express disdain for herself. To lend weight to her attempt to defend the nobility of the translator’s work, the young woman switches to English, and in order to prove that translation is also an art, she chooses a comparison that she thinks will illustrate the matter better: music and the complementary relationship between composers and players. The poor girl isn’t aware that Martin has led her here on purpose and is waiting, amused, to stick in his final argument—Julia can see it on his face. She’s seen this show more than once before, he uses the same trick every time a new interlocutor comes along. The other person, just like the young American right now, will say that Bach is great but so is Gould, otherwise we would never get to hear his interpretation of the former’s variations, and then Martin will reply, with his humblest voice, that we could all just read the sheet music, the mathematics of music is written down right there, and all the rest is no more than sentimental rubbish.